How should Canadians behave when Bush II arrives in Ottawa on Tuesday?

One is torn between decency and realism, which is by chance the question that always arises in December in one's own life.

Should we send greeting cards to the people who never send us cards back?

I say yes, make the humane seasonal adjustment for the recipient's chaotic mind/personal life. Husband says no, is sick of toting the annual deadweight of my friends from high school and his Aussie pals, who may have died of drink years ago.

Verdict: We'll send them.

The news that Hitler's notorious Bavarian Alps vacation home, Berchtesgaden, has been turned into a hotel, well, call me waterlogged by history but I'm not happy about it. They'd been talking about it for years but I never dreamed they'd actually do it. Yet there is it, the Intercontinental Berchtesgaden.

It's true that I have always been abnormally sensitive to the spirit of place.

Britain's Foreign Minister, Jack Be Nimble (real name “Straw,” seriously), swelled up like a puff adder this week and announced that the notion that there was any link between the first London bombings and Britain's presence in Iraq was “astonishing.” (And after that even before more bombs went off in the tube.) Tony Blair said it would be a “misunderstanding of a catastrophic order” to think that, if he had kept well away from Iraq, the killers wouldn't have gone to Pakistan for bomb lessons.

Here it is, Boycott 6 (hurricanes don't even go that high). I wrote in my How to Boycott column last week that I dreaded this one out of journalistic faith. Oh ye of vanished belief.

I read the centre-left British newspaper the Guardian online and pay $620 a year to get its Saturday paper airmailed. I've been reading it for 40 years. No, I am not 102. I am 46 but we got the Guardian Weekly when I was a kid. I think it's the best newspaper in the world; many Canadians read it.

Every publication has a gormless reporter, often several. This person is stupid, but handy.

It takes very little to annoy the Vatican. As proof, Amnesty International seems to have managed it.

It's odd because Amnesty is an organization, like Médecins sans Frontières, that is pretty as a pearl, selfless as a live organ donor and pretty much morally unassailable. We're all for human rights and medical care for the poor and the stomped-on of this world, correct?

Not so much, says the Vatican.

Amnesty recently decided on a policy it had been discussing for some time.

Call me ungrateful but 2007 was a terrible year. My ability to cope with the fading era of President George W. Bush ran out 12 months early. I can take no more.

Even wine doesn't taste the same to me. There's no joy in it. People tell me it's good but I can't say that I notice. I'm drinking Prosecco and cava now.

It's called The Great Pacific Garbage Patch and it may be the most disgusting object ever born of man. Twice the size of the continental United States or merely Texas — it's difficult to measure — it drifts 900 kilometres off the California coast, a full 100 million tonnes of discarded plastic. Over the next decade, it is predicted that its size will double.

Need more horror? It is 30 metres deep. There are two bulbous slidey linked islands of it, floating on either side of Hawaii. I say "it" because it is a new substance for scientists to categorize.

In all the posturing and chewing about rights, both human and religious, involved in legalizing same-sex marriage, people are working under the smug assumption that this really is all about marriage. I cannot agree. This is all about sex.

People who are comfortable with their sexuality, theirs and other people's (and the two go together), are perfectly pleased about, indeed, indifferent to, gay marriage. Those who aren't cannot abide the thought of others deriving or giving pleasure.