Poor Donald. He's fallen off the fame cliff, and he can't get up.

Superstorm Sandy. The fiscal cliff. Twinkiecide. Talk about sounding the alarm. Lately, events have been so ominous that a person could be persuaded that the Mayans were on to something, apocalypse-wise.

Other than the adolescent titillation over the title of the book "All In," why am I obsessed with the Paula Broadwell/Gen. David Petraeus scandal?

It's all over except for the shouting, which, given the whole polarized tenor of the race so far, will no doubt be loud and nonstop. I pray that the outcome of this presidential election does not become a Gore-Bush redux, with fighting going on for months.

Now that Sandy has been designated a "superstorm" (and who decided that and why?) it seems that in the last four days, Northeasterners have cycled through five or more stages of grief, even though "severe cabin fever" or "fury at Con Edison" might not register on the classic Kubler-Ross model.