It makes an excellent addition to your Festivus celebration, as well.

Why is is that all the really good things are only available to us at Christmastime? Lit up houses, 24-hour marathons of brilliant movies, free days off for non-essential federal workers courtesy of our generous Commander-in-Chief? (I totally got Christmas Eve off and I love it!)

Well now there's one more item to add to the list: Starbuck's Limited Edition Dark Chocolate Peppermint Mocha Frappuccino. I purchased a four-pack last night, frankly, because I liked the red on the packaging. What a brilliant decision on my part! This stuff is a Christmas delight. Rich chocolate, refreshing peppermint, and more caffeine than you could shake a stick at with your jittery hands. Go now! Get some!

And to all those people who think Starbucks is trying to take over the world, I say let them. As long as they provide me with delicious, caffeinated treats, I will happily be their robot slave.

Apparently the Chinese think I'm selfish

So here's the fortune I got with my sweet and sour chicken tonight:

"Perhaps you've been focusing too much on yourself."

What the crap?

Oh man, I got so played.

So I was trolling the Sci Fi channel website, trying to find out when they're going to supply me with a new season of BSG, and I saw a preview for a TV movie, Tin Man, a modern take on the Wizard of Oz. It looked interesting and I like Zooey Deschanel and I really like Neal McDonough, so I decided to check it out. Things were going smoothly, but as I approached the two-hour mark, and I started to get this feeling, like "Hmmm, how are they going to wrap this up in the next few minutes?"

You know that feeling. Nothing good ever comes of that feeling. That feeling immediately precedes the "To Be Continued" screen. So I was annoyed that it was a two nighter thing, but I somehow got sucked into the second night anyway. Imagine my shock, nay, my horror, when it all happened again. I was approaching the four-hour mark, and that awful feeling came back. I sat up on the couch and shrieked, "How can they be doing this to me again!" I checked the TV guide, found that the third night was the last, and buckled down to invest two more hours, because I was not prepared to cut my losses. After four hours I deserved to see how it ended.

Well, my long national nightmare is finally over, and now I realize that I just invested six hours, six hours in something that wasn't all that great. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great, or even terribly good. That's time I could have invested a repeat viewing of Pride and Prejudice, or half of Band of Brothers, or 12 consecutive viewings of that episode of Sports Night where Isaac takes Luther Sachs to task on the air for supporting a university that flies the Confederate Flag. Oh man, that episode is so, so good.

And now I find out that the new season of BSG isn't coming until March, when I was previously promised January. Oh Sci Fi, you got me good. You played me like a cheap piano. I hope you're proud of yourself!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that annoying dead people should stay dead.

Okay, Heroes people. This is simply not fair. For so long I've been waiting for a certain annoying someone to finally bite it, and just when it looked as though that someone was gone from my TV forever, you had to revive that certain someone with some magic blood. (I promise, potential viewers, the storylines on this show are actually better than I'm making them sound.) That is not fair! You can't kill someone and make me do the happy dance and then just undo it all. It's just not right.

I've been waiting for that fake accent to make everything good again...

So I finally got caught up on all the Heroes episodes I missed while in Europe. Do you all remember when I squealed and squee-ed and was just generally obnoxious in my delight that David Anders was guesting on Heroes? And then I asked if it was possible that he could become a regular character and fabulously evil? (Well, I did. I said it. It’s all right there in a previous post.) Anyway, to quote Penny Lane, it’s all happening! David is out of 1600s Japan (don’t ask), into the present day, looking like a regular character, and totally being evil. At the same time, the second season of Heroes has finally ceased to suck. Coincidence? Doubtful.

It makes me wonder if I have predictive powers. Very specific predictive powers, applicable only to snarky British characters.

Dude, I really can find a silver lining in anything

So, this is what my cellphone voicemail message currently says:

"Hi, this is Allison. Leave me a message. Oh, and here's a very important piece of advice: Never fly Air France. They will lose your luggage and then they will steal from it."

The silver lining? I'm glad it was the French who screwed me over, so at least I can still look on the Italians with fondness.

Hands off the drawers, Frenchy.

So, all day I've been trying to get Amanda to be more upset about my luggage saga, to share in my righteous anger. It took the tale of some pilfered booze to really ignite the rage:

"A bottle of wine is missing? Ok, NOW I'm furious! What if some weird Frenchman stole your underwear? Gross! I don't even want to think about that!"

Indeed, Manderz. Indeed.