My nephew told me today that his friend has twice, in as many visits, been peed on by monkeys at the Lincoln Park Zoo. And we decided that Lincoln Park Monkey Whiz would make an excellent name for a microbrew.

Me: What do you have on tap?

Waitress: Pete’s Wicked Winter, Sam Adams Octoberfest, LP Monkey Whiz . . .

Me: I’ll just have a Bud Light.

My nephew and I were sharing a golf cart on a Gulf Coast golf course that has recently been denuded of 150 wild boars, captured by boar wranglers and repatriated nearby. And it occurred to us that Gulf Coast Wild Boar was another appealing name for a specialty beer. A good complement, perhaps, to the Man-Wrangled Wild Boar on a bed of endive that you just ordered as an entree.

(Speaking of Gulf Coast golf courses: Tom Friedman, author of From Beirut to Jerusalem and The World is Flat, once said to me, “I enjoy your golf writing.” By the time I thought of a response — “I enjoy your gulf writing” — he’d been gone for a full five minutes, a phenomenon the French call esprit d’escalier, or “the wit of the staircase.”

But back to microwbrews. In thirty seconds, you ought to be able to think of at least three dozen superior names for boutique beers, names drawn from phrases that already exist all around us. I’ll get you started:

Valley Forge National Park

Tommy Bartlett’s Water Show

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

International Date Line

Do you pronounce the word route to rhyme with boot or to rhyme with doubt? Wide receivers invariably run “rowts.” But they drive, in every single instance, on “Root” 66. So which is it?

Do you take a cruise in the Care-uh-BE-in or in the Cuh-RIBBY-in — or in neither? And for that matter, is it neither (to rhyme with seether, like the Veruca Salt song) or neither (to rhyme with tither, one who gives ten percent of his income to the church)?

Does lithe rhyme with seethe or with blithe? Is it niche to rhyme with itch, or niche to rhyme with leash?

Is forte for-TAY or fort?

There are people who change the pronunciation of their name with each movie, as in director Martin Score-SEZ-ee. (Or is it Score-SAY-zee?) Kim BAY-singer or Bass-injur, to rhyme with passenger?

I don’t like it when adults (uh-DULTS) call themselves ADD-ults. These same people think they sound ma-TOOR, but I say they’re imma-CHOOR.

Nor do I like the way golf announcers say AM-uh-tur instead of AM-a-chur. It bugs me often (to rhyme with coffin, not often to rhyme with coughed-in.)

Natives of my home state of Minnesota frequently say root to rhyme with soot instead of boot.

They say roof to rhyme with hoof instead of goof, even when referring to former Twins catcher Phil Roof. Many Minnesotans say sorry to rhyme with story instead of starry.

They often — offin — pronounce aunt to rhyme with haunt rather than aunt to rhyme with can’t –- something I can’t (to rhyme with aunt) abide.

In most other instances, I embrace regional variations. In Philadelphia, people say yooj, as in “The Iggles just took a yooj dump.” In Boston, tuna is a stereo receiver and tuner is the nickname of Bill Parcells.

It’s New Orleans (or N’awlins), not New Or-LEENZ. The soft-rock group of the ‘70s pronounced it the latter way, but then they also put out this album cover, proving my point.

English is confusing, and sometimes I don’t know if I’m coming or going. Literally so in the case of via: Is it via (to rhyme with hiya) or via (to rhyme with see ya)?

Is fetid pronounced FEET-ed or FETT-id? It has to be one or the other, unless you’re a celebrated caterpillar, who is at once much-feeted and much-feted.

That’s all for now. Merry Christmas from the Rushins. (For the last time: It’s Rushin like concussion, not Rooshin like solution.)

I own a gorgeous apple-red acoustic-electric guitar on which I literally can’t play a lick. When I got it, I taught myself the intro to Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold the World.” But my early enthusiasm wore away, followed soon by my calluses, and the guitar now sits there – worse, stands there, in its thirty-dollar stand – and mocks me.

My world is full of these unused things – monuments to my indolence – from the health-club swipe card on my keychain to the hybrid bicycle that I’ve mounted once. (Mounted on the wall of my garage, that is, where it’s even more stationary than the stationary cycle in the basement.)

I had a summer fling with my XM satellite radio. But it’s given me the silent treatment since the baseball season ended. We still share a bedroom, but I no longer turn it on. And it no longer turns me on, though I’m still its Sugar Daddy, paying ten bucks a month for its company.

