"The customer is always right."

Bill Smith, who was one of my first bosses, never told me that. The customer isn't always right, he would say - but the customer is always the customer. I saw him take back goods because the customer had changed her mind. I saw him take back goods because the customer had damaged them. I saw him take back goods the customer had bought elsewhere for less, giving them a refund at our higher price. When he wasn't around the store, I was to handle returns, and I had two options: I could make the customer happy with a replacement or a refund, and he wouldn't second-guess me, or if I thought the customer was really a crook, I could politely ask the customer to wait until Bill had returned.

Over the years, the lesson has done me well. They tell a story about a lady who complained at a Nordstrom that the snow tires she'd bought the previous fall had given poor service. The manager asked how much money she'd paid for the snow tires, and issued her a cash refund on the spot - she didn't need to return the tires. A new assistant watched the whole thing, and after the lady had left with the refund, complained, "We've never sold snow tires. We've never sold tires at all. You gave her a refund, and she's not even a Nordstrom customer," but the manager replied, "She is now!"

If you make a customer especially happy, she'll tell one friend - ten friends at most. If she is outraged, she will tell ten friends at a minimum, and often will tell a hundred customers. My first wife, Em, had scoliosis, giving her a hump on her back. If she shopped carefully, nobody noticed - and because she was a size 14, not a size 10, and because she wanted ivory, not white, for her wedding dress, she had to order it made instead of buying off the rack.

It takes 4-6 weeks, J.C.Penney told her, to get your dress, but no worry; we had 8 weeks. Penney's waited 5 weeks, then phoned her and told her that the dress wasn't available in ivory, only in white. I got on the phone, and pointed out that the receipt said "no cancellations" and that it was only 3 weeks until the wedding, not enough time to order a dress from some other economical provider. They said we could have a white dress, not what we had ordered, or we could have a refund. We ended up having to hire a local seamstress to make a dress, at an extra cost of about $400.

And although I grew up wearing J.C.Penney clothes, I no longer shop there. My mother and sister stopped shopping there, and I've told thousands of people how they screwed us. It's perfectly understandable that they might sell something that they can't deliver; they weren't the manufacturers. But it shouldn't have taken 5 weeks for them to discover that error. Given the circumstances, they should have hired a local seamstress to fulfill their commitment. And if I have cost them $1000 in profits over the last three decades, I'm sorry; I really hope that I've cost them four times as much.

Most of the calls I receive are from nice people. There's a lady who's called several times, always on a Sunday, to report problems. She is so apologetic, but it's really nice to get her calls, because her calls let us know there's a problem, and we can work on fixing it. Attacks on the servers happen much more frequently on weekends and during school vacations, and we've learned how to fight the attacks.

Lately, most of the attacks have been mail attacks. A regular denial-of-service attack asks for a bunch of web pages at once, but when you get a bunch of people trying to log into mail accounts - even nonexistant accounts, as the weekend attacks usually ask for - it takes a lot more server horsepower than to simply ask for a web page.

My wife and my doctor have been telling me to retire. In the mid-90s, the doctor I had then was a little more forceful: he told me that I had a choice: either quit working or quit breathing. I believed him, and retired early, but it just didn't take. Before long, I had a website, then two, then a bunch of websites, and then started selling excess hosting capacity when we got our own server.

You'd have to be crazy, my best friend told me, to go into hosting. Those people are nuts, and they constantly fight with each other. For the most part, I haven't had trouble with other hosting companies. There's one that constantly was trying to fight with me, but he was constantly trying to fight with everyone. And the customers were, for the most part, pretty nice.

That's not to say that we pleased everyone. I've pointed out before that I rent web space from other people, because their hosting makes more sense for certain sites than my own. We don't claim to be perfect; we just claim to be diligent in supporting industry-standard hosting.

One customer joined us in mid-summer. He's made a lot of support requests, but they weren't really support requests. Someone called me up once, asking for a custard pie recipe. Not a big deal; I gave the best information I could. I can always use good karma. Someday, that person is going to send a customer to me, telling the custard pie story as an example of how we go out of our way to provide good support, even when the request is outrageous.

What it amounted to, was that this guy wanted me to build his website for him. And eventually, he started asking questions about Perl and PHP. I explained to him that in order to run PHP or Perl, he needs to get a site that supports PHP and Perl. Domania owns AmishHosting, which supports those technologies, but Domania itself doesn't.

He called back a few days later, telling me that he wanted to cancel his account, and asking for a refund. We offer a 30-day moneyback guarantee, and he was about 4 months too late for that, but I said OK anyway - the customer is always right - and I hung up.

Thirty seconds later, he called back. "You didn't even ask my username!" he shouted. I didn't have to ask his username; I knew who he was, from Caller ID. But I let him tell me his username, and I hung up.

Thirty seconds later, he called back. "You hung up on me!" he shouted. "Did you have anything else to say?" I asked. He said "No", and since I didn't have anything else to say, either, I hung up. And he tried to call a dozen more times, but I didn't answer.

The next day, he was calling again. I really wasn't in the mood for having him yell at me for hanging up when neither of us had anything to say. Finally, he took advantage of the answering machine, and proclaimed, "You dirty (bleep). You blocked me from accessing the file manager."

The reason he couldn't access the file manager, was that I cancelled his account. That's what he asked me to do. And when he started swearing at me, I decided that I need not go out of my way to give him a refund he isn't entitled to.

He's been calling again, at all hours of the day and night. In the last 4 hours, he's called about 75 times. Wouldn't you call that harassment?

Under federal law, 47 USC 223, (a)(1)(D), anyone who makes or causes the telephone of another repeatedly or continuously to ring, with intent to harass any person at the called number, can get two years in prison. I have records showing the phone calls, so it'd be a slam dunk.

