I know as a football fan in Vermont I am supposed to be hoping that the New England Patriots run the table and -- including the playoffs and the Super Bowl -- go 19-0. but week after week I find myself devoting all of my supernatural fan energy toward the Miami Dolphins instead, hoping against hope that somehow they can run the table in their own special way and lose every single game: That's right, go 0-16. At the moment, they have zero wins and 11 losses.

It's not that I dislike the Dolphins. Usually I am completely oblivious to them.Moreover, when I was a teenager living in Miami, I liked them just fine -- though if I hadn't rooted for the 'Fins, the state would have traded me to Buffalo for a couple of used sweatbands.

I even dated briefly (very briefly) a Dolphin Doll -- or a Miami Dolphins cheerleader-in-training. Actually, that implies her career track was more definitive than it probably was. Let me rephrase that: She went to high school cheerleading camps that were in some vague way affiliated with the Dolphins. She was hoping eventually to become a Dolphin cheerleader so she would never again have to date the likes of me and could instead marry a professional football player. We dated once: My father drove us to a movie and McDonald's. What the evening lacked in romance it made up for in animal fat.

But even that stunningly awful date isn't the reason why I am pulling for the Dolphins to lose Sunday after Sunday. Nope, the reason why I am sitting intensely at the edge of my couch when the scores roll across my television screen on Sunday afternoon is because I am a firm believer that you should never do something halfway -- especially when the stakes are this high. The Dolphins have the chance to enter the record books as the worst team in the history of the world if they don't blow it and win a game. Sure, there have been winless teams in the past (most recently, the 0-14 Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1976). But no team has lost every contest in a 16-game season.

Let's face it: Would anyone remember Charlie Brown's baseball team if they ever won? If they did, they would merely be like my horrifically bad Little League team when I was in fifth grade. We were something like 2-19. I honestly can't remember how many games we played. But I do know we lost all but two. Imagine, however, if we had trudged through that season absolutely winless. You can bet I would know today the exact number of times we stared at the scoreboard after the last out and saw that our streak was intact.

In any case, today may be the Dolphins' toughest test if they want to reach the record books: The New York Jets. The Jets may be every bit as bad as the Dolphins, but they've had the misfortune of winning twice this year. Ignominy -- excuse me, immortality -- is no longer an option for them.

Can the Dolphins beat the Jets? Alas, I fear it's possible. Consequently, I am hoping that in the locker room before kickoff the Dolphin coaches are talking about pride and heart. If they say one thing to their players, I hope it is this: Get out there, guys, and lose one for the Flipper.

An update: Last week I expressed my scorn for the $25,000 hot chocolate with edible gold at Manhattan's Serendipity 3. Apparently, the restaurant was more focused on gold flakes than mouse turds. New York City health department inspectors saw some -- as well as the live mouse that may have left them -- and closed the joint.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on December 2, 2007.)

Earlier this year the Air Force inadvertently moved six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles from North Dakota to Louisiana, which wouldn't have been a news story except for the facts that no one removed the warheads first and for a few hours no one was quite sure where the missiles were. Details, I know.

Could this whole near-disaster have been avoided? Absolutely. And while the Air Force has made it clear that the problem was that existing procedures simply were not followed, I would suggest they take a page from the playbook of the commercial airlines, and in the future treat nuclear missiles as if they were passengers' luggage. I know, that sounds like a lot to ask because it's clear that our nation's airlines watch over our luggage the way a mother bear protects her cubs.

And as a first step in that transition, I would encourage the Air Force to rely more heavily on the three-letter designations that the International Air Transport Association uses for airports. In other words, if they are sending a couple of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to -- for instance -- Burlington, they should put a luggage tag around them with the failsafe letters BTV: The worldwide code for Burlington International Airport.

