Are global consumers so accustomed to mobile-phone minute-based pricing plans that they’ll go for the same concept when it comes to travel fares? That’s what South Africa-based Airtime Airlines is banking on. The upstart start-up is selling plane tickets based on total flight time between origination and destination sites.

The carrier still needs regulatory approval, and an actual aircraft fleet, before it gets off the ground at all. That said:

If Airtime irons out those details, passengers will buy minutes instead of a traditional point-to-point ticket. They can buy a “starter pack” of prepaid minutes and top off their accounts by purchasing more minutes — by text message — at the going rate of 5 Rand (about 53 cents) a minute. Flight times have been mapped out in advance, so sitting on a runway for three hours won’t triple the cost of your ticket.

Topping off accounts is where things get interesting. The cost for Airtime minutes can fluctuate, presumably according to promotions and market factors, so topping off becomes an exercise comparable to fuel hedging. Buy a big block of minutes when you think they’re at their cheapest and you look smart, unless the price drops again the next day. Then again, it might go up. The price recently rose from 3 Rand to 5 Rand, meaning the cost of a round-trip flight from Durban to Cape Town climbed from about 750 Rand ($81) to 1,250 Rand (about $134). Still that’s cheaper than the $200 it would cost on South African Airlines.

So if this structure actually catches on, people would start to think of their traveling agendas in terms of time spent — both actual in-the-air and money-wise. It’d go from thinking, “That ticket to Orlando is gonna cost me 300 bucks” to “Going to Orlando will eat up 120 minutes from my account”. Interesting concept. I guess frequent fliers like businesspeople would be the chief target market, as setting up a flight-minute bucket account would be a barrier to entry for regular folks who don’t fly more than a handful of times a year.

Not that I see this taking off, figuratively or literally. But it’s fun to speculate what this brand of timed air travel would be like.

In a remarkable showing of political repurposing, John McCain is taking his “Putting Country First” Presidential campaign slogan and applying it to his brand-new political action committee, dubbed simply Country First PAC.

And he’s not lifting just the wording from the since-dismantled McCain-Palin ‘08 machine. Even the fonts, colors, and decorative designs from the White House campaign have been transplanted over to the Country First website. I guess that creates instantly-recognizable continuity with the conservative Republican stump issues that McCain championed during his run, and will continue to promote via this new organization. Smart approach.

Congrats to David Singer, HockeyFights.com founder and a frequent visitor to this here blog, on being interviewed by Yahoo! Sports’ Puck Daddy regarding the recent death of amateur hockey player Don Sanderson during an in-game fight.

Fighting in North American hockey is a recurring point of contention within the sport (it’s generally not in the rules in European leagues and prep/college play). So the Sanderson tragedy naturally has become a lightning rod for now-increased calls to have sanctioned fisticuffs banned from the NHL on down.

As you can guess, someone who runs a site called “HockeyFights” isn’t going to fall on the anti-fighting side of the debate. And the broadbased popularity of David’s site attests to the continuing support for five-minute penalty bouts on the ice. That support clashes with overt efforts to eliminate sanctioned fighting within the game, along with the more subtle de-emphasis by the NHL in rule refinements and marketing efforts that avoid mention of this aspect of the game.

Myself, as a fairly hardcore hockey fan? I can live with the status quo, in that I accept fighting as it’s currently codified in the NHL. If it’s popular enough with some of the fanbase that banning it would upset them, then leave things be. That said:

I’m not much of a supporter of fighting, and wouldn’t miss it if it were outlawed today. Hanging onto an activity that’s considered an ejection-worthy penalty in other team sports strikes me as antiquated. And as iffy as it is to judge any sport by the standard of another, I have to note that basketball, football, and other contact sports manage to function without the “outlet” that flying fists supposedly provides. Not to mention that this argument never ends, with re-flares coming at regular intervals — frankly, I’m tired of rehashing this debate when the value of it, for me, diminishes with each round.