Last winter I bought a pair of hockey skates and resolved to dominate Open Skating with Ovechkinesque displays of brilliance, sticklessly stickhandling past sequined eight-year-old figure-skaters at my local rink. They are the first pair of CCMs I’ve ever had that weren’t hand-me-downs, and I’ve worn them once: In the hockey aisle at Dick’s, where – to be fair – they looked sensational in the shoe mirror.

Still, I’ve discovered that I prefer not ice skating to not Rollerblading, something I’ve been doing for the past several years, since I bought (and soon forgot about) my in-line skates, knee and elbow pads.

I own a set of poker chips that would make Steve Wynn blush and they came in an aluminum briefcase of the sort that is usually stuffed with bills and mistaken for an identical aluminum briefcase in spy movies. Every time I look at that velvet-lined case — and I do so often — I wish I played poker. But I don’t. Ever.

Three Christmases ago, I gave my wife an iPod that to this day has not been opened. It sits in a closet, still shrink-wrapped in its cellophane sarcophagus, so old by Apple standards that the very same model is now called an “iPod Classic.”

Every other mint item in our house is mine: Graphite-shafted, self-mulching, remote-controlled reminders that love is a fickle mistress, fading long before the warranty does.

Most of these things evolve and survive, adapting in a Darwinian way to their environment: Treadmills turn into coatracks, Ping Pong tables are perfect for folding laundry. That bench press – now a bookshelf – says I seldom finish what I start. And often don’t even start what I start.

But I do finish some things. Last spring, for instance, we fulfilled a longtime wish and finished our basement. I haven’t been in it yet. But I hear they did a beautiful job.

We’ve all seen those officially licensed caskets emblazoned with NFL and Major League Baseball logos that let recently interred fans of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays feel — in terms of crowd size and ambient noise — as if they never left the Tropicana Dome.

We’ve seen those Nascar-themed caskets inspired by Jim Murray’s line from the Indianapolis 500: “Gentlemen, start your coffins.”

And perhaps you’ve even seen my favorite chariot: This coffin, in a plain brown wrapper stamped “Return to Sender.”

When the inventor of Gatorade died last month, I got to thinking about how I’d like to spend eternity and figured having my ashes placed in a Gatorade cooler and dumped in celebration over a coach’s head might not be a bad way to go, even if it meant spending eternity shampooed down the shower drain at the Superdome.

I’d be happy to have my ashes placed in the Globetrotters’ “water” bucket and deployed in their timeless confetti gag — scattered across the front row of some Rust Belt armory or auditorium. Or loaded into a confetti cannon and shot in celebration from the rafters at the Final Four. What’s more Final than that?

But as Deathstyles of the Rich & Famous go, nothing beats the last wishes of the guy who invented the Frisbee. He once told our very own Ogar — just returned from Italy, if I’m not mistaken — that he’d like to have his ashes placed in a Frisbee mold and then be thrown onto his neighbor’s roof, there to spend eternity.

Let me respond to a libelous comment attached to the previous post. “Toma” suggests that my paper-route customers would have been more inclined to pay me had I actually delivered my newspapers instead of throwing them down the sewer.

For the record: I never threw a single paper down the sewer, but instead heaved my entire inventory, still bundled, into the Dumpster in the parking lot of Hillcrest Elementary School, in much the way Newman stashed his mail in Jerry’s storage locker for years.

Incidentally, a postman in Wales who was discovered in 2004 to have hidden 25,000 items of mail in his house was named Newman.

Had I thrown my papers down the sewer they never would have been found. What I didn’t know was that Hillcrest, in the early ’80s, was a hotbed of Dumpster-diving and so my papers were eventually discovered and traced to me. Penny Saver executives had me summarily de-bagged, which is even more painful than it sounds.

On a related note: katiemc reports that collecting a Monopoly windfall when landing on Free Parking brought with it the risk of having one’s face sat on, followed by a second (and greater) indignity: The full fury of her brothers’ flatulence.

The preferred method among my siblings was to “crease” on a Nerf basketball, which was then clapped over the victim’s face like a chloroformed handkerchief. You could similarly befoul an aspirin bottle, which was then fitted over my nose while I slept, like the evil opposite of an oxygen mask.

I should mention that these acts were almost always conceived — and perpetrated with delight — by the aforementioned “Toma.”

