Our faithful correspondent Ogar sends me an interesting dispatch, which may or may not be accurate. I think I remember hearing the phrase in question during pickup games at the Southdale Y in high school, which would predate the 1989 reference that Ogar cites. Is my memory wrong? Anyway, here’s Ogar’s e-mail:

Not sure if you’re aware of this, but our mutual overly-tall pal, Manute Bol, seems to have been the coiner of the ubiquitous phrase “My bad.” Evidently, the Dinka dunker, whose language claims estate from the Nilo-Saharan superfamily, first uttered the expression after joining the Golden State Warriors in 1988. According a story in the Jan. 10, 1989 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “When he throws a bad pass, he’ll say, ‘My bad’ instead of ‘My fault,’ and now all the other players say the same thing.”

The holidays, it must be said, did not begin auspiciously for the extended family. My 6′11″ brother-in-law threw out his back while shoveling snow. We’re now a hyper-extended family. And while his injury was — and remains — excruciatingly painful, it did inspire me to compose a joke that might have fit into a Johnny Carson monologue circa 1977.

Me: “Jason is so tall . . .”

Imaginary audience: “How tall is he!”

Me:  “Jason is so tall, he needed a cut-off man to throw out his back.”

I was relieved to see Jason doubled over after I told him the joke. Alas, he was also doubled over before I told him the joke. His injury is just that painful. In fact, Jason is so tall he has to triple over in laughter or pain. (Ed McMahon: “Hi-yo!”)

The holidays began in earnest when we went to Mass on Christmas Eve and sang “Gloria In Excelsis Deo”. My brain is so hard-wired to think of all music as pop music that — after every repetition of “Deo” — I had to physically stop myself from belting out a Belafontean, “De-o! Daylight come and me wanna go home.” I also have difficulty hearing a choir sing “Gloria” without then hearing Van Morrison say “G-L-O-R-I-A” or Laura Branigan sing “I think I got your number.”

It didn’t help that I got iPod speakers for Christmas and finally began loading hundreds of old CDs onto my empty MP3 player. And though George Ivan Morrison is, at this very moment, singing “Don’t Look Back” while my entire record collection plays on Shuffle, I must defy his wishes.

It’s been years since I listened to many of these records, records like “Marvin the Album” by Frente! and “Mona Lisa’s Sister” by Graham Parker and “Volo Volo” by Poi Dog Pondering. I’ve missed them like friends. I dug “So We Go” by the Hang Ups out of a shoebox as if unearthing an Incan vase. I nearly wept on hearing “Greyhound Bus” for the first time in years, and not only because it’s a gorgeous song. Everything about it — 760-mile bus journeys; Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin; the Hang Ups’ hometown of Minneapolis — reminds me of college. The whole album sounds like fall and makes me think — I cannot say why, exactly — of brown leaves cartwheeling across a parking lot.

Many of these CDs were given to me by my older brother Tom. We shared a room with twin beds separated by a nightstand just wide enough to hold a boom box that played Steely Dan tapes more or less on a loop for three continuous years. It was Tom who gave me a Christmas subscription to CMJ, the “New Music Monthly” that always came with a mix CD. I’ve just disinterred five years’ worth of these CDs from their Case Logic crypts. Here is “Brimful of Asha” by Cornershop and “Don’t Marry Her” by The Beautiful South and “Volcano Girls” by Veruca Salt and even “Mmmbop” by Hanson. Listening to them, I am beside myself. (Almost literally, as if listening with the me of 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.)

Most of these voices were consigned to the basement by moving trucks, then buried there by marriage and children and the monotony-dread of putting hundreds of songs on my hard drive. But now I’ve done so, and find myself knowing every word to every song that comes without warning on my randomized player. These songs were too long out of eyesight, and out of earshot, but they were never far from my mind. Like the pilot light, also in the basement, the music warmed the house with a low blue flame even when I didn’t notice it was down there.

All of which says something about music and memory, as The Smiths now take their place in the Shuffle window. What it says is: There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.

