On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia

The tree is down and the ornaments packed away. The leftovers have been eaten and the hangovers hung. The cats have almost stopped pooping tinsel. It's really over.

Time to put our Bob Cratchit mittens back on and get back up on the stool, rubbing our hands in anticipation as we open the first newspaper of 2009 we can bother to read. Incidentally, does anyone else think that the very lowest ebb of journalism is all those endless lists of Best of/Worst of Whatever that the papers use as vapid filler at the fag-end of every year? It was worth spending part of the holidays at a work-related convention in Philadelphia to avoid all that.

So, what have we in the paper today? [ed. note -- meaning as so often the day before yesterday] Just this from David Eddie:

I come from a family of nerdy number-crunchers; I also went to an egghead high school where about half the population were calculator-toting dorks who spoke in robotic voices and had weird little peach-fuzz mustaches, high-waisted flood pants and tinted glasses.

Hem hem now -- surely no more than one-third or so?

Uncle Dave's advice also seems off in this column: if the writer of the letter can't or won't explain why the in-laws 'deeply dislike' her, isn't that the first thing to get clear about, even if they are physicists? We dorks are usually pacific, even genial folk.