Christmas with the family always carries an air of suspense. Will that present you wrapped so beautifully measure up aesthetically, socially, fiscally and - most importantly in family gatherings - be nicer than your brother's? Will it be a genuine hit or will the recipient, oohing and aaahing with suspiciously loud enthusiasm, really be feigning the ecstasy of giftgasm?

So here's a bit of information to help put you at ease: Unless it is cold hard cash, it's going to be re-gifted. The most beautiful glassware, those color-coordinated throw pillows that acrylic sweater from Wal-Mart that appears year after year - nobody keeps anything these days, even a crowd-pleaser like a bottle of Champagne. Especially, as it turns out, Champagne. Put a trace tag on a bottle of Champagne you give someone, in the manner of the scientists that study the migration patterns of birds, and you're likely to see it make half-dozen stops, so that by the time someone finally opens it, it will very likely be flat.

According to USA Today more than 70% of people say they've re-gifted, or considered re-gifting a holiday present. Gifts from co-workers (25%) and family members (22%) are the most likely to be exchanged again and again.

There are even internet sites like AOL's Re-gifting Gone Wrong or Regiftable.com that illustrate just how widespread re-gifting has become.

I re-gift on a regular basis. It's a good frugal practice, because who hasn't gotten a present that was puzzling or inappropriate but would have made the perfect gift for someone else? Rather than throw it out, pass it on.

Admittedly, I am hard to buy gifts for. My needs/wants are few and my personal taste is fickle. I hate returning things to the store, so I created a shelf in my closet where I put things specifically to re-gift at a later date.

The rules of re-gifting are but simple common sense: Do not re-gift items that have been opened or used (a family heirloom, presented as such, is the exception); do not re-gift one-of-a-kind items, which will nail you, if the item is spotted, as certainly as a DNA sample; examine any gift carefully for old cards (one may have been tucked into the box); do not re-gift to someone in the same social group in which you received the gift.

I make sure the gift fits the person first, and then I put it in a nice box and wrap it nicely. Presentation is part of the gift. The thing I hate is when you know you get a re-gifted item, and it's a cheap gift too.

Certain items are a total, dead, instant giveaway that you not only are re-gifting, but you're too lame to put any effort into it: candles, soap, random books, mysterious CDs (unless your brother wants the hip-hop version of "Man of La Mancha"), obscure software, cheesy jewelry, scarves (do we not all own a scarf?), fruitcake, pens, cologne, boxed sets of extinct bath products (Jean Nate? No, no, no), videos or DVDs obviously acquired on a street corner, socks and any appliances or electronic gear the giftee would be puzzled to receive because they probably just got rid of it (including hot-air popcorn poppers and anything with a cassette deck in it).

Re-gifting is not without peril. The Web is filled with stories of re-gifters who have fouled up: the crystal vase, that perennial wedding favorite, with a gift card inscribed to somebody else; the fancy food with an expiration tag dating back to the late 1990s; the freshly washed pajamas that might have passed as new if it weren't for the sock and dryer sheet inside the leg.

Do you have a funny re-gifting story? Share in the comment area below.

My birthday was never a big deal to the world as a whole. Sure it was a date circled on my calendar and that of friends and family, but beyond that it was just another day. That changed ten years ago.

It changed when terrorists board airplanes on the morning of September 11, 2001 and attacked our country. It changed when more than 3,000 Americans who were just going about their lives, tragically died at the hands of these extremists.

All of a sudden – my birthday, 9/11 was no longer just another day; it was now a date spoken of almost every day, a day that bruised our American soul and changed the way we lived every subsequent day.

Since 2001, when people ask my birthday and I respond,” 9/11,” almost every reply is, “oh, I’m sorry.” I’ve never known how to react to that. My sarcastic standard response is, “it was my birthday before it was a tragedy – unless you ask my mother.” It typically gets an awkward giggle followed by a quick change of subject.

As an American, I feel that each life lost on that day left a hole in our collective soul. My heart aches for the children who lost parents, the husband who lost wives, friends we shall never see again. I fill with pride hearing about the everyday hero’s that stood strong in the face of tragedy that day – from Mark Bingham and the “Let’s Roll” heroics of Flight 93 to the fireman and emergency workers who worked tirelessly to save every American life possible.

I don’t mean to sound trite to question how I celebrate my birthday on a date that our nation mourns. In the grand scheme of things my birthday is even less important in light of the tragic events we commemorate this weekend. Is it possible to have a HAPPY day when such hurt still tears apart our country. I’m not sure – but I try.

