Oh dear. This is how it starts. You start liking the Yankees when you are a kid and sooner or later - WHAMMO - your misplaced love lands you in the political hot seat:

The city’s acquisition of the Yankees suite had drawn scrutiny, especially after e-mail messages surfaced in November showing that aides to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had zealously pursued the luxury box, as well as free food and access to post-season games. Representative Anthony D. Weiner, a Queens Democrat who publicly demanded that the city give up the suite, said, “This is something that they never should have negotiated in the first place. And,” he added, “it was only after the public found out about it that they did the right thing.”

Zealously! Is Bloomberg the Mayor of all New Yorkers? Did he secure the rights to suck on a Texas hot at the Mets games, too? How about the Rangers? Not likely. It's a form of madness, liking the Yanks. Makes you do strange things like looking forward to seeing A.J. Burnett play. It just ain't right.

I am using Twitter more and more. I am enjoying the ability to quip, to note, to park an idea. It is a veritable hotbed of fifth-rate wags like me. But there is trouble afoot as the BBC reports:

Micro-blogging site Twitter has admitted that some of its most high profile bloggers have been targeted by hackers. It announced that 33 accounts had been hacked, including those belonging to president elect Barack Obama and singer Britney Spears. It follows a phishing scam on the site which encouraged users to click on a fake Twitter homepage.

Tragic. Imagine the world thinking that a quip by Britney Spears (or rather a junior assistant in her PR firm) was actually not a quip by Britney Spears!!! Hackers are so bad. They might figure out a way to make the background behind the home page of Britney Spears look like the background behind the home page of someone else. Fantastically disasterous. Temple walls coming shattering down clacklily about one's ears.

The success of Twitter is in its fundamental unimportance. How else can you explain it's ascendency over Facebook, that millstone of webby obligation relatively speaking? Twitter is what it promises. Nuttin. Hack away.

If this article is correct, the Huffington Post gets about 481 times the readership of A Good Beer Blog but only around 60 times the ad revenue. Who knew? Which means I have an +8HP$ ratio.

Not having a real Senate and supporting the abolishing of the one we have, I find the powers and make-up of the US one pretty interesting. Consider this question raised in the NYT today:

Candidate Obama promised to “re-engage” and “work constructively within” the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Will the new president pass a new Kyoto climate accord through Congress by sidestepping the constitutional requirement to persuade two-thirds of the Senate? Draconian restrictions on energy use would follow. A majority of the Congress would be much easier for Mr. Obama to get than a supermajority of the Senate. A scholar at the Brookings Institution has already proposed that a new president overcome objections to this environmentalists’ holy grail by evading the Treaty Clause.

That is a really interesting idea - that the regions of a modern country could have the power to stop the national government from making deals with another national government or governments. The relationship and respect according to the balances of power it a bit of a dry subject but it goes a huge way to establishing the sort of government one can expect as well as the likelihood that such a government will actually be successful in achieving its goals.

And it should get one thinking. As Mr. Harper wakes and rubs the sleepy dust from his eyes, does he ponder this sort of thing? It is one thing to suggest making our Senate elected and another thing to stack the Senate with appointees, even those who give their boy scout salute and promising to quit if those elections ever do come. But it is entirely another to determine what the newly electable body would actually do? Changing the Senate is likely the most easily grasped of the fog of reforms that remain floating about the Conservative Party's governmental agenda. Yet even it is unclear. Would his new Senate actually be able to stop a treaty? Would it actually have powers that would normally be reserved to the cabinet and PMO or the House of Commons? That is the sort of asymmetrical trump card that is usually assigned to the legislative body that represents your betters. We never hear about those plans. What would they be? What would you accept.?

And if there are no jurisdictional reform plans... why bother?

No more days off or days where you think you really should be off. It's like coming off a drug. January. Plans need to be made to avoid the day when the urge to hibernate meets the desire to get to know Mr Christie better. Plans to keep up the housework, to get out and about, to pay off. The sun rises earlier already. As early as it did in early December. The darkest month is past. And no more need to find oneself admitting that "in the early hours of New Year's Day I found myself locked outside in York in my underpants."

