Foil paparazzi; always do a panty check before leaving the house.

No more pointless arguments. When people say something that I disagree with, play air guitar until they go away.

Write, produce, and direct grainy, artsy, award-winning documentary When the Party’s Over: What Happens to the Girls Gone Wild.

Increase amount of body art. Not on myself, of course, but others.  Random strangers.  Use chloroform.

Cross WGA picket line; take advantage of industry desperation to revive The Greatest American Hero.

Hack into online Scrabble dictionary so it becomes possible to play perfectly good words like “Fiberkle.”

Ignore sister when she offers idiotic parenting advice. No wait!  That’s a resolution for Jamie Lynn Spears.

Buy hybrid car--i.e., has both CD and mp3 player.

Cut coffee intake in half. Accomplish this by filling up mug with 50% Irish whiskey.

Master taxidermy.

Christmas was great but very expensive.  I really wanted to get a dollhouse for my niece, so I foolishly obtained one of those volatile subprime mortgages.  Let me tell you, in this economy, it’s not a good idea to get an adjustable fifteen-hour loan. By hour seven, I had already squandered dozens of quarters paying off the interest.

But it all worked in the end, because I was able to refinance to a fixed 30-day rate.

Still, and I don’t mean to sound like a hardass, but she’s going to have to take the place “as is” for now. It’s just not the right time to take out a home equity loan to do major remodeling--even though the structure is currently missing a wall.

One of the problems of living in a city that has a Baghdad-style body count is that bad things occasionally happen to your car. This week, someone stole my back license plates. (They probably tried to steal the front as well, but those were bolted on wrench-tight.  Sucks to be you, jobless delinquents!) I checked the DMV web site to see what I had to do, and their instructions were clear:

“If only one plate is stolen, you must surrender the other plate to the DMV.”

That ticked me off.  Not the concept--just the wording.  I didn’t want to “surrender” anything.  How about finding the people who stole my license plate and tell them to surrender?  “SURRENDER GREG’S PLATE THEN COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP.” I was the victim; I didn’t want to surrender. My main girl Dorothy and I take a stand on these kinds of things.

But when I went to the DMV with my completed application for new plates, the guy looked up at me and “You also need to surrender your remaining plates.”

I’ll say this about the DMV: they are consistent. When even the employees speak the same language as the forms, you know you have a well-run system.  A horrible carnival of anguish and pain, but nonetheless well run.  Hell with fluorescent lighting.

Still, for the cost of a little bit of wasted time plus twenty bucks, I received brand-new plates.  And the upside is that my new plates are much easier to remember. They are an agreeable combination of numbers and letters.  I have a theory that if you say them sequentially and very fast, they sound very much like an old Sumerian nickname that basically means “Hunter gatherer with substantial and intimidating forearms.” I am not going to research this just in case I’m wrong.

If you greet me with outstretched knuckles, in anticipation of doing the traditional male “knuckle touching” move, rest assured that I will not leave you hanging.  I will fulfill the gesture in the manner that society has mandated:

However, it’s worth noting that you’ve achieved the absolute opposite of what you intended.  Rather than bonding with me, you have almost guaranteed that we will never be close in any form--because if we were really friends, you’d know that I find the gesture completely annoying .  It’s actually my first filter for a potential friend. Well, that and whether you use the word “Irregardless.”

Furthermore, you might not want to push your luck and try it a second time. Because as I said, I won’t leave you hanging. But that doesn’t mean I won’t press my fist to yours and shout “WONDER TWIN POWERS ACTIVATE.”

And wouldn’t that be embarrassing if I did that with a lot of people around?  Well, maybe not for you; you’ve already taken on the form of a Doofus.

I thought I had been doing pretty well about not letting my own pop culture biases affect (or some would say “infect") my niece.  Take the other day, for example.  While shopping for a stocking stuffer book, I chanced upon a literary tome that immediately caught my eye.  Entitled Scooby Doo and the Rock and Roll Zombie, my first thought was that this was the perfect gift for Cameron.  Surely its gripping narrative and eye-popping illustrations would encourage her to take yet another step into the wonderful world of reading.