The upshot? The situation brings to my mind Thomas Jefferson’s “wolf by the ear” comparative:

“But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

Granted, the slavery issue that Jefferson was struggling over was of considerably more importance than how a sports entertainment league governs itself. But the scenario is comparable: Hockey is confronted with a contentious problem, and whichever course of action taken by its guardians will lead to problematic consequences.

Fighting in hockey is indeed a wolf. Keep it or banish it, the resultant course won’t be easy to deal with. Eventually, the NHL and other leagues will make their choice, and hopefully we can all move on from there.

While author Neale Donald Walsch can hack it with the best of them when it comes to “Conversations with God”, he’s a bit more challenged when it comes to conjuring up original material for his Beliefnet blog. So it is that he was caught plagiar-blogging an inspirational Christmas story originally written by Candy Chand:

Walsch wrote on his blog Tuesday he was “truly mystified” about what happened and apologized. He said he had been telling the story for years in public talks and “somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience.”

“As a published author myself, I would never use another author’s words as my own,” Walsch wrote. “Yet I have apparently done just that — although with no deliberate intent to do so.”

Chand, of Rancho Murieta, California, said she did not believe Walsch’s account.

“It’s pretty difficult for me to believe that someone has a memory lapse that is word for word my story,” she said. “He deleted the first paragraph. That’s it.”

I love how email-forwarded material gets “internalized” so readily. Not to mention re-blogged with abandoned.

I guess God Himself needs to doublecheck Walsch’s material now, just to make sure His end of those “conversations” weren’t “internalized”. Although I guess that’s the ultimate aim anyway, in a more spiritual sense.

Thomas Beller was having trouble letting go of his longtime West Village studio apartment, much to the consternation of his wife. Until he finally saw the light:

I had denied it. But now I saw that I was in denial. We had been living with ghosts. It made me question why I had been so reluctant to leave. What was I holding onto? To these women who had spent time here? To old friends who, for all kinds of reasons, were not friends anymore?

To what extent does living with the past impede living in the present? Or living for the future? I love things that hold their own history — places, objects, apartments, most of all people — but for the first time I felt that this apartment’s history might also be toxic. Had it thrown a curse on my tenant whose engagement had blown up?

The memories that loomed before me as I awoke from my nap were, after all, not entirely good. And so that evening, in some fundamental way, I made my peace with moving out… After a little while I was satiated with the sense of privacy and, sensing its limits, closed up shop and hurried uptown, where the brightness of my wife and daughter were waiting.

So the light was his family, and his single life was his dark past. More or less.

For the couple of days that I’ve been mulling over Beller’s essay, I’ve tried to avoid judging it too harshly. But I can’t help it: To me, it comes off as one man rationalizing his capitulation to any individual identity within his married relationship.

I realize it’s standard procedure to jettison the pre-marriage domiciles. I’m also acquainted with the female instinct to nest. All told, Beller was asking for trouble by holding onto his bachelor pad so long after his nuptials.

What I have a problem with is the rationalization. He couldn’t just admit that it was finally time to move on — he had to assign bad vibes to scene of his old life, and indeed to that old life overall. It’s a slash-and-burn approach to settling into a married mindset, at the expense of a good chunk of self-worth.

He had an epiphany, all right. Too bad it amounts to the ability to now say “Yes, dear” on reflex.

Three years after last inciting an olfactory freak-out across the five boroughs, a mysteriously sweet stench is once again wafting through Gotham:

The strange, syrupy scent has descended on parts of New York City and New Jersey at least three times before. Beginning in the fall of 2005, people in various areas of the city and nearby New Jersey reported the scent.

Some have theorized that the smell came from New Jersey. Others theorized that it was generated by a candy factory in Manhattan. There were also fears that the odor was linked to an act of terrorism.

Officials ruled the odor harmless but never solved the mystery of its origin.

My memory’s faulty — I could have sworn the last incident happened after I got back to town in 2006…

That said, I have yet to detect anything. And I traversed a good chunk of Manhattan today, from midtown on down. No smelliness that I noticed. I can’t say I’m much in the way of an astute smeller (if such a thing exists), so maybe I’m blissfully exempt from this nose assault.

