I think it’s a very valuable service. For example, I know that I do not have any of the common BRCA gene mutations linked to increased risk for breast cancer. Getting screened for those in a clinical setting costs thousands, and it isn’t covered by insurance. 23andMe tests so much more and costs only $99 with a 12-month commitment to their $9/mo data update service. With the update service, they’ll email you about new research on any of the SNPs they’ve typed for you. You can buy prepaid subscriptions, too, if you want to give a gift! Those are $207.

If your relatives have been typed by 23andMe, you can, with mutual consent of course, see which traits you share, what genes came from which parent, and, like I did, whether your lineage is what you’ve been told it is. An excellent reason to make 23andMe a gift this Christmas!

Knowledge is power, and 23andMe is a lot of knowledge for a very low cost. And now through December 27, they’re offering $23 off your purchase if you use this link:

$23 off 23andMe

Also, every time someone uses that link, I get a chance to win an iPad (or other ossum gadget).

23andMe isn’t available in New York State, because Albany has outlawed non-clinical genetic testing. If you are a New York resident, you have to collect your saliva sample and mail it to 23andMe while you are not in New York.

Take advantage of this cool offer! And feel free to ask me anything if you want to know more about 23andMe!

At WalMart, I was helped by a man named Dexter wearing a long-sleeved Henley shirt.

I went to two Targets, a Giant Eagle, a Home Depot, and a WalMart today. I encountered two charity collection drives. A Salvation Army bell ringer, and a Firefighters’ Union toy drive. Both were stationed outside the WalMart.

I have done something I never expected to do. I purchased an artificial Christmas tree. Forgive me.

Her obsession is with Christmas trees.

Every year of my life (except last year, when we were in Italy), we have had a live Christmas tree. For the past 10 years, it has always been a particular sort of tree, an aibes concolor, from a particular tree farm about a 30 minutes’ drive from her house. She loves this particular model of tree (and so do I) because it is resilient–the needles do not drop for a long time as long as it is regularly watered; because it has long but fat needles; because it is a typically dense model; and most importantly, because it smells of oranges. Yes, oranges. Christmas isn’t Christmas without a concolor fir.

But every year, she must get a bigger one than the previous year. We’ve been through tree stands like you wouldn’t believe. This year, she really managed to push it.

Mom always goes for an eight foot tree, because the ceiling in her living room is nine feet high. But this year, the tree farm didn’t have a lot of trees. Something about deer eating things, and the economy, and crap like that. So if we wanted one that big, we’d have to go out into the field and pick one to cut down. All the trees in the field were 12–18′ high, but they said to pick one and they’d sell us the top eight feet.

We found a lovely one and they cut it down and home it went. Foreboding music cue here.

The diameter of the cut trunk ended up being a full three inches bigger than the largest tree stand in our collection, and our collection was (we presumed) quite extensive. After Mother’s Husband left (cursing a storm and decrying the whole practice of live trees), Mother convinced me to help her bring it in the house without him, and then figure out the stand issue “later.”

The tree is fully nine feet across at the bottom–wider than it is tall. These sorts of things cannot be baled to temporarily reduce their diameters. And we had to squeeze it through the (admittedly large for a front door) four foot wide front door. This took an hour and a half of shoving, pulling, squeezing, and otherwise being mightily unpleasant. Fortunately, being very freshly cut, it was quite resilient and, after much ado, managed to get it’s fat ass in the door and lie pathetically on the living room floor.

We first tried a new plastic stand alleged to hold trees “up to 10 feet”. This we bought from the Lowe’s for $25. It promptly collapsed, plastic rent and twisted beyond all hope in a matter of seconds. So we called a small, local garden store. And they told us about this:

They called it “The Last Stand.”* As in, the last one you’ll ever have to buy. And boy howdy was it.

The thing weighs easily 30 pounds. It’s steel. Thick steel. Welded. And the bolts are thick. Really thick. We drilled out a half-inch hole, about one inch deep, in the center of the bottom of the cut stump of the tree, attached the stand, then tipped the tree up. It took all of five minutes. I grabbed the thing and shook it hard and slow to see if it was likely to tip. It was rock solid. If you buy big trees, get one of these stands. It will change your life.**

And so I play enabler to my mother the giant tree addict for yet another year. Here’s the tree, complete with decorations and presents. And yes, this is actually how wide it is. I did not stretch the photo for comedic effect.

