It turned out that a whole bag of talent had fallen out of my pocket and slipped down between the sofa cushions. Lord knows that when I went to bed last night, I was completely out of the stuff and was down to rummaging through the trash so I could rinse whatever few grounds were still clinging to last week's used filters. It got so bad that when a red light on my laser printer started flashing, I would up jotting down "TONER LOW. REPLACE SOON." in an empty window. If push came to shove, I could probably steal that line for a column. It had a certain zing to it and if the original author didn't care enough about his work to protect it wish a © symbol, then that was his problem.

But fortunately, I did indeed find a little more talent this morning. Once again, I have to tip my hat to TiVO. I had pretty much resigned myself to breaking a decades-long streak of never learning how to work a french-fry machine and settled in on the sofa to watch a quick seven or nine hours' worth of TV before looking for a new gig. Somewhere after "The Dick Van Dyke Show" but before "Bargain Hunt" I had the opening line for a column due later that day, and by the time I got through a two-hour "Columbo" I had the whole arc all mapped out.

So, lesson learned: all that jazz about maintaining an orderly and quiet work environment and focusing on your task is all crap. If you really want to make it as an author, your best bet is to make yourself a sandwich, plop down on the sofa, and just sort of hope for the best.

Speaking of TV, my new obsession is BBC America's "Faking It." It's an example of something you practically never see on television: a simple premise executed flawlessly.

Obviously, you won't last long in a given profession without acquiring a deep and broad range of specific skills, backed up with experience and dedication. But how hard would it be to learn just enough to fake your way through it? If you had a mere four weeks of intense training, could you acquire just enough competence and confidence to convince a panel of experts that you're the real deal, even working alongside seasoned pros?

"Faking It" is a weekly exploration of that question. An insurance adjustor takes a leave of absence from his job and spends the next four weeks working full-time at learning how to become a movie stuntman. Professionals teach him how to throw and take punches, how to spin cars around the pavement, and the very special skills necessary to be able to fall off the top of a tall building more than once. Finally, he's on a movie set with three "real" stuntmen with years of experience. Four copies of the same highly technical stunt sequence are shot and then screened for a panel of experts. If the majority of them fail to spot the faker, he "wins."

But we'll put that word in quotes. He doesn't actually "win" anything, apart from personal satisfaction. There's no quiz at the end of each week in which he can win a new lamp or anything. Just work, work, work and more work, under the narrow eyes of coaches who are, at turns, alternately convinced that this guy's absolutely hopeless and amazed that he's gamely doing as well as he is.

It's perfect because it isn't about the winning or the losing. It's about the process. The coaches only have to teach this guy just enough to bamboozle a few judges, but they can't avoid taking pride in their profession. With any job or hobby — up to and including mass-murder — if you're good at what you do you love to show other people how it's done right. And a hell of a lot gets invested in success or failure. The faker and his coaches watch via closed-circuit TV while the judges record their final impressions, and the joy the coaches display for the faker when he's successfully pulled the wool over their eyes is genuine and unrestrained.

Actually, the word "faker" is a poor choice. The fakers fake nothing. The insurance man really does fall two stories into an airbag. The radiologist really takes pictures of fashion models and the priest really buys and sells used cars. And in the end, the panel of judges awards a diploma based solely on merit. In a fair test based solely on the pictures, professional photographers and fashion editors decided that the radiologist was one of the two best photographers in the shoot. Did they reach that conclusion because of the guy's skills as a faker, or because of his newfound skills as a professional lensman?

The radiographer tells the story midway through his training "They think they're preparing me to fool people. But to me, in my mind, I'm really becoming a photographer!"

I'm sorry to have missed the season premiere, in which the BBC revisited the subjects of the previous season to see how they've been affected by their experiences. I'd be very surprised if the priest ever set foot on a used car lot again, but I'd be equally surprised to learn that the radiologist didn't wind up buying a very serious (and ultimately very well-used) camera.

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I've had one of those 7:30 AM insights. As most insights do, they come when advanced thought is being avoided instead of courted.