In a sign that automakers are extremely desperate to move units any way they can, Hyundai is trying to sway recession-wary consumers to buy cars with the option of returning them if they lose their jobs and subsequently can’t keep up with the payments.

It’s necessary outside-the-box thinking, in response to circumstance:

Hyundai is offering the program because its own market research showed car shoppers weren’t attracted by rebates and other more normal incentives, said Joel Ewanick, Hyundai America’s vice president for marketing. People are simply too worried about making payments no matter how good the deal is, he said.

Shows how deep the uncertainty is in this economy, with big-ticket purchases like cars getting hit. Unless your heap is just falling apart, it makes no sense to take out one of the multi-year auto loans that had gotten to be so typical. Assuming all the carmakers are facing this resistance — and they surely are — I’m thinking we’re about to see a huge collapse in the new-car market.

The big joke: I doubt Hyundai would even want to reacquire the incomeless-defaulted vehicles. It’s not like they’ll be able to turn them around to another buyer, and storing them would just add to their costs.

Underland Press is making a go at saving book publishing by — ta-da! — putting novel-writing online, in bite-sized interactive installments:

“A wovel is a Web novel,” [Underland founder Victoria] Blake says. “There’s an installment every Monday. At the end of every installment, there’s a binary plot branch point with a vote button at the end.”

[Web programmer Jesse] Pollack describes the wovel format as reminiscent of the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, with a high-tech twist: “allowing the readers to … choose their way through and decide on integral changes in the plot.”

Voting is open from Monday to Thursday, the author writes the chapter from Thursday to Sunday, and Underland Press posts the installment on Sunday night. She says it’s a combination of “…the technical functionality of Web 2.0, the creativity of fiction and the pace of print journalism.”

Actually, it’s laughable to frame this as Web 2.0. It’s nothing but a cattle-call for feedback — you could accomplish that by using basic blogging software, with built-in commenting, to present these in-process excerpts. And the notion that this will draw back people who prefer Web media over the printed page is specious reasoning. Hate to sound harsh, but I don’t see this amounting to much.

As for that coinage, “wovel”… Not only is it already the name of some “As Seen On TV” snowshovel contraption, but when I look at the word, I can’t help but transpose the “w” and “v” and think “vowel”. Just stick with webnovel or something else as straightforward.

When you think of samurais, you think of samurai swords.

But the ancient Japanese warrior class liked using bow and arrow as well, especially while on horseback. Yabusame is the time-honored tradition of equestrian archery, akin to polo in England or rodeo in America, and the competition exists in present-day Japan:

The targets, held about seven feet aloft on small poles or scaffoldings, are roughly the size of a mounted opponent’s chest. There are three along the runway, which is only 165 yards long, giving the archer just enough time to raise his bow, load and shoot — three times — all the while spurring on his horse.

When the dull, turnip-shaped tip of an arrow strikes just right, the board explodes in a blur of splinters. But as often as not, the arrows miss, sailing past the targets and thudding into the canvas behind them…

Archers don’t actually sit. They squat, using special stirrups and very light saddles.

Something I’ll have to catch, should I ever visit the beaches of southern Japan…

This morning, I caught the replay of last night’s MSG Network “Hockey Night Live”, and heard an intriguing idea from — of all people — former Rangers great Ron Duguay:

In future Winter Classics, why not take advantage of the extra space inside the baseball/football stadium bowls and “spread out”, i.e. increase the size of the ice surface, beyond the National Hockey League regulation dimensions of 200 feet long by 85 feet wide?

Duguay’s primary rationale was that bigger ice provided better viewing opportunities for the mega-sized crowds, particularly those in the higher upper decks. He didn’t specific just how much bigger the sheet should be; certainly not supersized to fill a football field or baseball diamond, but I’d guess something considerably larger than the Olympic/international standard of 200′ by 100′. He didn’t cite any sort of improved player/game experience from a bigger playing area, which is a switch from recent history, when regular carping about giving players more room to move and make plays was commonplace.

