It’s been a long time since New Year’s Eve was a circled-in-red day on the calendar. The idea of packing into some hotel ballroom for a warm glass of champagne at midnight and 10 minutes of kissing strangers is a vision of hell. We had an impromptu gathering at our house in Ann Arbor to welcome in 2004, and that was fun, although the year that followed didn’t play out all that well, and only underlined the idea that less is more on December 31 of any year.

If I had more money to travel, it might be fun to greet the new year in an exotic locale, Guam or atop Mt. Fuji or someplace with cheap firecrackers and new customs. File that one under pipe dreams. Truth be told, one of the best New Year’s Eves I ever had was when I was a kid, and we went next door to celebrate with the neighbors, and the lady of the house made me one apple beignet after another until I couldn’t eat any more. She was Dutch and said it was traditional. Powdered sugar was better than champagne to a 10-year-old.

The problem is the expectation of fun, of course. Even an optimist can find it hard to be merry when you’re expected to be, and after a string of underwhelming years I just gave up. Now our custom is to make a nice dinner, open a better-than-average bottle of wine, pop in a better-than-average rented movie, switch over to Times Square at 11:55 p.m. and go to bed 20 minutes later. Now that I think of it, that was one of the more memorable nights in recent memory, watching “Spartacus” and finishing 19-whatever laughing over the oysters-or-snails scene.

Whatever your plans are tonight, I hope they’re fun and safe and whatever you’d like it to be — oysters or snails.

So, then. Bloggage? Not bloody much. Having completed my entire four-item to-do list yesterday, we celebrated by seeing “Avatar.” I walked in irritable, having inadvertently chosen a 2-D screening time and unwilling to wait three more hours for the next 3-D, and got more irritable as we sat through 15 minutes of ads and 15 minutes of previews of movies I’d forfeit a kidney to avoid (“Clash of the Titans,” anyone? “Release the kraken” — are they serious?). I spent the time thinking how many people I know are calling it “Dances With Blue Cats,” and assuming this was another waste of an afternoon.

Two hours later I was yelling, “Go, red dinosaur!” and reflecting that I hadn’t had this much fun watching the totally predictable since “Star Wars.” Funny how that goes — you watch the setup and reflect that the characters couldn’t be more crudely rendered if they were drawn in grease pencil, the story all but lit with neon signs, and yet you’re still completely entertained. It’s the journey, not the destination.

We’re going to have to see it again in 3-D. No, we won’t. 3-D Imax. Then I never have to see it again.

Actually, what amazes me about special-effects bonanzas like this is how the actors do it. It’s one thing to summon up emotion in a kitchen, another thing in a sound stage, another thing entirely while dressed in a special suit, sword-fighting in front of a green screen. I heard an interview with James Cameron in which he described who played the flying dinosaur Zoe Saldana leaps onto in the course of demonstrating warrior skills to her humanoid pupil — some grip big enough to endure take after take of being leapt upon by a skinny actress. Movie magic.

It’s probably just a pepperoni pizza repeatin’ on him, but the year closes out with a reminder the reaper was busy in 2009, and most of the names on his list were in boldface. Get well soon, Rusty. Because it would be bad karma to wish for a painful…fail, wouldn’t it? Bad. Karma.

Welcome to whatever new readers we’re getting today; we’re ending the old year with a small honor. This blog is included in a Detroit News feature on notable local sites, which I had to stay up late to read. My husband always washes his hands of these things, a wise move. There aren’t many rules in our lively comment section other than: Be interesting. And be aware, the content isn’t usually so lame. Every blogger gets a glide pattern once in a while. In another two weeks this blog celebrates its ninth birthday, plugging along more or less five days a week. It’s worth what you pay for it, and I hope it surprises you from time to time.

Happy new year to all, and fingers crossed for the good kind of surprises.

My neighbor has outdoor speakers, and is playing Christmas music for… someone. Santa, or maybe me. I’m only hearing it on my trips in and out to the car and recycling bin, but it sounds like those records my dad used to get at the Sohio station when I was a kid — a blend of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand. Lots of strings and feeeeeeling.

