LYONS – This Valentine’s Day, as happens every year, I face the same question: What gifts shall I give my loved ones to properly express the deep and abiding love I have for them?

The one to my wife should be romantic, to my daughter appropriately daddy-ish, even though she’s in her ‘30s, to my granddaughter cute and funny, if possible, or grandfatherly doting. The cards sometimes are difficult to find, but there are enough places to look that ensure near hits, if not direct ones, in finding just the right expressions of love. What is much more difficult is finding just the right Valentine gifts for those women. I

PUEBLO – I once watched a TV documentary about orangutans and what scientists were learning about them.

One of the things I learned was just how much larger the male orangutan is than the female and how that size and power difference translated into sexual privilege – one might even call it sexual assault privilege.

PUEBLO – Greetings, fellow travelers on spaceship Earth, that marvelous blue ball on which we each and all live for a time as it runs round and round in circles within circles.

Well, that just sounds stupid. Let me try again. Jovial January, everyone! Worse.

This is ridiculous. Look, all I want to do is wish you all a “Happy New Year” – but I can’t. The most I could do is wish you all a “Happy 11 Months” – after that, who knows? No, I’m not talking about the results of the presidential election, though that could make more than a few folks in this country want to jump off the nearest bridge.

LYONS – At this time of year, great debate often rages throughout the nation regarding the very use of the word “Christmas” in addition to whether it’s appropriate for city, state and federal governments to allow displays of “Christmas” trees, lights, nativity scenes, etc. on public property and paid for with public funds.

PUEBLO – The ancient Mayans’ long-count calendar stops on Dec. 21, 2012, at the end of a 5,126-year cycle. That has some folks in this country and around the world convinced that our world will end on that day, too.

PUEBLO — I awoke in a cold sweat one night last week. I’d had a terrible dream about federal spending cuts vs. tax increases on millionaires.

What made the dream terrible and brought on the cold sweat, however, wasn’t the still-rotten state of the economy or the trench warfare each party has adopted with regard to how to make things right. Nor was it the “occupy” protestors across the nation, or all the millionaires and corporations that pay no income taxes.

Rather, it was that, in the dream, I found myself agreeing with Bill O’Reilly. Yes, that’s right. I was agreeing the often-obnoxious Bill O’Reilly, the guy who tells other people to shut up rather than acknowledge that their opinions are equal to or in any way superior to his own.