I like those codes a lot. I first noticed them a few years ago when I was arriving in Bradford, Pa., to speak at a small college. I grabbed my suitcase in baggage and saw that Bradford had the following three-letter airport designation: BFD. I have the maturity of a 7-year-old, and so instantly I thought of what BFD really stands for: Big Freaking Deal. (Some people, of course, use a more colorful and adult adjective than "freaking," but you get the point.) BFD is the sarcastic shorthand for news or information that someone else thinks is momentous and you believe is a snooze-fest.

Yes, even before the brave new world of cell phone text messages, I was getting in touch with my inner teenage girl and thinking in three-letter abbreviations.

And ever since that trip to Bradford, those airport codes have been taking up a lot of the precious (and, apparently, diminishing) space in the hard drive behind my eyes. Now a lot of us know the basic codes, such as the fact that BTV stands for Burlington. This one makes complete sense. Many of us also know that Los Angeles International Airport is LAX, which also make sense: The LA is for Los Angeles and the X is for cool. But then there are those codes designed for aviation history geeks. To wit: O'Hare International Airport is ORD, which makes absolutely no sense unless you know that O'Hare once was called Orchard Depot Field.

My personal favorites among the codes? There's LOL, which is not Laugh-Out-Loud Airport, but is actually Derby Field in Lovelock, Nev. There's DIE (an airport that must give even the calmest flyers among us the creeps) in Madagascar. For the sports aficionados, there's PGA in Page, Ariz. and NFL in Fallon, Nev. There is SOB -- a reference either to tears or cads, depending upon your take -- in Hungary. Rockford, Ill., has RFD. And Sioux City, Iowa, has SUX, which city boosters once tried and failed to have changed, but now leverage with their special "Fly SUX" marketing campaign.

No one, alas, has FYI, XXX, BBQ or PMS. I checked.

In any case, attaching stickers with airport codes to nuclear missiles will go a long way toward restoring the nation's confidence in the men and women who control our nuclear arsenal.

Unfortunately, it won't solve the problem completely. Once those missiles arrived in Louisiana, the planes sat on the runway for four hours before anyone noticed there were live warheads on the wings. And the only way to solve that sort of human error is to bring in the very best people, the sort of dedicated individuals who would never leave luggage sitting around an airport for four hours: It's time for the Air Force to put our nuclear arsenal in the capable hands of our nation's baggage handlers.

Can anyone out there spell DOA?

(The column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on December 9, 2007.)

Hello, my name is Chris Bohjalian, and I am a Palm-a-holic.

It's true. I am addicted to PDAs -- not public displays of affection, though much to my daughter's horror I have locked lips with my wife at the shopping mall. No, I am addicted to my personal digital assistant. My Palm Treo.

A Palm is similar to a Blackberry. If I used a Blackberry, it would be my -- to use the popular expression -- crackberry. That is an indication of both how addictive these handheld devices are and how common is my dependence.

For those of you who do not use a Palm or a Blackberry (Hi, Dad!), a PDA is a cell phone, Web browser, means to receive your e-mail, camera, camcorder, alarm clock, calendar, calculator, MP3 player, and large animal veterinarian. OK, I am kidding about that last thing. A PDA is not going to help you impregnate a mare. But you get my point. A PDA is an extremely resourceful little device.

Like all addicts, I told myself for months that I was not addicted to mine. I didn't need to have it with me whenever I was away from home, I didn't need to feel its reassuring weight on the side of my belt. (Yes, I am one of those fashion-challenged geeks who hooks a PDA to his belt.)

The other morning, however, I forgot it when I was leaving for Burlington for meetings. I remembered it as I was pulling out of my driveway, but decided I would not stop and run inside the house and get it. I was only going to be gone for six hours. Surely I could survive a half-day without e-mail and incoming cell calls.