Three days ago, the next door neighbor came over and screamed at Blondie. She offered to get me, but the guy didn't want to talk to me. His kid walked through our front yard and got dog manure on his shoes, and he wanted $150 from us to buy his kid new shoes.

I know why he didn't want to talk to me. I'd have laughed in his face. He wants us to train the dog to climb up on the toilet and take a dump there? Trespassers do so at their own risk.

He's not a customer of course. Neither is the guy who cancelled his account. And neither are the folks that have been attacking the servers. "The customer is always right" doesn't have anything to do with it.

So I haven't done anything yet - but I've figured out a new resolution. I'm not going to retire, not just yet, but I am going to stop treating jerks with such courtesy. If you treat them nicely, how are they supposed to learn?

And again, thank you to the many people who let me know when there's a problem with the server. Your efforts are greatly appreciated.

If you look up oenophile in the dictionary, they don't have my picture next to the definition. But I've always been curious about wines.

When CompuServe was the leading online service, I used to hang out at the Wine Forum, hoping to pick up wisdom. It could have been that wisdom was in short supply; more likely, it was there and I didn't recognize it.

They kept talking about Robert Parker, and what he thought of this wine and that wine. I commented that I always figured Robert Parker as a beer guy, since "Spenser" mostly drank Amstel in those days. It turns out, Robin told me, that the Robert Parker who wrote great detective novels, was not the same Robert Parker who reviewed wines.

A couple of years ago, they decided that drinking one glass a day of red wine prolongs your life. Teetotalers didn't live as long, nor did people who drank two or more glasses a day. Since then, I've tried several times to develop a habit of drinking a glass of red wine with supper. I've largely been unsuccessful.

I wouldn't have a problem with white wine. I've rarely seen a white wine that I disliked, and the cheap white Rhine wines seem especially enjoyable. Liebfraumilch - it's German for "Loving Mother's Milk" - is the hash of cheap white Rhine wines. After they bottle their Reislings and whatever, they toss whatever's left together, and bottle it up. Blends tend to eliminate rough edges, and white wines are best fresh, so it makes a pleasant white wine.

Red wines have complex flavors, and they often are best when aged ten to fifteen years. They require an educated palate, apparently, and having grown up in a Methodist household, mine may be a "special education" red wine palate.

The most popular red wine appears to be burgandy. It's not very appealing to me, and Blondie outright refuses to drink it. (Me, I figure there are kids starving in Europe.)

So when I was at the State Store earlier this week, I picked up a couple of red wines that I'd never tried before. One, Marsala, is supposed to be a "dessert wine". I don't know if that means that it is supposed to be dessert, or it's supposed to be served with dessert. In either case, though, it doesn't seem to pass muster.

The label described it as sweet, with a nutty taste. It's not sweet. It's not even what you'd call dry. It's pretty sour. And I don't pick up any "nutty" taste at all. It tastes like raisins.

And it'll knock you on your heiny. It's about 17% alcohol. Generally speaking, wines run about 12% or so, because the rising alcohol level, as the wine ferments, kills off the yeast. Seems like this variety would be best suited for a curb-dwelling wino. After all, if your heiny is already in the curb, you don't worry about getting knocked on it. You're already there.

I'm thinking about making up a sangria with the Marsala. Maybe if you mix it with a lot of sweet fruit, it'll be more palatable. It'd definitely dilute that alcoholic content. And if we don't like it, perhaps we can go one step further, add some 7up, call it punch, and invite ourselves to a New Year's Eve party. Blondie has some friends who aren't curb-dwellers, but they get blotto at least five nights a week.

Or perhaps I can make Chicken Marsala.

The other wine I bought was a Shiraz. I know even less about it, except that, well, a few years ago, nobody knew what Lambrusco was, and then it was the rage, and a few years ago, nobody knew what Cabernet was, and then it was all the rage, and a few years ago, nobody knew what Merlot was, and then it was all the rage. These days, Shiraz seems to be all the rage.

We haven't opened that bottle, yet.

Wines come from all over the globe, and to some people, the country of origin is important. If you grow the same grapes somewhere else, and make the wine the same way, the french government still doesn't let you call the wine Champagne.

I'm a fan of Hugh MacLeod, a cartoonist, who has been involved in promoting Stormhoek wines for a few years now. You can see the back of the Stormhoek Savignon Blanc here. "Blanc" means white, but Stormhoek makes two wines, and the other in pinotage.

Pinotage is a red wine grape that is South Africa's signature variety. It typically produces deep red varietal wines with smoky, bramble and earthy flavours, sometimes with notes of bananas and tropical fruit, but has been criticised for sometimes smelling of acetone. Love the attitude - change the world or go home - but I'm not really fond of acetone.

So I think I'll save myself the effort of trying that red.

There are a couple of stories I was hoping to shoehorn in here, but they never really fit anyplace. Shoehorns, come to think of it, often are associated with ill-fitting shoes, aren't they? So you get them with a splat.

A year or two ago, I went to a specialist, and the nurse was taking my medical history. Do I drink, the nurse asked me, and I said I was trying to develop a habit, but so far I had been unsuccessful. She gave me that strangest look. Hey, I said, one glass of red wine a day is supposed to make you live longer, but I just can't get into it. It'd sure be nice if I could substitute some other form of dissolute living, like maybe sex. Actually, the nurse said, people who have a lot of sex do live longer. I gave her my best dirty-old-man leer, and said, "Yes?" She broke out laughing, and from then on, every third question on my medical history, she'd collapse in laughter.

Oh, well, I guess you had to be there. And this one doesn't much better. You know what happened when someone stepped on the Catawba grape? It gave out a little whine/wine.

There are happy drunks, and there are sad drunks, drunks who simply fall asleep, and drunks who get nasty and start fights. I don't get drunk, but I tell jokes and stories. My wife says it's a shame I don't get drunk instead....

