A CRAZY IDEA THAT JUST MIGHT WORK

I can’t hear you! You say Albany wants to ban Izods crossing the street? What do they have against preppy sportswear? Oh – iPods. Why, are they worried we’re all gonna get –
Whoa! Watch where you’re driving buddy! You could have killed somebody! Anyway … you were saying?

Yeah, yeah – it’s funny, right? State Senator Carl Kruger (D., Brooklyn), is introducing legislation today that would make it a crime to listen to an MP3 player while crossing the street. It would also become a crime to cross while chatting on a cell phone, fiddling with a BlackBerry, or playing a videogame. Groovin’ while movin’ would be punishable by a $100 fine — and, if possible, a tongue-lashing from me.
What kind of crazy person plays a videogame while crossing the street?
Sure, this proposal smacks of nanny-statism. Sure, it does come from the same guy who proposed bills to require full-size spare tires in rental vehicles, safety belts on school buses — which, while he’s at it, should also be required to fit someone who’s not the size of a boiler — and the annual inspection of manholes (but, strangely, not the actual filling of those holes). He has also proposed legislation to require companies to disclose the amount of sodium in their foods, to require that all new teachers learn the Heimlich maneuver — and CPR, of course — and a bill that would suspend a guy’s driver’s license if he’s convicted of boating while intoxicated, and vice versa. Not to mention a bill to require the Transit Authority to provide Zithromax for any commuter seated next to a passenger with a runny nose.
Well, that last one I made up, but the others are real. So, clearly, Mr. Kruger is a safety junkie who never met a danger he didn’t obsess about, magnify, and set out to vanquish through surprising, sometimes first-in-the-nation, legislation — as this iPod law would be.
So, it’s easy to poke fun.
On the other hand, as a mother who would like to see a helmet law for children — not the one already on the books for when they’re biking, I mean one that requires helmets all the time (bricks fall! children trip!) — I can understand where the senator is coming from. And there is something noble about allowing yourself to become a statewide laughingstock in the process of trying to save some lives.
“I was prompted by the fatalities that occurred,” Mr. Kruger said during a cell phone conversation from the freeway.
A cell phone call on the freeway?
“I’m being driven,” he hastened to add.
Since September, he said, there have been four MP3-related pedestrian deaths in the city, and they “were sort of a wake-up call to an issue that was going unaddressed.”
Just as a 2001 law banned holding a phone while driving (a great law), his iPod proposal — which would apply only in large cities — would force people, however resentfully, to pay a certain amount of attention to their surroundings.
Put that way, it sounds no nuttier than forcing drivers to get a vision check before they can get a license. The notion is: If you can’t see well, you can’t drive well. In truth, if you can’t hear well, you can’t cross the street that well, either. You’re out of it. Drivers are required to correct their vision. Pedestrians should be required to correct their hearing.
The problem is that most people feel they are paying plenty of attention already and are unwilling to give up one second of the soundtrack that flows through their lives.
“I can’t not listen to my iPod,” high school senior Elizabeth Kim said over the Korean music in her ears as she crossed Main Street in Flushing.
“Are they going to give me my money back?” asked Brooklyn freelancer Thomas Art, who was listening to Run-D.M.C. while crossing a busy street in Midtown.
One pedestrian, however, actually had his listening device off as he did his crossing. Carmelo Cortes, a 26-year-old from the Bronx, said he was of two minds about the bill. “It’s kind of stupid, kind of not,” he said.
Exactly. It’s stupid to think this law would ever work. “You there, bopping. Halt!” But it’s kind of not stupid to think that there is something dangerous about having millions of pedestrians newly disengaged from reality.
So, how about a deal? Drivers start paying serious attention to pedestrians and pedestrians pay serious attention to drivers, almost as if real lives were at stake.
Talk about an idea that’ll never work.

AND JUST 21 MONTHS TO GO!

She’s in it to win it. Yes she is. The phrase has already become more familiar than, “This call may be monitored for quality assurance.” (And do you think it ever is?)