Duguay’s “HNL” co-hosts shot down the idea pretty quickly. Their main counter-argument was that if the ice surface wasn’t NHL regulation, then the Winter Classic would cease to be a regulation NHL game, thus rendering it meaningless.

I’m not necessarily in favor of making this change. That said…

As we all know, regulations are made to be adjusted. My problem with the counter-argument is that, of course, the NHL has, in the past, functioned in buildings that housed non-regulation rinks. The Bruins (old Boston Garden), Blackhawks (Chicago Stadium), and Sabres (Buffalo Memorial Auditorium) all played on “short rinks” for decades, with the only justification being that the franchises didn’t want to lose seating capacity just to get up to regulation ice. So I don’t see any particular contradiction in messing with the ice size for an annual Winter Classic showcase game.

I can’t imagine re-jiggered ice being a popular move with the teams, particularly for the players who’d have to adjust their playing styles for a game that counts in the standings. And if the WC is meant to showcase NHL hockey, then you can argue that a different ice surface would showcase a different brand of hockey altogether.

Still, it’s outside-the-box thinking, aimed at enhancing the crowd-viewing experience. So it’s worthy of consideration, at least — if not actual execution.

National Hockey League brass should be dancing with glee over the television ratings from Thursday’s Winter Classic:

The New Year’s Day event on NBC earned a 2.9 overnight rating and a 6.0 share, the best overnight NHL regular-season rating in nearly 13 years. The Red Wings defeated the Blackhawks 6-4 in the second U.S. outdoor game in NHL history.

To put those somewhat nebulous TV numbers into context: Earlier this holiday season, ABC scored a 5.3 overnight rating for a Christmas Day NBA game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics. That’s a comparable showcase sports event on network television, so it shows that, while hockey is still a distinct rung down the ladder from hoops (not to mention football and baseball), it’s at least closer to the same neighborhood than it used to be.

And of course, the 2009 Winter Classic showing was a healthy increase over the 2.6 rating for last year’s inaugural, featuring the Buffalo-Pittsburgh tilt. Basically, momentum is building, which is exactly what the league was hoping for.

I’m pretty sure the data-parsing of these numbers will show most of the viewers in Chicago and Detroit, with a respectable number of eyeballs in the Northeast and other hockey-heavy pockets. That’s certainly acceptable, as no one’s expecting Super Bowl-like penetration from a glammed-up regular-season NHL game. Again, it’s a process, and so far a successful one, both game-wise and exposure-wise.

For the immediate term, this means that the NHL will try to keep the ball rolling. Best way to do that is to again feature two big-market teams on New Year’s Day 2010, which translates into New York Rangers-Boston Bruins matchup at Yankees Stadium. I’d kinda prefer to see Denver host the next WC, but I can’t complain about getting a chance to see a local New York edition of outdoor hockey.

UPDATE, 01/04/2009: Courtesy of Puck Daddy (who I’ll also thank for the trackback and featured blockquoting), here’s the ratings breakdown for the WC among the nation’s top-ten markets, by local rating/share:

1. Chicago 11.8/21; 2. Detroit 10.5/20; 3. Buffalo 10.1/20; 4. St. Louis 5.3/10; 5. Pittsburgh 4.4/8; 6. Denver 4.2/10; 7. Providence 3.5/7; 8. Indianapolis 3.4/6; 9. West Palm Beach 3.3/6; 10. Orlando 3.2/5.

Pleasantly surprising as far as the geographic breadth. I’m not so surprised with the strength of the Florida showing, but am surprised that my old home region of Tampa Bay didn’t crack this ten — and got beat out by rival Orlando, to boot.

In uncertain economic times, it’s important to know where you can cop a sorrow-drowning free drink — and indeed, where you’re encouraged to do so. So myopenbar.com, which alerts people as to where the latest promotional alcohol giveaways are being held, is performing a recessionary social service.

