There are only three more days of class left. Or, more importantly, there are only 10 more Christmas shopping days left.

That means it's time to make my Christmas wish list public. Of course, feel free to send me anything that's not on the list. But make sure your gift is pawn-able, just in case.

For some people, this season causes a lot of stress. That's not the case for first-years--Christmas shopping is easy because everyone they know wants Harvard paraphernalia. If the Coop had had a rebate my first year, I would have dropped out and bought my own island in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, it was still in its everything-under-one-roof-and-losing-millions-of-dollars phase.

Back to the subject. All I want for Christmas is:

1. Food for the starving children in North Korea.

2. A timeout during this whole Clinton thing. If you're going to investigate despite the fact that America is almost as apathetic about this as Harvard students are about the Undergraduate Council, give us a break. I think a month would be nice because that way, the hearings would be getting revved up right about the time finals start. Studying will be a lot easier knowing that there's nothing good on TV.

3. MTV to go back to playing music videos.

4. A summer job.

5. A new college bowl system. The Bowl Championship Series is supposed to match the two best teams in the country. On Jan. 4, No. 1 Tennessee will play No. 2 Florida State in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl.

Meanwhile, No. 4 Kansas State, which lost one game, in double overtime, no less, didn't even get a BCS spot and is playing in the Alamo Bowl. For a team that went into the last week of the season ranked No. 1, this is worse than kissing your sister or whatever else those kinky Yalies have come up with.

As usual, there is a full deck of crappy bowls. Littering your TV during various parts of the vacation will be the Las Vegas Bowl, Motor City Bowl, Aloha and Oahu Bowls, Insight.Com Bowl, Music City Bowl and Micron PC Bowl. There's also one called the Humanitarian Bowl. If its name were true, they wouldn't play it. Idaho vs. Southern Mississippi? Pass the leftovers.

I don't see why the NCAA refuses to switch to a playoff--the season would be a similar length, the schools would get a ton of money and ratings would be incredible. Wouldn't you want to watch Kansas State, UCLA, Ohio State, Tennessee and Florida State play each other?

Instead, some pencil-pushing, pencil-necked geek locked in a basement room at The Seattle Times is helping to determine who plays for the national championship by his computer program. And in a sick way, it's probably fairer. Florida State lost to North Carolina State 24-7 in Week Two and the voters forgave and forgot. Kansas State lost 36-33 Dec. 5 and it was screwed.

6. An end to the NBA lockout. I don't want a NBA season. I'm just sick of reading stories about the lockout.

7. Reason in baseball. The owners, exhilarated by the great 1998 season, have lost it again. They have already spent over a billion dollars in contracts this off-season. Kevin Brown, now of the Dodgers, signed a seven-year, $105 million contract.