Whatever you may feel about Hillary – or Obama, or the others, who are probably kicking the furniture at already being lumped together as “the others” – here’s one feeling most of us share:

Aieee! Didn’t we just get done with an election? Do we really have to start all over again already?

It’s like taking off on a cross-country flight, finishing your pretzels and looking down at your watch. Good God – five more hours to go? It wouldn’t be so bad, if there was a great movie to look forward to. But you know exactly what you’re going to see.

In fact, I already saw it. It started running about a day or two after Hillary made her announcement: the infinite pundit loop. Very intensely, one of the oh-so-serious morning anchors was interviewing the author of one of the oh-so-illuminating Clinton books.

“What about Bill Clinton?” the anchor was asking: “Asset or albatross?”

Gee, never heard that one before, right? And can you possibly guess the answer? Oh go ahead — try. Do you think the pundit replied:

A: “Gosh, I guess I never really gave it much thought.”

B: “Why? Did Bill do anything controversial?”

C: “This may surprise you, anchorman, but I solemnly believe Bill Clinton is both an asset and an albatross.”

I am so glad I was watching this thing, because the answer turned out to be C! Learn something new every day. The interviewer then went on to probe whether Bill might in fact overshadow Hillary?

“She has to be very careful about that.”

And isn’t Hillary rather “polarizing?” (Underneath, the crawl read, “Polarizing?”)

By golly, the pundit averred: she just might be.

And there you have it: the exact conversation we are going to hear almost every morning — and noon and night — for the next 21 months. Or, more precisely, 644 days. Of course Obama-mania came up, leading to the interviewer’s inevitable last question: “Is she going to be able to pull it off?”

“Yes, she’s going to win by seven states against the surprise Republican nominee, Scooter Libby.”

Oh please. You know the guy didn’t say that. He waffled, said goodbye and no doubt trotted off to his blog.

Now the fact that I actually watched this whole exchange despite its painful predictability shows that there is something undeniably exciting about having “one of the most famous people on the planet” (another annoying catchphrase) vying for top office. “Whither Kucinich?” this was not.

“But I wonder how long are we going to pay attention?” asked Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac Polling Institute. “Everybody will have fun with the Bill Clinton stuff,” he said. And they’ll love handicapping the First Serious African-American vs. First Serious Female Candidate horse race. “But a two year campaign is unprecedented,” Carroll said. And it may be unbearable.

“You know how when you’re home with the flu you turn on a soap and there’s Jason and he’s in the hospital and Diana is in love with him and they’re getting married?” asked my political junkie pal Divyashakti. “Then you’re home again a month later and you turn it on and Jason’s still in the hospital and they’re still getting married? That’s what this is going to be like.”

Yup. Until suddenly it changes. And then it’ll be worse.

“With an attempt to find a story every day, they’ll just keep making bigger and bigger mountains out of smaller and smaller molehills,” said a journalist who asked to remain anonymous because he may, indeed, be part of the problem. “A little remark will come to dominate and sometimes even define the candidate.” Think John Kerry’s bungled joke. Think “macaca.” Think the Dean scream.

Now think 21 months.

Hillary is in it to win it, fine. But the rest of us? We’re just in it — for the long haul.

NIRVANA IN THE READING ROOM

It’s Fashion Week in New York, a wild and crazy time when everyone seems desperate to know: Is the babydoll dress back? Leggy gals spill out of limos. Modeling agencies throw wild feasts. (“Tic-Tacs for everyone!”) In billowing tents covering an entire park in the mid-Manhattan, designers are sewing, swearing, sweating, shrieking. But three flights above it all, things are moving at a very different pace.

“I’ve been working on my book for five years,” said Jonathan Gill, pouring over a century-old volume of Harlem Life in the ornate and enormous Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library. The fashion tents below disturbed him not a jot.

Gill is writing a book about the history of Harlem. Actually, he’s already written it. “It was three times too long,” he said.

So why is he doing even more research?

“Don’t put that in! If my editor sees that he’ll go crazy!” cried Gill, eliciting a nasty stare from a woman trying to concentrate at the next table. “You’ll notice,” he continued, sotto voce, “I have no note-taking materials with me.” He’s just reading every single issue of the long-dead magazine because … that’s what scholars do. They research. Then they research some more. Once they end up in the Main Reading Room, they have reached research nirvana.

