I hope everyone had a nice and peaceful break. I mean, I hope everyone had a break of one kind or another but nice and peaceful is what I look for these days. We were in Ptown in a nice and peaceful house, right across from the beach. But while it had seven televisions, there was neither a single book--meaning I couldn't indulge in my traditional vacation pastime of ignoring the books I brought in favor of the trashy beach read I found-- nor a single reading lamp. Really, not one. Luckily my Kindle is the glowy kind so it wasn't too much of a problem, but I also needed to read some printed pages For Work, and could do it only in those few hours when the sun shone right through a window.

The single most edifying thing I read was in Janice Y. K. Lee's The Expatriates, a novel about life among the expats in contemporary Hong Kong. Meditating on the long string of the wrong men she's met, troubled heroine Mercy recalls one guy who tried to pick her up in a bar by showing her a trick with his beer: "He swirled a finger around his ear and stuck it in the white foam. It dissolved instantly." Now, she's telling us this to demonstrate her bad taste in men but I tried it on my Coke Zero and it totally worked. What's not to like?

Happy New Year, everybody.