Having been in one too many stores in the past week, I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with this crap, however. I’m counter-programming with “Every Picture Tells a Story.” The peak of Rod Stewart’s career, in my opinion, although obviously this isn’t shared by the rest of the world.

My back hurts, but my work is pretty much done. Alan can handle the little bit of wrapping that remains, and I’ve turned out a collection of dishes that do not go together in any way, but will serve for our Christmas fare, which will be sort of haphazard and brunchy. There’s an egg thing, a bean thing, a sweet potato bisque. And while I didn’t do a buche de noel, I did something similar — chocolate roll. It’s imperfect, nothing like the picture, but it looks more like a log than I thought it would:

The last stop today was the liquor store. I asked for a bottle of vodka and a straw.

So, the big day is upon us. I’m taking a few moments to enjoy the tree and a glass of wine. And while I don’t have much to report, I do wish you all a pleasant holiday and last week of the year, however you choose to spend it. I’m thankful for all of you who read and comment here; every day you show up is a gift to me, and I appreciate it.

Just so Bill O’Reilly hears it loud and clear, then.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Well, this is interesting. The Mexican good guys had a big win last week, killing a high-ranking gangster, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, in what is inevitably called “a gun battle.” The soldier who killed him also died in the shootout. Although it’s customary for police and military officers involved in anti-drug work to be anonymous and wear ski masks and other clothing to obscure their identity, once one of them is killed, their identity is made public. Ensign Melquisedet Angulo Córdova was hailed as a national hero. His mother was presented with the Mexican flag at his funeral, in much the same ritual we’ve seen in this country during military funerals.

The day after, Leyva’s henchmen burst into Córdova’s family’s home and killed his mother and three other relatives.

People today use the word “decimated” casually. We forget what it means. Decimation was a specific punishment for one’s enemies, and it meant one in ten — you humiliated and humbled the conquered by killing 10 percent of their soldiers. That was considered punishment enough. What’s going on here is something much worse, a zero-sum game that isn’t, really, because the lesson I mentioned yesterday applies here, too: There’s always a demand for drugs, legal or otherwise, and always a new generation of people willing to take them. Legalize everything and you take the gunplay out of it, but otherwise, there you are.

[Pause.]

Hey, it’s the Christmas season! Let’s turn the page and move on to something cheerier! You know the newspaper racket is in trouble when the freakin’ New York Times, home of the top-of-3A daily Tiffany ad, etc. etc., accepts a full-page ad for the Amish miracle-heater fireplace. It’s a throwback to the days when companies would run ads that looked like newspaper copy, because apparently there are still seven or eight suckers who believe that on one page of the New York Times you can read about the al-Jazeera cameraman who spent six years at Guantanamo Bay, and on the next a full page devoted to the “miracle” that an electric space heater enclosed in an Amish-made plywood box can make your heating bills “drop to a fraction.”

One of the funnier moments I’ve spent in the company of Alan’s family came when his sister Jenny related her conversation with Aunt Dorothy, who wanted to order one of the “free” heaters for Jenny:

“I don’t want one,” Jenny said.

“Why wouldn’t you want it if it’s free!?” said Dorothy. (There’s such a perfect logic to this, I don’t know what to say.)

Anyway. The scam of the Amish miracle heater is pretty easy to figure out, if you read above a third-grade level: The Chinese-made heater is just your average 1500-watt space heater, available at any Wal-Mart for around $20. You pay $350 for the “Amish” mantel that goes around it. There’s a website, of course. Poke around in there and enjoy yourself; did you know the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval is “prestigious?” Srsly.

The Amish are no strangers to this sort of thing. Alan once visited an Amish farm in Indiana that turned out olde-timey kountry wagons used in displays at Bath & Body Works. Knock together some scrap plywood, throw on some out-of-round wheels, slap a coat of paint on everything and then turn the kids loose on it — each one was “hand-distressed” by Amish boys and girls, who assaulted it with chains, steel wool, chemicals and whatever, preparatory to its placement in an American shopping mall. I love this country so much it hurts.

