Not in the alcoholic sense (fortunately!) but having New Year’s Day fall on a Saturday seems to me a perfect alignment of weekend and holiday coming together. Here are a few items left over from the ramping out and ramping down around the turn of the year:

Quite a cold snap we’re having here. They just extended our freeze warnings out to a third night. But it could be far worse, I know – thoughts and prayers for the souls of those who lost their lives in those tornadoes that hit Arkansas and Missouri the other day. Just awful.

There’s already a lot of talk about who in the GOP should challenge Barack Obama for the 2012 presidential election. In the coming months you’re going to hear a lot about the usual suspects like Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney, but this guy is the real deal. Business savvy with a great track record of success, articulate without the need of a teleprompter to communicate what he believes, “The Hermanator” may be a bit of an unknown now, but, believe me, in the coming months you’re going to hear a lot about him. I once said that little, if anything, good can come out of Atlanta; with Herman Cain, I stand corrected.

I think in the coming months you’re also going to see more stories like this as well. From my own travel experiences I’ve seldom had a problem with the TSA folks at the airports I’ve traveled through (although more often than not there seems to be a lot of overstaffing and people standing around doing nothing, which seldom makes a good impression), but there’s no reason why they need to be government employees. TSA should be a regulatory agency alone, not the provider of airport security; right now it’s just yet another bloated and inefficient government bureaucracy.

I love a nice champagne (Veuve Cliquot happens to be my favorite), and look forward to my annual Las Vegas weekend with my Goodboys buddies if for no other reason than the mimosa-laced champagne breakfasts that kick off our days and get us in the proper frame of mind. Here’s a nice article on champagne and the push to bring champagne into the mainstream. I’m all for that – especially with the California sparkling wines providing a nice and less-costly alternative to th French brands.