Now, I hadn’t read this particular installment in the Scooby Doo saga. But if I knew my literature, this alleged “Rock and Roll Zombie” would turn out to be the harmless old caretaker of the amusement park. Or perhaps the mean-spirited magnate who was attempting to buy out said amusement park.

Or it might actually be the caretaker wearing the mask of the magnate underneath the mask of the Zombie!  I hoped not, though. That whole “dual mask” twist is juicy but it’s also rather complicated. Surely such “Usual Suspects"-style reveals should be the province of a book that’s intended for, say ages 6 and up, rather than 5.

But as I reached for the book, I thought, well, maybe I was thinking too much about my own childhood and maybe it was possible to find something a little less corporate-ty for Cam.  And I ended up finding a very nice book with gorgeous, burnished illustrations and an easy-to-follow story. It didn’t have any rock and roll zombies, which I count as a minus (that’s also the reason I didn’t like Anna Karenina), but otherwise it seemed like a good choice.

Sounds like a rational chain of decision making? Except that I had an exchange with my sister-in-law the other day that made me realize that I haven’t been as good at this as I had thought:

SHE: Cameron’s decided that she wants a theme party for her next birthday.

ME: Oh, sounds great.

SHE (coldly): Yes...A Spider-Man party.

ME: Ha!  Really? Now that’s a chip of the old…

SHE: .....

ME: ...er...I mean...how nice?

SHE: Yes. I told her great, you can invite your uncle and all of your uncle’s friends.

I don’t remember foisting Spider-Man upon my niece, but maybe it just comes off me subliminally.  Or maybe it’s in the Howard blood. Maybe the Howard blood is radioactive.

(To digress for a moment, I’m confused why Dora the Explorer is somehow a more noble franchise to buy toys from than, say, Spider-Man.  I mean, talk about a role model that kids can’t live up to. How old is Dora supposed to be? Eight or so?  You show me a kid who is actually an “Explorer” by age eight. I could see Dora the Pooping or Dora the Oftentimes Drooling in her Sleep, but world traveling?  Let me tell you what I used to carry around with me when I was eight years old: beef jerky, Star Wars cards, and maybe a frog or two.  You know what I didn’t carry around?  A PASSPORT. If these are the characters that our kids are supposed to emulate, they’ll all be burnt out before junior high.)

The reality is, I don’t care one bit whether Cam reads about pink parasols or rock and roll zombies.  We start telling stories to kids as soon as they’re born: “This is who you are. This is where you came from. This is where you’re going.” And eventually they start choosing their own stories.  And no one, ever, has the time to read all of the stories in the world.  From that point of view, it doesn’t matter what stories you read, whether they’re these stories or those stories--as long as you’re immersed in them, and eventually have the ability to choose the ones that matter to you.  As long as she does that, I will happily stand down.

Which isn’t to say that I won’t stick her with Lemony Snicket down the road.

Northern California looks so cute when it tries to impress you with its seasons.  The leaves turn yellow and red haphazardly, like a kid scrawling inside a coloring book.  Then the whole area lurches into winter. Or it pretends to.  All that really happens is the air feels a little colder than usual.  It rains sometimes, but mostly the sun weakly dabs at the rooftops and tries to melt the morning frost.

California has no idea what real seasons are, and it will never know because it’s separated from them by thousands of miles. It has no idea that elsewhere in the country, the leaves turn so bright and vivid that they look as though they’re on fire.  It doesn’t know that if you stand in a certain place at just the right time, the air smells of apple cinnamon.  It doesn’t know that when the storms start to hit, the days become as hard and cold as a runway model’s face.

You are nice to California.  After all, you love California; it’s possible that you may never leave it again.  With that kind of commitment in the offing, the last thing you want to do is hurt California’s feelings.  So you smile indulgently as it parades its badly colored trees in front of you and occasionally showers you with rain.  Just because California does this one thing poorly doesn’t mean that it should be berated for its failures. California is a genius when it comes to spring, and second-run movie theaters, and couples key parties.  Let it get this nonsense out of its system, as it apparently needs to do once a year.  It’s all right if your face starts to hurt from all of the fake smiling. Once the air warms up and the fog lifts, your praise will once again be genuine.