Why baby Jesus? Research confirms there were upwards of 157 hotel-cum-stables in Bethlehem that night, with estimated 97 percent occupancy levels. So why did that star shine so brightly over his?

Imagine that I were to ask you to dress up as a baby and lie in a manger. Would you attract a comparable crowd of shepherds plus livestock and anything upwards of three kings from the East?

In a hugely influential 2004 experiment at the University of Colorado at Bollocks Falls, Professor Sanjiv Sanjive and his team asked 323 volunteers to wrap themselves in swaddling clothes and spend the night in a stable, lying in a manger.

Logic would dictate that at least one of them would be visited by shepherds, wise men, or kings from the East, right?

Wrong. The results—codified and analyzed on a specially devised and integrated grid system known as blsht—were astonishing. All 323 volunteers experienced a quiet night in. In other words, they waited up all night, but no one—specifically, 0.0000 percent of a total world population of 6,783,940,189 human beings—bothered to come by.

So what does this blsht metric tell you about your appeal, compared with the appeal of the baby Jesus?

It tells you this: he was special.

And—here’s another thing—you are not.

So the NYT has a reviewer who actually reads books!

How novel.

The kids are watching a recent Dora The Explorer special episode (“Dora Saves The Crystal Kingdom,” if you’re interested). I just watched a scene in which Dora wanders upon a knight warding a giant dragon off with a sword. To intervene and stop the fight, Dora decides that the best course of action is . . . to take away the knight’s sword! Pulling a lasso from her trusty backpack, she lassos the knight’s sword, leaving the knight defenseless. At that point, the dragon looks confused for a moment, and then becomes friendly. Dora, the Knight, and Boots the Monkey climb on to the Dragon’s back, and they all fly off together, best friends.

Remember how we all laughed when Hollywood started turning comic books into movies? And then videogames? And theme-park rides?

That all seems so quaint now. Because CBS is building a TV show based on a Twitter feed.

Can’t figure out how to give you a direct link, so this gift comes with some assembly required. I promise–promise!–it’s worth the trouble:

-Click here.

-On the light blue nav bar toward the middle of the screen, click on “The Sports Reporters.”

-“The Sports Reporters” column will appear on the right-hand side of the screen.

-Scroll down to the Oct. 30 edition and listen to “Candy Breakdown.”

-When you’re done, check out Candy Part II, above it.

Czabe really efforts this bit. And it’s awesome.

But wait! It’s actually kind of refreshing to see a D.C. mayor merely abusing his office for minor personal privilege!

I’d love to get Jay Cost’s thoughts on this very interesting piece by Fred Siegel and Harry Siegel. The piece is about New York City politics, but touches on Cost’s central focus on parties. For instance, this:

In New York City, the traditional parties have atrophied. The Republicans exist largely as a ballot line ready to be sold–currently to the billionaire Bloomberg–while the leaderless Democrats will have gone, despite their dominance of the electoral rolls, nearly 20 years without electing a mayor. Locally neither party commands either enthusiasm or respect. In their stead comes a billionaire’s party and a public sector union party. It’s an exaggerated version of the national alliance between George Soros and the public sector unions that helps drive the Democrats’ national agenda.

Eventually someone in newspapers was going to call the internet’s bluff and remind people that information does not want to be free. Murdoch looks set to do it.

If he does, I suspect others will begin following suit. It would be fantastic if it was Rupert who ended up saving the newspaper industry. Not that the people who work in newspapers would ever acknowledge it.