If those sedentary New Year’s Eves sitting on your couch with a plate of nachos just aren’t cutting it anymore… If you just feel the need to show off those new athletic skills you’ve honed watching all the Jenny Craig commercials… If you’re feeling the need to bond with Al Gore… then hop in your Prius and drive to Times Square.

Once there, courtesy of Duracell, you can hop on a Power Rover and help power the famous ball. These are basically big stationary bikes located around the area. They will store up the collective pedal power pumped into them through out the evening and light up the big ball for its classic drop to hearken the new year.

I sure hope there’s backup power, otherwise I fear we’ll only get the collective effort of a handful of drunk revelers, resulting in a barely glowing orb, flickering in and out of life as it descends. Come to think of it, that may be an accurate, albeit majorly depressing, harbinger of the year to come.

Christmas Day’s near miss terror attack on a Northwest Airlines flight headed to Detroit was arguably thwarted mostly by good luck. The would-be suicide bomber’s detonator failed. The quick thinking passengers then acted to subdue the man before he had a chance to fix the faulty bomb.

The news cycle is now in full-on scare mode. Everyone is calling for investigations on how the man could have been allowed on the plane. Looking into the man’s history, someone should have known he was dangerous. TSA is introducing new security regulations mostly intended to make us feel safer when we fly. And Republicans are positioning this as a failure of Obama’s national security policy.

Very little is being said about the realities of preventing a random single attacker. This guy, even in retrospect, was relatively low risk. Looked at another way, there are hundreds of thousands of people around the planet that are of a similar risk level as this guy was. And those are just the people we are aware of. The number probably climbs into the millions if we could truly analyze everyone’s behavior. There’s no practical way to track and monitor all of these people.

But even so, shouldn’t he have been prevented from getting on the plane? At what cost? There are no magic detectors for passengers headed onto planes. Short of requiring that we all fly naked with no luggage or carry-ons and remain in our seats throughout the flight, there will always be some risk that someone will slip through. And even if we managed to make the planes safe, trying to provide similar security measures to every gathering of a few hundred people would be prohibitive. We just squeeze the balloon. Make the planes safe, and the terrorists will move to shopping malls, movies theaters, trains, or some other venue.

The simple reality is that while reasonable precautions are certainly in order, and we should all be vigilant against emerging threats, none of us is ever guaranteed to be 100% safe. Sometimes we get through the day simply because we weren’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. We didn’t die in a traffic accident, we didn’t fall in the tub, we weren’t on the flight with the mechanical failure, and we weren’t walking on the sidewalk near where the car-bomb went off.

I’m elated that guy’s bomb failed. But I’m unwilling to let the fact that he tried drive me into a sense of fear about flying or other terrorist attacks. Every time we succumb to that fear, the terrorists actually win, whether they killed anyone or not. We can’t allow their effort alone to be a success.

It seems that back in 1978, hot on the heels of the so-called Summer of Star Wars, CBS aired a holiday special of the movie. It was only aired the one time. This poor unfortunate classic wanna-be. While its parent movie was destined to be a timeless classic, this special, despite aspirations to join the ranks of The Grinch, Frosty, and Rudolph, wound up in the scrap pile like so much holiday wrapping paper. It’s hard to imagine how this missed. After all, if adding Bea Arthur and Art Carney, with a special musical appearance by Jefferson Starship, to the cast doesn’t make Mark, Carrie, and Harrison more Christmassy, then I guess nothing does.

For your viewing pleasure, the special has been boiled down to its five minute essence, which I’m sure you’ll agree is more than enough. Enjoy…

Now that you can even get a Snuggie in a full Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle theme, I can’t imagine why you’d need to shop further for mobile domestic warmth products. Don’t those nice young men look toasty? And nothing says I’m the coolest dude on campus like TMNT gear.

But just in case you’re still feeling a chill in the room, those wacky Japanese can hook you up. You’ll be the envy of the household in this mummy bag with feet. (I’d recommend a nice pair of wool socks though.)

Your honey will certainly understand that tonight is not the night when they find you wrapped in this sexy nylon bodysuit. Ohh baby… I wonder if this comes in a TMNT theme?

There is an alternative medicine technique known as ear candling that claims to do everything from remove ear wax to stabilize your emotions, purify your blood, or even align your chakras. (Important because I’m sure you know how painful having your chakras out of whack can be.)

The process involves sticking a special hollow candle in your ear and lighting the sucker up. The idea is that the flame draws on the ear canal and creates a mild vacuum. If it did, I suppose I can see how you could rationalize why that might dislodge ear wax, but I suspect it would require a much larger ear drum damaging vacuum to actually remove any wax buildup. No matter, since the physics is flawed anyway. An open tube with warm air at one end would create a draft through the tube as the hot air rose, assuming there was an air supply in your head somewhere. But nobody’s that blonde, so you won’t really get a vacuum.