Only two weeks left until Christmas and on Rhapsody’s “Holiday Music” channel I’ve heard cuts from “James Brown’s Funky Christmas” and “Christmas with the Beach Boys” and countless numbers in which a Carpenter (usually Karen) sings about a carpenter (usually Jesus).

But I still haven’t heard the two best Christmas songs of all time: “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses and “Christmas in Hollis” by Run-DMC. Yes, I know I can instantly summon them on iTunes or YouTube, but that’s cheating, like buying a set of Topps cards instead of acquiring them the right way: In drip-torture fashion, one pack at a time, in the futile hope that you’ll find one Rod Carew as you pile up sixteen Dick Ruthvens.

Today’s punks will never know the agony of huddling around the radio for days on end, like a Londoner in the Blitz, hoping to catch “Boogie Wonderland” after hearing only the last eleven seconds of it once, while not yet having enough paper-route money to buy the damn album, largely because everyone pretended to be on vacation when I came to collect, though I knew full well that you were in there, Mrs. Flanagan, unless you left your sprinkler and “The $10,000 Pyramid” on while you went to your cabin.

My friend Katie McCollow points out in the Chicago Tribune that there is now something called Monopoly Express for those people who haven’t the fortitude — or the fortnight — required to play real Monopoly.

In third grade I slept over at Sean Burke’s house and played Monopoly all night in the basement and woke up at 8 a.m. having passed out on the board, my face pock-marked by pewter shoes and top hats. I staggered home bleary-eyed, an 8-year-old Edward Olmos, knowing the game would require another nine days to play out.

So I know all about the sonic Monopoly Express that is iTunes, but I’m going to do this properly, and sit by the radio until I hear Run rapping, “December 24th on Hollis Ave in the dark/When I seen a man chilling with his dog in the park . . .”

“Christmas Wrapping,” meanwhile, was unaccountably left off my list of Best Supermarket Songs of All Time: “A&P has provided me with the world’s smallest turkey.” It is the photographic negative of Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne,” which begins with a dude spotting a chick he once dated in the frozen food aisle on Christmas Eve.

“Christmas Wrapping” ends with a chick spotting a dude she hopes to date in the checkout line on Christmas Eve. Totally different, though released at the same time, like the eight or nine Capote movies that coincidentally came out 39 years after “In Cold Blood” was published.

It’s impossible to watch an hour of TV on a Sunday without seeing two dozen pharmaceutical commercials for things like Flomax, in which three gray-haired buddies with enlarged prostates go marlin fishing, mountain biking and then kayak down the Colorado, the rushing river a subtle reminder that your Flomaxed urine stream will soon resemble a Class VI rapids.

I wonder how former Cardinals quarterback Neil Lomax, who now runs a company called Promax, feels about Flomax. Or for that matter, if Eric Dickerson resents what the drug companies have done to his nickname: E.D.

Robert Louis Stevenson was similarily victimized. Until recently, you saw the initials RLS and thought: Monogrammed towels of the Treasure Island author. Now, of course, you think Restless Leg Syndrome.

Can anyone explain the Cialis ads in which naked couples park matching bathtubs in the remotest of places: A bayou in one, an oceanside cliff in another and a cow pasture in the spot that aired just after Andy Rooney last night? Last time I called Avis, his-’n’-her claw-footed, cast-iron tubs with four-wheel drive weren’t available for off-road bathing. But then I didn’t have my Wizard number.

Dr. Robert Jarvik flogs Lipitor. I’ve always felt a little sorry for the inventor of the Jarvik heart. He’s married to Marilyn vos Savant, reputed to have the highest IQ ever recorded, which must have been a buzzkill for him when they met:

SHE: “So, what do you do?”

HE [falsely modest, blushing on cue]: “Oh, you know, I . . . invented the heart. But let’s not talk about that. What do you do?”

SHE: “I’m the smartest person on Earth. [forced chuckle of self deprecation.] If you can believe the Guinness Book of World Records, that is.”

But mostly, as I watch these commercials playing endlessly during football games and basketball games and golf tournaments, I wonder why every one of the brand names is interchangeable with a person or place in sports. Think about it:

Lunesta, Levitra, Zyprexa, Boniva.

Knievel, Palestra, Johnpaxson, Loduca.