It is always a giggle when rankings get debated. Robert Jago does a good job figuring out Canada's top political blogs with little thanks and even ranked me 15th this month even though you abandoned me durning the holidays. This month's rankings, however, are getting an extra cherry belly full of it today. But it does beg a few questions:

• What is a blog?
• What is a political blog?
• What is a Canadian political blog?
• What is the best mechanism for comparing the relative popularity of Canadian political blogs?
• What is the point of comparing the relative popularity of Canadian political blogs?

I am comfortable with my spot on the sofa of the Canadian blogosphere, being by times noted or forgotten, visited or abandoned. I have a view but I am after all just one person - yet that is something of the point: being just one person. As far as I am concerned forums and multi-authored blogs are a different thing. They are a good thing but if the posts have to pass muster of a central editorial board or match the views of one individual that is simply not blogging.

But that is only my point of view.

This surely is the unnamed holiday. The shadow twin of Boxing Day, the orphaned Friday stuck between that holiday with a hangover and a weekend. I will suit up and make my way to work but will there be work to meet me there? There likely will be an emptiness, desks without jockeys, voice mail alerts flashing at no one until Monday's return to the new term, the start of the second season.

• Actual Doctor Who News Update: the next Doctor will be announced tomorrow. Will he be a she?
• Update: Skull Splitter saved. More here.
• New Year's Day was as idle as idle could be. Ever notice how idle and ideal are so closely related? Hmm? Have you? I didn't even watch a bowl game, which surprises me a bit. But I did roast a prime rib roast better than I have ever roasted one before. Thanks heavens for the pre-Christmas beef price collapse at the A+P.
• Congratulations to the twins.
• The New Years blizzard in PEI received the attention of bloggers with video cams.
• Ben is quite content with both 2008 and the prospects for 2009. I suppose I have to agree: the family expands, kids are arguably above average, the holiday tours indicated a fairly contented clan. Some will complain but they, we must recall, were asked not to stay on.
• What is to come? I expect again I will not be wise with my taxes even if I will spend hours getting better at Wii. I expect Iggy to coat tail what is happening to the south and benefit from the increase in confidence that will exist at the end of the year with or without yet another Federal election. I grew out my beard. Will it last? Such suspense.
• The corner has been turned in the baseball year with the season to come now the topic rather than the one that has just passed. I like the idea of Derek Lowe playing for the Mets but I have no idea where Manny is going to land.
• Predictions? Resolutions? What could they be? Pledging to be smarter and healthier? Promising to myself that I will eat wild game and buy cut flowers once a week? Ensuring I have an ear to the new bands despite all of new music being chronologically dislocated for me for almost a decade? Play more penny whistle. That's it!

Answer: whenever you need it to be like a bicycle:

Talks to resolve a gas supply row between Ukraine and Russia have failed, the chief executive of Russian gas giant Gazprom has said. Alexei Miller said gas supplies to Ukraine would be cut on Thursday but that Russia would do its best to guarantee supplies to Europe. Russian PM Vladimir Putin earlier claimed that Ukraine would block supplies to Europe if no deal was done. Ukraine denies owing money to Gazprom, and says it has guaranteed gas transit.

One of Russia's most indebted companies need to figure out how to get gas past Ukraine while paying off 2007 debts with 2009 revenues. Germany stockpiles. My heavens: Alberta looks so much nicer to deal with when you look at it this way.

What else is there to say? The year has been a good one and, even with the recession looming, I look ahead with naive optimism cut with a dash of the early on set of being an old grouch. We traveled a bit but not enough. I could have eaten more types of meat but when isn't that the case. For someone in my mid-40s I lead the life very much of someone in their mid-40s and 2008 was proof of it. I will remember it fondly but with no great sense of loss. Like 1996, come to think of it. Decent enough of a year but I put away all my 1996-ish stuff years ago.

So we move on. I generally fall into the half of the planet that hates New Year's Eve but there is nothing yet on the horizon to foreshadow anything extraordinarily bad waiting for me in the next few hours. NCPR appears not to be having its live phone in this year - which is sad. It always sounded like a mix of college radio and too much beer. I am sure they were all on the ginger ale in past years. I bought pet food just now. Common sense tells me that were I to have a hangover tomorrow I might not like being attacked by a starvation-crazed house cat. These are the lessons I have learned from my years on this planet. That and which remote does what. Reason enough to open a bottle tonight.

Happy New Year and Happy Hogmanay. Don't forget to first foot, replace the old salt for new, change all the sheets in the house and spin all the clocks more than 24 hours. If you don't, whatever my Grannie was scared of will get you.