Recently spotted: A.E. Housman's charming little monograph on a subject otherwise shrouded in mystery until his day—the question of the Latin word for "ass". Apparently it was subject to something like the same problem English used to have concerning the device now called a "toilet".

In English, down to the 19th century, the beast which carried Balaam was generally and almost universally, both in speech and in writing, denominated the ass. It is so no longer: the name ass, except in metaphor as a term of contempt or insult, has disappeared from conversation and from most kinds of print, and survives only in serious poetry and in prose of some solemnity. The name donkey, first printed in 1785 in a dictionary of slang, has usurped its place. It is possible that in Latin, in the 1st century before Christ, an analogous but contrary change befel the usage of asinus...

Heh. Ass.

The NFL: there's so much parity these days! Except, er, a team went 16-0 for the first time ever last year. And then somebody went 0-16 for the first time ever this year. But that was so crazy, I bet it somehow proves my point! [Falls asleep at typewriter, mashes keys randomly with face]

My last column for 2008: a short consideration of the latest, and most laughable, fake Holocaust memoir. 2009's first: analyzing the logic of the latest PR offensive by Rod Bruinooge and his underground parliamentary pro-life caucus.

Just a few seconds into a Meet the Press appearance, Condoleezza Rice asks us to swallow a whale.

In today's green-eyeshade-y column for the Post (second in a row!), I read between the lines of a recent speech by the governor of the Bank of Canada and find hints of Austrian-influenced policy aggression that other domestic finance reporters might have missed. Or, that I'm totally imagining. There's no Post on Boxing Day so this is it for columns from me this week: back on the 30th.

Bill Brownstein gets all topical about the lousy weather (it's -26°C here as I write this, with nary a letup in sight) in the Sunday Montreal Gazette:

In 83 years, technology has grown in leaps and bounds almost everywhere else. We've gone from the radio to the TV to the Internet age. We have landed humans and rodents on the moon. We have put trained chimpanzees in the White House. We can eliminate much of the planet with the pressing of a single button (which is why it will come as a relief to many that the current chimp in Washington leaves next month). And yet we get more stymied than ever by snow on our streets and sidewalks, compounded by an ever-expanding population of people and cars in our downtown cores.

I'm no physicist or chemist or engineer - as all my high-school teachers will attest - but there's got to be some brainiac working in a basement somewhere with a plan to remove snow and ice more quickly and more efficiently than we do it today.

Yo Bill! You should have checked with your sister paper in Edmonton. Meet the SNOW DRAGON! It's not only an instrument of terrifying, Godlike power, it's all, like, environmental and stuff too. Turns out it doesn't cost any more to melt the snow on the spot than it does to haul it away every time the truck's full and come back.

I took more of a beating that I thought on the Film Addict test: I've seen only 61.2% of the IMDB's 250 highest-rated movies. It's surprising how often I am sorry I skipped so many of the labs in my film-studies class.

The National Post, conscious of the need for scrutiny of our new Liberal leader, is having its top writers work their way through the career of Michael Ignatieff one book at a time. I'm in today's installment #2 of the reading circle, where Ignatieff's book of Massey Lectures, The Rights Revolution, is covered.

In today's Post column we look at what economists really think about the quickest, most efficient way to stimulate a troubled economy.

Boy, look at that poor family. 27 years later, and you'd swear they were looking at a door they expected Adam to walk through any second.

When I took the bus to Calgary last week I was struggling to find a word for the people I always meet at the Greyhound station—undernourished working people with stringy hair and poor dentition who have lived in many places and find themselves doing different jobs that require steel-toed boots every couple of years (which invariably emerges quite early on in conversation). Reading the Adam Walsh wire story was like having a finger jabbed into my chest. That's right, isn't it?—they're the "drifters" you always read about in crime stories!

Reporters use the word like it was some obscure occupational classification—as if "drifter" were a specific, indisputable role in life that you could decide to occupy when you were 18. And, of course, it's never used except in stories about murderers, but there must be lots of drifters who have never killed anyone. Here's a headline you will never see: "HEROIC DRIFTER SAVES FIVE FROM FLAMING BUS".

And from now on, you lucky people, that means a second column from me in the Post to go with my usual Friday appearance. We debut today with a rejoinder to a Canadian legend on the subject of Canada's British connection.

