Despite the fact that several women of my acquaintance have been done with this year’s holiday shopping since Labor Day 2008, it’s not too late to get get out there and stimulate the economy. As a courtesy to my readers, I thought it appropriate to present you with some gift ideas for those hard to shop for people on your list. As a courtesy to me (because I’m lazy), and because Dave Barry is way funnier than I’ll ever be, I’ll just link to his list.

I mean c’mon… who doesn’t need a nose shaped shower gel dispenser? And I’m thinking of getting my sweetie a pair of the metal detecting sandals so she can comb stroll the beach on our upcoming vacation and happen upon the pirate treasure that’s buried pretty much everywhere down there in the Caribbean. Goodness knows, we could sure use a few extra doubloons.

Kim and I lamented for years that whenever we would take the kids to a hotel or even the cottage, they would jump on the beds. It was their “gymnastics” routine, or so we were told. Well, to be fair, it was pretty much just the younger two who would leap on to, off of, and on the bouncy mattress until it it was little more than a heap of rumpled bedding. Which for a couple of neat-niks like us made bedtime a bit more of a chore than we might have hoped.

Had it only occurred to us to snap a few photos, we might have launched the current Internet craze years earlier. I give you BedJump.com, a site where people have photographed themselves and their friends in all manner of bed-bounced airborne poses in hotels all over the world.

Many photos look much like what I remember the kids doing:

While others are pretty cleverly done:

I’m thinking maybe we should see if we could get them back into this habit and cash in on our fleeting 15 minutes of fame…

It seems that Los Angeles is actually sitting atop a 20 billion barrel oil reserve. In fact, the city was originally founded as an oil town. There are actively working oil wells positioned discreetly all over the city. Some hidden in buildings and other urban structures, others just concealed from view. And there’s lots of tech in use to make the operations virtually silent and otherwise unnoticed by the residents and visitors. For a city that can’t seem to keep a secret about much of anything, this has certainly flown under the radar.

A camouflaged oil rig in LA:

For more info there’s a short but interesting documentary available.

The American consumer has long been confused with trying to figure out what they are actually paying for, especially when it comes to content like music, television, news, or even novels. Yet until the ubiquity of the Internet as a delivery vehicle came about, the issue was largely academic.

When you bought a newspaper, was that small fee actually paying for news, or was the news funded by ads and you were paying only for the printing and delivery to the door? When you bought a CD, were you paying for music or for the physical piece of media it was sold on? Honestly, most of us didn’t care as long as we got to listen to our tunes, read our news, and watch our shows.

The issue was further compounded by ad supported outlets that were free to the consumer. I could listen to radio or watch over the air TV without paying anything. The evening news came on at 6pm sharp and didn’t cost me a dime. As consumers we came to expect that content was pretty much free. The advent of value added services like cable TV played right into this mindset. While we paid for cable TV, we paid a connection fee to the cable company. It provided us access to the likes of CNN and Comedy Central, but we weren’t paying for the content (excepting premium content services like HBO). Granted, some of what we paid the cable company was in turn paid to CNN, which in turn subsidized their bottom line. But we didn’t see any of that. It was a bit like the infomercial that promises to send you a second set of Ginzu knives free as long as you pay the $29.95 shipping and handling charge. Sure, you’re really paying for the knives, but that’s hidden.

With the Internet, for the first time we came to consciously realize that we were paying for access, and just access. Using that access we can find all the content we might ever want and more. Music, TV, movies, news, and entertainment are just a click away. And most of it is available without paying. In fact, much of it is provided by the same companies we’ve traditionally sourced content from. Your local newspaper’s website is funded by the traditional newspaper business profits along with some minor online ad revenue. But the website itself generally isn’t profitable for the company.

But now these traditional content companies are finding that our appetite for traditional media distribution is waning. People are watching less broadcast TV in favor of Hulu and Netflix. People are buying fewer CDs and listening to less broadcast radio in favor of Pandora and Shoutcast. People are dropping their newspaper subscriptions in favor of Fox.com and Google news. And these companies are suddenly realizing that they can no longer give away content and charge for access because they no longer control the access. Further, they have hooked us consumers on the idea that content should be (or appear to be) free.

It would be a fair bit of suicide for content companies to simply erect pay-walls as they are threatening to do now. People won’t gratefully start to pay for something they perceive has always been free. At the same time, clearly content is valuable. People do pay indirectly for it today. So the issue is not whether or not content should be free. The issue is how to construct a new business model that either gets consumers to want to pay, or creates yet another indirect pay model that consumers don’t really perceive.

