So last year I did a top stories-type recap, both with actual news and my life. The year before was five word recaps. Before that, I was out of the country, and I don't think I even considered a year in review post in 2001.

As tempting as that last option is, I'll take the next shortest option that doesn't require trans-Atlantic flight.

January: Goodbye Walter Brown, hello Harry.
February: Three Lombardis equals dynasty, bitches!
March: Hockey and basketball - it's Madness!
April: John Paul departs, Benedict arrives.
May: Felt is Deep Throat? Huh.
June: Visited Chicago and Maine. Woo!
July: Took teacher's exam, NHL returns.
August: Wentworth hires me, finances rejoice!
September: Expensive gas mars driving vacation.
October: Pale Hose win Series, finally.
November: Red Sox drama begins anew.
December: W and Santa are watching!

Happy New Year to all!

Another fantasy football season has come and gone, and depending on how you look at it I either finished 10th (out of 10) or 8th (former my regular season mark, latter my final position based on consolation games). I'd feel better about my performance if I were just filling out the league for someone, but considering I run the league, I feel like I should at least be going .500 for the season.

Consider that my opening week line-up featured:

* Aaron Brooks, who would get benched

* Ahman Green, who went out for the season with a quad injury (and later had surgery for a ruptured tendon)

* Curtis Martin, who went out for the season with a knee injury (late in the season, after weeks of being stuck running the ball in the Jets' makeshift offense)

* Michael Clayton, who may have lasted into week 5 before his lack of production sent him packing

And that was for a week where I won. My roster also featured Deuce McAllister (season-ending knee injury), Chad Pennington (season-ending shoulder injury), and Tyrone Calico (lack of production, cut before season-ending injury). So it was a nice combination of bad luck and drafting poorly; I'll claim the former based on my 1-2-1 record in games where I scored over 100 points.

Now I just have to figure out who - if anyone - I want to keep from this team.

Happy Merry to all! Hope that Holiday is treating or treated you well. I'm still kind of sickly full from dinner (and post-dinner snacking, which you think I'd have passed being kind of sickly full, but I'm not that bright), but doing OK. I may be one of the last people to have discovered the appeal of the game Apples to Apples, as my sister-in-law and her boyfriend got a copy and we played it a couple of times. It certainly went better than my attempts at playing spades and hearts, whose rules I tend to confuse for the first half of the game. Cribbage went better, as in both games I managed a 24 point hand.

Not sure what my favorite present was. It's probably a toss-up between the first and second seasons of NewsRadio or a pair of slippers. I know, slippers, but when you have feet of my size any footwear that actually fits is cause for celebration.

Is it a recent development, or is the popularity of the Christmas song "Dominick the Donkey" something I've managed to miss over my 36 years? I'd not heard of it until last week, and now I can't escape it. What the heck?

Only two of us from the regular team made it to bar trivia last night, and at the end of the first half we were down by 16 points (which I suppose is a lot, given that a perfect score for the first half is 50 points). But we battled through the second half and managed to eke out a win on the final question in a semi-themed Christmas game that wasn't always to our liking. Anyway, questions:

What modern country was home to the St. Nicholas who inspired Santa Claus? Turkey - We had no idea. I thought Hungary, Mason thought Romania. We went with the latter. We needed to head farther east.

What 1977 Jim Henson offering was a holiday special featuring otters that was narrated by Kermit the Frog? Emmett Otter's Jug Band Christmas (Sly) - I suppose it can only be this, given that there's not a wealth of otter-related holiday material out there. I had heard of this, but in no way did it enter my consciousness when we tried to answer the question. The guys running the game claim it merits classic status. I'll leave that open to the court of popular opinion. But really, of all nights for our resident Muppet fan to not be there...

What US state was the first to make Christmas an official state holiday, doing so in 1836 (I'll give you a less defining hint than we got: the state would later not be a US state for a while). Alabama - The actual clue we got was that it was a Gulf Coast state. We guessed Louisiana based on the somewhat jazzy music being played during the question.

In what ocean would you find Christmas Island? Indian Ocean (Paul) - we went with Pacific. I suppose we were close.