I have no idea why this should purify your blood. However, it does make a modicum of sense that it would stabilize your emotions. After all, you’d need to achieve an unnatural level of calm before allowing a friend to shove a flaming stick in your ear.

And if this seems like a good idea, and your friend is a really good sport, you might also try the Butt Candle. This is an actual product, intended to relieve constipation and intestinal blockage. It works pretty much like the ear candle except you use a different orifice. And there are a few additional precautions. For example, should you have excessive hair “down there,” the instructions recommend you use a plant mister to pre-dampen the area and thus avoid any “follicular ignition.”

It strikes me there may be other issues as well. For example, your ear isn’t prone to emitting flammable gasses. Having partaken in a few locker room fart lightings over the years, the prospect of open flames in that region, especially while constipated, are met with a touch of trepidation.

And it recommends you use this product while lying on your back and holding your knees toward your chest. While this is certainly a dignified position for anyone to be in with a flaming stick up their butt, I don’t know if they’ve fully considered the male anatomy here. When guys are in that position, stuff that you’d rather not set on fire should be hanging near the open flame. Sing it with me… “Chet’s nuts roasting on an open fire…“

I can only assume the plan is that by the time you get into this position, have the hair burned off your butt, your junk roasted medium well, and your friend gets the pictures up on the Internet, constipation is the least of your worries.

Choir directors have been lamenting the disproportionate number of girls in choir, especially in those high school years. It’s just tough getting the guys interested. Well Paradise Valley, AZ choir director Mary Segall has a novel solution… take the choir on a field trip to Hooters.

Okay, so the official story is that the trip was to perform at a downtown Phoenix location, and Hooters was the only restaurant in the area that could accommodate 40 people for lunch. And I understand why she’s sticking to that story what with being suspended and all.

But we know the real truth…

Why Santy Claus? Why?…

A woman in El Dorado Hills, California really really does want a hippo for Christmas. Or at least she wants her old hippo back. Apparently thieves made off yesterday with a 300 pound pink fiberglass hippo that was in her yard. So, if you should encounter any pink hippos over the holiday, you know where to send them.

This song is sort of a family tradition, in the sense that we try not to miss opportunities to infect one another with it this time of year. Just thought I’d share the seasonal joy. It strikes that perfect balance between catchy and annoying such that you can’t help but listen to it, and then once you do you can’t get it out of your head.

Go on… click “Play”. You know you want to…

Who says nothing good ever came from a bunch of people sitting around drinking beer?

Or maybe you prefer a larger scale project because you have a large amount of friends and a stupid amount of beer? Try this 1000 bottle Christmas Tree…

Public health expert Dr. Nathan Grills believes Santa sets a bad example. Grills contends the old salt promotes obesity, speeding, drunk driving, and unsanitary practices what with all that nose touching and all. I guess dedication, charity, and compassion don’t count for much anymore.

This advice comes just in time, because young children are impressionable, and they all want to grow up to be Santa, right? I remember as a lad myself, dreaming of being dressed all in red, eating countless cookies, and hoping that someday I could freeze my nuggets off at the North Pole slaving away to make toys for all the little kiddies all year. Seriously, have you ever met anyone that wanted to grow up to be Santa?

Further, at some point results have to count for something. He may carry a few extra pounds, but he’s been alive for 100′s of years and it doesn’t seem to be slowing him down any. And who knows how alcohol effects him, but regardless I’ve never heard of a single Christmas Eve sleigh collision. Heck, the guy never even scuffs a roof shingle! Who wouldn’t want his safety record? And I know many who wish they could sneak into their house a little tipsy and be as quiet as he is. So whatever he’s doin’, it’s workin’ for him.

So Dr. Grills, maybe you could just go back and worry about flu infected students washing their hands or something and leave the poor guy alone.

Most of us have a notion in our head of what Chinese, Spanish, German, and maybe a handful of other languages sound like, even though most of us don’t speak a word of anything other than English. That is, we can recognize a language without speaking it based on its tone, meter, and phonemes. The comedy show Who’s Line Is It used to have a skit whereby the performers were required to do a scene using a foreign language they didn’t speak. They used this same meta-knowledge about a language to spout gibberish in another tongue.

But have you even wondered what English sounds like to those who don’t speak it? I’m unsure of the motivation, but an Italian singer wrote an entire song using English sounding gibberish. Listening to it, your brain is definitely recognizing the lyrics as “English”, and it’s frankly pretty frustrating because you can’t help but try and make sense of it, despite it not being decodable.

In retrospect, it’s a little like listening to a Bob Dylan song.

Newton South High School in Massachusetts exempted a student from an assignment to read parts of the Bible because the student said he was an atheist. This was part of a unit in Honors English on cultural traditions.

