Every once in a while I want to write to Santa for a Toy. Not a doll or LEGO

set or a bear, but something to play with that you wouldn't give to a kid;

something you don't really need, but you really really want for no good

reason.



Dear Santa,



Some year, please bring me a Hot

Fix Iron, so I can put rhinestones all over everything I want!



Thank you,



Hazy

Well, having cleaned B's WinXP laptop of a nasty virus, something in the DCOM Service seems to have been damaged. We know, because every few hours Windows is forced to restart the machine! I can't bloody figure it out... so over Christmas I'll be reinstalling XP on the box. Sigh. This also means B will have to take a long look at what he actually wants to reinstall, scuffling about for download files, backing up bookmarks, documents, and other data files, hoping drivers will behave nicely, et cetera. His Eudora and Mozilla mail will be the most critical; I hope I can figure out how to restore them suitably.



However, I think we'll have to consider which antiviral programs we want to reinstall! The old ones were obviously not the best to choose!

Bought over the weekend:



Oy to the World



Yes. Klezmer Christmas carols! And wow, are these arrangements clever... a little klezmer here, a little Gershwin there, a little surf guitar over there... wonderful musicianship with a great sense of humor. Definitely not your grandparents' Oldsmobile, but I think even Arthur Fiedler would have approved.

MADISON, Wis. -- The case of a man accused of driving drunk and leading police on a chase in a stolen doughnut truck is heading to trial.



Warren Whitelightning, 36, waived his right to a preliminary hearing Thursday. The court ordered a not guilty plea for him, WISC-TV reported.



Police said that Whitelightning drove drunk and stole a Krispy Kreme truck, leading officers on a high-speed chase.



If convicted, he faces more than 10 years in prison.





Come on, who hasn't wanted to steal a doughnut truck?

A couple years ago B and I took a Rick Steves tour to Europe. Rick Steves is this guy who writes guidebooks to Europe and also has a tour company and has done PBS specials ("Europe Through the Back Door"). I like his guide books a lot, liked the tour quite well (though some aspects of it were not as optimal as I might have liked), and enjoy the PBS specials enough that I actually bought a set on DVD.



When I saw that Steves had a radio show, and episodes were available via Podcast, I thought I would check it out. I've listened to one or two now, and I've come to an inescapable conclusion:



Rick Steves is kind of dim.



My first inkling of this was the podcast about Prague. Since we went to Prague, and one of the people on the podcast was our local guide in Prague, I wanted to hear it for nostalgic reasons. While we were there on the tour, the tour guide told us that Czech is a hard language to pronounce correctly, and so she gave us an easy hello/goodbye word: ahoj. I used it maybe three times. On the podcast, Steves reiterated the recommendation of this word... only to have the two Czechs on the program contradict him! "That's very rude to say to people you don't know well," was one comment. Now here's the question: Steves has known these two Czechs for many years... and he never asked them what Czech phrases to hand out to the tour groups? Hmm.



And now the clincher: the podcast about travel in Egypt. Of course I listened hoping for an interesting tip for our trip next year, which is not a Rick Steves tour (the company does not run tours to Egypt). The local expert was a Scot who has lived 15 years in Cairo. He was talking about the difference in the culture you might find when visiting Abu Simbel, which is in the region known as Nubia. Steves says something like: Nubia? Is that where the word "nubile" comes from? Because if you look at old paintings of Nubians, they look nubile.



WTF? I think Steves just has no idea whatsoever what "nubile" means. It's a word used to describe someone of marriageable age; sometimes someone who is sexually mature. Can he really mean that in the old paintings of Nubians he saw, the subjects were "ready for marriage"? Or did he mean... something else?



Here's what I'm thinking... I'm thinking he needs an actual scriptwriter to help him keep his foot out of his mouth. I think I'll stop listening to the podcasts and just stick to the guidebooks and packing tips.



Some old paintings of Nubians, just because:



Nubian guard

Song of the Nubian slave