I know the competition is pretty tough, but it’s hard to imagine something much clumsier in its desperate attempt to be clever than this:

We’re trading a dogmatic president for one who’s shopping for a dog.

The next eight years may indeed be long for those looking for ways to poke fun at the president…

We’ve all seen the scene a million times: The impenetrable headquarters. The computerized security system with a fleet of guards watching a dozen screens. And then something happens. Maybe all the screens go out for a couple of seconds. Or maybe it’s just a weird glitch in the feed. We the audience know that someone has just hacked in and completely subverted the entire system. But the crack security leader looks at the monitors, grunts, and says “Well, it’s fixed itself.” And now the intruders — good guys or bad, depending on the movie — are free to romp through the site, while the monitors show empty hallways.

But on the first hour of 24 this season, there’s a scene in an air control tower where several of the controllers see a strange glitch in the system. The glitch itself is finished in a second or two — but one of the controllers actually calls his boss over to check it out. And when he can’t figure it out, he calls the FAA, who calls the FBI. Everyone along the line takes the situation seriously, and within minutes they discover a major security breach.

Now, given that this is the first hour of the new season, that discovery isn’t going to help the good guys a whole lot. But the simple fact that everyone in the scene acts responsibly and professionally and doesn’t ignore the “well, it’s fixed itself” security breach is enough to keep me watching gratefully through the rest of the season. I have no doubt that things will get absurd eventually — the show’s franchise essentially requires that – but I’m so happy to see Howard Gordon and his squadron of fellow EPs skip over this one hideous cliche, I’m willing to forgive almost anything.

Now if only they do a scene where Jack Bauer sets out to climb through an air vent and discovers it’s really only three inches wide…

Every time I’m in the middle of a project, I start having this recurring fantasy that I’ll go to bed one night, and when I wake up I’ll find that I’ve finished the damn thing in my sleep. Well, that still hasn’t happened, but it’s beginning to seem less impossible:

An article that will soon appear in the journal Sleep Medicine, detailing the experience of a sleepwalker, shows that we can send messages even when we seem to be sound asleep.

 The Sleep Medicine article — prepared by Dr. Fouzia Siddiqui, a neurologist at the University of Toledo Medical Center in Ohio, and two colleagues — describes one woman’s e-mailing while sleeping as the first reported case of “complex nonviolent cognitive behavior.” It involved not just composing messages, but also navigating past two separate levels of password security to reach the e-mail software.

According to the article, the patient suffered from severe insomnia and was taking zolpidem, which is marketed under various brand names, the best known of which is Ambien. She decided on her own to increase her daily dose to 15 milligrams, from the 10 milligrams prescribed by her doctor, to counteract what she perceived as diminished efficacy of the drug over time.

Later, she received a call from a friend, asking about a strange e-mail message that the patient had sent the caller the previous night. She had no memory of having done so. When the patient checked the computer and looked at a folder containing her sent messages, she discovered that three that had gone out within eight minutes the previous night while she was asleep, all with unusual capitalization, punctuation and language. “!HELP ME P-LEEEEESE” was the subject of one message, an invitation for “dinner & drinks,” and the message also implored the recipient to “come TOMORROW AND SORT THIS HELL HOLE Out!!!!!!”

Okay, so she didn’t actually knock out act three of  her feature script in her sleep.  But maybe if she upped her dosage a little bit, she could at least solve some of those knotty act two problems before she woke up…

…just to see him die.

Oh, wait, no I didn’t.  I guess I just hummed that song so often that somewhere along the way I internalized it as my own experience.

That sounds believable, doesn’t it?

Almost as believable as it does when best-selling religious book author Donald Walsch uses it an an excuse for publishing someone else’s mawkish essay as his own.

Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series “Conversations With God,” recently posted a personal Christmas essay on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet.com about his son’s kindergarten winter pageant.

During a dress rehearsal, he wrote, a group of children spelled out the title of a song, “Christmas Love,” with each child holding up a letter. One girl held the “m” upside down, so that it appeared as a “w,” and it looked as if the group was spelling “Christ Was Love.” It was a heartwarming Christmas story from a writer known for his spiritual teachings.

Mr. Walsch’s story was nearly identical to an essay by a writer named Candy Chand, which was originally published 10 years ago in Clarity, a spiritual magazine, and has been circulating on the Web ever since. Mr. Walsch now says he made a mistake in believing the story was something that had actually come from his personal experience.

 I just hope before he writes that essay about what it’s like to have a dead guy in your bed, he stops to think that he might not actually have experienced it himself…