What actress played Audrey Griswold in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation? Juliette Lewis (Chris) - she had pre-skank days? Anyway, I remembered that it was someone who was a "name" actress, just not who. For some reason Christina Ricci came to mind. Must have been all of her Addams Family work.

What four letters start the names of two - and only two - US states? K, S, T, and V (Paul, but with kudos to Jack for his alternate answer) - we had 'C' briefly, until I started writing out postal abbreviations and stumbled across CT. Go figure we forgot the one closest to us. I have a feeling this is where we made up some ground.

Who wrote "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" and all that)? (Hint: he may be better known to us young'uns for recurring cameos on a sitcom.) Mel Torme (Chris) - Were it not for the hint, we'd never have gotten it. Good thing I was a Night Court fan back in the day.

What country was the first to popularize Christmas trees? Germany (Brian) - we bet to hold second, not expecting that the team in first would miss this. I wonder what they put? I was a little nervous that it would be some other Germanic country, so perhaps they went with Austria or something. Not only did we get the win, but being only two of us, we had a credit left over from our $50 bar cash prize. Woo hoo!

Let the hyperventilation begin: Johnny Damon is now a Yankee, to the tune of 4 years for $52 million. This seems like a lot of money. I'm sure Jon will give a reflective, well-concieved analysis of the signing (certainly in comparison to the apocalyptic rantings of sports radio).

I am unsure who'll be out in center for the Sox in the coming year (my guess is that whoever it is spent a lot of 2005 in Pawtucket - or perhaps even Portland), though if they can bring a shortstop with them when the show up for spring training, so much the better.

So today I started the book Crossworld, in which the author discusses the history (and even some sociology) of the puzzles, documents his own addiction to the New York Times puzzle, and enters the world of competitive puzzling.

At the beginning of the book, the author notes that he is from a town "at the northernmost end of Boston's North Shore (white-clapboard public buildings, preppies, gulls wheeling in the deep, snug, boat-filled harbor)..." As I also hail from such a town, I glanced back at the cover to get the author's name. Turns out that the author, Marc Romano, was in my brother's high school class. I knew him a little bit (about as much as an 8th grader can know a senior who isn't a family friend), and the book seems like him in tone and spirit (that being said from 20 years after our last meaningful interaction, which was undoubtedly not that meaningful).

It's a pretty good book, owing something to Word Freak but able to stand in its own right. Some of the Amazon reviews feel that Marc's a little too-focused on himself in the text, but as a blogger I don't have much ground to stand on making that argument. I will say that I'd have liked a little more meat to the history of the puzzles, but I don't think there's a great deal of primary source material from which to work.

I was going to post yesterday on the minor irritation caused by the turnstiles being down at North Station when I came in for work. This forced two commuter trains' worth of people to use the lone gated entry, meant primarily for wheeled contrivances.

Of course, given that I could just have no subway to use, like our friends in New York, such complaints look pretty paltry. I look forward to Boggie's take on this, assuming he ever posts again. My guess is that work has outdone itself and sent him on a job to either McMurdo Sound or the International Space Station (in which case we'd better get photos of penguins or a first-hand account of zero-gravity toilets, respectively).

Barring the weekend in Chattanooga, I feel better today than any day since Thanksgiving. I know I'm jinxing myself by saying that, but I figure I might as well say it now before the bird flu hits.

A pretty uneventful weekend, spent either Christmas shopping or watching football. I had hoped to liven things up by seeing the blog equivalent of Cooch shooting blood from his ears based on Nomar signing with the Dodgers, but nothing yet.

The revelation that W has sicced the NSA on us piqued my interest. That he fully intends to continue doing so makes me plutonium wonder what it takes to Allah get put on their yellowcake watch list. Probably more Bin Laden than this.

As Jon mentioned, our governor, Mitt Romney, has decided to pack it in after only one term, opting to not seek re-election next year. I caught a little of his press conference on this, and it bore a certain similarity to the autobiography the first President Bush wrote on The Simpsons, as Mitt (like 41) stated he'd pretty much done everything he wanted in one term.

Romney now goes off to see if his steady shifting to the right over the last year or so gives him any traction in a run for the White House. Good luck with that; I'm sure there'll be some questions about the same-sex marriage thing when you stump at Bob Jones U.