OK, so I finally watched the shoe video:

Nothing in the prior headlines emphasized sufficiently, for my money, that this dude gets off a second shot. He actually has time to take off his other shoe and throw it, missing Bush's right ear by, oh I don't know, maybe an inch and a half? Is it just me or do some Secret Service asses need to be gnawed light-to-moderately here? Fellas, I know you only expect to really earn those pensions about once every 20 years or so, but as far as I can tell you weren't even the ones who took out Mr. Crocs of Death. Your predecessors moved faster when Bush Sr. ralphed on Emperor Hirohito that one time.

On the other hand, judging by the fact that NBC broke in on regular programming for this, maybe the bar has just really been lowered. I'm old school: when I see the SPECIAL REPORT graphic I think "Oh, God, what happened to the space shuttle this time?" Nope, Lester Holt is just feeling frisky today and wants to make sure you see "Can Prezdent Has Shoes?" before you catch it on YouTube.

Procol Harum performing "Repent Walpurgis" on French (?) TV, 1971. I know less than nothing about this group, but contrary to what you'd think the drummer seems like the key to this whole bagel fry. Incredible Floyd-at-Pompeii vibe to this clip: any group of the time would respect the way they come out of the noodly bit in the middle like a heavy bomber rising from the tarmac.

At least there's one space in your Friday morning paper that devotes itself to the finer things and rises above the political muck. At least one columnist should have noted, I thought, that John Milton, almost unobserved, has turned 400.

Sol Sender, chieftain of the team that designed the Obama campaign logo, talks about its extraordinary adaptability and shows off some alternative finalists. [þ: Design Observer]

Clearly the most suitable medium for the depiction of the late constitutional showdown in the House of Commons was always going to be hairless 3-D homunculi floating freely in an abstract psychedelic universe. And, fortunately, today we have the technology to produce such images almost instantly. Americans who can still afford decent chronic are studying this diagram (recommended soundtrack: Aoxomoxoa) and going "Oh shit, it all makes perfect sense to me now."

How the most famous gag in comics originally worked, back in November 1952.

UPDATE, 11:28 pm: The more I look at this, the more surprises I see. Would you have guessed that all along, the football Charlie Brown was trying to kick actually belonged to Lucy? How much does her unheeded "I don't know if this is such a good idea" alter the subtext of the next forty years? It turns out that all along, Lucy was being co-opted into a display of male physical authority that she was never really consulted on or asked to endorse. Is it any wonder that she gradually developed from the rather adorable "fussbudget" of proto-Peanuts into the castrating screamer we're more familiar with?

But it doesn't mean you're in the clear on that Duranty thing!

The master summarizer of Maclean's, laid off by Rogers as the ripples spread from the boss man's death spasm, has been picked up by Canada's finest and fastest-growing news commentary site. Change your bookmarks!

New @ Full Comment: New Yorker/Naomi Klein reax.

A quite typical rebuttal to my column about Sean* Avery, taken from the comment thread below:

I would agree with your arguement if Avery had attacked Phaneuf alone, but to drag someone in his personal life into the game is crossing the line.

Are you referring to the line beyond which a business is allowed to punish someone for personal remarks that have no bearing on his job? Because I can't find this line on the rink diagram in the NHL rules, or anywhere else.

If you guys would sit quietly and a have a few minutes' think instead of reacting to this matter emotionally, you'd realize your argument obviously has a much better chance of succeeding if you leave Elisha Cuthbert out of it completely. The league is arguably within its rights to regulate relations between two of its contractually bound players; there's no earthly way you can argue that it has some responsibility to protect Elisha Cuthbert's feelings. But of course, once you take the pretty girl out of it, it becomes apparent that Avery's entitled to say pretty much what he likes, defamation notwithstanding, about a fully grown millionaire colleague.

The irony is that Elisha Cuthbert is a Hollywood veteran aged 26 who has been dealing with libels, imprecations, wacko fans, and paparazzi for years, is trained in doing so, and presumably has the logistical and emotional help of a paid personal staff. That big clod Farnsworth, by contrast, is a 23-year-old who lives in a much smaller, politer media universe and who is still mere months removed from being a Red Deer Rebel. But by all means let's indulge our protective hormonal instincts and wave our iridescent tailfeathers at each other.

*[UPDATE, Dec. 21: This read "Steve" in the original. My apologies to the one-time Atlanta Braves southpaw.]