I've been up for a few hours and nausea has subsided,

(Aside: this illness is like one of those really bad holiday parties. All of the fun people have long-since departed and the pests, the nuisances, the people whom either nobody actually invited or were brought by people who are now forsaking them, are all that remain.

The coughing, I liked. It gives you a good excuse to spend the whole day enjoying fruit-flavored candy. Plus, who doesn't like hawking up big gobs of phlegm? And I've always been such a huge advocate of sneezing. It's a nice little break in the middle of the day. Leaves you energized and invogorated, plus if anyone else is in earshot, it provokes them to bestow upon you the blessings and favors of He, She or It which created the entire Universe. Honestly, that can't be bad.

Waking up feeling sick to my stomach: that's no good. Suddenly feeling like I want a 71-hour nap: also something I would happily trade for just about anything. The latter is particularly annoying. The other day I was slinging my car around town, desperate to complete three hours' worth of errands inside the eighteen minutes in which banks, post offices, erotic bakeries, and copy shops were to remain open for business. "Of course, the big plus about cocaine is that it works great for the first couple of weeks," I mused. Let's be fair. You get your first whetevers for free (if "Walker: Texas Ranger" has taught me anything), and you get days and days of enhanced alertness and productivity without distractions like sleeping and having to leave the room before going to the bathroom.

But even as the steel door in front of the post office started ratcheting down and I skidded underneath it on my belly like Pete Rose trying to make it to third and beat the point spread, I dismissed the thought. Cocaine gives a great demo, but once you're stuck with the decision on a day-to-day basis you quickly come to regret it. I chose Macs over Windows for exactly this reason. End of aside.)

...so I've fixed myself breakfast. Glass of OJ, two slices of wheat toast with a couple of slices of American cheese melting intramurally.

And when bread is being toasted, it's time to break out the olive oil. Just a quarter-teaspoon brushed on one slice of a bland sandwich adds just the perfect whatsit.

Oh, yes: the Insight. Well, I've long been mystified by the Ranch Dressing phenomenon. I was raised in a place and an era in which this stuff was packaged, marketed, and used as a salad dressing. The folks at Jolly Rancher and Ken's Steak House were really clear on this point: no salad, no need for Ranch dressing. When did it become a condiment?

I eventually concluded that it was a geographical thing. My first time in the South was a long weekend in which I gave a couple of talks and then was shown around by some nice locals. The food was absolutely wonderful. But I was puzzled by something: it seemed like ever table I sat at contained two squeeze bottles. One was filled with white stuff. The other contained red stuff.

"So which is what?" I asked.

The locals exchanged looks. It's possible that the question had never been asked before, or that the information was never to be shared with outsiders.

"One of them is red," I was told.

Nods all around the table.

"And the other is...well, white."

This didn't really answer the question, but I felt that to press further would provoke a zen-like response along the lines of "It is unwise to tip the vessel of wisdom." Clearly it was a case of the only foolish question being the question that is asked. One who walks the path with a sure and patient gait would have merely formulated the question and then meditated upon it.

Yes, the white stuff was ranch dressing. But that wasn't the right answer: over generations of table use, it had ceased to be ranch dressing and instead became The White Stuff. Trying to define The White Stuff on anything but its own terms was a sign of true ignorance and it was a mistake that I refused to repeat.

As I brushed on the olive oil, I had a flash of the cultural genetic code that binds us all together. Here in the Boston area — maybe it's an Italian-American thing — olive oil isn't an ingredient in salad dressing, or the stuff you slosh around in a pan to keep things from sticking. It's just...well, it's olive oil. It's just there. Sometimes you even put it in a squeeze bottle so you don't have to keep heaving the can out from under the sink.

Surely, enormous cultural chasms still do and always will exist between the many nations within our United States. Candlepin bowling, for instance. To most people who live outside New England, leaving fallen pins in the gutter and being able to play off of them to make otherwise unmakeable 7-10 splits is like stripping down in the middle of the woods and dancing around a stunted oak, hoping to summon up something hooved and vengeful. Except in those parts of the country where consorting with Satan is like picking up dry cleaning, which just goes to show you what sort of trouble we're in trying to work together as a unified culture.

Still, our shared misuse of salad toppings is cause for optimism.