Take Senta Driver. She’s been researching her family history for 10 years. What makes the subject so fascinating?

“Remarkably little,” Driver said. “They saw everything happening in the history of America — all the major events — but they didn’t fight, they didn’t get into politics.”

That might be enough to dampen some folks’ genealogical enthusiasm, but.Driver arrived at the Reading Room the other day with a receipt from 1701 for her great-great-great-great-somebody’s coat. She was dying to find out what kind of material it might have been made of. That’s a research junkie for you.

The junkies here even have an enabler: David Smith, a librarian ready to help just about anybody with just about any question.

“Somebody asked how to make a bullwhip,” Smith said. “I pointed him in the right direction.” Another inquirer wondered, “Were horseflies used in the cockpits of fighter planes as an indicator of air pressure?”

After great study, Smith determined: Uh, no. And then there was the guy, he said, “who was doing years of research to prove that a black Jewish woman named Ameilia Bassano Lanyer wrote some of Shakespeare’s plays.”

Okaaaay.

Another Shakespeare scholar was hard at work in the Reading Room near Smith. He’s writing a play about the person he thinks wrote Shakespeare’s plays (neither black nor Jewish nor female). “I’m in touch with the Royal Shakespeare Company,” said the man, who would only give his name as Charles. “I’d like them to produce it first and then move it to Broadway.”

Let’s hope it happens soon. Charles is 85 — a former accountant. Like just about everyone else in the Reading Room (except Gill, of course), he was taking notes and having the time of his life.

L.J. Davis was working on his history of the assembly line. He’s written three books in the Reading Room, even though he only meant to write one. Mabel Gonzalez was researching the Spanish Inquisition — the one in Peru in the 1700s. Lyda Abonte de Zacklin had come in to track down a book by her favorite philosopher.

“It has to do with how our identity is getting lost and everybody is just a number,” she said. “But just at that moment when you think there is nothing, you feel desperation. And that moment saves you.”

Saved by desperation. That sounds more like the fashion world. Up in the Main Reading Room, the people don’t need saving. They’re already in heaven.

***

IT IS DIFFERENT, BEING A MOM

“Remember when you were first old enough to sit in the front seat and your mother was driving and she would swing that hand out and it was so annoying?” my friend Nancy was asking.

Sure I remember.

“But now,” Nancy continued, “I find myself doing it. Like, ‘Ah! The train is coming!’ Here comes the arm.”

And I’d thought it was just me: Just me with the mom who considered herself a human safety belt. Just me, in turn, driving my kids crazy by yanking them back from the subway (even though I already make them stand so far back they can’t even feel the whoosh).

All of which makes me realize two things:
A: Most mothers are paranoid nut jobs constantly freaking out about death.
B: Barbara Boxer got it right.

Right about the Condi thing.

Last week, you’ll recall, Senator Boxer, a Democrat of California, got into a big to-do with Secretary of State Rice at a hearing on the proposed troop surge. If the president sends in more troops, the senator asked the secretary, “Who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with immediate family.”

Gee, couldn’t she be a little gentler and just stab Ms. Rice through the heart?

Later, Ms. Boxer insisted she’d only been trying to create a bond with the secretary. As in, “Hey, look – we’re twinsies! Neither of us has a child the right age to serve.”

But the remark hit every female nerve. It was, as Rush Limbaugh so graphically put it, a blow “below the ovaries.”

It is almost impossible to think of any situation when it would be a decent thing to point out that a woman is childless. Whenever the Bible mentions a female in this condition (and boy, does it ever), the fertile women are taunting her. The husband is taking another wife or two. The woman herself is generally beseeching God to open her womb.

As a woman who also beseeched for many years, I recall there was nothing worse than being reminded — usually by a cabbie — of the life-changing transcendence of parenthood. “I have four children. You? What, none? You are really missing something.”

Thanks.

But now that I’ve got the offspring, there is one thing I really miss from my old life: Sanity. That blissful lack of constant worry, fear, and, in particular, knee-buckling empathy.