Two days left, and my list is painful to look at. Yesterday’s excursion to the mall was fruitless but for the picture of Olga the mannequin in her hello-sailor cocktail dress. The sooner this fashion flies, the better. Kate tried on a dress at Betsey Johnson, just for the heck of it, and looked adorable. Two hundred dollars for a dress seemed a little steep, she said, and of course I agreed. But it’s funny how a Betsey dress can be just as short and just as strapless, but looks fun instead of trashy. That’s why they pay her the big bucks.

Happy Wednesday, whatever yours holds. I’m outta here.

My e-mail program seems to be hosed. Oddly, I am unconcerned. I can pick up the mail in two other places (phone and web), and besides, I’m starting to see problems like this as not really problems at all. Weekends are good for unplugging, and I intend to do so. I might even like it.

It occurred to me the other day that making a writer work on a computer with an internet connection is a little like making an alcoholic insurance agent move his office to a bar. Which reminds me, if you haven’t read Sweet Juniper’s latest post, you should. It’s not about writing or alcoholics, but it is about insurance. Sorta. It’s also funny.

Two cups of coffee, and I can sense it’s already going to be a short-attention-span kind of day. Sometimes I hit the finish line of the week like one of those rubber-legged marathoners, and today has one of those hit-or-miss to-do lists: Meeting, buy sanding sugar, clean house, make elaborate Christmas cookies. Sometimes Friday turns out productive against all odds, because I don’t have to work four hours farming news at the end of it. I’m free to work myself into a frazzle and collapse on the couch with a glass of wine at its end. Plus, I want to make a giant dent in “Chronic City” this weekend.

I need to remind myself, however, that to-do lists are proof you’re alive, and if I wanted even the alive alternative, I could look up the Facebook photo of our own mild-mannered Jeff with a giant bandage taped under his nose. He looks a little like Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown,” only without the nice suit.

So with that, I’m dumping this thin gruel into the same ol’ same ol’ category and starting my day. Because that sanding sugar isn’t going to buy itself, y’know.

Have a great weekend.

Just wrote a long piece of something and threw it away. It was heedless, and I need to be more heedful. Google Alerts make finding something to be offended by way too easy, which is why I use them judiciously. I Googled my name the other day and found a hidden gem — a comment left on a blog three years ago that blamed me for the steep circulation slide suffered by my former employer during the nearly 20 years I worked there. That was good for a laff. I knew it was my fault, somehow. It wasn’t the industry-wide decline in all ink-on-paper news, or the idiot publisher’s plan to cut costs by severing the subscriptions of several thousand out-of-county readers, or anything else that went wrong in the long slow decline of newspaper journalism. Glad we’ve found a culprit.

I’m wondering why things haven’t stabilized or recovered in my absence. You people who still read it will have to answer that one. The last time I looked at it I got embarrassed. No wonder so many former employees fudge the details in their bios.

So you folks will have to fend for yourselves today. I can offer you a cheesecake recipe, which I bothered to type last night (oh, of course it’s everywhere on the web, but I didn’t know that until after I typed it) for e-mailing to Mindy, who was despairing at finding a recipe for a classic dry, dense cheesecake. I clipped this out of Esquire magazine around 1980 and have made it several times, but not for a while. Esquire contended it represents the Platonic ideal of cheesecake, and credits it to a famous New York City deli. Notes follow:

Lindy’s cheesecake

To serve, remove the top of the pan very carefully and cut into wedges.

Me again. Now I see why I haven’t made this lately. All that fussing with the crust! It’s a lot of work to make something everybody leaves on the plate, but you need it to keep the filling from running out the cracks in the springform. If I were doing this today, I’d scrap the pastry for graham-cracker.

I’d also forget that ridiculous 550-degree oven. Most home stoves don’t go that high, and you can get the same result — the nice brown top — at 400.

But this is a hell of a cheesecake. It’s the citrus zest. Enjoy, if you end up making it.