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Geez, I don't know who it was that invented the concept of Inside, but if I ever find the guy I'm going to present him with a hearty handshake and a $25 gift certificate to his neighborhood Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse. I don't want to pooh-pooh the amount of work that went into the development of, say, those 450-nanometer blue laser diodes that promise to quadruple the capacity of recordable DVDs. Clever stuff; job well done there, boys. But they won't be available in quantity until 2006 and until then, it's hard to compete with the simple concept of being inside while snow keeps tumbling down outside.

And boy, has it been snowing. We're in Hour 40 of this nor'easter, with another few hours of ambition to come. It's been coming down with a sense of dull inevitability, like one of the ladies from your Mom's church who's organizing the annual bazaar and has just learned that you own a pickup truck. IE, one can protest, fight, struggle, rail on, rail on, rail on against cruel, blind night, but in the end it's smarter to just roll over and accept that your weekend is pretty much shot.

More than two feet, so far, not including drifts. At least when you're faced with this much snow, your course is fairly clear: do the bare minimum amount of work to make sure that you don't wind up as the sad subject of a Movie Of The Week. Half of the driveway is cleared away. The snowplows deposited a dense rille of compacted ice at the end, but fortunately I had enough M-80's left over from my cousin's August wedding to take firm authority of the situation. A three-foot-wide path has been cleared from the driveway to the door.

Thus: in case of emergency — like, say I run out of Cokes — I can get the car out. And deliverypeople can make it to the door tomorrow, so I'll have a fresh supply of magazines, toys, and (God willing) gift packs of steaks and cheeses coming in.

Other than that, we're having school downstairs today, due to the weather. Sitting on the sofa, watching a movie on cable in jeans that are still vaguely damp from the morning's labors. Volume is deliberately set low enough that it doesn't drown out the sounds of the neighborhood kids, all of whom are (quite correctly) exploiting this weather as an excuse for some serious spazzing-out.

Lots of work to remains to be done today, but it's not the worst possible environment. All thanks to a modest 43-year-old dentist named Hugo L. Janriccson, who, in his small workshop in Waterbury, Vermont, invented Inside in 1822.

(Yes, I made it up. But Googling for the true inventor turns up nothing, so I choose to be part of the solution rather than a contributor to the problem. So there it is: all keyworded and everything, a sitting duck for any search engine that chooses to look for "inventor of the concept of Inside." You can't make things any more authoritative than that.)

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Screening my email: Here's one in the list with the subject "Cheesecake.com Gift."

Well, that can only mean one of two possible things: free cheesecake, or free Varga Girl-style pinups of exciting women in equally-exciting poses. "Either way," I determined, "I am opening this message."

And so I did. And there was much rejoicing.

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Oh, and to the three people who asked: The cheesecake.com freebie turned out to be actual cheesecake, not goache-and-pastels of incredibly friendly young women in states of creative undress.

(Again, I state that my job ain't like your job. In my line of work, if you stay put long enough somebody will eventually offer to send you a cheesecake. But I'm sure there are perks associated with your gig, too.)

My caramel-and-pecan cheesecake arrived via FedEx yesterday morning and it's just as good as that other thing would have been. It's cheesecake the way God meant it to be. One forkful emphatically states that there's no diet — no matter how faddish, bizarre, or ambitiously fraudulent — which says that this stuff is appropriate for consumption under any circumstances.

"Can you believe I'm eating cheesecake...and yet I'm sticking to my diet?" It's a cliché of diet advertising. Well, no, madam, I don't. I believe that what you're eating is a Nilla Wafer with a centimeter-thick layer of sugar-free, nonfat kale-derived emulsion on top of it. What I'm eating right now could stop a bullet, like the Bible in a Civil War general's coat pocket.

(Though I'm not entirely sure that it's an apt analogy. There's nothing life-saving about eating good cheesecake. Unless you chose it over the sliced deli turkey that slipped between the rear wall of the fridge and the condenser coils five weeks ago.)

As I said, it's a full-sized cheesecake. That's good, but it presents me with the problem of something that (1) I really like (2) really must be eaten before it starts to go bad, but (3) isn't a step towards my goal of making it to middle age without even one heart attack or stroke.