Wrong. Far be it from me to exaggerate in this column, but it wasn't pretty. Sure, the tremors were manageable and I wasn't vomiting. My pupils weren't dilated and the muscle cramping was bearable. But I was nonetheless filled with anxiety: I was convinced that people -- editors, my wife, my daughter -- were trying to reach me. I was sure that profoundly important events were occurring in my professional and personal life, and because I was oblivious to the digital dialogue, I was out of the decision-making loop. Twice I borrowed people's cell phones and called mine, just to make sure there wasn't a message waiting for me. I had to force myself to keep walking at the corner of Main Street and South Winooski because every cell in my body was screaming for me to march into the FedEx Kinko's store with its computers and Internet access.

I don't normally have an overwhelming desire to use my PDA when I'm driving, since driving and texting (or talking) is a pretty good recipe for disaster. But the fact that I did not have my PDA with me had me actually ruing the wasted minutes as I drove from Burlington back to Lincoln.

When I got home, the first things I did were to check the phone messages on the PDA and scan my e-mail on my computer. Number of phone messages? Zip. Zero. Nada. Number of important missed e-mails? Again, zilch -- unless I wanted to count the sales information and online coupons I received from United Airlines, Staples and Free People. Oh, wait: There was also a reminder that that evening's episode of "The Office" on NBC was going to be a rerun.

Now, if I were a reasonable person, I would have sat back in my library chair after reading the e-mails and realized that I was a self-important moron. The world had spun just fine without my digital participation, thank you very much. Moreover, I have to believe that if I hadn't been pining for my Palm while in Burlington, I would have paid much better attention to the flesh and blood people around me.

But I am not a reasonable person. Instead I sat back in my library chair and took a deep breath. "That was a close one," I thought, "I am never again going to forget my PDA."

Hence, I am Chris Bohjalian. A Palm-a-holic.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on December 16, 2007.)

'Tis the season to exploit the season. Actually, the season to exploit the season is winding down. Christmas is but two days away. My sense is that marketers didn't capitalize upon Christmas or Hanukkah this year with any more fervor than in past seasons.

Nevertheless, as Christmas Eve draws near, I always find myself experiencing an enormous sense of relief that the commercialization that marks our world is approaching its annual pause. At least it feels like a pause. It seems to me that even the most rabid of marketers lose a little of their growl and foam by Dec. 24. I certainly don't expect this year to be an exception.

The advertising effort that rankled me most this past month? The New York State Lottery's use of holiday songs in both the name and the marketing of its instant scratch-off games: Jingle Bills, Merry Money, and Holiday Bucks. Actually, "rankled" is too strong a word. I didn't find them offensive. I found them annoying and amateurish. If you're going to commandeer someone's venerated traditions, at least rise to the challenge of Old Navy and put a red sweater on a dog that looks like a sausage.

But now we are reaching that stage in the season when, if we are lucky, we can take a deep breath and sit very still. We can focus for a moment on all that is right with the world and all that is wrong -- on all the ways we have striven for personal decency in our lives and, alas, on all the ways we have failed. We can recall the people we have loved who we have lost, and ponder the friends and family who deserve more attention than we give them.

I find it interesting that Christmas and Hanukkah fall at the end of the year: We have a moment when we can celebrate faith and the inexplicable mysteries that drive us toward divinity, and then we can face the New Year with resolve. We can, if we are either ambitious or delusional (or both), make concrete resolutions to do better. To try not to make the same mistakes again. And again. Some of us -- the fortunate and the blessed -- will vacillate between joy at all that we have and despair that so many others are struggling for food and shelter and warmth. For safety. For survival.

The other day I had lunch with my friend Stephen Kiernan. Kiernan used to write for this paper before he decided to focus exclusively on his books. He shared with me a statistic he had recently come across for a book he is researching and writing this winter.

"What do you think is the average age of a homeless person in this country?" he asked me, and I answered 31. It was a guess, and it was way off. The answer? Nine. The age of a fourth-grader.

By almost any measure, the chasm between the rich and the poor in this country is widening, with an ever-shrinking percentage of the population holding an ever greater percentage of the wealth.

Meanwhile, we spend a large part of December encouraging one another to consume. To be frivolous. Extravagant. Self-absorbed.