There are only two seasons in New England — Fresh Chowder and Fresh Powder — and the latter was expected to begin last Friday, when the forecast called for heavy snow. “Two feet,” said the weatherman, to which my soon-to-be-4-year-old daughter said: “Dad, I have two feet. So that’s good.” I agreed that it was.

My four-year-old is, to say the least, literal-minded. When my wife asked her today if she wanted to make blueberry muffins, my daughter said: “But we don’t have any blueberries.”

Wife: “We’ll make the muffins out of a box.”

Daughter: “If we make them out of a box, we won’t be able to eat them.”

The snow was supposed to begin, according to local-TV consensus, sometime between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. And so we spent Friday morning, in a meteorological sense, waiting for the cable guy, until the first flakes finally showed up — as the cable guy does — at ten minutes ’til one.

Now, I enjoy winter as much as the next guy, and I like to think of myself as the Frost of snow. (On second thought, Frost wrote a lot about snow; perhaps I can be the Frost of frost.) But the snow that began at 12:50 p.m. on Friday did not stop falling for the next 60 hours. Which, it turns out, was not quite long enough for my taste.

Every morning my daughter and I bundled up like twin Michelin men and spacewalked into the yard to make snow angels. Mine were alarmingly large and disturbingly deep, like the crater left by a fallen satellite. “Can I play in yours?” my daughter asked. “Can I bring toys in there?” And she proceeded to do just that, treating my outline like a sunken living room while I made silent New Year’s vows to lose weight.

Every afternoon we scaled the hill at the top of our street, like Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, if Hillary and Norgay had purple sleds with their names Magic-Markered on them. Five minutes of ascent paid off in 20 seconds of descent. We went bombing down the hill, the 4-year-old freezing up front to minimize drag, while I sat in back, bobsledding at Innsbruck in my head.

We did this for most of the 60 hours, pausing only to sleep, shovel, drink hot chocolate and eat muffins made out of a box.

For two full days, I saw no news from the outside world. On Sunday morning I went on an archaeological dig in my driveway, trying to unearth the weekend’s newspapers. But they’d been consigned to the oblivion of a plow-made snowbank.

And so I’ll never know what happened this weekend. At least not until the spring, when the snow melts and a 3-month-old front page reveals itself, like some ancient rune, telling tales from the long-ago epoch of the Bush administration.

Until then, time stands still. Or rather, time jumps around like a kid in a snowsuit who has to use the bathroom but doesn’t want to go inside.

The other day I received the following request from “S. Dino” and “J. Dolina,” the Mike & the Mad Dog of sports call-in radio in Quezon City, Philippines. Sportswriterly collegiality compels me to pass it along:

Sir/Madam:

Please help us to get in touch with Mr. David Thirdkill who played in the Philippine Basketball Association (P.B.A.) in 1986-87 with the Tanduay Rhum Masters and Purefoods Hotdogs, respectively? He was adjudged as the “The Best Import” which he won in those days and prior to that stint in the P.B.A., by the way he was a member of that 1986 N.B.A. World Champions……….The Boston Celtics led by the Finals MVP Larry Bird!! We just want to interview him (Mr. David Thirdkill) these days in one of the Radio Sports Station DZME (1530khz) AM Band in the Philippines if we will still have a chance to get in touch with him (Mr. David Thirdkill), Thank you very much Sir/Madam in advance.

Now, I do have a few questions, not the least of which is this: Is “Steve,” in the Philippines, really a named used by both genders, like “Pat” or “Morgan”?

And if so, didn’t the photograph of the bald, Flintstone-bearded man on the bio page of my website tip the “Sir/Madam” scale decidedly in favor of “Sir”?

But never mind. If you know the whereabouts of Mr. David Thirdkill — or just want to relive the glory days of that ‘86-’87 Purefoods Hotdogs team — give Dino & Dolina a jingle on the DZME Listener Line. Tell ‘em Sir/Madam sent you. Let’s make this interview — “Thirdkilla in Manila”? — happen.