When I used to read about, say, a fire that killed six people, “two of them children,” I’d wonder: “What, the other four weren’t as important?”

Now all I can do is turn the page as fast as I can. The idea of children — toy-hugging, nose-picking, crust-shunning children — dying is literally too much to bear. And when I think about their parents…

“It’s like a part of you wasn’t activated yet,” is how my friend Beth puts it. For her part, she no longer can go to sad movies involving children. Ever since having her son, “I’m a puddle,” she says.

It is this electric and unbidden connection to other children, to other parents, and, of course, to one’s own children that’s different about mothers. Not that non-mothers can’t love and care fiercely about the world’s young people. Just that this feels like a change in the DNA.

For all I know, a man’s DNA changes, too, when he becomes a father. Then again, the camping manuals don’t say, “Never disturb a father bear and his cubs!”

Does this protectiveness — maybe over-protectiveness — make a person better equipped to decide a nation’s defense policy? I don’t know. But it does have a way of turning “troops” into “children,” into “someone’s dearest beloved out there eating Army rations in a terrifying place. And to think that just a few years ago he wouldn’t even eat his crusts.”

The instinct is to throw out your arm and pull him back.

Lenore@Lenoretown.com

Skenazy is a contributing editor at The New York Sun.

AN AFTERNOON OF GIVING AWAY $20s

Here you go, sir. Twenty bucks. Really. Take it! Ma’am you’ll never guess what I’m giving away today. Yes, it’s a $20. Enjoy!

So that’s how it feels. Handing out free money in the drizzle a few days back, I could finally see why Larry Stewart , a.k.a. the Secret Santa, spent the past 26 years giving away $1.3 million to strangers on the street. It’s an absolutely perfect way to spend an afternoon – and, if you’ve got it — a fortune.

Stewart can’t give his away anymore — at least, not physically. He died Jan. 12 from complications of esophageal cancer, at age 58.

On his website, the Kansas City cable TV-long distance entrepreneur recalled how he had been so poor and hungry as a young man that in 1971 he went into a diner and ate a huge breakfast he had no way to pay for. The diner owner leaned down and said, “Son, you must have dropped this.” It was a $20.

Only later did Stewart realize: No one had dropped that money. It was a gift. And later still, he decided to start gifting in his own right. By the time he made his first million — 1982 — he was handing out $100 bills to astonished strangers.

Stewart’s example inspired a whole lot of people to try his particular random act of kindness – including me, a gal normally so cheap I buy the off-brand Rice Krispies, which are so hard they hurt my kids’ teeth.

But inspiration is inspiration.

“I’m excited!” exclaimed Emilio Vuchev, my recipient #1. He’d been handing out flyers for a pizza parlor when suddenly, here he was in possession of a $20 bill! And what would he spend it on?

“A present for my mother.”

They still make guys like this?

“Flowers,” he said. “And something sweet, like chocolate.”

“Hey!” I floated away, thinking. “I just, albeit indirectly, surprised someone’s mom!” But the lady I approached next brought me back down, fast.

“What is this for?” she frowned.

“For you. For anything you like. Really.” (Did this happen to Larry Stewart, too?)

“Well I’ll put it in the collection plate,” she sighed.

You have a nice day, too.

Walking around with money you’re going to give away is a strange, secret feeling. Only you know you are about to change someone’s day. That must have been what Stewart found so fun. That also probably explains why he remained doggedly anonymous until last fall, outing himself only because he thought a tabloid was about to do it.

With the tingling, however, comes the tug of responsibility: whose day aren’t you going to change? I was just about to cheer up a chilly looking hat vendor when a man limped by. His belt was a sock.

“Here’s a 20.”

“Oh God, really? Thanks!”

He ran off as fast as his limp could take him and I – even though you’re not really supposed to worry about where the money is going – ran off right behind him.

Where would he go? A bar? A betting parlor? A drug dealer? He looked so desperate.

But no. He ducked into a little luncheonette. I asked the cashier what he’d bought.

“Coffee and Tylenol,” she replied.

