I wanna be a tennis commentator.

Here are 3 things Roddick could have done against the mauling Federer gave him wednesday night. It might have bought him .... three games. I don't think the pair who called the match (Carillo and Enberg?) mentioned any of these:

Flatten his groundstrokes a little. Unlike Nadal, he hits with only a fair amount of spin - not enough to hurt Federer, but enough to give him time to prepare. Hit approach shots down the middle instead of always approaching against a sideline. This takes away the angles. Mix things up by dropshotting on the approach. Make Federer think about having to move forward, not just cover the baseline.

I'd like my ESPN armchair commentary contract now, plz.

Merried holidayz.

Merry x-masing and happy new yearsing! Basically, I saw a bunch of movies. Eragon was like Lord of the Rings on food stamps. In Curse of the Golden Flower, Gong Li's bitchy queen lives in a gaudy temple and goes insane. Matt Damon's Good Shepherd takes his work home and causes the Bay of Pigs. Oh, and Night at the Museum? Sacagawea tracks an SUV and hooks up with Teddy Roosevelt.

Christmas break is great because it simplifies life to a comforting clarity. When the choices are sleep, eat, or see a shitty movie, there's little shame in option (c). Besides, it's hard to feel guilty when you're busy snoozing or gorging on the cheap cupcakes you begged out of your mom at Costco.

I picked up a few Miyazaki films for my cousins. Princess Mononoke was better than I remembered, though Claire Danes' voice-acting turn was still dependably bad. My sisters liked their set of Disney True Life Adventures. Each nature doc is expertly set to dryly funny dialogue and a playful score reminiscent of Fantasia. It's cool, yet sad to find some of the best reminders of that company's once-relentless creativity in footage over fifty years old.

In other gifting news, I brought home a Wii for my folks. The new controller has streamlined the playing experience to the point that, in the right game on the right day, I can be beaten by my parents. This is both impressive and unforgivable.

On the 28th, I managed to simultaneously strain my back and catch a cold. The exciting thing about pairing a backache with a sore throat is that each cough feels like a hard kick in the spine. I mean, that is the definition of awesomeness right there. I tried to recover by playing FFXII until 3 AM on my last few nights. I'm about fifty hours in, and my party is alternately awesome and incompetent, depending on the type of beastie that shuffles into its path. The game is great, but I don't understand why most of the characters have barely escaped puberty. Is there some rule stipulating that life in Japan ends at nineteen? I'm waiting for FFXX, where every character will be a fetus.