But I'm keeping a smart head. I'm approaching this cheesecake the same way I tackled last weekend's two feet of snow. There's no need to be some kind of hero; handle it in manageable chunks over a couple of days and the job'll get done just as completely.

(Another bad analogy. Unlike snow, shoveling cheesecake will give you a heart attack no matter how well you pace yourself.)

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Still continuing my placid tour through the many island nations of Sick. Stringing together more then eighteen words consecutively is still very much a hit-or-miss proposition, so I'll just pop out a couple of quick things:

The phone rang this afternoon and it was one of my favorite people, stuck in an airport somewhere. Conversation slopped all over the place during the half-hour call, but it briefly skidded into the realm of those little wet-nap-ish wipey things you can clean your PowerBook screen with.

"My screen looks like I've been dunking it in soup," I said.

"Mine looks like I gave birth on top of it."

And here I took immediate and immeasurable pride in having a friend like this.

Of course, she passed The Test a long, long time ago. What is The Test? I haven't the foggiest. Who tests their friends? But every really good friend of yours has passed it at one point or another. They said or did something — on their own or in reaction to something you said or did — and (metaphorically speaking) balloons and confetti dropped from the ceiling and a big orange curtain parted to reveal a failed actress posing on the hood of a brand new AMC Matador. You know you're on to something, here. You're quietly confident that giving him or her your private email address will not turn out to be the first step in a complex chain of events that ultimately results in a court date.

All this reminds me of the time when we sat together during a seminar and were more than slightly bored. She made a silent overture toward a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. We played to four or five straight draws before giving up.

I mean, just consider the immense synchronicity of psychology and game theory that has to happen to choose the same...the same...

(Andy clicks into Mozilla, Googles, and fails to find a satisfactory technical term for "the shape you make with your hand in a game of 'Rock, Paper Scissors'." He does, however, learn that in Japan the game is called Jan-Ken-Pon and that after you lose a round, the winner shouts "Look...That...Way...NOW!" and if you wind up looking where he's pointing, you must then take your own life. Or something.)

I mean, just consider the immense synchronicity of psychology and game theory that has to happen to choose the same hand gesture four times in a row. "OK," I thought, after Round One ended in Scissors-Scissors. "'Scissors' is still fresh in her mind, but she won't choose it twice in a row. She'll subconsciously pick the one that beats Scissors. So if I wanna win..." Result: Paper-Paper.

The final tie occurred after we each (me definitely, she apparently) tried to short-circuit any possible logic-based offense strategy by picking a symbol at random. I think we missed out on a big opportunity. I bet if we worked on it, by the end of the day we could have wished people into the cornfield and stuff like that.

Steve Martin seems to get thrown into swimming pools an awful lot these days.

It's got me concerned. Like all standup comedians who transition into film careers, he had to buy his way into the business through buffoonery. But it wasn't long before Steve was landing more sophisticated comedic roles in movies like "Planes, Trains And Automobiles" and "Roxanne." Thus, it became wholly unnecessary for writers to come up with a reason why Steve Martin might arrive at the church on his wedding day covered from head to toe in mustard, for instance.

He'd actually moved all the way out of comedy and into dramatic roles. So why do trailers for "Cheaper By The Dozen" show him as the Overstressed Dad being catapulted from a bouncy-house into a pool? Why was he cast as the Uptight White Guy who gets tossed into a pool in "Bringing Down The House"?

Two theories present themselves. One: he went nuts on eBay and bought a freakin' buttload of Rothkos, Kandinskys, and De Koonings. These things don't come cheap — even when you're not bidding against BobSpongeBob8289 — so he has to spend a few years working as a slave to his modern art jones.

But I prefer to think that he's taking these (dare I say) Alan Thicke-ish roles because he no longer defines himself as an actor...at least not primarily. These days it's all about his writing. That's where he invests his pride. It's okay by him if he acts in mediocre movies. Just don't tell him that his latest novella, his latest piece in The New Yorker, or the play he's currently workshopping is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from a guy who used to play the banjo with an arrow through his head. That's failure, in his eyes.