At a tiny candy stand where Spanish music blared from a not-so-tiny boom box, I gave the proprietor my second-to-last $20. “I look at this as a recompensation,” he said happily.

For?

“This year I spent over $400 on Christmas presents for kids I don’t even know. We had them delivered to my mom’s house and she hands them out to a lot of kids: ‘Here, honey, here’s a toy!’ Do it every year.”

And I was congratulating myself for handing out $100?

“You should give a $20 to my friend Lance in there,” said the candyman, Frankie G., pointing to an ancient shoeshine man in the shop next door, sound asleep on his stool. “He hasn’t had any business all day.”

Lance was going to use the cash to get something to eat. He looked delighted at the prospect. But first, he had a serious job to do.

“Get up here.”

I climbed onto the shoe shine throne, a place I’d never been.

“He’s the best,” said Frankie. “He shined a pair of boots for me one time so well that when I went home I walked like this” – he pantomimed a tip toe – “not to get them dirty. I haven’t worn them since because I just like looking at them.”

I like looking at mine now, too. Because if you look real close, you can see Larry Stewart smiling back up.

***

AN APPLE A DAY MAKES ME FEEL OLD AND GRAY

So now your cell phone will be able to do more things than you ever DREAMED it could do, ever WANTED it to do and ever could possibly MAKE it do without the help of your has-to-be-bribed-with-ramen-for-dinner 12-year-old.

Only problem: While he’s busy punching buttons and telling you how easy it is to sync your laptop to your ring tone to your prefrontal cortex, you are curled up under the bed wondering: Was everything always changing this fast and it just SEEMS like now it is faster and harder to keep up than ever?

Or is it all Steve Jobs’ fault?

Let us look back to the Middle Ages to find out:

The event: That futuristic extravaganza, the Renaissance Fair
The place: Merry Young England
Standing on a tree stump: Sir Steven of Jobs
In his hand: A branch

Listen in:

Wenches and gentlemen, gather round! See what a wonder have I here! You’ll recall that five harvests ago I introduced ye to the magickal device that made it simple for you to hear anyone whistle any tune at any time – provided you were standing close by. My device – the iStick — had merely to be poked into the ribs of your fellow peasant, along with the request, “Whistle or I’ll poke ye again. Harder.” Simplicity itself! These days it is hard to remember a time before such sticks were in every person’s hand.

And ribs.

Now, verily, most inventors are happy if they can create one such revolutionary device over the course of their three long decades on earth. But yea (for me!), I’m here to revolutionize again, this time with three popular devices astoundingly melded into one utensil. Behold the Apple iBranch: A branch from an apple tree you can use to prod your oxen, hold whilst walking and, as always, poke the reluctant whistler.

But wait! There’s Sir Thomas Moore! (A little joke.) With just a few bits of straw you can turn this branch into a broom. Remove the protective apple I’ve stuck on one end and it becomes a spear. Lash on some new-fangled iron, it’s a hoe! And you can sync the broom to the spear so that if someone bothers ye while ye be sweeping, you can impale him like a poxy rat. And if someone is calling you while you are listening to a whistler you can put the whistler on hold (simply beat him over the head) and revive him when you’re ready to listen again. It’s absolutely intuitive!

Now watch this. You can forward your whistler to your oxen by pushing him along with the pointy end of the branch. If you’d like him to hoe while he’s whistling while you are sweeping, simply press control/poke/sweep. You can instantly message your Lord or Lady by forwarding the iBranch through a castle window. And it can download pictures by drawing in the mud. Any questions?

WOMAN WITH GRAY HAIR: I don’t get how you can hoe and sweep at once.

SIR JOBS: Ask your son.

AGED MAN: Do we really need one stick to do all this? Couldn’t we just use a bunch of sticks?

SIR JOBS: That’s olde-think. See how sleek is the iBranch. And it costs but 499 potatoes (599 if you want it sanded).

SON: I want it now! Here are 599 potatoes from my father’s storage hole.

AGED MAN: That’s our food for the winter!

SIR JOBS: Sold! Believe me, young man, your parents are stuck in the Dark Ages.