So Happy Birthday to me and may God Bless America.

LeBron James

Last night millions of Americans, sports fans and curious observers, tuned into ESPN’s LeBron James infomercial to hear the NBA star’s decision on a future team.

According to Nielsen overnights in the nation's top 56 markers, ESPN's The Decision presentation, averaged a 7.3 rating. The performance marked the highest overnight rating for any non-NFL ESPN program in 2010 and was the top-rated program in all of television, cable or broadcast, according to officials at the sports programmer.

During the special, interviewer Jim Gray asked LeBron: "Ever want to go through this again?"

I can answer for most viewers – Hell, no! Please. Never again!

The news that James was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to join the Miami Heat could have been handled with an announcement or a tweet but instead was blown up into an hour-long, prime-time special that was anticlimactic at best. But The Decision and the LeBron saga does give us some clues – good and bad – to making life and communicating life decisions.

1. Distinguish and acknowledge the situation at hand

Identifying the decision you want to make is your first undertaking. It may not be as easy as first seems. Whether your problem is big or small you need to identify the specific problem in order to start making decisions. LeBron’s decision to forsake his hometown Cavaliers for the Miami Heat failed to clearly distinguish the reason for his choice – was it to win championships or to play with buddies Wade and Bosh?

2. Review your information

Once you have gathered all the facts you need to decide what is relevant to the issue. Due to either the softball questions of Gray or LeBron’s process, he failed to clearly state why the reasons why Miami was better positioned for a championship run than any of the other five teams he considered. The hometown Cavalier fans who supported LeBron the last seven years deserved that.

3. What are there consequences?

Consider what the outcomes of your decision will be. Check to make sure you've gathered all the facts and your information accurate? Be sure to consider all your alternatives and what the consequences will be from your decision. Miami is a team with, right now, only four players under contract. Even the formidable Lebron-Wade-Bosh trio will be challenged in a five on three match-up with the rest of the league. What is this gamble doesn’t pay off and the trio nets zero championships for the Heat? Does King James tarnish or even lose his crown?

4. Did you make the Right Choice?

Obviously we won’t the outcome of LeBron’s decision for years to come. Key to LeBron’s success and any successful decision is determination. Once you make a decision you need to put it into action. Don't worry about your decision being 100% full proof. Until you put your decision into motion you will not know the results of your action. Monitor your decision and make the necessary adjustments as you go along if you need to.

Based on The Decision, here is a simple guideline you can use to help you when making decisions, it's called OAR.

O = Objectives that you are seeking.

A = Alternative choices that are available to you.

R = Risk that go along with the alternative choices. 

By DAVID POGUE, The New York Times

Published: July 7, 2010

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

Last month, the standards editor at The New York Times wrote a memo that shocked — shocked !— bloggers everywhere. He asked Times writers to avoid using the word “tweet” (as in, “to say something on Twitter”).

“We don’t want to seem Paleolithic,” he wrote. “But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords.”

That the Internet’s reaction was so swift and harsh only proves the point: the techno-savvy population can’t even conceive of the existence of a less savvy crowd. If you use jargon every day, you can’t imagine that millions of people have no idea what you’re talking about.

I do a lot of public speaking. And even today, when I ask my audience how many know what Twitter is, sometimes only a quarter of the hands go up.

The response depends a lot on where I’m giving the talk and the audience’s age.

But one day it occurred to me: how would they know? All of these buzzy social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter sort of crept up on us. The government never mailed fliers to every household explaining what it’s all about.

As a public service, therefore, I’m offering a handy clip-’n’-save guide to the social networking services you’re most likely to hear about at this summer’s barbecues. (Warning: This is an extremely basic overview. If you’re already someone who, you know, tweets, this will all seem like old news. But it’s not intended for you.)

These services all have a few things in common. They’re all free. They’re all confusing at first. They all require time to understand and exploit. You can interact with them from your cellphone, which is part of why they’re so popular.

FACEBOOK

This is the biggest social networking service, with 400 million members — 22 percent of everyone on the Internet — and it’s growing by 5 percent a month.

It’s a glorified “facebook”— name-and-photo directory — of the sort that colleges distribute to incoming freshmen. (In fact, Facebook started out exactly that way, as an electronic facebook at Harvard.) You answer as many questions about yourself as you feel comfortable sharing: your name, contact information, relationship status, favorite music and maybe a few photos. Then you search for friends, past or present. When they accept your friend invitations, you can now see their Facebook pages and they can see yours.