Bloggage? Just a little:

You learn something new ever day. Something I learned yesterday: The Presbyterian College sports teams are known as the Blue Hose. Good thing they’re Presbyterians and are genetically unable to see the humor possibilities.

My “Jersey Shore” nickname: The Rack. Fitting. Find your own. That site also has a Tiger Woods mistress generator. Here’s mine: Congrats, your Tiger Woods mistress is Melody O’Brian from Duluth, MN. She is a 19 year old business executive. You know she’s telling the truth because she knows about Tiger’s tattoo.

Best of luck to day to our own mild-mannered Jeff, having sinus surgery today and likely out for a while.

To work for me.

I’m going to miss the group of Wayne State students we have working for GrossePointeToday.com this term. They’re smart, energetic, capable, everything a hyperlocal website needs. What’s more, they’ve given me something every editor wants over time — improvement. It’s a pleasure to handle their copy.

Every so often people ask what I tell journalism students about their prospects for a career in journalism. Over time, I’ve developed a short speech. It goes like this: “I don’t know what your future holds for your chosen field. Recent events would suggest the outlook is grim. The very best of you will probably get work somewhere in journalism, but most of you won’t have it easy and some will strike out. Change your major while you still have time, but stay in this class to learn to be a better observer, a sharper questioner, a less credulous media consumer and a more careful writer. They are skills that will serve you in any field you choose.”

How does that sound? I can’t lie to them, but I believe what I tell them: Studying journalism will, if nothing else, make them better news consumers, and brother, we need those more than ever. Last night at the gym, I grabbed the last treadmill for a 20-minute speed-walk to nowhere, and found myself face-to-face with the TV tuned to Fox News. Glenn Beck was on, and even the closed-caption Glenn Beck is hard to take. G. Gordon Liddy was pimping gold during the commercial breaks, alternating with Beck pimping his book. I considered for a minute when the last time I heard gold touted as a serious investment option outside of the apocalypse-now media. The early ’80s, I guess, the time of runaway interest rates and dark mutterings in corners about Krugerrands vs. Maple Leafs. Which reminded me of a police report I saw recently, in which the officer noted the homeowner’s loss to thieves: One Rolex Oyster, several coogerands. I can say with authority that journalism has taught me to spell the South African gold coin correctly.

(Although I always have to check. Two Gs and one R, or the other way around?)

And now it’s time to go. Editing copy put me behind, and now I’m off to the gym and various holiday/maternal obligations. Lucky for me I got a whole extra hour of sleep today and Alan made coffee so strong I’m risking v-fib. Today’s question: How much of your formal education have you left behind in your life?

This is what the precipitation map looked like all day yesterday:

I’m sorry this isn’t the animated version, so you could see the way those cotton-ball areas of snow park themselves over certain coastal stretches and stay and stay and stay. Some of you non-Midwesterners may not be acquainted with what we call “lake effect” snow, but that’s it, right there. It’s why western Michigan driveways and parking lots need three-foot day-glo sticks along their edges to guide the plows, like they have in ski-resort towns. It’s why the east side of Cleveland can get heaps of snow while the west side doesn’t. (Or maybe it’s the other way around. Borden?) It’s why snow in Buffalo and Erie can be nearly apocalyptic. It’s why, coming home from Milwaukee to Indiana, you can be all, like, what a beautiful day for a drive, round the southern end of Lake Michigan and suddenly realize it’s going to be a blizzard clear to South Bend.

Cold air races across rising warmer air from a large body of water and bingo-bango, precipitation. Lake-effect snowfall is a wash for lake levels, as it represents only a temporary relocation of water, and all melts back into the lake in spring. Last year, we had a snowy winter that came from storms moving south-to-north, and that was a good thing for the 21st-century Saudi Arabia of H2O. All ur waters are belong to us.

If you’re interested, western Michigan got 13 inches yesterday. We have the lightest dusting, not even enough to sweep, much less shovel.

Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice. That’s our state motto. If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.

Maybe not in January.