Either way, the onus is on the content companies to build this new model. In many real respects, they are now victims of the very model they created and thrived with over the past many decades. They need to step up to the reality of the Internet consumer and once again offer value we will pay for. Trying to enact legislation to enforce their dying business models or prosecuting their own customers for piracy is hardly the way to save a business.

Probably the hardest thing for a company to do is to stop doing what has always worked in the past. Regardless of how fruitless it becomes, there is a natural tendency to keep pushing the same button over and over. The reality is that many current content companies will likely fail because of their inability to find a different button to push. But for consumers, the beauty of capitalism is that new companies, with new business models, packaging content in ways we do find valuable, will doubtless emerge to take their place. It’s the capitalist circle of life. And sometimes it’s a little bloodier than we might prefer to watch.

New York is somewhat infamous for its highly dysfunctional legislature anyway, but the Senate really outdid itself this week. The gay marriage bill, after passing the Assembly, and with a promised signature from the governor, was defeated by a wide margin in the Senate. We had the opportunity to be the 6th state to come to its senses and recognize that the government doesn’t play a useful role in deciding who should be allowed to marry whom, but opted instead to yield to fear-mongering and religiously motivated intolerance. Among the naysayers was my own state Senator. I’d take it out on him at the polls, but I can’t figure out how to not vote for him any more than I haven’t in the past.

If you’d like to listen to a Senator who gets it, take a listen to Sen. Diane Savino’s lucid plea from the Senate floor during the vote. You go girl!

It’s taken all year, but I finally found the perfect Christmas gift for Kim.

Yes, yes, I know she has an irrational fear of birds and a pathological aversion to big gaudy jewelry. But I think having an actual stuffed bird’s head mounted to a big silver plaque on a chain around her neck will help desensitize her to both things at once.

Now all I need to find is a nice animal print top for her to wear with it. This will be a Christmas she will always remember!

(I am sooo gonna wind up spending New Year’s alone…)

“Ouch!”

Well, if you think that hurts, you’ll love these science inspired groaners from science comedian Brian Malow. Standard disclaimers apply. If you laugh out loud, you might be a nerd geek.

Actually the coolest thing may be that there is a job out there called “science comedian”.

I somehow suspect that while the side hug is positioned as universally appealing to Christians, many followers of Christ will still prefer the scandalous “full frontal hug”. The horror!

It’s not clear just how terrified you need to be about your body, your feelings, or you inability to control them that this begins to seem like a prudent path. For those who embrace the side hug, wrapping your arms around a friend joins the company of kisses, hand holding, and other gateways to premarital sex. And don’t even think about dancing. (Oh wait, Kevin Bacon showed us back in 1984 that dancing was just harmless fun, so that’s okay.)

I have visions of a soldier overseas dreaming of returning to his girl, yearning to feel her one shoulder nestled in his arm pit again.

Can you even imagine what a theoretical ideal wedding night has to be like for two good Christians who up until that point have only shared a firm side hug, replete with 3 or 4 blessing pats?

I’m certainly not advocating for teen sex, but I am advocating for teaching kids self-control rather than fear and avoidance.

Still, if the side hug appeals to you and want to get your kids hooked on it, there’s a rap song for that. Good luck getting them to download this to their iPod.

Roswell’s Area 51 scientists are eating humble pie this week. It has come to light that the Bulgarian Space Research Institute has established contact with aliens.

It figures. All those billions we spent on NASA, and the Russian’s on their space program. Even the Japanese, Indian, and most recently Chinese have ventured craft into orbit. And the ungrateful turds make contact in Bulgaria. Damn their space-borne hankering for a good schnitzel!

Lachezar Filipov, deputy director of the institute said:

“Aliens are currently all around us and are watching us all the time. They are not hostile towards us, rather, they want to help us but we have not grown enough in order to establish direct contact with them”

In other words, they are just big intergalactic teases.

Presumably, Roswell shot back:

“Uh uh!!!” and… “Your mother wears pointy ears!”

A couple days ago the local paper ran an editorial embracing a new program at the suburban Fairport school district allowing girls to opt to take tech classes in an all girl environment. The premise is that girls have a different learning style. But the motivation is that girls are underrepresented in tech classes.

I don’t disagree that in broad brush girls may have different learning styles. Yet I think we could also find other demographic slices or groups of individuals that would benefit from different learning styles on different topics. The schools would certainly be unable to accommodate offering all subjects in all learning styles. Classes are taught somewhere down the middle, and students at the edges have to cope. The reason for this exception is only that there are not enough girls opting for tech.