You can get whole brisket in cryovac bags at Walmart. That's a lot of meat, and it's cheap - I think $1.59/pound, last time I checked, so it works out to about $20 for a brisket. It's some of the most flavorful beef on the carcass, but you can't hurry it, or it'll be so tough, you won't be able to chew it.

On Monday, I took half a brisket, stuck it in a big cast-iron skillet, and put it in the oven around 9 AM at 200F. Blondie saw the temperature on the oven, and knew I'd goofed, and was incredulous that I was deliberately cooking it at such a low temperature. At 3 PM, I goosed the temperature up to 350F, and tossed some taters and some sweet taters - the yams were wrapped in foil, but the russets were nekkid - into the oven. I turned off the oven at 4 PM, letting the temperature coast back down, and served supper at 5 PM. Blondie was again flabberghasted. Best beef she'd ever eaten, she said. That was hyperbole, of course, but it was really good.

But on Christmas Morning, she didn't think that it was appropriate. There wasn't any time to cook the other half of the brisket before noon, so where did I want to go for Christmas Dinner. I thought for a moment. "The Pho", I said. Pho Thanh Thuy is the real name, but I can never remember the rest. The Vietnamese noodle house is a hole in the wall, a dump, and the service is really spotty, but it has incredibly good food.

Best of all is their pho, a noodle soup which is the national dish of Vietnam. You can get it with pork or shrimp, but I usually get mine with flank steak. There's not much meat in any case, but the small serving is probably 2-3 pints in size. And they serve it with a salad that includes bean sprouts, alfalfa sprouts, and several other greens that I'm unable to identify, but no dressing. You just pick up a piece at a time and chow down. Or some of the people, I notice, put the salad into their pho. I tried that once, and it was good, but I like it better separately.

I can't claim it was worth 60,000 corpses to bring Vietnamese food to our shores, not by any stretch, but I'm glad we got something in exchange for all that blood. But when I called the place, they weren't answering their phone.

"Are you punishing me?" Blondie asked? If a bunch of Buddhists aren't open on Christmas Day, I said, what's the chance we'll find anyplace that's open? I remembered once, trying to take a girlfriend out to a nice dinner on Christmas, in Fort Wayne, which is considerably bigger than Lancaster. We ended up eating a high-priced buffet at a hotel, and the food was terrible.

But facing my wife's wrath, I googled for restaurant after restaurant, and finally found a chinese buffet that was open. And, actually, it's one of the better chinese places in town, good food, very good service, nice surroundings, and even on Christmas, they were only asking $10.99. If I had a nice restaurant open on Christmas, you'd pay $19.99 or more, because the alternative is to go hungry, and that's not profiteering: I'd also overpay my staff generously on Christmas to let them know how much they were appreciated.

Sitting there, I looked at the various tables of patrons. To my left, there was a lady saying that her cat was still wheezing, and she didn't know whether to give him another Lasix or that other pill. The fellow across the table didn't have much to say. Lasix is a diuretic. If I were wheezing hard, the last thing I would want is a dried-out throat. I wanted to say, "Lady, if your cat doesn't have edema, don't give it any Lasix." But I kept my mouth shut, and have wondered ever since then if I contributed to the abuse of a cat by my inaction.

They left, and Blondie wondered to me, do you suppose her husband is a vet, or he's a pharmacist? I didn't think he was her husband, or she'd have referred to the cat as "Fuzzball" or "Garfield" or whatever name the cat had, instead of saying "my cat". I also figured that he had no special expertise in the matter, or he'd have given her an answer. Instead, he simply nodded and expressed sympathy. She didn't want an answer, so much as she was trying to illustrate that she was willing to defer to his judgment.

Or maybe I misread the situation entirely. She was a nice looking lady, well-scrubbed, carefully dressed, and if anything, the guy was even prettier and more presentable. Living alone can be awfully lonely, and I hoped they decide they meet each others' needs.

There was a young woman filling a plate at the buffet. She wore khaki shorts with about a 2" inseam, lots of patch pockets everywhere, over black nylons. Well, I suppose it was pantyhose. She had offwhite boots that came up to her knees, with 3" spike heels. She was wearing a bulky brown sweater that came down halfway over her butt, and she had a vinyl belt, same color as her boots, about 2" wide.

I pointed her out to Blondie. "Costume party, time machine, or have the '60s come back into fashion?" Blondie turned back to me, and laughed inaudibly. "I suppose," she said. She has this way of answering yes or no to multiple-choice questions, and it'd be annoying, I guess, if someone really wanted an answer.

Some say it's rude to do people watching, but I find it necessary to do so, just in case my brother should someday ask me, "As an outsider, what do you think of the human race?" as he used to do, hundreds or thousands of times, when we were growing up.

There was a table of two men and six kids, mostly pre-teens. Every so often, you'd see the two men holding hands under the table. The kids were having fun. Chinese buffets offer such a wonderment of strange and wonderful foods, that anyone with taste buds should enjoy them, but for kids, selecting your own foods, and helping yourself to as much - or as little - as you want is a special treat. The little ones got yelled at, quietly, and they'd instantly slow from a slow run to a careful walk, and they'd come back to the table. Every so often, one of them would slip off his chair and go hug one man, then the other.

I remember dating a woman who had a 15-year-old daughter. I offered her some advice when her mother was out of earshot, and she shot at me, "You can't tell me what to do. You're not my father." I told her that I was offering advice, not giving orders, that it's a shame that I wasn't her father, because I thought she would be a wonderful daughter, and that you're allowed to have as many fathers as you have room in your heart for, whether they are married to your mother or not. About a month later, when her mother had left the room, she gave me a big hug, then quickly fled. I guess it takes time to make room in your heart for a dad - but these six kids definitely knew they had two dads, and they were appreciative of the fact.