So much for fifth-grade civics. How was your day? It’s Friday, traditionally my Exhale Day, although there won’t be much exhaling today — I’m meeting a student later to cut some video, and tonight it’s the middle-school Christmas dance, known hereabouts as “the winter formal,” although it’s not. Girls must wear dresses and boys, ties. But it will require a Getting Ready pre-party, and I gather we’re hosting. So I’d best pull up my socks and get it in gear. Some bloggage? Oh, why not:

I’m not nearly as well-traveled as you might think, and certainly less than I’d like to be. For instance, I’ve only been to Los Angeles once, but the city has stayed with me. The hills and canyons were so strange to a flatlander like me; I found it fascinating how you could be in an unmistakably urban area one minute, take a right turn and two lefts, and be in some cleft in the hills that felt entirely off the map. Ever since, I’ve wanted to live somewhere that strange. And while the Grosse Pointes are hardly L.A., Detroit offers enough strangeness and off-the-map feel for years of exploration.

All of which leads to a couple of Sweet Juniper bonbons, in which Jim and the kids find the country in the city and also the prairie.

All that talk of cutout cookies yesterday prompted Lex to send along instructions for making your own mad gingerbread men.

Tiger Woods nude photos? As one of my FB friends says, he needs to start talking, and the words he needs to say are SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY.

Via Fark, the headline I never got to write: Snowball the overweight hedgehog is running and swimming his way back to health

Costco awaits. Have a good weekend.

With the approach of the holiday season comes my annual consideration, dandled through the idle moments of December, right down to the wire, and inevitably discarded, i.e.,

Should I make a buche de noel this year?

Or, put another way, should this be the year I go to no small trouble to craft a rolled sponge cake cut and decorated to resemble a fallen log in the forest, complete with marzipan mushrooms carved by hand and smudged with cocoa so as to look authentically “dirty,” etc.?

It’s not part of my cultural heritage, although I suppose, living in an area first settled by the French, I could claim it as a local-history exercise. I generally avoid it on more practical grounds, seeing that our family is small and one-third of it got her palate from her father’s side of the family and has a default setting of ew, gross on all new foods. One of these years, but likely not this one.

I write a sentence like that and think, you might not be here next year. Do you want to pass into the next world and stand before whatever gatekeeper is there and say, “Regrets, I’ve had a few, tops among them, I never made a buche de noel?” No, but then, I’d never put a non-existent buche de noel in the top 10, or even the top 100. Rather, my hesitance has more to do with another lesson learned: That the more trouble you go to for food, the more disappointed you’re likely to be.

I’m veering dangerously close to a Bob Greene column he trotted out every six months or so, the sparkling wit of “never travel for food.” Greene liked to say — and say and say and say — that if someone told you the pizza was better in the next county, the pizza would inevitably be awful. I disagree because that’s a self-evidently stupid contention. The food is better in Paris than in Detroit. It may or may not be worth the enormous expense to go there and find that out for yourself, but it doesn’t make it any less true. (The food is probably better in Indianapolis than in Detroit. With very few exceptions, this is the worst restaurant city in North America, and the next person who tells me to visit Lafayette Coney Island is going to get the high hat from me, because I did that — once — and feel fortunate to have escaped with my stomach lining intact.)

I have found, however, that the best food is the easiest food, and the more difficult the preparation gets, the more likely it will disappoint. This is why I don’t brine turkeys and will never, ever deep-fry one. The best food is a perfectly ripe raspberry plucked from the bush and popped into your mouth, and it goes downhill from there, but you get the idea. The Italians have it right — the best ingredients, minimally messed with. Winter is a time for cooking, certainly. The raspberry bush is rattling its bare branches in a frigid breeze as we speak. But I don’t think it’s time for a buche de noel just yet.

What’s your pain in the ass holiday food preparation? Lately I’ve been looking at a recipe in last December’s Gourmet, for Christmas cookies. Sanding sugar in vivid colors is called for. I’m starting to waver.

No bloggage today but this. Some people have to learn lessons the hard way:

Alexi Dohnal arrived at the East Bank Club for a facial, changed into a spa robe and placed $140,000 worth of jewelry in a locker. When she returned, she found the lock cut and her jewelry gone.