While atheists should not be required to believe the Bible, they do not get to opt for cultural ignorance by refusing to understand it. The Bible is one of, if not the most, important book in the entirety of western culture. Regardless of your religion, you’re a fool to not appreciate its influence on the very culture you live in. School is about education. It doesn’t mean you’re exempted from hearing anything you disagree with.

As for the school, what is the precedent they have set here? Will pacifists be able to opt out of studying war? Will pretty much everyone get out of studying Greek mythology? This was a bad decision plain and simple. Bad for the school, bad for the student, just, well… bad.

The Senate’s 60-vote majority required to pass any substantive legislation sans filibuster has been enormously frustrating of late. And no, I’m not just talking about healthcare. This extends well back into Reagan’s tenure, but has been particularly problematic for the last three Presidents.

In thinking about this the other day, it occurred to me that the Constitution was pretty clear about the Senate requiring a simple majority to pass a bill. Further, I knew that the filibuster was introduced as a Senate rule and was not specifically defined in the Constitution. So I reasoned that given the filibuster’s resultant effect of being able to prevent a simple majority from passing a bill, shouldn’t it be unconstitutional?

I was pretty sure I wasn’t the first person to ask such a question, so a little research was in order. I came upon a pair of articles written by Vikram David Amar for FindLaw.com in 2003. They are a wee bit wonkish, but well worth the read if you have a few minutes. It’s also interesting that the articles were written to assess Republican chances to change filibuster rules to prevent a Democratic minority from subverting their narrow majority will. Today, we find the Republicans desperately clinging to the filibuster as a way to retain power in the Senate. Yesterday’s sword is tomorrow’s shield.

It turns out my fleeting analysis was overly simplistic. While the Constitution does say the Senate requires a simple majority to pass a bill, it also allows both houses of Congress to establish their own rules and procedures, and doesn’t provide much constraint on those rules. There are essentially two Senate rules at issue here. On the one hand is the cloture rule requiring 60 votes to end debate. But the stickler turns out to be the rule changing rule that requires a 2/3 majority to change a Senate rule (such as the cloture rule). Without the rule changing rule, a simple majority could change the cloture rule, which in effect would nullify the filibuster’s power.

Interestingly, the rule changing rule was created by a simple majority, and that turns out to maybe be the hinge on which this whole thing turns. The question is, should a simple majority be able to impose its will on a future Senate? It would seem the answer is no. With the exception of the Constitution itself, no legislative body should be able to do something that is not reversible by future legislatures.

Taking this to a somewhat goofy extreme for illustrative purposes, let’s assume that a simple majority were to pass a law outlawing boxer-briefs. No dithering. Pick one or the other. Further, let’s assume the law added a requirement that this law could only be overturned by a unanimous vote. Effectively, that law would now be immortal. I think pretty clearly that law would be struck down by the courts, not because of the goofy underwear constraint, but because it tried to make it illegal to have itself undone.

However, the rule changing rule is essentially the same. A simple majority created a rule that a simple majority cannot undo. Part of the rule is essentially insuring that the rule itself cannot be undone, at least easily. And to Amar’s point, that is likely the unconstitutional part of this mess.

While that’s all fascinating, it doesn’t really address the question of why the Senate or the courts don’t work to overturn a rule which has essentially rendered the body inert. I doubt the courts will want to intervene uninvited into the inner workings of another branch of the government, and I don’t blame them. That’s not a precedent we want to set. Yet the Senate must be somewhat self-aware that is has become dysfunctional under it’s own rules. Why don’t they act?

I suspect it all stems from a desire for power and a recognition that over time, each party will occupy the minority position. As Frank Herbert noted in his novel Dune, “The power to destroy a thing is the power to control a thing.” As the minority party, they may not be able to create anything, but they can destroy it, and destructive power is power just the same. And I think that Senators fear little more than the prospect of being powerless.

Rochester’s City Council voted Tuesday night to overwhelmingly approve the installation of red light cameras at 50 intersections. I’ve written before about why these camera systems are disingenuous at best. Usually they are touted as safety measures while the credible evidence suggests they are actually road hazards.

Curiously, local coverage of the council’s decision didn’t even attempt to position this as an effort to make the roads any safer this time. It was all about the money. Nonetheless, they cited Mayor Duffy as downplaying the projected windfall for the city, and also left the math as an exercise for the reader. However, they did provide the raw numbers in various paragraphs of the article. The city is projecting $3.5m in revenue and will pay $3,750/mo/camera. Crunch that up, and we are looking at about $1.25m to the city’s bottom line as a result of this program.

It’s understandable why these programs are financially attractive to local governments. I just wish they’d be honest with us and maybe with themselves about why they are doing this. Especially when you consider the additional incremental cost to citizens in terms of life, health, property damage, and insurance rates due to the increased accidents at monitored intersections.