Though, if nothing else, Romney will go down as the greatest governor of the last 20 years. Consider his opposition:

Mike Dukakis - who looked like a genius, until he ran for President, lost focus, and helped plunge the state into a recession well before the rest of the country caught on.

Bill Weld - a liberal Republican and Boston Brahmnin as well-known for his love of the Grateful Dead as for whatever he did while governor. Was going to be an ambassador until Jesse Helms stuck his nose into things.

Paul Celucci - elevated to governor when Weld resigned to chase that ambassadorship, won the office outright in 1998. Preached fiscal austerity, but ran up personal debts of $750000 and apparently let the Big Dig firms audit themselves. He also resigned over an ambassadorship, but actually got the post, serving as ambassador to Canada.

Jane Swift - Ah, Swifty. Between using her staff as domestic help and a state police helicopter to commute to and from her home out west, she managed to become very unpopular. At one point she had a favorability rating in the single digits. She was the first governor to give birth while in office, which I guess is something.

No pub trivia last night, I was too busy segueing from the "nose running like a sieve" stage of whatever I have to the "sinus pain and coughing up of stuff with the consistency of tar" stage.

(Apologies if this catches you while eating.)

I did have one of my more surreal nights of sleep (or "sleep," given the relative lack thereof), highlighted by my taking a Benadryl to induce drowsiness - only to wake up 90 minutes later when all the stuff in my sinuses apparently converged on the same point, creating a singularity of snot. Trust me, that's the sort of thing that gets your attention, pharmaceutically-induced sleep or no.

I've been running at about 40 percent effectiveness at work, though I'm doing pretty well with things not requiring me to leave my desk. Outside of wanting to nap, I actually feel OK. That will likely change when I leave to go home and expose myself to more of our frigid weather. Really, what's with the single digits?

Not too much to add, as being sick has generally curtailed activities. We did go to the wife's work holiday party, which was fun but abbreviated due to her being sick. We did stay the night at the Omni Parker House, which I can't complain about. We definately had one of the rooms they use for specials, as it was on the smaller side, but it was pretty well appointed. I'd go back.

So I'm back to being sick again. Or, perhaps more accurately, whatever I had that was never completely cured has mounted a comeback. It's not been too bad (the wife is much worse off, and it could be that I segued seamlessly from what I had to what she has), though for whatever reason it seems like one of the side effects is a lack of tiredness (as you might imagine given the time of this post).

Another side-effect (well, more of a self-imposed condition of trying to get better) is I've spent a fair amount of time lying down and watching sports, which is never a bad thing. I got to watch Northern Iowa and Appalachian State punch their tickets for the 1-AA national title game, and see top-ranked Grand Valley State hold off Northwest Missouri to take the D2 crown. All the games were well-spirited and went down to the last play. I know bowl games can be exciting, but there's something abotu having games like this at the end of a playoff that cranks up the intensity. I don't think I'd have cared as much if it were the close ending of, say, the Fort Worth Bowl.

I also got to see a bit of the SWAC title game between Grambling and Alabama A&M. I didn't even know they had a title game. Of course, I didn't see any of the second half, wherein the Tigers turned it into a rout.

Topping this off was an installment of Ice 2005, a two-hour block of bobsled, luge, skeleton, and curling. There wasn't enough bobsled for my taste, and the curling was a men versus women Team USA skins event (four ends, team with the hammer has to score two points to take the end), which was different. I suppose it would be too much to ask for this show to appear all year and actually follow the World Cup circut (or whatever curling's equivalent is).

Italy. Ghana. Czech Republic.

USA.

Damn. This is not going to be an easy group at all. It may very well be the group of death. B (England, Sweden, Paraguay, Trinidad) and C (Argentina, Ivory Coast, Serbia-Montenegro, and the Netherlands) are pretty tough, too.

Groups G and H vie for the weakest groups. No worries about France and Spain making the second round this year, unless France coughs one up to Togo.

I figured I missed the World Cup draw as I was doing an errand for work, but as of now they've not ever started yet. Are the Oscar people running the show? Considering a message just came across that the official mascot just finished presenting a song to the world, I'm going to assume that, yes, Gil Cates is at the helm.