I couldn't figure out another table. I think there were two parents, three kids, and their dates. The woman had dark, straight hair, an almond-shaped face with fine features, and a tan face. Maybe she was Macedonian? The man had white hair, and a dark brown face, and a large rugged face. Maybe he was Amerindian. The younger generation had a jewish nose, an oriental face, perhaps a Puerto Rican, a blue-eyed blonde with long straight hair and a couple more whose ethnicities were not readily apparent to me. I'm not really good at that sort of thing, I know; that's one reason why I am curious. But when they walked out in pairs, I was really perplexed, because I'd guessed wrong on who was paired up with whom. For instance, the swedish girl and the japanese guy: which one was the kid and which one the kid-in-law-to-be?

Nothing, of course, says that they had to be a family - except that they talked and argued and laughed together like a family. Adopted or foster kids? Perhaps. Maybe all six were their kids, rather than in-laws-to-be.

And that's the thing that I carried away from Christmas dinner. Families look different, but they're all the same. They talk together, they argue, they laugh, they care. It's not just that you've can make room in your heart for more than one father. You can make room for anyone, if you want to.

And all the souls on Earth shall sing,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day;
And all the souls on Earth shall sing,
On Christmas day in the morning.

Then let us all rejoice amain,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day;
Then let us rejoice amain,
On Christmas day in the morning.

Alan Abramsky of Roanoke, Texas, tells a story:

Under a cultural exchange program, my family was host to a rabbi from Russia at Christmastime. We decided to introduce him to a culinary treat that was probably not available in his country: we took him to our favorite Chinese restaurant.

Throughout the meal, the rabbi spoke excitedly about the wonders of our country in comparison to the bleak conditions in his homeland. When we'd finished eating, the waiter brought the check and presented each of us with a small brass Christmas-tree ornament as a seasonal gift.

We all laughed when my father pointed out that the ornaments were stamped "Made in India." But the laughter subsided when we saw that the rabbi was quietly crying. Concerned, my father asked him if he was offended because he'd been given a gift for a Christian holiday.

He smiled, shook his head and said, "Nyet, I was shedding tears of joy to be in a wonderful country in which a Buddhist gives a Jew a Christmas gift made by a Hindu!"

There was a segment on C-SPAN II this morning, where people were talking of Molly Ivins, a bigger-than-life red-headed Texan who covered politics and other news in a highly satirical form.
Bigger than life? Well, she was six feet tall. And while she was open to others trying to convince her that she was in the wrong, she didn't back down when she thought she was in the right.

Everyone accused Molly of being a Democrat, but she was raised in a Republican family, and held the Bill of Rights dear to her heart, like any good conservative. She was willing to be nasty in her satire if the subject was powerful and abusive, and she stood up for those without power or other resources. There was room in her heart for a very big family: darned near the whole human race.

When she was working for the New York Times, she once was called upon to cover a community chicken-killing festival. Her copy-editor didn't appreciate her reference to the event as a "gang-pluck" and she was called on the carpet. Her dog, as a puppy, was so clumsy that he could trip over the pattern on the linoleum. Originally, she named the dog "Shitface", but that name got shortened. When the dog would get away from her on the street, and Molly would call it, she got odd looks. I suspect she reveled in them.

My late first wife, Em, had many of those same traits. I remember Em referring to some snob as looking down on herself and me, as if we had shit between our toes. Well, she fessed up, we probably do have a "little", it being hard to clean it all out, but you've got two choices when it comes to walking barefoot in the pasture, and anyone who is too scared of a little poop to walk barefoot in the luxury of tall grass, well, he's not too bright.

She had similar opinions of men who would yell to the wife that the baby needed changing. "What's the matter?" she'd say. "Don't you have two hands? Are you too weak to lift him up? Are you too ignorant to help your kid do what he can't do for himself? Or don't you care about your kid?"

Molly Ivins usually disagreed with me on most issues, but I loved reading her columns, anyway. You don't learn anything, after all, from people you agree with. And she had such a way with words.

She died last January, and of all the great people we lost this year - there were some real doozies - I suspect we will miss her most. When Gore and Bush ran in 2000 she said, "It's like having Ted Baxter of the old 'Mary Tyler Moore' show running for president: Gore has Ted's manner and Bush has his brain." What would she say of Hillary, Barack, Edwards, Romney, Huckabee, and Thompson?

Within a respectful time after her dog Shit died, Molly Ivins began looking for another pet. She hoped to name it Achilles. "Then I'd get to command 'Achilles! Heel!'" she explains in her trademark Texas drawl.

It's been a respectful time. What's more, we're entering an election year. We need to begin looking for another Molly Ivins.

"Yeah, this is about what I would expect," he said to himself.

People made fun of Nazarenes, for lack of culture and rude dialect. "It's not that there is no room at the inn," he said to himself. "It's that they don't want to make room at the Inn for a Nazarene."

It's 73 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem, as the crow flies. He was no crow, nor was his wife. It was over a hundred miles to walk, and not an easy walk at that. Nathaniel of Cana was but speaking a common opinion when he said: "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"

"Nothing good every came from a census," Joseph said. Caesar wants to know how many men he can conscript for his armies, and how much he can raise in taxes.

He wasn't likely to get many jews to enlist voluntarily. They were still feeling the bur under the saddle, of having been conquered. Jews thought they should be governed by the priests at the temple, and since Caesar had put his governor in charge, the priests in charge of the temple had been replaced with priests far more willing to cooperate with Rome. It led to a dispute that would culminate in outright revolution in 70 AD.

Nazareth lies in a basin, about 1500 feet above sea level. If you climb a 500-foot hill just outside of town, you can see the snow-covered mountains of Lebanon to the north, the blue waters of the Mediterranean to the west. You could see Mount Carmel. To the south, you can see Megiddo, where the battle of Ar-Megiddo may someday be fought. To the east likes the Sea of Galilee.

