What would Christmas be without Christmas music on the radio? Here are some of the new Christmas albums out this year.

• Yo, It's Christmas from the Yo Yo Kids with Trick Out the Tree and North Pole Homies.
• Oh Santa! New and Used Holiday Classics from The Moaners, featuring Something Funny in Santa's Lap.
• Monster Ballads Christmas from Faster Pussycat featuring Silent Night.
• And Christmas For All! The Holiday Tribute to Metallica from the Santa Claus Naughty But Nice Orchestra featuring For Whom the Bell Tolls.
• The Flesh Eating Rollerskate from Psychostick featuring Holiday Hate, Jolly Old Sadist and Jingle Bell Metal.
• A Dan Band Christmas from The Dan Band featuring I Wanna Rock U Hard This Xmas, Please Don't Bomb Nobody This Holiday and Christmakwanzakah.
• The Secret of Christmas from the Captain and Tennille featuring I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.

Ah yes, there's nothing like the traditional sounds of Christmas, and these are nothing like the traditional sounds of Christmas.

On the sixth day of Hanukkah an enormous ice storm hit town, tearing down trees and knocking out power. A big oak totaled my wife's car and took out the phone line, electric, cable and broadband.

But back to Hanukkah.

The Book of Maccabees says, "A great miracle happened here." After the Maccabees retook Jerusalem's great temple from the Syrians, there was only enough sacred oil to burn the eternal flame for one day, but it miraculously burned for eight days. To this day, Jews celebrate Hanukkah by burning menorahs for eight days.

At my house this year, the electric menorah only stayed lit for six days. No miracle happened here.

Libyan leader Colonel Muammar el Qaddafi is coming to Paris -- and he's bringing his tent. The Bedouin tent is where he'll receive visiting VIPs. He'll pitch his tent next to the Elysee Palace, thereby turning the joint into one fancy KOA campground.

Quotation of the day --

"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion."

-- Edmond de Goncourt

The lead writer for Your Show of Shows -- starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca -- died Monday. Mel Tolken -- born Shmuel Tolchinsky -- was 94.

Tolken supervised a writers' room that variously included Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart and Neil Simon.

When the writers slowed, Tolken was known to shout, "Gentlemen, we've got to get something done! Jews all over America will be watching Saturday night!"

A new Columbia University report says that CT scans, those super X-rays that can detect cancer, can also cause cancer.

Sometimes you can't win for losing.

Wisconsin deer hunting season just ended. The death toll is --

• deer, 171,000
• hunters, 3

U.S. troops killed four passengers in a minibus -- three of them women -- at a Baghdad checkpoint.

U.S. Military Spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith says the civilians were killed by warning shots.

They've been warned.

Isn't it ironic.

Director Bruce Thompson of the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish has confessed to illegal deer hunting.

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission concludes that the state just issues too many reports, as they outlined in a 668 page report.

Assistant Director Cylenthia Clark of the Fulton County, Georgia, Division of Family and Children Services was indicted on charges she made her 8-year-old daughter strip down to her underwear and then beat the girl 34 times with a leather belt.

To vote in Virginia's Republican primary, it's not enough to just register as a Republican. You must also sign an oath swearing loyalty to the Republican party and promising to vote for the Republican presidential nominee in the general election.

The State Board of Elections approved this. No word on how it will be enforced.

Inflation in Zimbabwe last month was 7,982%. But this month, says the country's chief statistician, there's such a shortage of consumer goods that inflation cannot be calculated.

Inflation in Zimbabwe approaches infinity.

J. Robert Cade died this week. He was 80. Cade was a Professor of Nephrology at the University of Florida. But he's best remembered as the inventor of Gatorade,

I'll drink to that.

Cade also invented -- in the 1970s -- Hop'n Gator, a fruity alcoholic drink. That one never really caught on.

Quidditch has come to our plane of reality.

You know, the Harry Potter game.

The Middlebury Mollywobbles defeated Vassar at this year's Intercollegiate Quidditch World Cup Fall Festival in Vermont.

The game involves two teams of twelve people each running around holding broomsticks between their legs and chasing the golden snitch.

Harry Potter's golden snitch was a magical flying orb, but in this game it's a guy running across the field with a tennis ball hanging from his shorts.

The object is to grab it. The tennis ball, not the shorts.

Has this hit U-Tube yet? It should be a hoot, maybe even funnier than those nut jobs with the light sabres who keep turning up.

Tradition can come back to haunt you.

It's a yearly tradition for the president to invite winners of Nobel prizes to the White House.

Even when a winner is the guy you stole the election from.

And that's how Al Gore came to be sharing a photo-op with the president in the Oval Office.

It was enough to send the Vice President into atrial fibrillation.

Al Gore had a 40 minute private meeting with George Bush. Gore says they spent the entire time discussing global warming.

Right.

And at the end of the day, doctors shocked Dick Cheny's heart back to life. There's no truth to the rumor that the procedure took place in a mountaintop castle, and involved lightning.

He's alive! He's alive!

I love this feelgood story about the Fairfield, Connecticut Fire Department that uses a thermal imaging camera to find people who are trapped in a fire.

It works on the principal that people are either hotter or colder than a fire. I'm not sure about the technical details.

Anyway, in Sunday's fire the department couldn't find any humans but they did rescue two cats.

In a perfect universe, God would judge people by how good they are to cats.

San Francisco plans to make available city photo I.D. cards that don't reference citizenship or gender.

The cards will primarily benefit illegal immigrants.

But the move is also applauded by the transgender community.

Not all agree. The Family Research Council says that the cards will encourage the idea that gender identity is flexible.

And their point is?

Quotation of the day --

"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

-- Thomas Jefferson

So it's Thanksgiving, and we celebrate that first meal when the pilgrims from the Mayflower sat down in Plymouth with the Indians to give thanks.

Wait, not so fast.

Virginia claims that Jamestown, the new world's first permanent English settlement, was the scene of that first Thanksgiving dinner, thirteen years before the Mayflower landed.

Wait, not so fast.

Florida has staked a claim for the first Thanksgiving. The Spanish explorer Pedro Menendez de Aviles and his crew sat down with the Timucua Indians for the feast of St. Augustine, in what is now the town of St. Augustine, 56 years before the Mayflower. The Nombre de Dios Mission founded by Menendez still stands there, the site of the first permanent settlement in America.

That means the first Thanksgiving, that uniquely American holiday, was in Spanish.

Take that, Lou Dobbs.

And about that Plymouth rock thing. That's not true either.

Like George Washington's cherry tree and Betsy Ross's flag, the Plymouth Rock story is another bit of invented history.

In none of the writings of the pilgrims is there any mention of Plymouth Rock.

The story of how the pilgrims landed there on the Mayflower didn't pop up until 120 years after the event, told by an old man who said he heard it from his father. There was no other supporting evidence.

And the stone known as Plymouth Rock is only a shadow of its former self -- one third of its former self, actually, after centuries of souvenir hunters chipping pieces off it.

Coming up later -- the truth about Santa Claus.

Quotation of the day --

"Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence, then, evil."

-- Epicurus