Another December, another inexplicable invitation from the President of the United States to attend a holiday party in his home. This year’s summons, like last year’s, arrived in an envelope whose golden, raised-letter return address — “The White House, Washington D.C.” — again made it look like a ticket to the Wonka factory.

This year, my wife suggested that my semi-retired Dad to go as my date. But he had a business commitment that he couldn’t break. Which is how Don Rushin joined Manny Ramirez and Jeremy Shockey on the list of people who have declined a White House invitation.

And so my wife and I flew to Washington last Wednesday and dropped our bags at the Willard Hotel, where Julia Ward Howe wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Martin Luther King wrote his “I Have a Dream” speech and I thought about writing something, for someone, somewhere down the line.

P.T. Barnum, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Tom Thumb, Samuel Morse, the Duke of Windsor, Flo Ziegfeld, Harry Houdini, Mae West, Gloria Swanson, Abraham Lincoln and Gypsy Rose Lee all slept at the Willard — simultaneously and in the same room, I like to think, with Houdini on the roll-away and Lincoln in the bathtub.

After a late-afternoon repast of submarine sandwiches, we turned up unfashionably early at the East Wing entrance to the White House, where we were met by a black-suited man with a clipboard. He checked his list for our names. It was exactly like the scene at a New York nightclub door, with one significant difference: I was ushered in.

Then we joined a short receiving line to see President and Mrs. Bush. When I was still ten paces from the president he said to me: “Found work yet?”

“Not honest work,” I said.

“Come on,” he said, shaking my hand as a flashbulb popped in our faces. “You must be doing something.”

“I wrote a book,” I told him. “A novel. But it won’t be out for another year.”

“Will it make me laugh?” he asked. We were standing beneath a portrait of George Washington.

“The author photo will make you laugh,” I said.

“I read Kurkjian’s book,” the president said, referring to my friend Tim Kurkjian, the baseball writer and ESPN analyst. “He wrote some nice things about you.”

“I still owe Tim a check for that,” I said, trying, for reasons that I cannot now fathom, to turn every utterance into a punch line.

And then, as Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Rushin stood idly by, the president reared his right arm back like a discus thrower’s and grabbed my hand in a soul shake. It segued, as these things do, into a regular handshake. And just when I thought it would reach its traditional third stage — fingertip-clasping, followed by snaps — he released the grip.

“I miss you in my living room every Sunday,” the president said, a reference either to my years as a Sports Illustrated columnist or to my years as an All-Pro linebacker for the Cincinnati Bengals.

I thanked him and Mrs. Bush for having us as guests, wished them a Merry Christmas and walked straight to the bar in the State Dining Room for an egg nog-and-Sam Adams-Light twin bill. While wandering the Presidential portrait-lined rooms of the East Wing, I realized that I’ve celebrated twice as many Christmases in the White House — two — as Presidents Harrison, Garfield and Taylor combined.

All night, the Marine Band was playing some heartbreaking piece of orchestral music whose name I could never quite place. During one such interlude, my wife reflected — out loud — that the crew-cut violinist three feet from me knew at least 40 ways to kill me with his violin bow. I could not dispute the point.

On our way out, I pocketed a few napkins and a set of drapes, bid farewell to the Secret Service boys and let the wrought-iron gate shut behind us with a cold, metallic clang of finality. Then I repaired to the Willard lobby, where President Ulysses S. Grant used to go after work for whiskey and cigars. And where, to his dismay, so many people came up to him with their concerns that Grant began to complain of being “lobbied” by these “lobbyists.”

We had a nightcap in the Willard’s Round Robin Bar, where Henry Clay introduced the mint julep to Washington. And then, after a few hours’ sleep, we drove our rented Chevy Malibu to the Hertz lot at BWI airport, where a shuttle bus delivered us to the Southwest Airlines terminal. Which isn’t to say that our carriage had turned back into a pumpkin.

Quite the contrary: We were in Boarding Group A.

A kid leaving nine o’clock Mass on Sunday pushed the panic bars on the double doors and the great sucking sound that followed was 50 people inhaling at once. The boy, maybe 9 years old, spoke for all of us when he said: “Whoa! Snow!”

