A hastily thrown-together, loosely-holiday-themed, final blog entry for 2007

Looking for some last-minute Christmas gifts? You are? Boy, good luck to you; you’re in trouble. Navigating a mall is like trying to get on that last chopper out of Saigon.

It was a rhetorical question, but if you’re really hard-pressed, let me recommend “Rescue Me Uncensored: The Official Companion” (Newmarket, $19.95), a bathroom read nonpareil – short, quick bursts of really funny dialogue, lots of pictures, a few of the poignant soliloquies. Essentially, it’s the best of the show, with all the weaker parts taken out. And of course there’s the requisite episode guide, a fairly just-the-facts-ma’am thing that seems out of character with the rest of the book, but those things amount to, like a whole bunch of paragraphs in a row without a break or a photo so you won’t likely be reading them.

Series creators Denis Leary and Peter Tolan tag-team on the preface, in which Leary explains how the two met and how the show came about, etc. etc., while Tolan provides a droll DVD-style commentary via footnotes. This one stood out: Leary’s discussing the day they met, and how he offered Tolan some pages of a script he had written for his perusal; Tolan interjects, “An actor with pages is like a four-year-old with a Glock: Nothing good can come of it.”

OK, so that’s one. Another, for anyone you know who might care about politics and what’s happening in and to the United States, is Keith Olbermann’s “Truth and Consequences: Special Comments on the Bush Administration’s War on American Values” (Random House, $24.95). Yeah, the title kind of seems just this side of hyperbolic, but read the essays – taken from Olbermann’s MSNBC show “Countdown;” these are what helped the show absolutely explode in the ratings over the past two years – and the title seems, if anything, a little muted.

These essays are finely tuned bursts of righteous anger, connecting the dots of assorted Adminstration scandals in a way that few mainstream journalists have done. Olbermann introduces each of the Special Comments by explaining what was going on and what inspired him to sit down and write them. Once they took off, network brass encouraged him to do even more, but he rightfully balked because he didn’t want them to become an act (though he has been allowed to slip more opinion – some would say, “even more opinion,” but that’s a discussion for another day; we’re discussing Christmas presents here – into the show’s news reports of late, which I’m not convinced is an altogether good thing, since it might dilute the impact of these commentaries).

One quibble: As nicely as these things read, you haven’t really experienced them until you’ve seen Olbermann deliver them. And, given the price for what’s a pretty slender volume and given how cheap it is to produce a DVD these days, it might’ve been nice if they had included a disk of some of the comments as an added bonus. Still, if you’ve wondered why everyone seems so complacent about the direction of the country, this assures you that others are of like mind. And if you know anyone who reads Ann Coulter or listens to Rush Limbaugh, this is the perfect gift, if you’re the sort of person who likes to see steam come out of people’s ears.

And if these items don’t float your boat, there’s always this. Or this.

Happy holidays; we’ll chat next year.