That pear-shaped basin was in limestone mountains, and the town of Nazareth was built of white stone blocks, with very little growing. Thus, in the Rodney Dangerfeld of communities, Joseph had the Rodney Dangerfeld of occupations. Herod was building the city of Sepphoris at the time, and Joseph had to commute to work, on foot.

The way out of the basin was to climb those mountains, and if you were headed to Bethlehem, you climbed the stem of the pear.

Joseph saw the flocks on the mountainside, and said to himself, "That's the life." It was cold, despite being summer, from being so high up, and Joseph knew that in winter, the life of a shepherd would be unpleasant, but he looked at his hands. Nicks, cuts, cracks. His arthritis was bothering him in the cold. Wool is full of lanolin, he thought, and a shepherd's hands are soft and they don't hurt.

And shepherds have to walk, but I have to walk to Sepporis, he thought. I can't even make it home nightly. Not that it matters. His wife was pregnant, and he had nothing to do with it. "That's the definition of a lazy man," he said out loud. Mary heard him. "What was that?" she asked. "Oh, nothing," Joseph answered.

Mary knew that Joseph was skeptical. He'd come a long way down, from a respectable family in a respectable town. I suppose he imagines that he can't compete if his wife has had a god for a lover. Dare he even touch her, or would a jealous god strike him dead?

There are times in the month when a man is not permitted to hold his wife's hand. She's not even permitted to pass a basket of rolls to him at the dinner table: she has to put down the basket within his reach, first, and then he may pick it up after she has released his grasp. Later, after she has taken a ritual purification bath, it's his duty to respond to her demand for marital rights.

But Joseph was not a young man. There were no little blue pills. And a threat from God can make it difficult to respond. Joseph felt further shame.

But mostly, he felt arthritic. As difficult as climbing is, it's much more demanding on the joints to walk downhill. And as poor as he was, he had no ass to haul his burden. One doesn't begin a journey of two weeks with bare hands, and with no beast of burden... "I'm an ass," Joseph said to himself, and while he was talking about the load on his back, that wasn't all he was talking about.

Mary was in her third trimester, only the trimester is a myth. Even today, OB-GYNs talk about a standard 280-day gestation as lasting not nine calendar months, but ten lunar months. After all, the woman's reproductive cycle repeats once per lunar month - and ten months doesn't evenly divide by three.

Mary had dropped. She was constantly complaining about her lower back pain, not necessarily with words, but when she kept rubbing her back, Joseph felt like he was being criticized. Elizabeth hadn't had to make such a long trip when she was pregnant with John, six months earlier.

This whole thing was kinda hinky, anyway. How do I know that was an angel? What does an angel look like, anyway? Maybe Mary and Elizabeth are witches, and they've divined this whole thing up, giving me a hallucination.

John the Baptist had been born six months earlier. Today, they celebrate John the Baptist's birthday on September 8, but they didn't take much notice of birth dates back them. It seems like early March would be quite early for the shepherds to have their flocks out. Today, we think that John was born in mid-winter, and Jesus was born the following mid-summer. Or not. We don't really know.

Elizabeth was married to an elderly priest, Zechariah. He, too, was lacking in little blue pills. Marrying a priest would have been a good move. The temple was the largest slaughterhouse in the world, and the priests and their families ate well.

"Travel broadens one," Joseph said, and Mary nodded. That's not precisely what he was thinking, though. He was thinking that walking for two weeks gives you too much time to think, too much time to wonder about whether your wife and her cousin had hatched some sort of plot.

Women die in childbirth, Joseph knew. He'd worried about this trip. "If you think I want to climb up and down mountains with a baby in my arms, you dumb carpenter, you've another think coming," she'd said. "I'm not about to die in childbirth." Joseph worried of his wife falling, and the child dying of the injuries. He worried of his wife and child dying in childbirth. He thought of his wife dying in childbirth, leaving him with a child to raise on his own. That scared him most of all.

But they had come to lower altitudes, and the air was warmer. The wan look on Mary's face was gone, as circulation returned.

And the stable was warm. The livestock gave off body heat. An ass gave off as much heat as a 150-watt bulb, not the Joseph would have known what a light bulb was, and although an ass doesn't smell particularly good, a milk cow does. The air was moist from the livestock exhaling, and moist air is uncommon in a desert land. And then Mary's water burst, and it was coming. Joseph ran to the inn, and asked if there was a midwife nearby. There would have been. Could you send for her? I need to get back to the stable.

But there surely was no hurry. A women who's never given birth before takes her good old time delivering. She would have laid there in the straw - it's less prickly than hay - for hours, until the midwife cotched the baby.

It's a boy, the midwife would have said. Looks just like the father!

Joseph would have thought to himself, so that is what god looks like - all red and wrinkled, with a misshapen, and covered with greenish-black meconium. The midwife would have cleaned the baby up, and then wrapped him with a long cloth, wrapped snugly, so that the baby would feel the comfortable pressure that he was used to, and put the baby to Mary's breast.

"Dumb kid," Joseph would have said. "Doesn't even know to suck teat." Not a problem, the midwife would have said. It often takes 2, 3, 4 hours before the baby starts to suckle, she explained.

Days later, the wise men would arrive. "You followed a star to get here?"

One of them nodded. "And you knew this to be the place, because the star was directly overhead?" Again, the man nodded.

"I hate to point this out, since you are supposed to be wise men, but all stars rise in the east and set in the west, just like the sun. So even if you divined that this was directly under the star at some given moment, it'd be in the wrong location an hour earlier or an hour later."

The wise man nodded again. "So are you going to drawing circles, and tell me how I can get rich selling Amway to my friends and neighbors?"

But the baby had learned to suckle by this time, and the wise men thought the baby was rather attractive, and so was the mother's breast. "Looks just like the father," one of the wise men said.

"Don't give me none of that crap," Joseph replied. Poor fella, Joseph thought. There will be statues to his mother, but none of me, and the statues of Jesus will show him being tortured to death. Too bad the baby hadn't been a girl.

