Column

Some ethical purists are concerned about all the free lunches – and free dinners, and free breakfasts, and free drinks, and free golf, and free heavy apps at free receptions – being lavished upon Washington’s lawmakers when they’re in Olympia. It’s a question of independence and influence-peddling. But there is another, potentially more devastating problem with all the generosity flowing from lobbyists to legislators: the risk of dependency.

There’s an old Irving Berlin song performed by Bing Crosby called “Let’s Start the New Year Right.” It suggests that kissing would be one way to achieve that goal. Hard to argue with that.

What do you call a safety net that shrinks when it’s needed most? If you’re a certain kind of thinker, you call it victory.

Jeff Nadeau knows he snores. So when he took the train from Spokane to Seattle in the middle of the night, he was worried about falling asleep and making a startling amount of noise. But he quickly realized the guy sitting behind him would be providing the soundtrack for their train car.

In the annals of Hval holiday lore, one story is guaranteed to get trotted out each Christmas. My children call it, “Mom’s Christmas Tree Meltdown.” I call it, “Too Many Children, Not Enough Tree,” but whatever its title, the tale marks an embarrassingly Grinch-like episode in my holiday history. My family finds the story hilarious. I do not. The exact year of this event is unclear, but I think our sons were 4, 6 and 8 because they all remember it. Thankfully, Sam was not yet born, so he didn’t witness the debacle.

Today is the day Spokane-area families look at game films and critique their Christmas performances. This is a tradition going back decades, to the home movies era. It has grown in popularity since portable phones became capable of recording video.

The bare bones facts are simple and straightforward. Doug Johnson and Teresa, his wife of 35 years, have taken up the ambitious hobby of restoring and modernizing vintage travel trailers.

Imbued with a commitment to real-world reader service, photographer Kathy Plonka and I sallied forth from the Review Tower late Monday morning on a mission to help holiday season procrastinators. Yes, it was time for a little man-on-the-street journalism.

OK, now is when we find out who really hates winter. Someone whining about any prospect for frosty weather during this particular week on the calendar has to be considered a hard-core snowophobe.

I need to do some shopping. So I invite you to enjoy a very special batch of holiday reruns.

Gather ’round, boys and girls. Uncle Doug has a Christmassy story to share about Santa’s most famous four-legged friend. You know, the one with the shiny red nose?

Again, Kootenai County owes a debt of gratitude to Treasurer Tom Malzahn for postponing his retirement 21 months to protect his office from right-wing ideologues who control the local GOP. In Idaho, the respective parties provide up to three names for appointment by commissioners when a vacancy occurs among the courthouse elected officials. Malzahn feared that the tea party/Ron Paul wing that dominates the GOP Central Committee would bypass his competent deputy, Laurie Thomas, in favor of conservative ideologues.

There are different ways to consider winter’s long nights. It’s said that, for some, early sunsets pose a wellness challenge.

In less remarkable times, it might be less remarkable to hear a sheriff – a GOP sheriff in an ultra-red county, no less – remark that his job is enforcing laws. Not writing laws. Not ignoring laws. Not independently deciding the constitutionality of laws. And not turning over allegiance from the country and the county they serve to the wishes of political parties and their central committees.

A Spokane Valley friend who watches kids during the day and after school asked her young charges if they had any advice for her son, who recently got married. They did. And she was kind enough to pass along the marital counseling.

Being silent and sullen isn’t the only option for kids of a certain age forced to join their families on after-dark drives to look at Spokane-area Christmas lights. No, such outings are a perfect opportunity for young people to do what they do best. You know, be vocally unimpressed with adults’ ideas about fun.

We’re less than a week away from that magical day when that Holly Jolly Fat Man makes his annual appearance. And for the record I mean Santa, not rare sightings of the county prosecutor.

As we near year’s end, all the lists of bests and worsts are coming out. Among the more interesting, to me at least, are the lists of popular words and phrases/new words coined and something on the order of word of the year. Not to let all the national folks hog the spotlight, I have my own words and phrases to contribute, though they occupy a subset in the trend department – words I really, really hate. Top of the list for me is any word that is said with vocal fry, which it seems is close to every utterance by a starlet or female younger than 30 in any public arena.

An email arrived from a reader who enjoys social nudity. “There is a nudist resort, Kaniksu Ranch, just north of Spokane that I visited several times before I became a member,” wrote a man who told me his name but asked that I not print it. “Needless to say, it is closed in the winter. One year, over the Christmas holiday, I decided to get away from the dark and cold and flew to Phoenix. My version of snowbirding.