But are we fixing a problem that actually exists? Are girls turned off of or away from tech by “boy oriented” learning styles or are there other reasons girls don’t flock to tech careers? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying girls shouldn’t be in tech careers, and I know many who are quite skilled in the art. But I know many more who would rather slit their wrists than spend their days tweaking machines. It just may be the nature of the work rather than the style of learning the subject matter that causes girls to gravitate to other careers.

I’m reminded of a time when my son was just under two. We were headed to a friends’ home whose daughter was just his age. She was all excited that she would get to play with my son. He was all excited because he would get to plays with her toys. I don’t think it was that the evening didn’t cater to their individual learning styles. Rather, their brains were wired differently. Their desires, their motivations were different.

I desperately want people of any gender to gravitate to tech careers. I do think that many potentially talented people turn away from the field for a variety of reasons that might be correctable. But I think the notion that somehow the field (or any field) should be populated with proportionate numbers of boys and girls, whites and blacks, Protestants and Catholics, or any other groups is misguided.

Kim is annoyingly correct in that I haven’t given the Twilight series a fair shake. I’ve not read the books, I’ve not seen the movies, and I cop an attitude about the whole she-bang just based on its teen-girl appeal. Any movie that attracts throngs of swooning teeny-boppers (and their moms) just somehow doesn’t seem to fit in a genre with the likes of Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr. I like movies with all manner of creatures. I’ve enjoyed countless vampire and werewolf flicks. But it seems vampire flicks should somehow qualify as horror movies like Dracula, or at least action-adventures like Van Helsing. They should simply not be found in the store next to the Miley Cyrus DVDs.

To that end, I share a photo from a would-be Twilight sequel I probably would pay to see:

As the struggle to reform healthcare goes on, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we aren’t going to get what we really need out of any legislation that could actually clear Congress. Don’t get me wrong, I like the provisions to get more people insured, prevent you being dropped for pre-existing conditions, and other attempts to make healthcare in this country a bit more humane. However, it doesn’t look like there’s even a small remaining hope of getting anything into the reform bill that will actually reduce the cost of health insurance.

The public option, while hotly debated, isn’t providing competition for any existing insurance customers. And any attempts to regulate the existing industry or remove monopolistic practices are pretty much dead on arrival. Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group of budget watchdogs said of the bill, “As of now, it’s basically a big entitlement expansion, plus tax increases.”

As a practical matter, the health lobby is never going to allow the Congressmen they’ve paid good money for to vote for anything that will cut into their profits. And so far, the public isn’t united enough around any particular reform policy, or even the need for reform at all, to exact their will on Congress at the polls in 2010. This leaves us with two options: leave the system as it is, or accept “reform” that pads the pockets of the companies that are already the heart of the problem.

If we can agree on one thing, it is that the current system is broken. To not do something when we are this close would be devastating to future attempts. Further, we’d be right back here next time. But passing reform without cost containment of some form seems ultimately destructive. Minimally, it would be used as a weapon by those who opposed reform to say, “I told you so.”

Yet there might be a constructive aspect of expensive reform. Perhaps things need to get worse for people to unite against the current non-competitive expensive employer based system. The only thing that will break the stranglehold the industry and their lobby has over our government is a people’s revolt that is at least somewhat unidirectional. And that kind of focus will only be achieved through some shared pain. In part, I think we are not in agreement on a cure for healthcare because it doesn’t hurt enough yet.

You might be a nerd.

NBC is refusing to air PETA’s adorable commercial of a young girl offering a Thanksgiving prayer. I know it’s hard to believe once you’ve seen it, and hopefully it won’t put you off your dinner.

Personally, I support PETA, but only where the acronym stands for: People for the Eating of Tasty Animals. So stuff those butts and get those birds in the ovens!!

Obama kicked off a program this week to “energize and excite America’s students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” His stated goal is to show young people how cool science can be. Further, two local CEO’s were tapped to be on the team of five business and thought leaders to lead the $260 million program.

On the one hand, this is great news. I’m all in favor of anything that gets our kids engaged in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers. As I’ve argued before, I think this is essential to the economic success of America moving forward. What I can’t tell from any of the news is how this program really helps. I can’t see that Antonio Perez or even Sally Ride doing public service announcements about why science is cool will convince a lot of kids to give up their plans of being a rock star, a fireman, or a fashion model to take up physics. And for $260 million, I think about all you’re going to get is an ad campaign.

Still, the sentiment is in the right place. I’m just skeptical the execution will make a difference. But I’m still hoping.