I almost missed the pick for good, as when I left the building to go to the post office, I nearly got crushed between one of those Bobcat things and the building. Though it's nice to know that Lewis Black is in town; how else to explain the snow, thunder, and lightning?

Unrelatedly, commisserations to JQ for his second place finish last night on Jeopardy!. Go figure that this time, everyone knew the final question. Glad to see he got the question on the Phillipines, though!

About the time today when most Americans are somewhere between lunch and their mid-afternoon snack, a drawing will be held in Germany to determine the first round groupings for the 2006 World Cup finals. This article does a nice job of describing the process and has a link for following the draw live, if you're so inclined.

The US kind of got screwed going into the draw as they did not get one of the top 8 seeds, based on a formula FIFA devised using past World Cup experience and world rankings. Mexico managed to pick one up, though, which is a little galling given that the US did better than Mexico in the last World Cup and beat Mexico in the most recent qualifying. The Netherlands also missed a seed, punishment for missing the 2002 tournament.

This still leaves the question on the best and worst draws for the US team, a question answered here. I do have some disagreements, though.

First, the author suggests that Germany would actually be a nice first round opponent, as they aren't as strong as in the past. As true as this might be, this fails to note that:

1. Even without the world beating talent of previous squads, they're still good.
2. The tournament is being played in Germany.
3. Germany will play in the largest stadiums, which I imagine will be filled with German fans.

Playing at home gives you a huge bump; look at how Japan and South Korea did in 2002. A good German team with that bump will be very hard to beat.

The best choice from among the seeded group has to be France. They failed to qualify in 1990 and 1994, and didn't get past the first round in 2002. And while plenty of French fans will be in attendance, you'd have to think that locals would at least root against the French, if not in favor of whoever they're playing.

Out of the second pot, I'd go with Angola. It's their first World Cup, and they're about as surprising a qualifier as anyone (they and Togo would probably share that award). From the third pot I suppose I'd take the Swiss, though they're close enough that they should have some fans in attendance (I also don't want to chance a repeat of our loss to Poland in 2002).

As for the draw of death, how's this for starters: Brazil, Paraguay, and the Netherlands. For fun, you could sub out Brazil and the Netherlands for Argentina and the Czechs. Heck, any of the seeded teams outside of Mexico will be tough. Sadly, we don't get a shot to play Mexico in the first round.

I would add that I'm at a loss to explain how Australia gets into group of death consideration. They've not qualified in 34 years, and made it to Germany by beating Uruguay - South America's fifth-best team - in a playoff decided by penalty kicks. I can see why England wouldn't want to play them - the English can't seem to beat Australia in any of the other sports they compete against each other in - but I really don't see why we should fear them.

(And isn't that a statement worthy of coming back to bite me in the ass?)

Anyway, keep your fingers crossed.

First off, congrats to James Quintong for winning last night on Jeopardy!. It was, as he termed it, a war of attrition, evidenced by his locking up the win going into Final Jeopardy - with $4200. He's said that tonight's game will be more entertaining. Just hope it's another win.

Finishing what I started earlier in the week, there is very little that can be said for the state quarter class of 2008:

Oklahoma - I'm not particularly crazy about this design, but I think I like the idea behind it.

New Mexico - here are two very different takes for the Land of Enchantment. Hot air ballooning and nuclear warfare? Where do I get my moving van?

Ideas that come to mind: the symbol from the state flag (a cop-out, but at least something to fall back on), a kachina or other symbol of the native American population, some sort of Roswell-inspired alien design (can't we have at least one fun state quarter?).

Hawaii - out of the several designs here, I think number 14 is most striking, though I'm not sure how (or even if) they could get that same effect on a coin. Number 2 is pretty good if you want to go in a non-native direction. A spoof of the usual reverse side using a nene goose and native plants rather than olive branches would be interesting.

Arizona and Alaska - no designs for either of them on the site I keep linking to, and I can't find much out there elsewhere. This article has a good slide show of suggested images, though I'd have to say if it's a barometer of the social climate in Arizona, perhaps it's best that my lone "visit" there was a walk across the Hoover Dam from Nevada.

Arizona might have the toughest problem of any state, though: how do you get it's most obvious icon - the Grand Canyon - on a coin?