OK, now I sound clinically depressed. I'm not. And my point is certainly not to add a wisp of gloom to anyone's holiday. I love Christmas as a Christian and (yes) as a consumer. I know as well as anyone that stuff is love.

But it is these days right now, as the sound and fury of bauble-buying is starting to wane, that we can meditate on what our faith and religion mean to us and what would be our priorities if we were not quite so imperfect. Sometimes, it seems, the world works best -- spins most smoothly, revolves most gracefully -- when we allow ourselves those moments of quietude and peace. It is then, perhaps, that we see most fully both ourselves and our neighbors: What we have and what they need.

Merry Christmas. May 2008 bring us the courage to look our less fortunate neighbors in the eye and tell them that this year we will try -- really, really try -- to do better.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on December 23, 2007.)

Of all the sweet nothings that have been whispered into my ear, none can compare with the following: "Your fingernails are the most disgusting things I have ever seen in my life."

Such was the observation of a nice woman who once worked in publicity for my publisher. She murmured this endearment as I was signing books on a sunny afternoon in Chicago. Apparently, her eyes had moved from my signature to the jagged, occasionally bloody strips of nail and cuticle at the tips of my fingers. And while I could have named a lot of things for her that in my opinion were far more grotesque than my fingernails -- I have five cats, any one of whom is capable of producing a hairball on demand -- I held my tongue. She was, alas, on to something.

For years I have gnawed at my fingernails, sometimes with the fervor of a wolf in a leghold trap. Nail-biting is probably not the most repellent thing a person can do in public: Nose-picking is certainly worse. But it's not appetizing to watch, especially if you're using a thumbnail as floss.

Over the years, I've tried to break the habit, but my willpower -- which is excellent when it comes to things like ice cream and OxyContin -- is helpless when it comes to the satisfyingly crunchy enticements at the tips of my fingers. Consequently, late last month I decided to see if I could break the habit as a sort of Almost-the-New-Year's-Resolution. I called upon Kerry Skiffington, a clinical hypnotherapist with offices in Middlebury and Burlington. Skiffington has more degrees and letters after her last name than people find ways to mispronounce mine. She is also very patient, but it is worth noting that one of the first things she said to me was, "I like to handle medical issues. You know, blood pressure -- not just fingernails." This, of course, made me (ITAL)really(END ITAL) to want to bite my nails.

I had never been hypnotized before. My only familiarity with hypnosis was watching hypnotists make people do the Chicken Dance at the Champlain Valley Fair. Nonetheless, I wasn't concerned that Skiffington was going to have me clucking like a game bird, and that I would discover the footage someday on youtube.com. Instead, I feared that I would be difficult to hypnotize. (Like many of my worries, this one was completely unfounded. "You were a piece of cake," Skiffington would tell me when the session was over.)

The two of us chatted about my nails -- when I snack on them, why I prefer them to pretzels -- and then she had me recline in my chair and close my eyes. She talked to me in a calm and steady voice about habits and control and those tasty SnackWells at the ends of my fingers, and the next thing I knew she was counting slowly from one to five. A half-hour had elapsed. I hadn't exactly fallen asleep, but the 30 minutes had passed in a blink. When I sat up, I felt as if I had just had a massage. I was sleepy and relaxed and very content.

People come to see Skiffington for a variety of reasons. Some hope to quit smoking, others to lower their blood pressure. She has helped clients lessen their allergies, and improve their study habits. Many people have come to her to shed weight. (Skiffington makes a distinction between losing and shedding. "You lose things you want back," she explained. "You lose keys. You shed weight.")

It's been four weeks since I was hypnotized, and many of the times I've had the urge to munch on my nails I've restrained myself. My nails aren't perfect, but let's face it: A sequoia doesn't grow in a day. My sense is Skiffington accomplished something, and someday I might not appall the people whose books I am signing -- at least until they start reading them, anyway. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I am very excited about one of the presents I found in my Christmas stocking: A folding nail file and fingernail clippers.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on December 30th, 2007.)