Just a guess, of course. If he's just doing these movies to fill his war chest for future art auctions, hey, more power to him. Worse movies have been made to fuel way more dangerous addictions.

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Big jug of cider. Thanksgiving photos dumped out of the "good" digital camera. Boxes hauled out of the basement. Tree has been standing in its spot for a full day, allowing its branches to settle and for its internal temperature to acclimate to the house.

The Ozzy Osbourne Christmas Special playing on MTV.

Mmm. Okay. Looks like I'm definitely set to decorate my folks' Christmas tree. Stay tuned.

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Tree Decoration Stage 1 Complete: Working with a set of pruners, tree has been reshaped by hand. You must circle the arborage diligently and examine the tree from all angles; every branch, sprig, and limp that detracts from a consistent, pleasing, full shape is excised.

It's important from an engineering standpoint as well as an aesthetic one; those tiny, spindly little cowlicks are insufficient to support ambitious ornamentation, and trimming them back to the first juncture closest to the third divergent limb prevents that Apollo 11 Light And Sound Ornament from crashing to the floor, taking your dreams of a happy Christmas down with it.

First Stage was completed rather quickly this year. Credit the unusually high caliber of tree. Chop off a surplus branch at the very top and two branches at the bottom that were dropping too low and poof, the job, she is done.

Kelly Osbourne finishes singing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas." But just barely; at one point the ref came in and gave her a standing eight-count.

Stage Two begins. Lights are unpacked and tested.

Total cider consumed: 14 ounces.

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Setback: Have been working with the "backup lights," not the "prime" lights. No wonder there were so many missing bulbs.

"Scrooged" starts on Channel 38. Haven't seen it from start to finish in years.

Total cider consumed: 24 ounces.

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Regarding this "Prime" and "Backup" lights business. The best way to get started in a tree-decorating regime is to buy about twice as many lights as you'll need. I bought six sets of (glancing to the right at the box) Kodak 100 Light Extra Bright "Add-A-Set"s. Four white, one blue, one red. If your tree is the usual size — roughly the height of the bears in those adventure movies, just before they finish their roar and make a move towards the pioneer family's cutest daughter — three strings will do ya.

So the sets of lights are stored separately. One box has three sets of "prime" lights, stowed in separate coils about a foot in diameter. Best move I ever made was to stop that nonsense of carefully re-packing each bulb in each string just exactly the way it came in the box. At the end of the season I just wrap it around my arm, attach a zip-tie every ninety degrees, and toss 'er in the box.

(So why have the extra sets? Cheap source of spare bulbs. Step One of unpacking a "Prime" string is liberating a fistful of bulbs from a "Backup" strings, to replaced missing and burned-out lights.)

These are nice strings, too. They're the kind where one end is a plug and the other end is a socket, so they all become one jumbo string of lights. If you arrange the lights studiously, you can work it so that the plug drops right at the base of the tree next to your extension cord. They also have little plastic locking tabs, so the bulbs don't work loose.

Scrooged: Bill Murray visits Karen Allen's homeless shelter. Gosh, she's adorable. What man my age wouldn't want to hook up with Marion Ravenwood?

Bill is about to do his Richard Burton impression.

Cool. Definitely worth waiting for.

One of the homeless guys is also one of those dudes who has a phenomenal career for three or four years and then phht! you never see him again. He was also one of Steve Martin's volunteer firefighters in "Roxanne." Did he die? Come into money? Was he in one of the later "Home Alone" movies and then decided to enter a monastary and live the rest of his life in penance?

The lights. First string covers the top 2/5 of the tree. Second string is draped along the right side, covering more than half the remainder. Third string will coat the left side, with enough left over to fill in whatever gaps and blanks remain.

One more cup (8 ounces) of cider is consumed.

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Stage Two complete. After the third set of lights are strung, you gotta make two more passes. You cut the power and do your best to tuck the wires in and around the branches. Hiding all of the wires completely is impossible and the only person who even attempts it is doing so only because the pharmacy ran out of OCD medication.

(Well, it is the holidays.)