Why you’d bother: Facebook is great for sharing news, photos and videos with people who might care; for finding long-lost friends (or snooping on old lovers); for joining groups that support various causes or interests; for sending messages (it’s somewhat more streamlined than regular e-mail); and for playing games with each other (FarmVille, Mafia Wars).

Why not: Facebook keeps making policy and programming blunders that expose personal information to other Web sites. It also lets its advertisers place ads on the pages of very targeted members: divorced 45-year-olds in Texas, for example.

Similar: MySpace (a teenage and preteenage crowd, heavily focused on pop music and do-it-yourself page designs), Bebo and many others.

LINKEDIN

It’s Facebook for the professional set. Here, the concept is establishing a “who you know” network of current and former business colleagues.

Why you’d bother: LinkedIn is especially useful when you’re looking for a new job — or a new employee, which helps explain its 70-million-strong global membership — because you’re no longer limited to asking your immediate colleagues for referrals. Now you can ask colleagues of colleagues, which greatly expands your reach. LinkedIners can also vouch for one another as references.

A popular feature called Answers lets you ask business-related questions of people who might know — advice on everything from résumé formatting to business software.

Why not: As with Facebook, not all connections are legitimate. When people accept “friend” invitations from people they don’t actually know, the whole trusted-colleague concept weakens.

TWITTER

This is the service that lets you send tweets — er, brief, 140-character updates that feel a lot like text messages. They can be news, jokes, observations, links, gripes, questions, anything.

Except instead of sending them to just one person’s cellphone, you’re sending them to a handful, or thousands — as many as have signed up to receive them from you. Meanwhile, you’ve signed up to receive other people’s postings (to “follow” them). Once you’ve signed up for a few good ones, the messages scroll up your screen, like the transcript of a global cocktail-party conversation.

You can use Twitter on its Web site, but it’s much easier if you do it using a free Twitter-reading app for your computer or phone, like TweetDeck, Twitterific and Twitter (the official Twitter app for the iPhone, formerly called Tweetie).

Why you’d bother: News frequently breaks on Twitter (by being passed around so fast that pretty soon, everybody’s heard it). It’s fun to follow famous people; the stuff they (or their minions) type appears directly on your phone or computer screen, without any layers of interpreters in between.

Using search.twitter.com, you can find out what the world is saying about you, your company or any topic that interests you.

And if enough people, or the right people, follow you, you can get something truly revolutionary: expert, instantaneous feedback on questions or opinions.

Why not: Twitter can be a lonely place when you first sign up. Figuring out whom to follow, and how to get people to follow you, takes time and effort. And Twitterites use a lot of conventions and shorthand codes that can be confusing at first.

Similar: Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Facebook updates.

FOURSQUARE

As cellphones with GPS become more popular, crazy new possibilities pop up — like Foursquare.

It knows where you are. So when you open the Foursquare app on your iPhone, Palm, BlackBerry or Android phone, you see a list of restaurants, bars and shops near where you’re standing. By “checking in” (tapping the name of the one you’re in), you broadcast your location to your friends. There’s a game element, too: you earn points whenever you check in. In fact, whoever visits a certain place the most becomes its “mayor,” and may be rewarded by a giveaway from that business.

Why you’d bother: You can see where your friends are right now, making it easy to meet them. Businesses can offer you free products as you walk by (“Since you’re right outside, how ’bout a free coffee?”) — win-win marketing. And your buddies can leave pointers about an establishment (“avoid the halibut”) that appear right on your screen as you enter. Really cool concept.

Why not: With not quite two million members — mostly club-hopping twenty-somethings — Foursquare isn’t for everyone. Most people don’t use it, and most businesses aren’t listed yet.

Similar: Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite.

YELP

It’s a huge database of restaurants, shops, hotels, doctors, museums and attractions, all easy to find, with store hours, directions and phone numbers, covering 34 cities. But the magic is in the customer reviews: 11 million of them so far, mostly helpful and articulate.

Why you’d bother: Armed with those reviews, you have no excuse to go to a terrible restaurant or shady shop again.

Why not: There’s always a chance that the reviews are being manipulated (although the company says it’s diligent about filtering out suspicious ones).

Similar: OpenTable, Urbanspoon.

THE BOTTOM LINE

These sites all derive their power the same way: We, the people, provide the information — not the Web site owner. Some of these services establish lines of communication between people who might otherwise never meet, joining them by interest rather than geography. Others connect you with people you do know, or once knew, so that you can help each other out.