Not to mention building a pretty good business model:

Myopenbar.com has 30,000 subscribers in New York, most of them in their 20s and 30s, the very demographic that liquor companies want to reach. The site also has listings for five other cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and Honolulu) that have attracted 19,000 subscribers, and it has 30 employees. [Founders Seva] Granik, 33, and [Jason] Fried, 34, declined to say how much revenue the site generates, but they said it was profitable, both through advertising (Toyota Scion and American Apparel are among the sponsors) and the consulting fees that they collect for holding, marketing and promoting events. Those events are noted on the site; otherwise, bars and liquor companies do not have to pay to be listed.

This sounds very much like the ingredients that go into Thrillist, DailyCandy.com, and other email-subscription powered services. Since those Web 1.0-type operations are proven to make big money and attract even bigger acquisition offers, I foresee a very bright future for this venture.

I also foresee regular check-ins for me on the New York City edition of the site. The immediate lineup of free-flowing spirits around Manhattan seems to be heavy on the vodka; that’s acceptable, although considering the nippy weather, I’d prefer a more warming whisky or rum. Moochers can’t be choosers, though — even marketing-friendly ones.

As if second-hand smoke wasn’t enough of a stealth health hazard, now “third-hand smoke” has been identified as an even more pervasive silent killer.

Actually, it’s more of an invisible killer — more smoke-like than actually smoke:

“Everyone knows that second-hand smoke is bad, but they don’t know about this,” said Dr. Jonathan P. Winickoff, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

“When their kids are out of the house, they might smoke. Or they smoke in the car. Or they strap the kid in the car seat in the back and crack the window and smoke, and they think it’s okay because the second-hand smoke isn’t getting to their kids,” Dr. Winickoff continued. “We needed a term to describe these tobacco toxins that aren’t visible.”

Third-hand smoke is what one smells when a smoker gets in an elevator after going outside for a cigarette, he said, or in a hotel room where people were smoking. “Your nose isn’t lying,” he said. “The stuff is so toxic that your brain is telling you: ’Get away.’”

While the concept of second-hand smoke caught on and led to changes in smoker behavior — mainly physical removal outdoors to smoke or directing exhalation toward a window — I don’t see similar success in promoting third-hand smoke. If you don’t see it, it’s not going to be considered an immediate-enough nuisance for anyone to, say, jump in the shower right after puffing up. Everyone already knows how toxic tobacco is anyway — the unseen residue isn’t going to convince anyone to further shift their habits.

Let’s face it: There’s a reason why they coined the idiom “like a bull in a china shop”. And no mythological merger between human and bovine is going to temper that bullish behavior enough to justify a career path in the handling of fragile finery.

At least, not without taking out beaucoup damage insurance. Luckily, the kicking-in of said insurance looks to be the main fun in online videogame Minotaur China Shop:

Serve fine china to discerning mythological customers. Breaking items will cost you money. However, break LOTS of items and you’ll enter Minotaur Rage, a crippling psychological condition. Your insurance will reimburse you for any items broken while enraged.

Check out the all-too-predictable service-sector carnage:

[Minotaur China Shop Trailer from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo]

And get further insight into this struggle with anger-management by reading the literally-bullheaded shopowner’s own personal diary:

It’s my damned arms. They’re what got me into trouble in the first place, what always get me in trouble. They’re just slightly bigger than I know what to do with, and with my dyspraxia, sometimes when I turn around I lose track of how close I am to something. Things get knocked over. I just get so mad at myself! If I just slow down, calm myself, and think straight, it’s fine. But when I break something I feel so guilty, I feel so worthless, and I just start to see red.

I don’t see why it should happen to me. I never did anything wrong. I’ve been a decent minotaur — I never asked to be this way. It’s my pervert mother’s fault. That FREAK. What was she even thinking? I mean, seriously. And then my bastard father puts me in a labyrinth because he doesn’t have any parenting skills.

Tea, sympathy, and rage against the espresso machine. Add that all up into videogaming fun!