With the second pass, you add and edit colors. You can buy strings of multicolored lights, sure...but can we really allow something as important as Christmas light to be determined by the insane whims of (Andy looks at the box again) Minami International Corportation, from whom Eastman Kodak licensed and subcontraced the patents for the Extra Bright "Add-A-Set"? No no no. That won't do at all.

So what you do is you string the tree with white lights. And then you pace around the thing with a fistful of colored bulbs and you add a dot of red, a dot blue, a dot of whatever to break up the monotony. Just be sure to stop before you think it's time to stop, you know?

(For the record: 300 bulbs total. Perhaps two dozen red bulbs and about six blue ones are added into the mix.)

"Scrooged": Bill Murray (visiting Christmas Yet To Come) is inside a coffin and rolling into a cremation chamber as his brother looks on. Officiating at the service is Michael O'Donoghue, co-screenwriter and Saturday Night Live's legendary "Mr. Mike." Sad to think that he himself died not too long after this movie was released.

MO'D is one of those humorists that you can go your whole life never having heard of, and then someone sets you hip and you become an immediate and lifelong fan. More than that, you instantly resent everyone you ever met before then; none of these people — none — told you to seek out his work. Not even once.

He was a fascinating character. Hate filled so much of his humor. And I'm not talking about the stupid, knee-jerk, cynical, "I hear the networks are buying 'edgy' this season" sort of hate. It wasn't dumn, smarmy, smug hate either...that sense of "I'm the only person on this planet who isn't totally and irredeemably full of crap" that has given Bill Maher what passes for a career these days.

No. It seemed like everything MO'D suspected about the world, everything which scared and intimidated him, everything which made no sense and surely would never make sense to him, fueled him. It was a good hate. A pure hate. A productive hate that made people happy. How the hell did he pull it off?

If this is the first you've heard of the guy, click here. Read.

"Scrooged" ends as I finish this entry. Not a bad version of "A Christmas Carol," given that so few of them are any good at all. Bill Murray actually starred in what was probably the best version ever filmed, though he doesn't get credit for it because the filmmakers made the tactical error of not calling it "A Christmas Carol" and not using any of Dickens' p;lot or characters at all.

More on this subject later.

Another cup of cider gone. Total thus far: 40 ounces. If I were drinking malt liquor, I'd probably have a pretty good base coat laid down.

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Stages 3 and Four complete. With the lights hung and the wires hidden as best as one can, the tree-topper is placed and the garland is draped, and the skirt is wrapped around the base. This is your last chance to really attack the tree as a holistic unit without sending fragile heirlooms crashing to the floor.

Strings of shiny silver beads go up. This year I invest a valuable three hours in evaluating the need for a layer of the red wooden beads and ultimately decide to leave them in the box. The silver beads subtly multiply the lights but the red ones suddenly look like something you'd order from Martha Stewart Living on impulse.

Stage Four is the placement of family ornaments. For this, you must extinguish the lights so that you can get a clear view of where things are going and where the bald patches are. One must also remember that the tree must look clean and sober during daylight hours when the lights are off.

All of the family ornaments are now up. The incredibly cool (and equally fragile) blown-glass ones that look like a cross between a parachute and a hot-air balloon, the little satin angels, the frosted-glass orbs, and all of the ornaments that I and my sisters made in various arts-and-crafts and afterschool-related sessions.

Witness: the paper ornament I made in nursery school by pasting two squares of wallpaper remnants together. Folks, I want you to imagine the sort of wallpaper that people bought in the Seventies. Then imagine wallpaper even worse than that. Colors that you only otherwise see when you're travelling by bathysphere and there's a lot of pressure on your eyeballs. Patterns that are beautiful and wondrous to you if you're a planetary physicist and you're looking at radiotelemetry of a distant sun that demonstrates that nuclear fusion is possible in a relatively hydrogen-poor celestial body.

As wallpaper, as something covering every square inch of your dining room or den, as something you're going to have to look at every morning over toast and Cheerios...no. Definitely no.

(But as a Christmas ornament: not bad at all.)

I hang the ornament that one of the girls made out of yarn, one that another sister made out of a paper cup, another made by accordian-folding gift wrap. It's all very sweet, really, and demonstrates that you make your parents happy just by virtue of having been there. Mom is nearby as I unpack and some of the ornaments fail to make the cut on aesthetic grounds and others go back in the box because their structural integrity has dropped to near-critical levels. But the ones her kids made for her always go up, no matter how tatty or tacky they've become.