Politicians running for office like to talk about tort reform. There are too many lawyers filing nuisance lawsuits, and it's driving up the cost of health care.

So let me tell you about a 17-year-old girl from Los Angeles named Nataline Sarkisyan.

Doctors at UCLA determined she needed a liver transplant and sent a letter to Cigna Corp.'s Cigna HealthCare on Dec. 11. The Philadelphia-based health insurance company denied payment for the transplant, saying the procedure was experimental and outside the scope of coverage.

The insurer reversed the decision Thursday as about 150 teenagers and nurses rallied outside of its office.

But later Thursday afternoon, Nataline died.

Rose Ann DeMoro, of the California Nurses Association, called the final outcome "a horrific tragedy that demonstrates what is so fundamentally wrong with our health care system today. Insurance companies have a stranglehold on our health. Their first priority is to make profits for their shareholders – and the way they do that is by denying care."

Is this a nuisance lawsuit? Well, it won't bring Nataline back to life - but the whole point of punative damages is not to help the person filing the suit. It's to punish the person - in this case, an insurance company - who is being sued.

Admittedly, there are better remedies. The prosecuting attorney ought to bear the burden bringing this to the courtroom, not Nataline's family. The insurance company's stockholders ought not bear the burden. Instead, the people working for the insurance company ought to bear the burden. If the decision was made by someone just following policy, then the person responsible for the policy ought to be the person who goes to trial.

And ought to go to prison, rather than have a multi-million-dollar fine that the company pays.

His opponents deride John Edwards for being a lawyer. Edwards got rich suing over people who lined their pockets by deliberately disregarding the health and safety of their customers. In one case, a little girl was disemboweled because a swimming pool manufacturer couldn't be bothered to fix a problem part - a part that had already been fixed in other models of the pool. It would be cheaper to settle lawsuits rather than to redesign the part, they decided.

That makes John Edwards vermin in other politicians' eyes.

He wrote a book about several of his cases. It's a good read, a real eye-opener - and you can get it, used, at Amazon.com for $1.61. It's worth the effort.

Barack Obama says we need to have everybody involved sit down at a big roundtable, and that will solve the health care crisis. John Edwards says that just won't happen; the insurance companies, the people with the power, won't give up their power without a fight. And although Senator Obama has some really good ideas - my biggest objection to his candidacy is that I think some SOB will shoot him before he can take office - I think Edwards is right on this one.

I'm sorry Nataline. We failed you. Mr. Bush says nobody need do without health care in this country just because they don't have insurance - they can go to the emergency room. But in this case, Nataline died even though she did have insurance.

If you're the praying sort, say a prayer for Nataline's family and friends. They're hurting. And if you pray to a vengeful god, you might mention the corporate officers of CIGNA while you're on your knees.

“Some can and some cannot enjoy the lights, music, special programs, parties, gifts. Some enjoy them but find that the pleasure does not carry over into the rest of life. There is a variety of reasons making December a painful time of year for people. And for some this is the first December that will be terribly painful, but it will set the tone for years to come.” - Larry Harvey

I was sick on Christmas Eve, 1973. Not deathly ill, mind you, but whatever it was that was going around, I was getting it. And there was a bad storm coming in.

It was 106 miles to O'Hare from where I was living in Wisconsin, and I had purchased a ticket on United to fly to Fort Wayne. It was more than a hundred bucks, which I couldn't really afford at the time, but it was 190 miles, about three and a half hours, to drive from O'Hare to Baer Field, and it was going to be a short weekend anyway.

Then the weather set in. If the flight leaves at 7 PM, and the check-in is at 6 PM, I need to leave at 4 PM to get there on time. Better make it 3 PM to be safe. But with the bad weather, I should leave at 1 PM.

The roads, though, were clear and dry, and there was amazingly little traffic. I left at 1 PM, and arrived at 2:45. That's 105 minutes to go 106 miles, but cars were faster back then. If you ever think of checking in at 2:45 for a 7:00 PM flight, don't do it. You'd think that air terminals are where people wait on flights, and therefore, they would be designed to make waiting easy. They're not.

Airports don't make money by flying people around. Landing fees are almost free. They make their money on parking, and on renting out space, much of which goes to people who profit most if you are not comfortable waiting. They want to get you into the restaurants to buy food, into the bars to buy liquor.

Waiting for a flight anywhere else, you'll find that the seats are cold and hard, the air is cold and drafty, the surfaces made of marble, so that noise that otherwise would be intolerable, will bounce around, echoing, driving one positively bonkers.

The plane did not board at 6:30 PM and take off at 7:00 PM. The plane was still sitting on the ground at Stapleton forever, and I didn't get aboard the plane at O'Hare until 1:45 AM. Eleven censored hours, I was sitting on a cold hard surface, going through kleenex by the bushel, trying hard not to vomit, trying hard not to soil my drawers, feeling physically drained. I wanted to be in a nice soft bed, drowning in luxurious softness, staying warm with the help of hot chocolate and hot chicken soup delivered by someone female and sympathetic. I would have settled for a vest of dynamite, to blow myself and the United terminal to hell, or even some strychnine.

Surprisingly, United didn't cancel the flight. I'm sure it wasn't because of people who were only going from O'Hare to Baer Field. Either they had passengers from Stapleton, and didn't want to put them up in a motel, or else they needed to have the place someplace the following morning. Or maybe the dispatchers wanted to get the flight crew home for Christmas.

I'd like to apologize to the people involved in that flight. I was miserable, and I'm sure I made everybody around me miserable as well. That's not to say that, over the years, United didn't deserve all the misery I shared that night. (Sorry, Jan!) United Airlines is a poor excuse for an airline, which is an industry where even the best companies do poorly.

And though I looked out the window, I didn't see Santa's sleigh. Maybe he considered the weather report, and took a private jet.

