Santa Lee

There are only three more days of class left. Or, more importantly, there are only 10 more Christmas shopping days left.

That means it's time to make my Christmas wish list public. Of course, feel free to send me anything that's not on the list. But make sure your gift is pawn-able, just in case.

For some people, this season causes a lot of stress. That's not the case for first-years--Christmas shopping is easy because everyone they know wants Harvard paraphernalia. If the Coop had had a rebate my first year, I would have dropped out and bought my own island in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, it was still in its everything-under-one-roof-and-losing-millions-of-dollars phase.

Back to the subject. All I want for Christmas is:

1. Food for the starving children in North Korea.

2. A timeout during this whole Clinton thing. If you're going to investigate despite the fact that America is almost as apathetic about this as Harvard students are about the Undergraduate Council, give us a break. I think a month would be nice because that way, the hearings would be getting revved up right about the time finals start. Studying will be a lot easier knowing that there's nothing good on TV.

3. MTV to go back to playing music videos.

4. A summer job.

5. A new college bowl system. The Bowl Championship Series is supposed to match the two best teams in the country. On Jan. 4, No. 1 Tennessee will play No. 2 Florida State in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl.

Meanwhile, No. 4 Kansas State, which lost one game, in double overtime, no less, didn't even get a BCS spot and is playing in the Alamo Bowl. For a team that went into the last week of the season ranked No. 1, this is worse than kissing your sister or whatever else those kinky Yalies have come up with.

As usual, there is a full deck of crappy bowls. Littering your TV during various parts of the vacation will be the Las Vegas Bowl, Motor City Bowl, Aloha and Oahu Bowls, Insight.Com Bowl, Music City Bowl and Micron PC Bowl. There's also one called the Humanitarian Bowl. If its name were true, they wouldn't play it. Idaho vs. Southern Mississippi? Pass the leftovers.

I don't see why the NCAA refuses to switch to a playoff--the season would be a similar length, the schools would get a ton of money and ratings would be incredible. Wouldn't you want to watch Kansas State, UCLA, Ohio State, Tennessee and Florida State play each other?

Instead, some pencil-pushing, pencil-necked geek locked in a basement room at The Seattle Times is helping to determine who plays for the national championship by his computer program. And in a sick way, it's probably fairer. Florida State lost to North Carolina State 24-7 in Week Two and the voters forgave and forgot. Kansas State lost 36-33 Dec. 5 and it was screwed.

6. An end to the NBA lockout. I don't want a NBA season. I'm just sick of reading stories about the lockout.

7. Reason in baseball. The owners, exhilarated by the great 1998 season, have lost it again. They have already spent over a billion dollars in contracts this off-season. Kevin Brown, now of the Dodgers, signed a seven-year, $105 million contract.

The Astros just withdrew from the bidding for Roger Clemens because his agents want not only a trade but also a new contract. That's not the way it works--you trade for a guy because he's under contract and not available as a free agent.

Instead, Clemens' people asked that the two-year, $16.1 million deal he has now be extended to a three-year, $43.5 million deal, according to the Houston Chronicle. That amounts to adding a year to the contract for $27.4 million if I subtracted correctly (give or take a few ten millions).

Baseball is killing itself if only five teams have the budgets to be able to compete for the title. In 1998, everyone knew the Yankees would win the World Series, but the home run race was there to captivate the imagination. Baseball can't bank on a similarly intriguing story this summer to distract fans from the lack of excitement in the standings.

8. If I can't get wish number seven, I want to be a major league starting pitcher.

9. Defensive Driving classes for "Crazy Shuttle Guy." If you live in the Quad, you know who this guy is. He shouts at passengers, drives crazily but always manages to be late, misses stops, leans out the window to make obscene gestures at other drivers, and, like George Costanza's father, always "stops short."

10. Congress to make moving a sports franchise punishable by anything the spurned fans can come up with short of death. Any kind of beating, whipping, electrical stimulation, or painful and possibly humiliating medical procedure (we are talking about old men in most cases) would be fair game.

This isn't too much to ask for, is it? Happy Holidays.