(When it comes to the gifts I get her today, however, Mom's only interested in — as she puts it — "da bling." No, I haven't the foggiest. I've bought her a $15 Blockbuster Gift Card and can only hope that "da bling" can somehow be found somewhere therein. Fingers crossed, for sure.)

Ten ounces of cider remain from the original half-gallon. Must start rationing.

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Stage 5 complete. Project complete: tree is now completely decorated and the FAA has issued a Form 8130-7 Special Airworthiness Certificate, approving it for flight under the Experimental Aircraft category.

In Stage 5, I take this tremendously sentimental display of family history and tart it up with lots of spaceships and cartoon characters. It's a controversial step, but the alternative to putting my collection of ornaments on my parents' tree is actually setting up a Christmas tree of my own, and that seems like a hell of a lot of bother.

(I mean, if I set up a tree of my own, the only people who'd get to see it would be the hitchhikers whom I pick up, chroloroform, and then hold hostage for my amusement. And I've never actually done that. Not even once. So you understand that setting up a tree of my own would be a singular wasted effort.)

It should be stated that Microsoft has been terribly helpful with Stage 5. Every year or so they redesign their keyboards and mouses and package a set for promotional distribution. It arrives in this marvelous heavy cardboard box that's (a) about 20 inches wide, 14 inches across, and six inches deep, and (b) absolutely perfect for storing Star Wars ornaments in. Swing open the lid and you can see the whole assortment without having to dump the whole thing on the floor. I sure hope that Microsoft continues its agressive pursuit of perfection in wireless and optical input space. It serves the needs of the consumer and with this year's ornament purchases, I need a third box.

Yes, I've got dozens. Yes, they're mostly the (extremely fine) licensed items sold at your friendly local Hallmark Gold Crown store. I stated buying them the year after I failed to buy the first ornament in the line, a nicely sculpted original-series USS Enterprise. The next year brought an Enterprise shuttlecraft with a microchip that played special holiday greetings from Leonard Nimoy, and we were off and running.

I don't buy them all. I'm a soft touch for spaceships and anything from the Middle Trilogy, and am open-minded enough to at least take a look at the rest of the year's new offerings. You doubt my open-mindedness? Look at this: I actually bought the USS Voyager ornament. Sure, the TV show made you long for the gritty tension and complexity of that episode of "Baywatch" where the gang helped organize the regional Special Olympics, but it wasn't a bad-looking ship. "All it needs is a little love," Linus said, wrapping his blanket around its variable-geometry warp nacelles.

(A rare occasion in which Linus would have been wrong, wrong, wrong. If there's one thing that show didn't need, it was more love. Yes, Jean-Luc Picard drank tea, was active in shipboard community-theater and kept a psychologist on the command-deck so that in moments of crisis he could ask "Tell me, counsellor: how does the enemy feel?" Give the man credit, though: he knew which button fired the damned torpedoes.

But Voyager? I wish the show's producers had the guts to just bold an enormous set of rubber lips to the front of that ship so Captain Janeway could literally respond to immediate and unequivocal violent danger by giving whatever-it-was a big, sloppy smooch, leaving a huge Aunt Estelle-style lipstick print on the side of a Borg Dodecahedron or whatever. "Tuvok! Divert primary life-support energy to the forward osculation array!" she would snap, in that Tina Turner command voice of hers. "But do not engage the Hr'Hrug Flagship Of Joyful Creative Pandestruction until it lowers its aft shields.")

The Shuttlecraft made the cut. I have two Darth Vaders and two Luke Skywalkers. Putting up all four would be overkill. One of the Vaders has a sound chip, so he went up there. I hope I never get so old and stodgy that I'm blind to the appeal of having the ornaments fight, so naturally Luke — the one in the Bespin Cloud City costume, because Vader speaks a line from "Empire Strikes Back" — got placed on the same branch, a little further along.

