Here’s my latest birdhouse hanging from a tree in our backyard. I wanted to give it a really garish paint job, using pink and purple, but I just couldn’t do it. I ended up with something that Sharyl said would fit in on Sesame Street.

Slate’s “Explainer” feature is offering up the best of the questions they did not answer this year. My favorite:

How often are presidents born, and how often do they die? Do they die in bunches, or on average every four years?

It’s Christmas for political news junkies. C-Span always has excellent coverage of the Iowa caucus. Tonight, Democrats are on C-Span and Republians are on C-Span2. I wish we still had picture-in-picture on our TV.

Anyway, it’s pretty cool to be able to eavesdrop on this part of our political process. I’m pretty psyched. How psyched? This psyched:

That boy from Hope, AK is pretty slick. Not that Clinton boy, the other one.

Mike Huckabee called a press conference yesterday to unveil his new anti-Romney campaign ad set to run in Iowa. Only when he began the press conference, in front of a banner reading “Enough is Enough!”, he denounced negative campaigning and said he had asked Iowa TV stations to pull the ad. It was Romney’s attacks on John McCain, he said, that had changed his mind.

And then, to the audible amazement of the assembled press, he played the ad for their cameras to record and gave them a copy of it. (I suppose he gave them a copy of it so they could not play it for a national audience.)

He managed to attack his opponent and claim the moral high ground.