My 8-year old figured out this year that Santa Claus was really his parents, and he was very worried that he wouldn't get any presents.

We told him that Santa was real, even though he didn't exist. He's the spirit of generosity and giving, and we give gifts to each other in his name to honor these things. This satisfied him.

My 12-year old has never admitted belief or disbelief in Santa, though, so he may have been in the same situation as the LW's child. I think he eventually caught on but kept quiet about it to protect his brother.

It's nice to hear that Monica Lewinski is getting on with her life. Almost everyone does dumb things when they are young, but few are raked through the coals for it like she was.

A known donor may want to involve himself with your child and your family far more than you are comfortable with. And if he decides he wants custody, all it would take is one wingnut judge for you to lose your child.

It'd be hard for Rangel to enjoy his new office with a face full of bird shot.

Then again, I wouldn't call what Cheney does "hunting" -- it's more like a caged bird slaughter-fest, with the occasional lawyer thrown in to vary the blood sport.

Dr. Scott Haig's personal life must be pathetic if it's so important to get that ten minutes of synthetic attention from an attractively-shod pharma saleswoman whose goal is to manipulate him into buying drugs. Twist that inflated medical ego indeed!

Seriously, though, what torqued me off about this piece isn't his dismissive attitude towards the pharma-babes. It's his dismissive attitude towards his female colleagues. They are dressed in unfashionable work clothes and sensible shoes, and are therefore eminently forgettable to the good doctor. Presumably he would prefer to be surrounded by the young, midriff-baring interns who that New York Times columnist wrote about last month. And he's dumb. His crack about the shoes is certain to irk the female doctors and nurses who work with him. If you think that nurses in particular won't find ways to get back at him for this comment, think again.

Chances are that your goddaughters already know that you disapprove of their lifestyles and spouses. But going on and on about it is only going to alienate them. I've seen this happen in my own family -- it only caused the person in question to become defensive and more resistant to any kind of advice about changing his behavior, no matter how lovingly meant.

To be truly effective, change must come from within. What you do and say may ultimately sink in and trigger real change ... or it may not! You can't control what is going on in your goddaughters' hearts.

So go easy on your goddaughters. Be a helpful, friendly godmother. Lead by example. Talk about the environment by all means, but don't be judgemental or lecture them because they'll just tune you out and/or get mad at you. If they're receptive to your way of thinking, they'll come around eventually. Ultimately reality will catch up with them, one way or another.

Is Oprah's school a feel-good project aimed to perpetuate her name? Of course! So are Carnegie's libraries, Stanford's university, Gate's foundation, and the myriad other philanthropic projects of super-wealthy Gilded Agers both past and present. That doesn't mean that they are not worthy endeavors.

Bottom line: it's her money and she can do with it as she wishes (quibble as we might over whether she's spent some of it unwisely).

After some experimentation, we found brands that had a shade of light we liked. We use them in most of the house, but haven't yet found CFLs that work well in fixtures that require specialty bulbs (like chandeliers) or lamps with clip-on shades.

Our electricity bill is significantly lower after making the switch. Plus CFLs really do last a lot longer than incandescents. For real longevity, though, nothing can beat some of the old NON-compact fluorescent bulbs. One that we bought in the early '90s is still in daily use!

Also, CFLs don't throw off much heat. We used to use incandescent tri-level bulbs in our torchier lamp, but they eventually melted the shade. (We'd used bulbs with the wattage specified by the manufacturer, too. But they did send us a new shade for free when we complained.) Switching to a tri-level CFL bulb solved this problem because they're a lot cooler.

... to figure out that gasoline prices are going to trend upward. It doesn't take a crystal ball to see that people are going to demand higher quality cars once they experience them. And it doesn't take a shrink to know that executives who ignore these things and blame the government are deeply in denial.

What the Big Three should have been doing is learning from their competitors and looking towards the future. Instead, they've chased short-term profits. Why haven't they been developing hybrid versions of their cars, vans, SUVs and trucks? Why did GM kill a viable electric car program? Why haven't they made more of an effort to build a quality product when the Japanese have been killing them on this issue for a generation? They've blamed environmental and safety regulations when they should have been looking in the mirror.

He wondered why we continued to make use of road maps in these days of GPS and cell phones. When I pointed out to him that these technologies weren't always reliable, gave a false sense of security, and didn't give as complete a picture of where you might be going as a comprehensive road map, he laughed at me.

I guess he'll be OK as long as he doesn't stray out of the East Coast urban zone where he lives. Then again, there are wild, rural areas even in the megalopolis. And Mother Nature can wallop you anywhere.