Don’t worry, the jewelry is insured. Still, she’s “disheartened” and “depressed.” Poor bunny rabbit.

Off to the gym.

If this blogging gig paid anything, I’d hire Jolene as my research assistant. Not only does she read the entire internet every day, she actually remembers what she read, searches like a ninja and is always able to provide a helpful link to something that ran six months ago. She was the one who suggested, a few days ago, that we start a discussion this month with recommendations of gift books for the holidays. So I’ll kick off December with her excellent idea.

Federal Trade Commission full disclosure: All links in today’s entry will take would-be purchasers through my Amazon Associates store, aka the Kickback Lounge, where yours truly will receive a tiny percentage of the purchase price. (Commenters’ links most likely won’t.) And a word to any fellow bloggers out there: Amazon’s payments, compared to Google’s AdSense, are the difference between your paychecks at a rural weekly newspaper and those of, say, Katie Couric. Which is to say I made about $17 last month, and sometimes I’d go months before making that much from the don’t-be-evil people. Who are.

OK, then: You’ve already read my thoughts on “Tinsel: A Search of America’s Christmas Present,” but I’m here to recommend it again. Hank Stuever has been getting some very respectable reviews for his look at how the holidays are celebrated in Exurbia, but for my money you can’t beat this one, from Amazon:

This is a nasty book written by a bitter, self-described homosexual with an anti-God, leftist agenda. That being said, it’s an “absolutely phenomenal” read.

Ha. Well. Actually, what comes through in the book (for me, anyway, and I’m not the only one to note it), is how much Hank actually likes all the people he writes about, even as he does not shrink from describing them in situ with the sort of all-seeing eye an anthropologist would envy. Recommended for the overdecorator, or under-spirited, on your gift list.

While we’re pimping our friends-who-just-happen-to-be-celebrated-authors, two for the mystery/crime fiction readers on your list — Laura Lippman’s fine standalone, “Life Sentences,” and her collection of short stories, “Hardly Knew Her,” the latter of which reveals more of Laura’s impish sense of humor than her long-form fiction. (Not that she’s a slug or anything, but many of these stories are just plain funny.) Also, the stories are available in paperback, so you can buy both and make a gift bundle, while tossing a few shekels at Laura for her bundle. I should probably mention that “Hardly Knew Her,” like much of her fiction, takes as its theme what a PhD might call the perfidy of women. Perfidy, but with humor. Win-win-entertain.

“Closing Time,” on the nightstand in the right rail for the longest time, isn’t new — it was published last year — but it’s worth your time even if you have to look a little harder for it. Joe Queenan’s memoir of being the abused son of a charming Irish drunk stayed with me for weeks after I finished it, and stays with me still. Rich with detail of growing up poor at a time when anyone with a work ethic could become comfortably middle class (if they didn’t have a drunk for a parent, that is), and not only poor but white and poor, and not just anywhere but in one of the most interesting cities in the country (Philadelphia), it’s a banquet throughout. It’s not a front-to-back bummer, either, but at its heart a story of how a person can overcome just about anything if he has the right kind of help and just a little bit of luck. I’ve been a fan of Queenan’s for years, and this book adds a new layer to my appreciation of a fine, funny writer.

Because we all know a lot of non-reading readers, and because America needs its share of books that don’t cause even casual readers to break a sweat, as well as something funny for your guests to page through while they watch you cook Christmas dinner, a recommendation from Mindy, who found the website that led to “Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong.” Revel in the simple yuks provided by cakes with names misspelled on them, or emblazoned: BABY SHOWER FOR BOY. Mindy recommends bookmarking Cake Wrecks as your daily amusement stop, now that the Lolcats seem to have run their course. Yes, what she said.

Which sort of fills out the entry for today, but I want to add one more, a website that should be a book and probably already is, but one you can look at right now — Ugliest Tattoos, name self-explanatory. Whatever you do, don’t click the “sexual” tag. OK, I warned you.