You may find absolutely nothing of value to you in these sites, and that’s fine. But isn’t it better to make that decision now that you know what you’re ignoring?

Happy tweeting!

It's a third summer of big balls on ABC's Wipeout!

The last couple of summers have been filled with new TV shows being offered up by networks and cable to a starved audience ready to be entertained. This summer is no different, but unlike last year that soared with shows like Royal Pains and True Blood, this year the summer TV menu is more about the stupid and juvenile and absurd. It is a summer a guilty pleasures that most of us wouldn’t dare admit to watching!

Summer of 2010 is the year of entertaining the mindless! Here are my top five picks for TV’s dumbest shows that cant be missed (At least until the ultimate summer camp show, Big Brother premieres next week).

Losing It with Jillian

We love her screaming at people on The Biggest Loser, but we love her on this show even more as she actually moves in with the families she's making exercise until they puke. She cleans their closets, gets them over their hoarding, helps them deal with their emotional issues and still manages to find time to do her yelling workouts... all in an hour, and over the course of only a week. So much more immediately gratifying than The Biggest Loser.

Bethenny Getting Married?

The arguably most tolerable star of The Real Housewives of New York... or at least the only one we'd be willing to watch an hour of by herself, got a little show where she deals with getting knocked up and planning a wedding and juggling her life. It's charming, even though we already know that she got married and had her baby, so there's not a whole lot of suspense happening.

Wipeout

There are few shows on television that are stupider than this one, but our inner 12-year-olds can't help but watch and laugh at people falling in the most dramatically ridiculous ways.

The OCD Project

Remember Fear Factor? Well, this is sort of like that but somehow even grosser and with a purpose that isn't just cash. OCD sufferers (from germaphobes to people who think they need to flip light switches a certain number of times to avoid killing their children with their minds) are thrown into group therapy and pushed to their limits by mentally trying to kill their loved ones, to holding knives to people, to rubbing strange gutter blood on their faces, to eating pastries after rubbing them all up in a public toilet.

Drop Dead Diva

There's something about barely cobbled together courtroom scenes, tear-welling righteous melodrama and a chubby Elle Woods impression that just does it for us. Throw in Paula Abdul and the camp factor is at it's best! 

Lamar Odom of the Lakers and his bride Khloe Kardashian.

Call it booty-lucky!

When the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Boston Celtics last night in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, the team not only won its 16th NBA Championship it also won the second jewel in the 2010 Kardashian Crown.

With Lamar Odom winning an NBA championship last night -- two of the Kardashian sisters have now helped lock down the last TWO major sports titles ... which leaves Kourtney in a pretty tough spot.

The three Kardashian sisters - Kourtney, Kim and Khloe - are the famous siblings at the center of E! Network reality series Keeping up with the Kardashians.

Kim Kardashian used her lucky butt to help boyfriend Reggie Bush secure a Super Bowl ring with the New Orleans Saints. Khloe Kardashian, who married Odom just days before the start of the 2009-2010 NBA season, was the Lakers secret weapon last night.

Hopefully Khloe and Lamar will have better post championship relationship success than Kim and Reggie whose relationship ended mere days after the Saints Super Bowl victory.

Third sister Kourtney, whose on again off again boyfriend and he father of her new baby isn’t a professional athlete, could be a lucky charm for some athlete looking to win a World Series or other sports title. Line up guys to get a date and a championship and the third jewel in the Kardashian crown!

Nashville's Arnold Myint on Top Chef D.C.

Recently the New York Times published an article about how Bravo is using traditional consumer product marketing methodology to dictate programming and focus of the networks reality television programming.

The article, tied to the premier of Bethenny Getting Married? – an extension of Bethenny Frankel’s three seasons on The Real Housewives of New York City, highlights Bravos use of viewers’ opinions culled on the Web and pinpointed through more traditional market research. These traditional consumer products and goods (CPG) tools tend to dictate which Bravo stars graduate from ensemble reality shows to their own programs.

But I think the Times missed the key Bravo programming tactic that the network uses more than any other – BEATING THE DEAD HORSE.

How many versions of Housewives and their shrieking, drinking and backstabbing can we endure? The network has already tried (and failed) two different attempts to duplicate the success of Project Runway, which it lost to rival Lifetime network. And talk about formula programming – just swap out designers, for hair stylists, interior designers, chefs and now artists (new Work of Art produced by Sarah Jessica Parker) – in a format that is stale and repetitive.

The dead horse beats loudest for my all-time favorite Bravo program Top Chef.