I defy anyone to tell the sports term from the pharmaceutical in the following list:

Teixeira, Cymbalta, Peralta, Allegra. Golota, Valtrex, Villanova, Celexa. Testaverde, Provera, Torrealba, Celebrex.

Ask your doctor if prescription Redsox is right for you.

My column in Time this week is on the joys of air travel. To fasten your seat belt, insert the metal clasp into the buckle and pull on the loose end.

One of my all-time favorite movie lines is from “Stand By Me,” which I saw in 1986, when I thought I wanted to become a writer. “F— writing,” says Gordie Lachance. “I don’t wanna be a writer. It’s stupid. It’s a stupid waste of time.” To paraphrase Lincoln: All writers feel that way sometimes and some writers feel that way all the time.

I became a writer anyway. Twenty years after I first saw “Stand By Me”, I wrote my final column for Sports Illustrated and received countless kind e-mails, none more moving than the one whose header read simply: “You Can’t Leave, The Plants Will Die.” Another great movie line, from John Winger in “Stripes.”

But this is about writers, not movie lines. If you think writing is lonely work, you are, paradoxically, not alone. Almost every writer of any note was a miserable cur, or so it would seem from my heavily Post-It-Noted copy of Daniel J. Boorstin’s fascinating doorstop The Creators: A History of Heroes of The Imagination, which I read when I’d just begun to make a living as a writer.

Take Balzac. That sounds like the ad slogan for some new pharmaceutical, I know, but I’m referring to the French novelist. Honore de Balzac wrote for 16 hours a day, going to bed at 6 p.m., waking at 1 a.m., writing until 8 a.m., napping for 90 minutes, then writing again until 4. “I’ll have to lead this life for some months,” said Balzac, “not to let myself be snowed under by my debts.” On top of that, he had to endure inevitable playground riffs on the name “Balzac.”

Charles Dickens was world-famous and wealthy, a rock star of his day – the original Chuck D – but he seemed never to have turned down an assignment, and then literally book-toured himself to death. Boorstin quotes John Forster on Dickens: “He had unwittingly sold himself into a quasi-bondage, and had to purchase his liberty at a heavy cost, after considerable suffering.”

Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick and got the second-half of that title as payment: “Because he still owed Harper’s, his New York publisher, seven hundred dollars of unearned advances on his earlier books in April 1851, they had refused to give him a new advance on this one,” writes Boorstin.

Melville said, “All my books are botches” and for years after publishing Moby Dick he worked as a bureaucrat in a New York City custom house. On the 100th anniversary of his birth, in 1919, his body of work was resurrected. But not, alas, his actual body: He died in 1891 in obscurity.

Still, among miserable writers, Proust takes the cake, though he’d have called it a madeleine. Marcel Proust lived in “self-imprisonment” in a room soundproofed with cork. He sent messengers out to collect telling details for his six-volume Remembrance of Things Past — quite an undertaking to write on spec, and one that was initially rejected by his publisher.

Indeed, “the last three parts of Remembrance of Things Past,” Boorstin notes, “would be published posthumously without the author’s final revisions.”

Which calls to mind another movie line, one that his publisher might have uttered to Proust: “Oh, there won’t be any money. But when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So he’s got that goin’ for him. Which is nice.

The other day, I pulled the mail out of the box and found, beneath the daily dispatch from Bed, Bath & Beyond, a card from The White House, whose return address was embossed in gold like a ticket to the Wonka Factory.

Inside was an invitation from the President and First Lady to a White House “holiday reception” six days later. So my wife and I scrambled for sitters and flights and hotel. I’ve had a longstanding policy of going to the White House whenever summoned by the President of the United States, though until last Thursday night I had never had to implement it.

And so we dutifully turned up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and were ushered into the East Wing’s Cross Halls, on whose marble floor all manner of strange pairings have waltzed –- some literally so, in the case of John Travolta and Princess Diana in 1985.

There have been weddings in the East Wing –- Lynda Johnson was married there — but most of its couplings have been arranged marriages, as when President Carter and Deng Xiaoping, or President Bush and Vladimir Putin, walk down its red carpet for the kind of ceremonial announcement familiar from a million photo-ops. I alone made one of the East Wing’s odder pairings on Thursday — a strange union of sportswriter and White House: Oscar Madison meets James Madison.