Now add your own recommendations. And for those who use the Kickback Lounge, I’d get your names tattooed on my heart if I could.

I hope your holiday was pleasant. Mine was, although at some point I shifted into hibernation mode — all I want to do is sleep, a condition that will likely last until we change the clocks again. Sleep and eat. You ask me, the bears have the right idea.

Maybe cutting back on carbs will help. She said as she finished the last slice of birthday cake.

If any of you doubt that I basically pull every entry on this blog from my nether regions on a daily basis, I offer as evidence the preceding two paragraphs.

I’m a little rusty this morning. Lots went on over the weekend, lots coming up. We had a production meeting/casting session for the upcoming 48-hour film challenge, and I took a moment to look around the table at all the smart faces there and reflect on what these Michigan tax incentives for filmmakers have wrought. The difference between what we brought to the party in June 2008 and what we have just over a year later is pretty remarkable. Not that the 2008 team was bush league, but most of the people we have now, from actors to crew, have serious professional filmmaking experience, and it shows. A year ago, casting the zombie movie, some of the people auditioning had trouble reading. Saturday, we had a 13-year-old girl who most recently worked with Rob Reiner. In fact, as I looked around the table and asked myself who’s the weak link in the chain? It’s me. Time to bring it, I guess.

We also had house guests, John and Sam, for Saturday night, when we finally celebrated my birthday. Lovely cake and presents. Pork tenderloin with an Indian spice rub on the grill, yum yum. We discovered that even though both John and Sam are plugged in net people, being childless they’ve missed many YouTube classics — Charlie Bit Me, the Panda Sneeze, and of course, the Dramatic Prairie Dog. John learns fast, however, and quickly threw together this video homage with his iPhone and one of my birthday presents, which we’re calling…

…Dramatic Horse Pen.

That’s a pen from some cowboy museum on John and Sammy’s recent trip out west. Punchline: It doesn’t work. Glad it’s good for something.

And now my attention is drawn by the events of the day — the president’s speech on Afghanistan tomorrow, the next phase in heath insurance reform, and, of course, Tiger Woods’ marriage, about which I could not care less. I am interested in human behavior, however, so before we go on, let’s stipulate something that is, to me, as plain as that Escalade wrapped around the tree, yonder:

Woods is lying. He’s lying about the accident, he’s lying about whatever preceded it, and he’s lying about the role his wife played in it. He probably started the whole chain of events by lying to her, too, the classic, “Who, me? I wasn’t with her! The National Enquirer is lying!” That’s OK — everyone lies sometimes, and none of us would want to live with a 100 percent truth-teller. Sometimes the greatest honesty comes out of gentle deception, etc. I’m thinking today of his wife, who I’m going to speculate was wielding that golf club not to rescue her husband, but to threaten him and perhaps knock his block off. Eric Zorn and I have been exchanging e-mail on the subject, and he contends her target was the car all along — nothing like a smashed window to punctuate your peril when you’re trying to escape the fury of a Swedish giantess. I think maybe she was aiming for the man himself, which would be pretty damn stupid on her part — any physical injury to the ATM machine she shares her life with would imperil its future smooth operation. But then, I doubt Woods married his wife for her brains. Maybe that’s what he found in the New York “social director” he was allegedly dallying with, an intellectual equal to his Stanford-educated brain.

Let’s take a look at this TMZ item, though, one that says Tiger was shopping Zales (Zales? Yeah, that sent up a flag for me, too) for a “Kobe Special,” i.e., a big flashy rock to appease her feminine furies. I’m reminded of the female comedian who, after the original Kobe special was delivered, remarked, “Just what every woman wants — a big shiny reminder of her husband’s infidelity.”

Let me just go on the record here, and say I hope my child will grow to adulthood knowing that her mother never went after her father with a golf club. Good lord, Elin, one misjudged swing and you’re talking closed-head injury and the rest of your life being the next Dana Reeve. Suck it up.

Ten a.m. looms, dragging behind it a busy day. We’re back to the mangle, folks, and starting the long slog to Christmas.