1:26 a.m. It worked, I tell you: it worked! The magic cookies have acted as a no-fail, one-hundred-percent-guarenteed boy magnet. Proof.

The cookies are right up there with my other surefire fun guy magnet, which I've so graciously outlined in the appropriately linked entry. Love them boys. These boys made me miss my boy so much I can't tell you.

He's big, he's wonderful, and he would love these cookies. I would feed him until he fell off the chair ... hmmmm ... just how far do you think the magnetism is effective? Thousands of miles? It could happen.

Now, the boys in these photos were over for a long, involved business meeting that I didn't have to attend, so I was free to putter in my office all day and so I did. I wish I'd remembered that I was supposed to write my World Year piece, which I just this second finally finished, and not a minute too soon.

These weeks are flying, I tell you -- flying.

So, I'm merrily puttering and playing my radio and working on a nice homemade Christmas card and checking in periodically at the NASA site to see how our little lander is doing. Something there is that doesn't love a 'bot.

I noticed that they're trying to get the dish antennae to work, and if that fails, they are going to turn to the UHF antennae, just the way we do when the TV reception is bad. Next -- the wire coat hanger.

And I was casually reading the last of the special New York Times Sunday magazines of the last year of the millennium and what do I find on the inside back cover? Why it's an official Davie Letterman Top Ten list, lamer than usual, of things about the century, or some such. So lame I've forgotten the topic. Or maybe I'm still seething.

Because I have been religiously avoiding all movie reviews of Sixth Sense, in the idea that it would be nice to go to the movies and not have already predigested the plot. And up until late this afternoon I have been successful in my self-censoring. But there, in the stupid list -- is the big 'ole secret plot device, and that, my friends, is that.

Now I know. If you still don't know and don't want to know until you go -- don't read the Times' Sunday Magazine, back of book, David Getting More on My Nerves Every Day Letterman. And I really am sick of the white socks and tassled twinkletoe shiny slip-ons he wears.

Which reminds me: Two of these lovely boys are West Point graduates and when they were leaving, I happened to notice the shoes of one of them -- black Dr. Martins' type boots, but shiny! I tell you -- spit-shined to a nice patent-leather gloss. Brings back all sorts of memories for me.

The military. I actually know how to spit-shine. And how to burn the lacquer off your husband's belt buckle and polish it to a mirror gleam with Brasso. Oh my. Those were the good old days. Back then -- when men were men and we knew how to land spacecraft properly.