*Warning: This link goes to what appears to be a vintage 1996 website, complete with embedded midi Christmas music player, cursor-chasing text, and animated GIFs. What the company lacks in web design skills they make up for in yuletide arboreal erection competence.

**The company didn’t give me anything at all to get me to say that. We bought ours. We paid less than they charge on the website, because we bought it locally and didn’t have to pay for shipping.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=E

I’ve set up a Flickr account because I need a safe place to store all the hundreds and hundreds of photos I’m going to take this Christmas. I am going to Italy for two weeks: December 19th through January 1st. I will visit Rome, Florence and Venice, with day trips to Vatican City, Pompeii, Orvieto, Pisa, San Gimignano, Assisi, Siena, and Maranello, where the Galleria Ferrari is. I will be doing all the classic touristy stuff — climbing the Duomo at the Florence Cathedral, visiting the Sistine Chapel, touring the Roman Catacombs, posing like an idiot in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (here are some examples), and riding in a Venetian gondola. Except in winter. At Christmastime. Which is not the tourist season (excluding Catholics who like to go to Vatican City around that time of year).

I’ll be taking along with me my new spiffy Christmas present to myself: a nicely equipped DSLR package:

• Body: Nikon D90
• Wide Zoom: AF-S DX Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5–5.6G VR
• Telephoto Zoom: AF-S DX 55-200mm f/4–5.6G ED-IF VR
• Fisheye: AF DX Fisheye Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8G ED
• Sticks: Manfrotto 055XPROB
• Panorama Head: Nodal Ninja 3 MkII w/RD3L 6–8-30 Rotator & EZ Leveler II
• Geotagger: di-GPS Mini 3L-SD90

You will notice the fisheye and the panorama head in there. I plan to make some lovely panoramic photos of the very best things to see in Italy. I will be using PTGui Pro to make the panoramas. I probably won’t make them until I get back, though, because they require quite a bit of processing. If you see one in the Flickr, consider yourself very lucky.

(For the petty tyrants at the FTC, I didn’t get anything for free. I paid full price for everything myself. Anything good or bad I have to say about any products mentioned here should be taken as the remarks of an ordinary consumer, not of a paid reviewer.)

I will probably review some or all of the camera stuff when I get back, after I see how well it performs.

Pisa Photos (I didn’t take those photographs):

1. Starts with a Bang » A Free-Fall Follow-Up
2. All Things Kendall + Carolina » Tradition!
3. Starts with a Bang » How Stable are Skyscrapers?
4. Royal Navy » RFA Cardigan Bay » A Group Visit to the Leaning Tower of Pisa

On a marginally-related note, has anyone had any pleasant experiences with any of the various gift-card exchange services on the Internets?

Most of the family members I do like come to my mother’s house for the Christmas. This year, some came early for my little sister’s graduation party. I say little, but she is only four years younger than I am. She just graduated from University with a business degree. Yay, her.

The day before her party, she had an interview with a local sales firm. Or at least, that’s what she thought she had. She found the position through online job-hunt service Monster Dot Com. The position was advertised as being with High-Profile Sales Firm A. She was excited. The interview was an all-day affair. Now, in the legal world, all-day interviews mean fancy lunches, meeting the partners, chatting with associates, cigars, expensive liquor, and high-profile social affairs. Alas, my poor sister arrived at her interview to discover several unfortunate things.

First, the position for which she was being interviewed was not with High-Profile Sales Firm A, but with No-Name Back-Door Shady Firm B, which only had a passing business association with High-Profile Sales Firm A. To wit, they shared an office. No-Name Back-Door Shady Firm B didn’t even have its own offices.

The business cards were home-printed. And had colorful graphics.

And it turns out, “all-day interview” means shadowing someone doing door-to-door business solicitations in area strip-malls.

A truck-driver offered her ten extra dollars to take a ride in his truck with him.

She got a citation from the police for soliciting without a license.

The poor thing was traumatized, and immediately decided to go to graduate school to get her MBA. She said to me, “If these are college-educated people, I want nothing to do with them.” I promised her I would blog about her experience.

Unlike Filbbert, I have a really neat sister. She lives near me, and we do stuff together sometimes.