This isn't my worst Christmas story. The one I told earlier, about my wife developing Lupus, was significantly worse. On the other hand, I have a number of other Christmas stories that don't meet the Norman Rockwell standard for a Saturday Evening Post cover.

One year, I was dating two girls, A and B, best friends, and had decided to propose to A. I drove to her family farm, two hours away, and A showed me her new engagement ring - she'd received it from B's brother, who had been away in the Army. I drove home to see B, expecting some sympathy, and she excitedly showed me a new engagement ring of her own.

So in my search for the ultimate Christmas song, I've narrowed it down to two songs. One was running through my head for those hours in O'Hare, because that was the year it came out: "If we can make it through December". The years we were struggling with Em's medical bills and trying to raise a son, December was an especially trying month, what with the need for winter clothes, and the costs of Christmas, knowing that January 1, there would be a new deductible to meet on the medical insurance, and we'd get clobbered again. It'd help if Christmas came in mid-summer, instead of when a new year starts, and when a new cold weather season sets in.

The other song is more traditional. "O Little Town of Bethlehem" is soft and sweet, and just when you relax, it hits you with "the hopes and fears of all the years at met in thee tonight." Nobody grows up without hopes, and for the most part, life is a series of dashed hopes. Most of those boys that dream of growing up to be a fireman or a policeman don't. For every one who hits the home run to win the big game, there are a dozen or more on the winning team that don't, and a couple of hundred other kids who aren't even on the winning team.

And if you haven't experienced fear by the time you're twenty-five, there's something wrong. You've surely had the experience of walking across the floor to ask Debbie to dance, only to have her say "no", so that you can walk all the way back, and all your friends can razz you about it for weeks. You've surely driven home a little too fast, going around the corner, only to lose traction, and your steering wheel doesn't work, your brakes don't work, and you see that huge tree racing towards you in slow motion, and you know that it's going to hurt like hell.

There used to be a cartoon character who, in time of crisis, would yell "Hooooooooooooold EVERYthing!" and the cartoon would do a freeze frame while he adjusted things, then he'd say something else, and the cartoon would resume action. We need a "Hold Everything" gizmo for such times as that.

When I hear OLTOB, I think about my kids that were stillborn, and about the lives I've never led. When you're little, they tell you that you can grow up to be anything you want to be, and not only is that a lie - Willie Shoemaker couldn't have every grown up to be a pro basketball player, and Michael Jordan couldn't have grown up to be a jockey - but they don't tell you you can't be everything you want to be. Ask a kid what his favorite color is, and he'll tell you three or four or five colors. If cats can live nine lives, why can't we each live nine centuries, each as a different person?

We're not going to the midwest to see my family. We're not going east to see Blondie's family. We're going to stay right here, cuddling under a blanket with the dog, trying to pretend that it's enough. It's not. We met too late in life, and we'll die too soon of old age. But we'll try to get a lifetime's worth of cuddles in.

Whatever your plans for Christmas, I wish you - and whatever your family consists of - well.

WHTM-TV ABC27 is off the air. They went off the air on Saturday. They were off the air Sunday. They're off the air today.

Retailers buy a lot of advertising between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The station isn't just going to lose money because they can't run the advertising, they're going to lose customers as well. This is one of the most important weeks of the retail year, and stores that can't advertise are not going to be able to sell the goods next month. Some of them are going to go out of business. Some of them are merely going to remember that WHTM cost them a lot of money because they were unreliable.

They're going to lose some viewers, too. Their regular viewers are going to sample local news on WGAL - which is significantly better. They're going to sample cable television shows which are often better than ABC's shows as well.

Jay Leno has already lost me due to the writer's strike. I was formerly TiVOing both Letterman and Leno. With the writer's strike, I'm watching neither - and I've discovered Corner Gas on WGN. I can't record three things at once on my TiVO, only two, so I can add Letterman back - but Leno is history.

Back when Hurricane Katrina was still a threat, we checked out our stormworthiness. Our data center doesn't just have an emergency power generator big enough to handle the center, but it has a backup generator, in case the emergency power generator fails. And there's enough diesel on hand to run the generator for a week. The datacenter buildings were designed to withstand a Force 4 storm, but in fact have ridden out a Force 5 hurricane, so that's pretty sound, too.

The servers don't go down if we lose power here at the house. In fact, we did lose power last week, for about 50 minutes. Never the less, we'd quickly feel a pinch. Our business phone needs electricity, because it goes over the internet, so we have to power the "modem", router, and Vonage converter. The phone number "rolls over" to my cell phone, so we're safe for a while, but having to drive the car in order to charge the cell phone is kinda silly.

So we bought an emergency generator back then. It's big enough to not only run the computer system, but the deep freeze, and the rest of the house, because little generators cost almost as much as big ones.

Never the less, when the lights went out last week, we found out we were unprepared. No flashlights could be found, and the only candles we could come up with were scented Yankee candles, which smell nice, but don't shed much light. Needless to say, I bought four flashlights the next day, and did a trial run of turning off the power company, and firing up the generator. Next time, we'll be in a lot better shape.

It wasn't cheap to do that; it added about 1-2% to the cost of the house. On the other hand, I considered it a cost of doing business.

I can't imagine what the folks at ABC27 are thinking. Within an hour of going off the air, either the station manager or the station engineer should have been able to figure out that their power crunch was going to last a while. They could have - and should have - made a few phone calls. Getting someone to haul in a generator mounted on a semi trailer, and getting someone else to haul in a tanker truck of diesel fuel, would have been expensive, but a bargain compared to the cost of going black during the week before Christmas.

If anyone knows of a good station manager looking for another job, WHTM belongs to Albritton, and they're headquartered in Washington, D.C. I kinda figure that they'll be changing station managers about the start of the new year....

I don't watch ABC27 very much anyway, so it really doesn't matter to me, but I have to wonder why they're asleep at the switch.