Actually, I haven’t played the game. It’s not a regular-issue Flash-driven app, but rather requires a plugin called Unity, and I’m not inclined to install yet another browser add-on. Plus, gameplay looks a little too complex for my tastes, especially when the shop-wrecking payoff is all I’d be after anyway. Maybe when/if they port it to the iTouch.

Rather than bear the double-sting of falling out of power and seeing an influx of reveling Democratic throngs, a good number of District of Columbia Republican apparatchiks are bugging out of Washington during President Obama’s Inauguration festivities.

While simultaneously making lemons out of lemonade:

Good capitalists that they are, some of these Republicans are among the Washingtonians looking to rent out their homes to well-heeled Democrats who will pony up for a place to stay.

One GOP aide to a well-known conservative despised by Democrats is hoping to head up to New York City and make a few bucks in the process — but is taking a page from Reagan’s “trust but verify” mantra.

“I want to rent my place out but don’t put my name next to that in case I do — don’t want people knowing they are staying in a [REDACTED] staffer’s place and trash[ing] the joint.”

Maybe this will kick off a trend of opposite-party self-exile from DC every four or eight years. Certainly wouldn’t kill these politicos to bust out of the Beltway, whatever the reason.

The second (annual) coming of the NHL Winter Classic earlier today came off about as perfect as it could. Unless you’re a Blackhawks fan, and had watch the home team blow a 2-goal lead to the Red Wings en route to a 6-4 Detroit win in the frozen confines of Chicago’s Wrigley Field.

But aside from the hometown letdown, it was a great game to watch, and a second consecutive picture-perfect outdoors showcase for the National Hockey League. Maybe better, mass-market wise, than last year’s 2-1 shootout win by the Pens over the Sabres, since ten total goals provided more than enough offense. (I generally prefer a defensive struggle.)

Some assorted thoughts from me:

- About the only thing that would have improved the spectacle would have been some snowfall, like last year in Buffalo. Didn’t happen, which actually improved the on-ice action. Besides, what snow there was in Wrigley was decorative:

To give the outdoor setting a more wintry look, the league pumped in some faux snow to fill in the outfield and surrounding areas around the rink. There were only two places on the Wrigley playing field that weren’t covered by the white stuff: the pitching mound and home plate. Who’d figure you’d need fake snow on New Year’s Day in Chicago?

- Speaking of the ice, it was well-praised by everyone involved. From what I saw, it looked like it was actually too cold, in that the puck had little glide under it for players to accomplish the standard long-range passes. That said, puck movement was crisp enough, and the shot totals (43-37 favoring Detroit) indicate that there were no problems.

- I thought the sight of the players emerging from their locker rooms, and climbing out of the baseball dugouts to get to the rink, was a nice touch.

- The selection criteria for future Winter Classics sounds interesting:

The league is expected to seize on the successes of the first two Winter Classics to establish a bid process not unlike that which determines hosting the All-Star Game and the entry draft. Teams and cities will have to put together a plan outlining why they deserve to host the game…

Look for the NHL to closely consider staying in baseball stadiums as opposed to NFL facilities, even if the number of fans would be far greater and the sight lines in baseball facilities aren’t necessarily ideal. Baseball facilities don’t pose as many scheduling headaches, and the field is flat as opposed to crowned, which was the case at Ralph Wilson Stadium a year ago.

All of which makes sense. As much as I’d love to see the Rangers host the 2010 edition here in New York (at Yankees Stadium), I have a feeling that next year’s event should take place well within the Western Conference. To me, the ideal host would be the Colorado Avalanche, playing in the MLB’s Coors Field during a wintry afternoon in Denver. Going up against either the Minnesota Wild or San Jose Sharks.

- And if the Avs want to clinch that, they should acquire the one player who’s now a fixture at these outdoor flings:

Detroit goaltender Ty Conklin was actually playing in his third outdoor NHL game, having been in the nets for the Oilers in the [Heritage Classic] in Edmonton a half-dozen years ago and again for the Penguins in Buffalo last January. The feeling, he said, never gets old.