There's pretty much nothing for Alaska out there. But they've got a good site for their coin commission, if nothing else. I'd like to nominate the Iditarod as subject material, though getting a sled dog team on a coin may be tough.

Program note: as he's mentioned on his blog, James Quintong will be on Jeopardy! tonight. He's been quite mum on his performance, so check your local listings and keep your fingers crossed!

After a few weeks off, we returned to bar trivia with the same result as last time: second place. We lost by two points to a guy playing on his own, and given the winning score it was pretty impressive. Anyway, your questions:

What rapper-turned-actor made his film debut in the 1994 movie Renaissance Man? Mark Wahlberg (Phil) - we had no idea, but settled on LL Cool J pretty quickly. Seemed like a good idea at the time, and really, how much of a rapper was Marky Mark?

What South American country is named for a tree or the people who collect its wood to make dye? Brazil (Paul) - we followed roughly the same logic, though I was fairly sure there was a brazilwood tree. Good thing there is, too, as the Brazil nut grown on a completely different tree. Take that, logic!

With the help of accountant Walter Diemer, what company was the first to produce bubble gum? Fleer (Myron) - Right on the company and the name. We couldn't come up with it, and guessed Wrigley's, even though we were pretty sure that wasn't right. We started talking about card companies pretty late, and I think if we'd taken that tack earlier we'd have come up with it (or at least come closer).

Whose debut album was 1999's On How Life Is?

What rock (more pop than rock, really) musician was the first Western performer to play in both Israel and the Soviet Union, doing so in 1979? Elton John (Sly) - We went with Paul McCartney, based on his Back in the USSR album and the musical clue of "Back in the USSR" by that first band he was in. Given how obvious some of the earlier musical clues were - "Mrs. Robinson" for a question about David Robinson and "I Ran" for a question about, yup, Iran, it wasn't that much of a stretch.

Of course, we also were thinking of a reasonably legitimate rock person, as per the question (the parenthetical comment is mine). Feathery capes and platform shoes are only really rock if they're on Ziggy Stardust.

This was actually much harder than the final question, naming the continent whose highest peak is Mount Kosciusco. They'd have been better off asking that one in reverse.

It appears to still be a little early to find the final designs for the 2007 state quarters, but here's what we've got:

Montana - they took the route that gave us the very nice Mississippi quarter: give the US Mint some ideas and let them design something. Like many of the western states, the ideas tend to focus on natural beauty and features. At least one has a state outline involved, which I kindly ask the folks at the Mint to ignore with prejudice.

There are a bunch of ideas here, the only one that really piques my interest is the Little Bighorn one, which seems ripe for a controversy (or contrivoversy).

Washington is also going this route (OK, expect that people are unless I tell you otherwise), and you can read the official press release about the final designs here. The prominence of the state outline is highly troubling, and I would whole-heartedly back either of the last two options over any of the first three. I would tend towards the orca one given that Native Americans aren't getting a whole lot of play where state quarters are concerned. Couldn't hurt to throw a bone to the people whose land got stolen.

Though, I have to say, Bigfoot on a state quarter would totally rock.

Idaho - finding information here is pretty tough - the site I've been linking to for many of these entries doesn't even have a short list of themes. This article gives us what we're looking for, and isn't that a mixed bag?

The falcon, fine. The Sawtooth Mountains, great. A "Farmland Tapestry" is, uh, interesting. The state song sounds like we're viewing the state in a museum ("and here we have Idaho, next to the petrified dinosaur poop"), and "Bold and Distinctive" sounds more like "have to come up with a fifth idea before I get to go home for the weekend."

This may be the first case where an outline of the state would be welcome.

I also find the lack of a potato in any design to be perverse.

Wyoming - the only one of these I like is the one using the lariat. In official channels, I can only find that designs were due to the state at the end of April. There's really nothing about what the final themes were.

I have a feeling the quarter will either wind up taking the logo off of the University of Wyoming's football helmets or somehow play off of Yellowstone and/or Old Faithful.

Utah - honestly, I think this one is pretty good. The only other thing I can find in a cursory Google search is information on the formation of a commission to come up with designs. The page for the commission on the state's website is not working. That bodes poorly.

