I usually make fun of the Bay Area for going into a panic whenever there’s a light drizzle outside, but today’s storm shut me up pretty quick.

I left for work thinking nothing unusual was going on, and things just got progressively worse. Stoplights were out on Fulton street, but they had crossing guards keeping everything moving. Traffic was pretty tolerable on the Golden Gate Bridge, but then as soon as you passed through the tunnel, you started to see more and more tree debris on the freeway. Power was out in the entire shopping center at Marin City, forcing me to go to a McDonald’s for breakfast (intolerable! Call the National Guard!)

Most of it was this weird juxtaposition of normal day-to-day activity in self-absorbed Marin, with the occasional bit of weirdness like an entire tree lying on a freeway on-ramp. Nothing worthy of an Irwin Allen movie, but still eerie for a morning commute. I think what made it even creepier was that I had my iPod on shuffle, and both the Royal Crown Revue and the Pixies version of “Stormy Weather” came on.

I’d reached the exit for work when traffic on 101 ground to a halt. I got a message that power was out at the office, so I should turn around and head home, but by that point it was too late. I was stuck at the San Anselmo exit for an hour and a half. I had to give up that route and pull off into a shopping center with no power, to use their facilities in the dark (which is itself a nerve-wracking experience).

When I eventually made it back to 101 South, traffic was moving more quickly, which brought its own set of unnerving incidents. Even going 35 mph, the car kept hydroplaning, and then a gust of wind would come up and threaten to blow me into the next late. Driving through the headlands, you could see huge branches fall off the trees and start rolling down the hills towards the freeway.

And getting back on the Golden Gate bridge was something I don’t want to do again — it was like driving through an automatic car wash. There was a solid gray wall on either side of the bridge, and the wind sounded like it was coming from every direction. Everyone was driving slowly enough not to get blown into each other’s lanes, but it was still impossible not to get that image of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse out of my head.

Back in the city, stoplights were still out along Park Presidio, and I saw a car that’d been parked on one of the side streets had its roof and windshield crushed by a fallen tree branch. And of course, ten minutes after I get back home, I see on the news that they’ve shut down 101 between the GG Bridge and Sonoma County, asking everyone to avoid going to Marin. Now they tell me.

Considering that I’ve still got power and even my satellite reception is unaffected, I think it’s a good day to stay inside. And remind me never to give the power and roads workers any grief anymore; those guys were out all over the place, in the worst of it, guiding traffic, repairing power lines, and clearing roads. They get this kind of stuff completely cleared away while I’m still in bed.

Since I failed miserably at every single resolution I made last year, I’m going to take it simpler in 2008, and only choose one.

Someone on a message board announced he’s challenging himself to read a book a week this year; I read too slowly and am too easily distracted for that, so I’m aiming for 26 books, or one every two weeks. So I declare 2008 to be The Year of Reading an Unremarkable Amount, Which Is Still Going to Be Quite Challenging For Me. Mark your calendars.

My ongoing resolutions — lose weight, and stop smoking — are still in effect, but I’m going to stop pretending that those are to-do list items I can check off. I’ll keep them in the “necessary life transition” category. I should probably throw “spend less time at work and get more accomplished in the hours I do work” in there somewhere.

The first book for the year is Getting Things Done by David Allen. I’ll get around to it sooner or later.

Some people have accused me of being wishy-washy, or a push-over. I prefer to think of myself as being like a willow tree: kind of droopy, and my wood isn’t used very often.

The big headlines on the top of Yahoo!’s news page today: Hello Kitty marketing being retargeted at young males! Japanese people are crazy for pen spinning! Hilary or Oprah: which woman do Americans respect most?

Glad to see that the internet is on top of the hard-hitting news, when there’s a country with nuclear weapons that’s seeing its democracy threatened by crazed religious fundamentalists. I hear there was an assassination in Pakistan, too.

Thank you, thank you! That is the kind of biting political satire you only get from a professional comedy writer. Who’s suffering crippling writer’s block at the moment.

Happy Holidays, everyone! I can tell it’s Christmas Eve, because I sincerely hope that everybody’s having a happy holiday, even the people that annoy me.

(Speaking of people that annoy me: I think I finally made one of my shallow epiphanies towards understanding the ongoing War on Tolerance that takes place around this time of year. When non-pundit people get agitated at the sight of a Christmas tree or Santa Claus with the wish “Happy Holidays” attached, their discomfort is a lot like when non-southerners are baffled by the proper use of “y’all.” They assume the worst and fail to give others credit for understanding the concept of inclusion — when a southerner says “y’all,” he’s making the charitable assumption that you’ve got someone else in your life who’s also invited; and when a person says “Happy Holidays,” he’s not excluding Christmas, but inviting those who don’t celebrate that particular holiday to enjoy the festive excess of the season. Even heathens.)