Some 40 people showed up at the house for her party. I knew she was much better at the making friends thing than I am, but this was ridiculous! I don’t like crowds of people, especially people I don’t know, making inane conversation and drinking too much wine. I hid in the kitchen most of the time, and spent some time talking with a friend of the family (who also happens to be an attorney) about law school. Yet again, law school manages to taint every corner of my life.

I did make an extraordinary triple-chocolate peppermint cake, though.

Yes, those are candied mint leaves. It was a major hit. The recipe is here. I followed it exactly except that I used only 1/2 cup of chocolate chips in the cake batter, because I couldn’t find miniature chips and I thought 1 1/2 cups of full-size chocolate chips would make the cake way too chunky, and I baked it in two pans instead of one. They took only about 28 minutes to bake.

The chopping of the chocolate, however, was quite time-consuming. All in all, I spent about 4 hours on it, excluding the buying of ingredients, forgetting the cake pan, and having to drive all the way back to the Wal-Mart to get it. It became known in the family as the “All-Day Cake,” and I have been informed that I will be asked to make it again in the future.

After the party, the rest of Christmas was mostly unremarkable. I kept alive my three-year-old tradition of being miserably sick on and around Christmas, but that didn’t stop me from making the most of it. I’ll spare you the unpleasant details of this year’s ailment, but I should make a general warning never to sneeze while eating raw cauliflower.

1. 9 to 5
2. A View to a Kill
3. Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy
4. Batman
5. Batman Returns
6. Blade Runner
7. Dial M For Murder
8. Diamonds Are Forever
9. Die Another Day
10. Dr. No
11. Family Plot
12. Foreign Correspondent
13. For Your Eyes Only
14. Frenzy
15. From Russia with Love
16. Goldeneye
17. Goldfinger
18. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
19. I Confess
20. License to Kill
21. Live and Let Die
22. Marnie
23. Moonraker
24. Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941, d:Hitchcock)
25. North by Northwest
26. Octopussy
27. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
28. Psycho
29. Ratatouille
30. Rear Window
31. Rope
32. Saboteur
33. Shadow of a Doubt
34. Stage Fright
35. Strangers on a Train
36. Suspicion
37. The Birds
38. The Living Daylights
39. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1955)
40. The Man with the Golden Gun
41. The Queen
42. The Quick and the Dead
43. The Spy Who Loved Me
44. The Trouble with Harry
45. The World Is Not Enough
46. The Wrong Man
47. Thunderball
48. Tomorrow Never Dies
49. Topaz
50. Torn Curtain
51. Vertigo
52. Witness for the Prosecution
53. You Only Live Twice

You will notice all the James Bond films (excluding Casino Royale (2006), which I already own, and Casino Royale (1967) and Never Say Never Again, which don’t count) and a large number of Hitchcock films. I received the James Bond Ultimate Collection and two Hitchcock collections which account for the atrociously large title count this year.

I also received several other lovelies, including a Linux-based wireless router, new 7.1 speakers and sound card for my desktop, a 250GB portable hard drive, and the PC game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I also received a positively scrumptious black wool peacoat.

It is difficult for me to express exactly how much this man scares me. Not just from a political standpoint, but as a person. Even the look of him portends terrible things. Perhaps he smells of doom.

It isn’t even the possibility, however remote, that he might be elected that scares me. A theocrat at 1600 Pennsylvania couldn’t do so much damage as, say, a theocrat at One First Street. It would still be awful, but if putting up a theocratic government is your goal, the Oval Office isn’t the most effective route.

What is really frightening about Mike Huckabee is that so many people — people who have secretly yearned for a more religious government for decades — are becoming more vocal about their desire for a tyrannical government. What happened?

But there is one upside:

If he does get nominated, voting for the Democrat will sting just a little bit less.

Most of you know this holiday by its much less cumbersome and more familiar name, Christmas. But let’s face it: Christmas is about buying stuff for people you like and getting stuff from them, in a fantastic orgy of sales and decorations, smothered in a gooey outpouring of happy delicious good will. Hooray, Capitalism!

In the spirit of the lively exchange of gifts, I have published The List. See the hat on the “W” in the header? You can click that, too.

Not only do I like getting things for Christmas, but I like buying them for other people, too. So don’t be shy! Get those lists up so everyone knows what you want this year!