Santa Claus, the most prominent visage in the world this time of year, is in fact a true International Man of Mystery. How much do you really know about the stranger walking around your darkened house each Christmas Eve?

I got to ride in a Christmas parade last week and I recommend that pastime to you. Watching a parade is as quaint a bunch of fun as you’ll ever want to have, but being in the antic procession itself puts a delightfully different perspective on the matter.

Some sort of accord has been reached over the Very Important Tax Cuts and I wish I could tell you what it was. About all I gather is that the White House has delivered another change we can believe in, and this time it’s a change to an old bromide: it used to say, “Them what has, gets,” and henceforth it will be, “Them what has, keeps.”

Julian Assange is not a fellow you’ll invite to your holiday party this year, unless you want black ops crashing your soiree to do a little wet work on your guest.

I came close to meeting Keith Richards once, which, in the parlance of rock and roll, means I did not come very close at all. It would have been in 1989, around the time of the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels tour. Through felicitous happenstance, the band was in town to record some interview footage at Leo Ticheli’s video shop for a documentary marking the band’s 25th anniversary.

Some of them were killed by gunfire, but most of them were blown apart by bombs on the roadside. The majority of the fatalities occurred in the southern part, but there were deaths in every section.

Two authors in the same city, each from a large family, each inspired by a grandfather, each passionate about the printed word. Instead of writing great American novels, though, each decides to sell them in a gallant—some might say foolhardy—attempt to keep the love of books alive.

Will the officials at the top of the Democratic food chain be held accountable for miserable performance? They will not. Perhaps anticipating the rout, the State Executive Committee moved its elections up to August instead of the usual January, so every doofus responsible is safely employed for the next four years.

The Founding Fathers had rather a choleric view of democracy. John Adams said, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” Ben Franklin suggested, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

You heard it here first: when the new season of American Idol cranks up in January, a singer many of you know will be in the running. I wish I could be more specific, but the litigious drones that toil at the behest of Emperor Murdoch’s network would wreak a horrible vengeance were I to divulge names and places. I mention this only to whet your appetite for seeing a band from Noid, England, Saturday night at Bottletree.