Snow was falling in big soap shavings, the kind that never melt in the movies and just remain on the actor’s shoulders like dandruff for the duration of the scene, even if that scene is set in some northern foundry, where the character has just come in from the cold.

When they saw the snow, our two daughters did their two-footed, two-inch, Phil-Mickelson-at-the-Masters jump for joy, for they are a couple of Madame Tussauds who don’t care to build generic snowmen but love sculpting specific, exactingly detailed snow humans. Last year’s Snow Grandpa had a mustache and eyebrows made from strips of sod torn up by the snow plow. It looked uncannily like their Groucho Marxian maternal grandfather.

They also built a Snow Dada, whose head stubble, sad to say, was represented by three lonely pebbles sitting atop a snowball. (They looked like unsown seeds.) Within a few days, Snow Grandpa and Snow Dada began to shrink and stoop in exact simulacra of their real-life counterparts, until Snow Grandpa was just a hat and a pile of facial hair. As for Snow Dada, I was reduced to some cheshire-cat caricature of myself: Head stubble and eyeglasses.

As Charles Foster Kane can attest, snow conjures memories like few other meteorological phenomena. Strangely, my memories now come in reverse chronological order. And so after I see my kids making icy effigies of their family members, I see my then-girlfriend/now-wife looking up from an NFL playoff game to see that West 70th Street in New York has been Wited-Out with snow. She suggests we take a walk, as New York snow remains white for 17 minutes, during which time the city is a muffled Eden whose snow-covered garbage bags piled on the sidewalk look like an endless line of Frostys. And so I am drinking overpriced hot chocolate on Columbus Avenue when Tom Brady fumbles — or doesn’t, on further review — during the Patriots-Raiders Tuck Rule Game of 2002.

A few years before that, I hail a yellow cab for LaGuardia, and as we make our way up Central Park West, snow begins to fall softly. The giant slanting flakes are a paratroop battalion storming Gristedes. The cab driver, newly emigrated from Haiti, turns to me and says through six inches of bulletproof Plexiglas: “This is the first time I see snow.” I have a lump in my throat the rest of the drive, though in fairness that may just be motion sickness: The driver executes a series of unintentional 360s, 540s and 720s all the way to the airport.

Now it’s February 28, 1993. I’m flying from spring training in Arizona to Vail, Colorado, where I will ski for the first time as an adult. While changing planes in Denver, I see on TV that the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas is engulfed in flames. Outside, it is snowing sideways. My face is peeling from two weeks in the Cactus League. On arrival in Vail, I’m met by two of my brothers, who take me straight to the double-black-diamond Genghis Khan, whose benign name gives no hint of its diabolical nature. On rented skis, I fall down at the top of Genghis. Gravity does the rest. I haven’t been on skis since I was a 12-year-old trembling atop French Cliff at the Hyland Hills Ski Area in Bloomington, Minnesota. But now I have conquered Khan.

It’s 1985. I’m a freshman in college. My buddy Vil is at the wheel of his — what? Chrysler LeBaron? — on our way to South Bend for a Marquette-Notre Dame basketball game. We are just south of Milwaukee in the snow on I-94 when we hit a patch of ice and the LeBaron spins 180 degrees and stalls out. We are facing oncoming interstate traffic when Vil starts the car in the manner of a soon-to-be-victim in a slasher flick. Then we continue on. No words are exchanged, but we know: For a split second we had both turned into skeletons, like John Candy and Steve Martin in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.”

Now I’m 7. Or 8 or 12 or 14. I wake up. It’s morning. Above my bed, a thin pane of ice is adhered to the inside of the window. I pry it off with my thumbnail and look out: “Whoa! Snow!”

Downstairs, my mom is listening to the school closings on WCCO, presented, as ever, in alphabetical order. We have always just missed Bloomington: They are perpetually reading out Blue Earth or Blue Grass or Bluffton. We have to wait for what seems like an hour until we hear Boone & Erickson say those six words that still trigger a V-E celebration in my soul:

“Bloomington Schools, Public and Parochial — Closed.”