The Marine Corps Band played “Deck the Halls” –- and the halls had been comprehensively decked: Earlier in the day, the White House Christmas tree went up in the Blue Room, whose donors in Laurel Springs, North Carolina had been named 2007 National Grand Champion Growers by the National Christmas Tree Association. It’s true of every conceivable competition: You win a national championship, you go to the White House. Even if you’re an 18-foot Douglas fir.

We immediately joined a short receiving line to see the President and First Lady. The President wrote to me this spring to tell me he enjoyed my writing in Sports Illustrated and to wish me well in the future, the presumed explanation for my presence on the guest list.

On Thursday night, he said to me, “Are you making a living these days?” I told him I was trying to avoid doing so, and largely succeeding in that effort. He asked Rebecca how she felt about that and she replied with puffed cheeks and a kind of whistling sound — a sitcom expression of the long-suffering wife.

I confessed I was writing a novel and the President said: “I hope it’s humorous.” I said, after giving it some thought, “I hope so, too.”

After a minute of conversation, the Rushins were smoothly ushered into the East Room -– I was half-expecting a trapdoor — where we compared small talk with other guests, including a female veteran who now works with other veterans: She had received a hug, she said, after asking for one.

My 6’4” wife had gone unhugged and we speculated that perhaps President Bush was like my 6’2” brother Tom, who had told Rebecca upon meeting her years ago: “I don’t hug low.” (Which is to say, he refuses to be the low party in a hug. So he always goes high, forcing Rebecca to slouch and embrace him beneath the armpits.)

Having said hello to the hosts, we were able to exhale: The wedding was over, the rest was all reception. This was the first of 19 such holiday parties that the White House will host this season and after a couple centuries of doing this they seem to have it down: Spiked eggnog, open bar, a massive buffet laid out in the state dining room, which is dominated by a pensive portrait of Lincoln, chin on hand, emulating one of my old column mug shots.

There were two beers on offer: Heavy Seas Winter Storm, out of Baltimore, and Sam Adams Light. Under the circumstances, I had the one named for a Founding Father.

In the end zone, you’re supposed to act like you’ve been there before. But no such proscription applies at the White House. And though I had been there once before and Rebecca had been a few times, we both took the advice of a guest who had been more times than we: He said to sit in as many chairs as we possibly could, for almost every one of them has held an historic fanny.

And so we set about . . . setting about, on every settee, scroll-armed sofa and claw-footed club chair in the joint, hoping to hold down a cushion that Churchill might have sat on during his 24-day stay at the White House in 1941, our keisters communing through space and time.

Thanks to the Marine Corps Band, we were indeed playing musical chairs. The Marine Corps Band has been together continuously since 1798, a record of longevity exceeded only by the Rolling Stones. The Marine Corps Band played at Gettysburg when Lincoln gave his address there, though –- to be fair –- the band’s lineup is not the same now as it was then. As with Guns ‘N’ Roses, there has been nearly complete turnover.

As the band played, we spent nearly three hours sitting in chairs, imbibing the First Nog and making chitchat: In the Red Room, in the Blue Room and in the East Room, where President Ford was sworn in after Watergate and Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy once lay in state.

It was in the Green Room, appropriately enough, that we ran into Notre Dame football coach Charlie Weis and his wife, Maura. I told the coach I had two brothers who went to Notre Dame and a sister who went to St. Mary’s. We posed for a photo that I thought I’d send my siblings as a Christmas card, until my wife gently reminded me of her existence, to say nothing of our two daughters. She suggested it might be difficult –- not to mention tacky — to Photoshop three-quarters of my family into my “family” Christmas card.

Sigh.

As the clock neared midnight –- or rather 9:30, when we’d be thrown out –- we began taking snapshots: Of the gingerbread White House, of a nativity scene to end all nativity scenes, of ourselves sitting in so many chairs that we began to wonder if this house belongs to the American people or if it in fact belongs to Goldilocks.

On our way out, we retrieved our coats at the coat-check table, which had been set up in the doorway of the White House movie theater. Invited in, Rebecca and I sat down in a pair of plush red chairs along the wall in the front row.

Told I was in the President’s seat, I thought of having a rummage in the cushions for change, then recalled that Presidents live in a cashless society, as in ancient Egypt.

And then I was back outside looking in. The Marine Corps Band played on and my wife and I stood on the White House steps, slightly nog-addled, savoring a warm, clear night. Just the two of us. Or the twelve of us, if you include Secret Service.

No matter. There was a song in my heart and a bounce in my step. And two dozen White House napkins in my coat pocket.