Millennium Falcon: no-brainer. The X-Wing kicks butt. I've a sentimental attachment to the Enterprise-D, and I've got a Klingon Bird Of Prey with a cool flickering forward energy weapon. Done and done. Artoo is in. Yoda is in. Boba Fett? So in there, but his ship stayed behind in the Microsoft box. Again I wonder: why didn't they ever make a Han Solo In Carbonite ornament? It's a solid idea and I might have to liberate the HSIC accessory from an old action figure to make it happen.

C3P0 — new 2003 arrival — was carefully positioned under a white bulb for maximum glintage. I hung the Death Star so that it's camouflaged by traditional Christmas globes, but that's when I began to sense I was creeping dangerously near the point of over-doage. I had left most of the Trek ships in the box, as well as all of the First Trilogy ornaments, but the Apollo 14 LEM and the Friendship 7 Mercury capsule had to, had to go in.

The 2003 TIE fighter: in. As a compromise, I deleted the Advanced TIE on the basis that Vader is already represented on the tree.

I hung Superman and I carefully placed Spider-Man, and here I knew I was finished.

(Aside: the only two superheroes who made the cut. They're just perfect. Superman is sculpted in mid-flight, so if you ignore the metal hook screwed into his fifth thoracic vertabra and the fact that he don't seem to move around much, the effect is dashed lifelike. And the good folks at Hallmark must have worked straight through lunch while whiteboarding their Spider-Man Ornament concept. Weblines extend from each of his hands and end in separate hooks, and with careful placement it looks like John Romita himself drew Spidey swinging through your tree. Definitely brings tremendous value for $14.95.

Compare and contrast to the Hulk ornament, released a few years ago. Superman's flying through your tree. Spidey's swinging through it. The Hulk is...what? Rampaging through it? Leaping?

The Hulk ornament was seriously under-concepted and that's why I declined to purchase it. A good lesson for you MBA candidates: don't sell the steak, sell the sizzle. End of aside.)

And so I closed the lid on the Microsoft Bluetooth For 2002 box. I hated to leave Spock in there. He's seated at his little Science console and lends a little dignity to the proceedings. But alas, the hardest part of executing any work of Art is knowing when to stop.

I also have one of Kirk in his command chair. But leaving him in the box was an easy choice. There was the overcrowding problem, but he had to take the year off because this was the year I heard Wil Wheaton tell the story of the time he was first introduced to William Shatner. The experience inspired him to insert an obscene gesture in the man's middle name and the moment I heard it, William ****ing Shatner he became. Aptly, and for all time. It was like when you get a new cat. Over a period of weeks you try out a number of names that don't stick...until for some reason you find yourself saying "Norton!" The cat doesn't react visibly but in an instant you know that this had been the creature's name all along; it just took you a while to become aware of it.

I've read many "Star Trek" biographies — one year, a local salvage store practically the Book-Of-The-Month Club for remaindered autobiographies from former castmembers — and I'm very certain that the man was William ****ing Shatner well before Wil ever uttered those words in public. Still, it's hardly in the Yuletide spirit to be thinking such things when looking at a Christmas tree.

So it's done. I plug in the tree and electricity slaps into a dozen electronic ornaments and voices erupt from all sectors. John Glenn, Al Shepard, Spock, Vader, Emperor Palpatine, and the rest of the all-star cast flood the air with catchphrases. My folks will face this every day at dusk for the next week or two. Thank Heavens for nieces and nephews. I have the cool, confident bearing of a man who lives by a firm moral code but I'm certainly not above uttering the magic phrase "the kids'll get a real kick out of this" at times like this.

Every year, my Dad and I used to go over to my late grandparents' house and we'd get it ready for Christmas. I'd go into the attic, find their little fake tree, bring it down into the living room, and put it on top of the big console TV. All you had to do to set it up was pull off the garbage bag, bend it until it was straight again, re-attach any lights or ornaments that had popped loose in the previous 50 weeks, and plug it in.

We always enjoyed a good laugh about it. But every year that I decorate the family tree, I think Dad appreciates the wisdom of my grandparents' approach more and more.

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Catch up on the many heroic banalities that I posted last month.

This page and its contents copyright © 2003 Andy Ihnatko.