The billboards are everywhere. On one, a child's tiny toes rest atop the big, burly feet of a man, suggesting a playful moment between a dad and his toddler. Another portrays a laughing boy being chased by what appears to be his boisterous father. In another, a dad and son hop across the grass on bouncy balls in a larger-than-life spontaneous moment.

All of these images are captioned, "Take time to be a dad today" and refer to the Web site www.fatherhood.gov.

Positive images of fathers engaging with their children are a welcome message in a culture where families struggle to remain intact and mothers generally bear responsibility for childrearing.

Then again, I'm certain that our Founders are gathered in some corner of heaven wringing their hands and wondering how we evolved into a government that teaches its citizens how fulfill our most basic human responsibilities. What next? Take time to brush your teeth today? Take time to blow your nose today? Take time to visit the potty today?

They don't call it a "news cycle" for nothing. As surely as the minute hand winds down the waning moments of 2009, headlines bombard us with a now familiar theme for every New Year's week: The Recap. This time, we're reviewing not only the year that ends at midnight Friday, but the decade as well -- a period one of the newsmagazines is calling the "Worst Decade Ever."

Ouch.

Decade-in-review stories interest me because I'm afflicted with a memory like Swiss cheese. Pointing and clicking my way through the headlines, I'm saying, "I remember Kelly Clarkson," and "Oh yeah ... Halle Berry's Oscar" and "Has it been that long since the wardrobe malfunction?" Time flies like a bustier at a Super Bowl, doesn't it?

Of course, there were seminal occurrences during the past 10 years that have redefined our country and our culture, and those remain with us as current events. Richard Hatch's victory on the first season of "Survivor" gave us "The Bachelor" and "Jon and Kate" and the recent ill-fated "balloon boy" attempt at celebrity.

The Facebook guys gave us "friend" as a verb and teenagers with bad grades.

Those hanging chads of 2000 gave us a generation of Bush-haters and a lucrative career for Al Gore in climate change.

The inconceivable and surreal tragedy of 9/11 gave us the war on terror, now being fought by 18-year-old men and women who were still wide-eyed children on the day it began.

It turns out that Dr. Nathan Grills of Australia's Monash University isn't the ultimate Christmas curmudgeon, but when it comes to comedy writing, let's all encourage him not to quit his day job.

Dr. Grills' satirical article "Santa Claus: A public health pariah?" published in the current edition of the scholarly British Medical Journal posed the controversial thesis that "Santa's behavior and public image are at odds with contemporary accepted public health messages."

Unfortunately, the professor's article didn't come across as satirical. Probably because it said, "Given Santa's fame, he has considerable potential to influence individual and societal behavior -- and not necessarily for good. Santa is a late adopter of evidence-based behavior change and continues to sport a rotund sedentary image."

Not even kidding.

Sneakers? Check. Morning TV show to pass 40 minutes on an elliptical machine? Check. Soft-core porn advertising for the commercial break? Check.

Who knew you could burn so many extra calories at the local gym just being humiliated by the content of an ad for designer watches? Thanks to Italian fashion icons Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, we can all cringe with embarrassment while three anorexic-looking twentysomethings engage in the latest TV and advertising fad: Sexual threesomes.

You are probably wondering how sexual perversion and timepieces go together in a television commercial. Me, too.

Apparently the target audience for the brand D&G Time includes promiscuous young adults with upward of $650 to spend on a simple wristwatch. I guess when the watch is all you plan to have on at the end of the day, it had better be special.
 

Back in September, my husband, a law professor, asked if I would host one of the student groups for which he serves as a faculty adviser for a gathering at our home. I spent a delightful afternoon helping the group put on a barbecue to launch the semester while listening to them banter about myriad issues, as law students tend to do.

This made me wonder: Are lawyers taught to argue among themselves, or are they born that way? Hard to say.

One thing these aspiring lawyers didn't debate were the basic principles that brought them together as a student group; namely, the tenets of their Christian faith. This was a gathering of a chapter of the Christian Legal Society (CLS), a national organization of lawyers, judges, legal scholars and law students whose stated purpose is "seeking justice with the love of God."

Seeking justice now brings CLS to the highest court in the land.

 Here in the Midwest, we know a thing or two about climate change. Don't like the weather? Wait five minutes. It'll change.

Perhaps it's my casual attitude about weather generally, or maybe my cynicism about big science, but the revelations of data doctoring by climate scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit didn't come as a surprise to me.

With so much at stake, one must only follow the massive money and political power trails to assume there's more to this issue than an uptick in the temperature. Climate change is the issue through which citizens of the U.S. could be forced to subject our Constitution and ourselves to the sovereignty of a worldwide governing body. The ramifications for our liberty and lifestyles of an international treaty on climate change are truly frightening - much more so than melting ice caps.

My community is a state capital and a college town, which means I live in a geographic bastion of political correctness. To wit: A recent headline in my hometown newspaper actually read: "Celebrating diversity."

Setting aside the lack of journalistic brainpower that prompted such a cliche - above the fold, no less - the story about a "multicultural appreciation event" (formerly known as an "ethnic festival") offered up just one more example of the general obsession with multiculturalism as an end in and of itself.

With Thanksgiving and the Judeo-Christian holidays upon us, I fully expect a series of equally creative headlines in the coming weeks such as "Giving thanks for diversity," "Interfaith services celebrate diversity" and "Holiday meals celebrate diversity."

Truly, the most fervent among the diversity movement are headline writers.

Thanks to Oprah Winfrey's interview of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, I'm heading out to buy her book, "Going Rogue: An American Life."

Like millions of Americans, Mrs. Palin intrigues me, not because I'm a huge fan or a huge skeptic, but because despite mountains of media content produced about her, she remains a mystery.

Those who want the stereotyped, "Saturday Night Live" image of Mrs. Palin to hold up as fact argue that the mainstream media has offered an accurate picture of the woman and that picture is "I can see Russia from my house."

Photo: Screen caption of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Tuesday was one of those days when the news can confuse us. Just as millions of Americans tuned into the painfully moving memorial service at Fort Hood, Texas, honoring 13 Americans whose lives were extinguished by an Islamist soldier in their midst, entertainment news carried headlines about a record-setting war game now available wherever toys are sold.

"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" from video game publisher Activision is predicted to be the highest grossing first-day release in the entertainment industry. It's supposed to make more than any book, movie, DVD or video game ever has made on its initial release, including all of the "Harry Potter" iterations.

We ought not be surprised, but we ought to be concerned.

It's probably just a matter of time until burglary suspect Kane Kellett files a lawsuit claiming he was denied his right to free speech.

What with the perverse, modern-day interpretations of our constitutional guarantee of expression, one can only imagine the damages he will try to collect for being held in contempt of court simply because he flipped off the judge.

For now, Mr. Kellett sits in a McHenry County, Ill., jail, where one might hope he is learning a hard - if not overdue - lesson on the importance of civility. Or not.