‘Move over’ law resonates for me

Would that Martin Luther King Jr. could have been the one to deliver the invocation at the upcoming Inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama on Jan. 20 for such an historic day. Rev. King would have just celebrated his 80th birthday when Obama took the oath of office, using the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used in 1861 for his swearing in.

Last year I made a new year’s resolution to lose some weight, and I wound up dropping 8 pounds. So with that kind of track record, I’ve decided this year I’m going to resolve to become a spectacularly wealthy icon of material success.

The annual transition from old year to new typically brings with it a bevy of predictions. Some are accurate, most are not. Though I claim no psychic powers, I can offer one guaranteed forecast for this or any other year: there will be conflict in the Middle East.

Email accounts belonging to the Melrose Free Press, numerous other GateHouse Media newspapers and several other corporations were compromised last week by a brand-new computer virus. Any emails sent to the Free Press as of Tuesday, Dec. 30 or later have not reached the newspaper and must be resent.

 For Massachusetts’ hospitals, I fear the light at the end of the tunnel may be an oncoming train. The impact of the overall state fiscal crisis and Gov. Deval Patrick’s recent emergency 9C cuts is just beginning to be felt, and already the outlook for health and human services is grim. Gov. Patrick had no easy choices, and tough cost cutting decisions absolutely had to be made.

Most people are aware that alcohol-related deaths increase on New Year’s Eve, but many do not realize that more than twice as many people are likely to die in an alcohol-related traffic crash that night than on other mid-week winter evenings.

As regular readers of this column know, this is the time of year when I like to look back on my predictions from 12 months ago to see whether my keen journalistic insight served me well in prognosticating the major events for the coming year.

As a native-born Medford guy who’s been living in Dublin for the past 16 years, I’m constantly drawing comparisons between life as I remember it around Boston and things as they are in my adopted home.

A mother cherishes an afternoon of skating with her young son.

It’s time once again for newspapers to name their top stories of the year, which is very helpful for the people who can’t recall who was elected president, or whether or not the economy imploded. Also, it fills space.

In a few short weeks, George W. Bush will be out of a job.

With the election less than a week away, we turn this week’s column over to our resident expert, Professor Civics, to answer your last-minute voting questions.

Thanks to some generous grandparents, our family became owners of a Wii game system, known for its wireless controller with motion sensors. It turns out if I’d had one of these in 1982, I’d still be in my parents’ basement, clubbing Donkey Kong with my little wrench.

Although Irish people may talk like Democrats, both at home and abroad, the country itself is more in tune with Republican values.

Science has finally invented the environmentally safe bullet. Made of non-toxic tungsten instead of nasty old lead, these fancy new bullets would not cause any harm if they were, say, eaten by a goose. Presumably they would still do some damage if they traveled through a goose at a high velocity, but what do you want?

Despite the candidates guide I wrote not too long ago, it seems there are some people who still have not decided who to vote for in the upcoming presidential election. So I’m here to help make their decision a little easier by offering them a simple quiz.

Back in February, I wrote a column about my consternation over turning 40 in seven months. Well, I know I was whining, but now that it’s actually happened and my 30s are really behind me, I have to admit: It’s even worse than I imagined.

When I was a kid, some under-funded organization I was involved with assigned me the task of selling tremendous chocolate bars for $1 apiece. My strategy was to leave them on the kitchen counter at our house, whereupon they would eventually disappear, requiring my parents to write a check to cover their cost. This plan never fails.

What we never counted on was a sudden ice storm like we had Thursday night. Within seconds the side of the house was a sea of limbs, branches and pine needles — and Lilly, our homebody dog who’d never left our sight for more than 10 minutes, was gone.