Top Chef set the gold standard for reality competition with engaging hosts (Padma and Tom), thrilling competition, and exotic locales and food. The new season, set in Washington D.C., should have me chomping at the bit – and not just because it features my favorite chef and Nashville friend Arnold Myint of Cha Cha and Suzy Wong fame. But instead of excitement, I have heartburn.

I’ve suffered the last 3 months through the unnecessary Top Chef Masters, hosted by the boring Kelly Choi and the most un-critical critics in the business. Do we really need a chef with the title of Master? The contestants didn’t seem inspired for the crown! The win wouldn’t skyrocket them to fame, because they are already famous with books and restaurants and pots lines!

So please Bravo – stop beating that dead horse. Leave it alone. Let the Top Chef gang use it for a quick fire challenge. I know that Arnold Myint would whip it into a fabulous specialty cocktail – much better than the bad duplicate programing it’s being used for instead!

Mandela's Word Cup

Clint Eastwood’s Invictus was my favorite movie of 2009. The true story of events in South Africa before and during the 1995 Rugby World Cup was inspiring and told the story of the host nation following the dismantling of Apartheid and the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela s South Africa’s first democratically elected leader.

Invictus showed how Mandela used Rugby, an unlikely instrument, to unify a torn and fractured country. Whites loved the sport. The national teams, the Springboks, were the white nation's high priests. But black South Africans hated rugby, and the Springboks in particular, whose green jersey they saw as a loathsome symbol of apartheid oppression.

Mandela himself wasn’t particularly a rugby fan before the 1995 World Cup, but he was a visionary who saw the potential of sport to change a nation. That's why he seized on the Rugby World Cup.

Mandela—in a tremendous act of self-interested generosity toward the vanquished whites—allowed South Africa to host the tournament, which had been awarded to the country in 1992. And then he convinced his black compatriots to make the Springbok team their own, even though there was only one nonwhite player on the 15-man roster. He did this by enlisting the white stars of the team to his cause, persuading them to learn the new national anthem (previously a song of black protest) and to reach out to what initially was a mightily skeptical black population.

Fifteen years later that same vision and belief in the power of sport that Mandela planted with the Rugby Cup (which South Africa surprisingly won) is bearing fruit on the world’s biggest sporting stage – The FIFA World Cup, which kicked off yesterday in Johannesburg.

The vision though for this World Cup isn’t as clear as the goal of national unity in 1995. South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 tournament and the estimated 450,000 international visitors from all over the world was supposed to be an economic coming out party and establish South Africa as the continents progressive leader in industry and commerce. But the national that spent billions on stadiums and infrastructure for the event still battles a 27% unemployment rate, 20% of its population lives in poverty, and thought the lowest on the continent, a staggering national crime rate spurred by illegal sex trade and prostitution.

Maybe sport can propel change in hearts and minds but not in dollars and sense. We have a month of soccer World Cup action to see if Mandela proves the world’s doubters wrong, just as he did with that Rugby World Cup.

The cast of Fox's "Glee" is hitting the road for a live concert tour.

Taking a cue from "American Idol," 20th Century Fox TV announced that the scripted Fox musical comedy will embark on a four-city stage tour, with dates in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and ... Phoenix.

In addition to a title with double exclamation points, "Glee Live! In Concert!" will include performances of "Don't Stop Believin," "Somebody To Love," "Jump," "Don't Rain on My Parade" and "Sweet Caroline."

The show is conceived by series co-creator Ryan Murphy, and cast members will include Lea Michele (Rachel), Cory Monteith (Finn), Amber Riley (Mercedes), Chris Colfer (Kurt), Kevin McHale (Artie), Jenna Ushkowitz (Tina), Mark Salling (Puck), Dianna Agron (Quinn), Naya Rivera (Santana), Heather Morris (Brittany), Harry Shum, Jr. (Mike) and Dijon Talton (Matt).

"The response of the fans to our little show has been so immediate and so gratifying, we wanted to get out and thank them live and in person," Murphy said. "And what show lends itself more to a concert than ‘Glee?' We can't wait to take this show on the road and the actors couldn't be more excited to perform live for audiences in these four cities."

Dates below; tix available via Ticketmaster.

May 18 Phoenix, AZ Dodge Theatre
May 20 Los Angeles, CA Gibson Amphitheatre
May 21 Los Angeles, CA Gibson Amphitheatre
May 25 Chicago, IL Rosemont Theatre
May 26 Chicago, IL Rosemont Theatre
May 28 New York City, NY Radio City Music Hall
May 29 New York City, NY Radio City Music Hall