AGED MAN AND WOMAN (sneaking up behind Sir Jobs with giant branches they’ve ripped from a tree): Get out! Now! Take THAT for making us feel old and dumb! And that! And that! And while you’re running, whistle!

SIR JOBS: (Runs away, whistling “Green sleeves.”)

SON: Wait! I’m going too!

Moral of story: Times always ARE a-changing and it always IS Steve Jobs’ fault. Now you know.

WHEN MEN GET INTO NYLONS

They say age ain’t nothing but a number. But it’s more than that.

It’s how you relate to pantyhose.

If you think of pantyhose as a normal part of life for women, you are middle-aged. If you think of them as ancient togs with all the sex appeal of bunion cushions, you are Gen X. But if you think of them as something to wear with defiant pride, you are truly something else. A brave new breed. A customer on the cusp.

You are, in short, a man.

Yes, while women’s pantyhose sales have been in freefall for about a decade, pantyhose sales to men are heading sky high. Or thigh-high anyway. And on a guy, that’s pretty high.

“Our customers are primarily heterosexual, happily married men that you would never suspect of wearing anything unusual under their trousers,” says Steven Katz, managing partner of Ohio-based Comfilon (as in comfort + nylon), the nation’s largest purveyor of male pantyhose.

Katz comes from a long line of leg men – his great-grandfather started a stocking company in the 1920s. But Katz himself only dreamed up his male hose (that doesn’t sound right) eight years ago, after perusing rival hosiery companies’ websites and seeing the same reader comment over and over: “Why are there no pantyhose for men?”

Ah, where would we be without the insights of the web?

Men were longing for the comfort and coziness of pantyhose – attributes I’ll admit I missed back in my own more pantyhose-intensive days. (If men said they longed to see their money disappear down the drain with a single snag, or enjoyed the challenge of trying to walk around in an undergarment that was, upon mid-day reflection, made for someone much, much shorter, that I’d understand. Maybe. But they really thought of pantyhose as the perfect garment: warmer than socks, less bulky than long-underwear. And so, they longed – same as women do for equal pay.)

Anyway, now that men can buy pantyhose, and do, it is fair to ask why younger women are shunning them.

The pantyhose, that is. What it is about this item that makes it such a cultural flash point?

When panties and hosiery first crossbred in 1959, they were more than an instant hit. They were an instant demarcation line. Before that, women had to wear all sorts of hardware to hold up their stockings. Pantyhose were not only easier get on (and off!), they also went so high up the thigh that they made the miniskirt possible. Hello, youth culture, Sexual Revolution and Twiggy! Goodbye rubber girdles – the very undergarment that had seemed so liberating to earlier women, when they bid goodbye to the even more-constricting corset.

What’s appalling to me, a pantyhose baby, is that today’s young women feel the same way about pantyhose that I feel about girdles: Eww. “Sex and the City” made bare legs the billboard for a liberated libido. Anything else looked pathologically prim. But just as women my mother’s age tsk-tsked the no-girdle look, bare legs in winter look utterly ridiculous to friends MY age. So now WE sound like old ladies.

“Look at those winter white legs,” snipped my friend Nancy at Dunkin Donuts the other morning. “Tell me that is attractive. She’d look so much better in a pair of nice black nylons.”

That’s why I’m hoping that the pantyhose for men movement takes off. If men can make pantyhose sexy, then maybe women can wear them again, too, without feeling as old as Betty Grable.

Or, come to think of it, Twiggy.

Lenore@LenoreTown.com

QUIT HIDING BEHIND YOUR CUTE LITTLE KIDS

Now that everyone’s joyful holiday cards (except ours – sorry!) have been sent out, let us take a moment to figure out what happened to an entire generation of Americans.

You know the generation I’m talking about: The folks over age 30. Look at any glossy family photo card and they are harder to find than a frowning snowman. In their place grins a group far more photogenic.

Their children.

True, true – every once in a while you may get a card that features a whole family. Once in a while you get a wheat penny in your change, too. But the cards gaily arrayed on my mantle (okay, gaily piled next to the phone) show, for the most part, brothers and sisters with their loving arms around each other. Or at least together in the same room.