- On the business side, I’ll be anxious to see the ratings report and other economic impact from this Windy City spectacle. Early indications are promising. And from my screengazing view, it looked like the league and NBC reeled in some high-caliber advertising, with Super Bowl-level spots on display. In particular, Go Daddy’s attention-grabbing commercials had a toned-down trial run today; I’m wondering if that could be a future trend, at least in years when the same network carries both the Classic and the Super Bowl.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m not the only one who wondered what will become of this decade’s most distinctive New Year’s novelty eyewear mask:

The first decade of the new millennium allowed novelty manufacturers to use the double zeros as the spot for the “lenses.” Although the side-by-side zeros will no longer be an option next year, 2010 still leaves a possibility.

“With 2010, you still have the two zeros. But 2011, it will be interesting,” said Bill Furtkevic, vice president of marketing for Party City. “We’ll have to wait and see what they do.”

The party-junk manufacturers have something up their sleeves for two years down the line. But they’ll have to do it without the original inventors of these specs, who are giving up.

As you can see above, the year doesn’t have to contain consecutive double-zeros for face-strappable fun. So not only does next year’s 2010 work, so will 2020, 2030, etc. Not that a once-a-decade frequency is a particularly sustainable business model…

I also wonder why these goofy glasses didn’t catch on twenty years ago. The ’80s and ’90s would have lended themselves well to this numerical creativity, with 8s and 9s having that closed-loop effect. I guess it took a millennium to make it happen.

Happy New Year! Usher in 2009 with a hangover cure for the mind and soul, if not the drink-ravaged body:

Yet to come is what Kingsley Amis called the “metaphysical hangover”: “that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future.”

Amis admonished readers to see these symptoms for what they are: “You have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what” a skunk you are, “you have not come at last to see life as it really is.”

That’s one way to see the light of day at the top of a fresh year: Take stock of all your foibles right away, and negate them just as quickly. Call it the January Catharsis. Beats making resolutions.

If you gifted someone with a used Zune this holiday season, the recipient is probably hating you right now:

Call it the Z2K9 bug. [At approximately 2AM EDT on Dec. 31], a number of first-generation 30GB Microsoft Zunes failed en masse. According to accounts posted to Zune forums around the Web, the players seized up during the initial boot process and became unresponsive to the standard reboot or reset commands. “From what I can tell it looks like every Zune 30 on the planet has suddenly crashed,” one Zune owner wrote in a post to the Zune Forums. “Is this a virus? A glitch? A time bomb? A disgruntled Microsoft employee? Planned obsolescence to make us buy a new one? Or just a terrorist plot to drive the free world crazy?”

Looks like Microsoft has been blindsided by this meltdown and has yet to push out a fix. The good news is that it’s only affecting this one older version of the media player, not the other models; and contrary to some reports, the firmware updates aren’t to blame. Otherwise, many a Zune owner (assuming there are all that many — I’ve seen a grand total of two of these in the NYC wild) is now in proud ownership of a brick.

I’ll smugly note that my trusty iPod Touch (16GB, if that matters) has been plugging along without incident, last night and today. Suck it, Zunesters.

This may or may not be my final blog posting of 2008. (All signs point to “yes”.)

If so, I’ll leave it with the above cameraphone photo, just snapped yesterday here in Alphabet City. Something about this stuffed-toy Santa hanging around here, well after Christmas, makes me wistful — but in a good way. Plus I like the tiny teddy bear he’s holding, his marionette-like rosy cheeks, his plaid pants, and that he’s hanging from a winter-denuded sidewalk tree.

Flickr’d as well, of course.

Not that this is a monumental revelation, but I’ve finally made this connection regarding weather-related comfort (or lack thereof):

In summer, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.

In winter, it’s not the cold, it’s the wind chill.

Seems straightforward. Although it seems to elude most people, at least when it comes to expressing the concepts in common phraseology: While the heat maxim carries much Google juice, the cold one hardly registers at all. More people like to bitch during the summer, apparently.