Were I to guess, there will be a final design featuring a beehive, one the Great Salt Lake, and one with a seagull (perhaps centered on an outline of the state). Given its position as the state's official snack food, perhaps a Jell-o mold could sneak its way in.

If you're a job-seeker, it may not be the wisest thing to have the email you submit with your materials to share the name of this band. Especially around here, where, you know, there are a few of us whose families came over from Ireland.

While I was away being a nerd this weekend (the skinny: 4th place as a team, 9th place individual scorer, discovered that pineapple Coke is good while watermelon root beer isn't), I got a West Virginia quarter as change, an in observing such it came up that I'd not updated the Mark Across America portion of Travelin' Jones to include new quarters and such.

It's nice to know that someone cares. Or is at least willing to make it seem so.

Rather than making the promise to update things that I will likely not keep in a timely manner, here's a preview of the 2006 state quarter designs:

Nebraska - you can see all four finalists here, and I'll mention that the winner is the Chimney Rock design, which I like quite a bit. There is part of me, though, that wishes they had saluted their unicameral legislature.

Nevada - here's the winning design with some finalists. The bighorn ram quarter finished second (it's the state's official animal) and the miner came in third.

According to this article, roughly a quarter of the votes came from children. Which I think goes a long way to explaining why the horsies won over the scarier animal and the gruff miner.

I do think they missed a golden opportunity in not selecting a slot machine paying off in Nevada quarters. Would that be the first time a coin appears on itself?

There's also little to disagree with for this quarter-turned-PSA.

Colorado - if nothing else, the winner and other finalists get the point across: Colorado has mountains. I'm not crazy about this one. Pretty blah, really.

North Dakota - bison are great, but I'd have gone with Roger Maris.

South Dakota - no big surprise that Mount Rushmore won, but I didn't realize that the pheasants grew so big out there. The lack of scale is a little off-putting. The sheafs (sheaves?) of wheat are a nice touch, though.

Tomorrow: 2007!

We saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire tonight, and we enjoyed it quite a bit. It was clearly much darker than the first three (in keeping with the shift in tone in the books), and the least "Hogwarts-centric," meaning that it was less concerned with the school year as with the plot involving You-Know-Who.

It's also the least true to the book of the four, but not in a bad way. There's a fair amount of stuff left out as well, but given the length of the book there's no way they'd be able to put it all in a movie without it approaching Fanny and Alexander-type length. I thought this hurt the portrayals of Krum and Delacroix the most, as they're not much more than place-holders in the movie. Between the two of them they probably get 10 lines of dialog, if that.

As for the actors getting older, they're all still believable as 14 year-olds. As much as the main characters have changed, I thought the difference in appearances in Ginny Weasley and Neville Longbottom were the most striking.

I was also pretty surprised that Cho Chang had a Scottish accent. Me and my cultural biases.

Anyway, it's another solid entry for the franchise. Especially when you can use half-price passes to go see it. Viva parsimony!

And with the movie we got six previews:

* Aeon Flux, which looks like they crossed The Matrix with Gattaca. Though that may well be the vibe from the series; I never watched it.

* The Shaggy Dog, another remake of the man-becomes-canine Disney film, this time starring Tim Allen. Yes, there are wacky hijinx and valuable Lessons Learned. Hopefully, one of them is that you should never see a Tim Allen movie.

* Cheaper by the Dozen 2, which leads me to ask, "Why?" Basic plot: Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt's huge family takes on Eugene Levy's richer big family. There are wacky hijinx and valuable Lessons Learned. Hopefully, one of them is that most movies should not be sequelized.

* King Kong, which I have to say I have no interest in. I've never been that interested in the story in general, which leads me to ask: are there supposed to be dinosaurs on Skull Island?

* The new Superman movie had a very vague preview, mostly short snatches of film that give you a general idea that he's back, but without showing too much of the film. It piqued my curiosity, but didn't show enough to really pull me in.

* Finally, there was Happy Feet. It's an animated cross between The March of the Penguins and... Swing Kids? Strictly Ballroom? One of those dancing movies, anyways, as it appears to be about penguins who dance. Robin Williams does his fey Latino voice for one of the penguins, which is problematic.