This wouldn’t be so bad if I had spent my childhood growing up with these tots, or had gone to college with them or even had wasted years and years and literally tens of thousands of dollars in graduate school with them (and for WHAT?). But the fact is, these are things I did with their PARENTS. And it is their parents that I really want to see. Especially if we have grown apart, this is our one chance to be together again. And isn’t that the whole purpose of annual cards? To weave a skinny thread through the years, tenuously but tenaciously holding loved ones together? (Answer: Yes.)

Ideally, Christmas cards should work like time-lapse photography. You should be able to flip through them and see: How do my friends look now? And now? And now? Old sparkle still there? Old wife? Old hair?

Boy am I glad I didn’t marry HIM!

Of course, it is precisely those sentiments that adults hope to avoid by using their kids as proxies. These moppets are doing for them what Miss November is doing for the jug of motor oil she’s, uh… What exactly IS she doing with that jug of motor oil? Let’s just call it caressing. Point is: She is making it look good. Better than any other brand of motor oil, ever.

But come on – we were never friends with motor oil. We certainly never slept with it. Motor oil is not the point. Aging friends and family are.

So suck in your stomach, if you must. Wear dark glasses. Rent a spouse. But next year, do us all a favor and put your old, sweet self on your Christmas card.

And by then you should be getting our card, too.

Lenore@LenoreTown.com

NO MORE NEW WHEAT THINS!

Ever dunked a cookie into a cup of hot chocolate a split second too long? Of course you have. Maybe you’re doing it right now. (Check!) Either way, you know what you end up with: A contaminated drink with a cookie stub hovering above its own disintegrated body.

This is an experience you’d want to repeat?

Well, apparently someone in corporate marketing thinks so, because now you can buy S’mores Flavored Nesquik, the world’s first drink engineered to taste like an after school snack accident. By comparison, Mini Marshmallow Nesquik sounds like Dom Perignon.

On the other hand, Nesquik isn’t nearly as disturbing as the new Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Pop-Tarts. Raw dough inside a baked tart. I don’t even get how that is possible.

So, as a new year approaches and we all get busy making resolutions, this seems a perfect time for some:

RESOLUTIONS FROM THE PEOPLE WHO COME UP WITH NEW FOODS

We, the country’s strange and unseen food consultants, do solemnly pledge:

This coming year, we will not add sour cream ‘n onion flavoring to anything else. Not to a baked version of a previously fried snack, not to a trans-fat free version of a previously baked snack, not to nothin’. We are fully aware that just opening a container of sour cream ‘n onion anything makes the whole room smell like a frat house where not one of the so-called “brothers” was willing to wash out the dip bowl. There it sits. So adios to sour cream ‘n’ onion.

Note: We did not promise anything about sour cream ‘n chives!

Okay, okay. No sour cream ‘n’ chives either.

This is the year we will also stop fiddling with Wheat Thins. There is simply nothing left for us to do with them. We’ve done parmesan/basil, “harvest garden vegetable” (and any other word we could throw in to conjure up the kind of farm-fresh food this isn’t), and we’ve done ranch, of course, and honey (never hurts to make a food sweeter!). We’ve even done Big Wheat Thins, which look like something you’re supposed to put in your shoe. So, frankly, we’re done. If you don’t like the Wheat Thins there on the shelf, you’re not going to like any new ones we can dream up. Try a Ritz.

But don’t expect any new weird Ritz shapes, either! Even WE are embarrassed by Ritz Sticks, which claim to help “dip, dunk, scoop.” Like the round ones were so impossible to maneuver? Like they weren’t the best-selling cracker in human history? No new shapes!

No new blue kiddie drinks either. Promise. Kids lose all aesthetic appeal when their lips get blue. We see that.

Nor will we add pomegranate to any drinks, even though, frankly, we could sell pomegranate milk, at this point. Pomegranates are the new sour cream ‘n’ onion. (NOTE TO BOSS: Sour cream ‘n onion milk in ’08?)

We will strive to make only responsible brand extensions in the coming year.

Unless the folks at Coke want to talk graham cracker crumbs. With lime.

Lenore@lenoretown.com