Via Jackson Publick’s blog, there’s word of the next Venture Brothers season, and a contest that’s already been won. But the crew has given everyone a version of The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” as performed by The Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend. (I haven’t listened to it yet, so I can’t vouch for its work-or-family-party-appropriateness).

It didn’t take long back east for me to get whipped back up into the Christmas spirit, and I didn’t have to do any shopping, which is the best gift of all. I hope everybody’s enjoying the best time of the year, and looking forward to next year!

Considering how memorable the stories are, it’s obvious Stephen King and the fearmeisters responsible for The Car were tapping into something primal and universal with the idea of an evil car.

I just think that by having the car totally flip out and kill people, they missed out on a prime opportunity for dread and true horror. A murderous demon car jumping through windows to run over girlfriends? That’s just a quick, cheap cat-jumping-out-of-the-cupboard scare. How come nobody’s captured the true long-term dread and despair? The kind you only get from owning a no-less evil, but passive-aggressive car?

Like, for instance, a POS Jetta that’s so boring and practical it latches onto your soul like a deer tick, slowly sucking the life out of you over eight long years. And lets every convenience feature break in the first year or two, but refuses to die. And goes dead in the middle of 70mph freeway traffic. And then its alternator goes out and kills the battery, stranding you in a ditch on the side of 101 north where you have to get towed to pay over 800 bucks for a repair on a car you don’t even want anymore.

It’s not just soul-draining and money-draining, but it does weird things to you, psychologically: I’m so fed up with it now that I’m ready to take a Bullitt. I’ve never seen the movie, and I’ve never been into muscle cars, but damn that’s a nice-looking car.

At this point, I’m ready to just get a big, stupid, impractical and irresponsible car. So what if the planet’s running out of oil? Haven’t I offset my carbon footprint enough over the past eight years, driving a car that gets 28 mpg? What’s the harm in going back into debt to get an overpriced car that’s bad for the environment? Or a convertible that’s completely impractical for the San Francisco bay area?

From what I read on the internet and hear from my family’s Amazon wish lists, it’s close to Christmas time. It’s hard to get really in the spirit of the Most Wonderful Time of the Year when I never really know what time or even day it is.

See, the problem is that I get a cold every year around late November/mid-December, but this year’s different. My immune system’s apparently decided that it’s tired of getting kicked around every year, and this time, it’s going to fight back. The problem is that my immune system is, like its owner, a fairly meek and mild-mannered white guy who doesn’t exercise much. By resolving to take on the young punks who are encroaching on his neighborhood, he’s just proving himself to be pathetically impotent.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I’ve been headachey and unable to breathe through my nose for what feels like a month now. The antihistamines and decongestants I’ve been taking are labeled “non-drowsy,” which is technically accurate: I vacillate between hyper-awake, where it’s physically impossible to close my eyes and I feel like I can see through walls, Matrix-style; and comatose. Neither of those is, technically, “drowsy.”

I’ve been getting no longer than 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep at a stretch, and it happens at completely unpredictable times. Last night I got home from work at about 8:30 or so, sat down on the couch to sort through whatever mail the cat hadn’t already eaten, and pulled out the laptop to get some writing done. The next thing I knew, it was 2 AM and I was bolting out of bed, because I had to warn Molly Shannon that the guy she was about to give a big investment check to was actually a grifter, and he hadn’t actually developed a way to regrow limbs, but had an identical twin who’d lost an arm in a mountain-climbing accident. (Did I mention the weird fever dreams I keep having?)

So for the more lucid of you: I hope you’re all enjoying the oncoming Christmas-and-I-suppose-other-holidays-but-really-we-all-know-what’s-the-most-important-one season! To get in the spirit, here’s the first of three YouTube clips of David Sedaris reading his story, “Six to Eight Black Men:”

I spent most of actual Thanksgiving digesting and being thankful for the traditional stuff — the health of my family and friends, having pretty much exactly the job I’ve wanted for over a decade and as far as I’m aware I’m keeping it despite the wishes of several people on the internets, and the fact that the world hasn’t completely blown up yet.

The day after Thanksgiving is reserved for being thankful for gross consumer excess and frivolous entertainment. Considering I’m always bitching about stuff on here, including the stuff I like a lot since I can’t seem to stop criticizing, it should be a nice change of pace.

The iPhone
I think I’ve mentioned once or twice that I paid a bit more than was necessary for this thing. But once you get past that — especially now, since it’s been reduced to “really expensive” instead of “holy crap you’ve got to be kidding me” — it’s pretty neat.