The Ultimate Christmas Movie and the ultimate Christmas song. I've been trying to figure out, over the past few weeks, what they would be. I still haven't figured out, but I've found the ultimate picture and quote.

Nobody ever told me, Tiger Woods said, how much I was going to love this little girl. He decided to play Daddy instead of playing The Buick and since Buick is one of his big sponsors, that was a big deal.

So what's that got to do with Christmas? Nothing - except that now is the time of year when we celebrate birth. The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, and the new year is born. Those of us who are Druids put up Christmas trees, the Jewish among us give dreidels and other toys to children, and the Christians pretend that there were shepherds out minding their flocks of sheep in the mideast in December. Jesus of Nazareth was probably born in August.

And as much as the idiot on Fox complains about people saying "Happy Holidays", Christmas starts on December 25 and runs 12 Days through January 6. We're in the season of Thanksgiving, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Festivus, Hannukah, and New Year's as well as Christmas - it's the Holiday Season.

But if it's not his birthday, it is our celebration of his birth, and the calendar really doesn't matter. One might as well chastize Christians for ignoring the Sabbath, which runs from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, in favor of Sunday.

Babies are a good reason for celebrating, and if Tiger Woods is late to the party in realizing that, let's be happy for him, that he knows it now.

Some of my happiest memories are of going grocery shopping with Jasper. We'd get to Maloley's, and he knew exactly where we were, and what the game was. He'd rush to unbuckle himself, and he'd try to climb atop me before I could unbuckle myself.

That didn't work well; I couldn't get out of the car with him on my shoulders. But as soon as I was outside the car, I'd hoist him up, and he'd grab ahold of my scalp for balance - not much there to grab, I admit - and we'd head for the door. The electronic door would open, and I'd walk up to the doorway, oblivious to the fact that, as a combination, we were taller than the doorway.

At the very last moment, I'd halt, and Jasper would erupt in a cackle of laughter. It was a game we never tired of.

Once in a while, Jasper's mom would come along. It wasn't often. Lupus is an exhausting disease, and the three things that make it worse are sunlight, fatigue, and stress - things hard for a toddler's mother to avoid - so we tried to do as many chores for her as we could.

And grocery shopping was something special for Jasper and me. He wasn't a hollow kid by any means; he was muscular, dense, and he knew when he leaned to the right, he could effectively steer me that way, but he was also a well-mannered kid, and when I said he couldn't have something, he generally took "no" for an answer.

If that's not another reason for a father to love a kid, I don't know what would be. Women don't take "no" for an answer. Heck, women don't take "yes" for an answer. Give in, in order to end an argument, and they're still beating up on you ten minutes later.

And if I knew babes were babe magnets, I'd have rented one when I was still single. It took me most of my 20s to learn how to meet women and ask them out. Walk through a grocery store with a kid on your shoulders, and women swarm all over you. Sheesh.

So if Tiger and Elin are the world's happiest couple right now, my only complaint is that there aren't more people trying to outdo them. The best Christmas gift isn't under the tree. It's in the manger, or in the bassinet.

There are many Christmas traditions that I'm trying to bring back, at least for myself, if not for everybody. For instance, the sack of candy they gave every kid at the Armory, when they visited Santa, had a handful of cut rock, and a couple of opera cremes, an orange, an english walnut, and a candy cane.

Every season, I look for opera cremes in stores. Those are little domes, about 1.5" tall, white cream inside, with a thin coating of chocolate. Once in a while, I've found something that looks like them - but they don't taste right. They're coated with chocolate-colored paraffin, or the inside is all waxy or it's gritty with crystallized sugar.

Cut rock is hard candy, about the size of a nickel or a quarter, maybe a third of an inch thick. There's a little picture in three or four colors, molded all the way through, and the outside of the circle is a solid color, red, or orange, or blue or green. I think it comes from Germany. In the past thirty years, I've seen it maybe 3 or 4 times, and it never tastes very good.

Candy canes are no problem, as long as you look for the Spangler's brand. Spangler's are also the people who make Dum-Dum suckers. Other brands of candy canes don't have the same flavor of peppermint. Bob's, for instance, is sharper and hotter, not as flavorful. Spangler's has the same rich peppermint flavor tht you find in a bottle of DeKuyper's Peppermint Schnapps.

And chocolate covered cherries are better than when I was a kid, as long as you look for Cella's brand, enrobed in dark chocolate. They send my blood sugar sky-high, and it's worth it. What's the point of a luxury that isn't luxurious?

I'm still looking for the best Christmas movie. "Miracle on 34th Street" is nice, and so is "It's a Wonderful Life" but they seem awfully sweet. I'm leaning towards "Die Hard". It's not really a story about a baby, but it's a love story. Part way through the movie, Hans and Karl return to where the hostages are being held, and Karl smashes a table of glasses in fury. Holly says "He's still alive."

Her coworker, Ginny, goes, what? Holly says, "Only John can drive somebody that crazy."

I'm leaning towards Die Hard because I recently learned that my favorite waitress's husband died four years ago, as the result of injuries he received from cops.

Good cooks and great waitresses are special people. They don't just do a really difficult job, but they're doing God's work. They say one is nearer God's heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth, and that's because that's where food comes from. Those who tend carefully for the bounty of the earth, and give succor to their fellow man, give hospitality, and the warmth of the hearth, are angels.

And I suppose this guy was doing something to attract the attention of the cops, but cops are only supposed to apprehend criminals, not execute them, and his widow certainly did nothing to deserve that kind of punishment.

A couple of bucks left behind is just a couple of bucks. I'd like to have her sit down to a good cup of coffee and a great piece of pie, with someone rubbing her feet, and someone rubbing her back as well - but it's her husband's hands she needs.

And John McClane can yell "Yippie-Ki-Yay", and shoot Hans Gruber, but there ain't no way I can make things all right for this widow.