Especially for plane flights. I’m not having to fly as much as I was last year (another thing for which I’m extremely thankful), but plane flights back to Georgia are still 4 hours long, and there’s only so much time even I can spend sitting staring at nothing. On the way out here, I watched three episodes of “Battlestar Galactica” on the thing, and the picture is startlingly clear, and the sound is even better than watching from home. (Trucks are constantly passing in front of my apartment, and the Edward James Olmos, he tends to mutter). The picture’s at least as good as the Sony PSP’s, if not better, and it just makes more sense to lug the phone around than a videogame player that has only two good games for it. Plus, even if the phone didn’t have a longer battery life than my laptop, it’s a lot easier to deal with than a computer and DVDs. The seats on economy flights are so cramped these days, I can’t even unfold the laptop all the way.

And three hours of video fit on the thing, even the 4GB version, in addition to over 700 songs. For the seven-hours-including-layover flight back to SF, I’m loading the phone up with Minority Report, which I’ve ever seen, plus more episodes of “Battlestar” and “Flight of the Conchords.”

The iPhone SDK
This is still tentative, but the optimistic part of me is already thankful for it. Since all the stuff the device does works this well, I’m looking forward to seeing the stuff the device can do. And Apple finally did what they should’ve done months ago, and announce that they are indeed planning on releasing an SDK for the phone.

It can all still go horribly awry, of course, when we learn that you’re kept from accessing any of the data or private storage of the phone, or you have to pay some obscene developer’s fee to develop for it, or you can only release stuff through the iTunes store or some nonsense. But there’s still a chance they’ll do things right. And it’s still a lot better than having them lie to us with nonsense about bringing down the cell network, or telling us how sweet it is to make web apps for a device with a slow internet connection.

30 Rock
Alec Baldwin’s performance a few weeks ago is probably the best 2 minutes of television this year. And even the MSNBC caption scrawls from the Edie Falco episode (”Mysterious Visitor from Future Wins Lottery Yet Again”) are funnier than 90% of the other stuff on television. Points go to their Lifetime movie parody, as well, if only for the title: “A Dog Took My Face And Gave Me a Better Face So I Could Change the World: The Celeste Cunningham Story”. Loss of “30 Rock” is about the only genuine reason people should be upset about the writers’ strike, and reason enough for the networks to capitulate.

Lobster Johnson
This is a new series based on a character that’s been in backup stories in the Hellboy and BPRD comics. And it takes all the potential that’s been bouncing around all the other comics and finally realizes it: a pulp adventure about supernatural evil that’s got some of the humor of The Amazing Screw-On Head, the epic feeling of Hellboy, and the Shadow-inspired team stuff of BPRD.

Plus, Jason Armstrong’s art is outstanding. He doesn’t slavishly mimic Mike Mignola’s style, but it still feels very much like a Hellboy comic that’s been put into a blender with the whole of comic book art history. Even better, he uses a style exactly when it’s needed — you’ll see characters with Mignola-style hands and Jack Kirby-inspired faces, plus I’m sure several other artists I can recognize but can’t pinpoint exactly what’s the influence. The end result is that you get the mood of a Hellboy comic, but you can actually follow what’s going on.

Teen Titans Volume 2
The DC Showcase series is a great idea that turns out to be disappointing in practice — for those of us who are more readers than collectors, it’s the chance to see all this comic book history that we missed, with all of the stories compiled in one affordable place. But as it turns out, the stories were never all that deep in the first place. And you’re not actually missing out on all that much by reading a synopsis online.

Except for Teen Titans, and that’s almost entirely due to Bob Haney. The man just knew how to make a shamelessly pandering, goofy comic book story and make it more awesome than it had any right to be. Volume 2 is lighter on his stuff than Volume 1 was, and as the comic moved into the late 60s and early 70s, it lost some of that goofy innocence of the early 60s. Still, I doubt you’re going to find anything that’s as just plain fun to read as these Teen Titans collections.

The Outstanding Videogame Glut of 2007
I can’t remember the last time so many great games were released in the same year. At least not since the Dreamcast’s golden year. Game of the Year for me is still Team Fortress 2 and The Orange Box in general, but Bioshock and Super Mario Galaxy were both outstanding enough that if they’d been the only good thing out this year, it would’ve been a banner year.

And I haven’t even gotten around to playing much of Final Fantasy Tactics or Jeanne d’Arc for the PSP, or The Phantom Hourglass for the DS, or the Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword expansion on the PC. Then there’s the list of games that I keep hearing are great, but for the first time I can remember, I’m not buying any more games until I actually have time to play them. I’m even still spending time with the latest Sims 2 expansion, and that game’s at the point in its life cycle where it’s supposed to suck.

The best aspect to it all is that the success of The Orange Box and Bioshock have invalidated all my long-winded worrying about the death of storytelling in games. Stories aren’t getting squeezed out of games, they’re just getting started.