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While thousands of people on the East Coast waited weeks for big utility companies to turn the lights back on after Superstorm Sandy slammed ashore, the residents of Madison, N.J., had power just days after the storm. This leafy New York City suburb operates its own municipal utility — and now some neighboring towns are asking whether they should, too.

"We were able to power up sections of town within two days," said Madison Councilman Robert Landrigan. "And then, by the weekend [after the storm], most of the town was back."

That was not the case a few miles away in Summit, N.J., where it took Jersey Central Power and Light 12 days to restore power to everyone. "We had a long, rough slog with this storm," says Summit Mayor Ellen Dickson.

In the company's defense, Dickson says Jersey Central had to restore power to 90 percent of its customers. "When you're in a numbers game — [for] who can get them up fastest — you go for the easiest: the low-hanging fruit ... bringing up a lot of people at once," Dickson says. "So honestly, when it comes down to a leafy suburb with lots of trees, where it's very difficult to get the wires back up, we are probably much lower on the chain."

Crews That Know The Neighborhood

Random is a fighting word for young Spencer Thompson. The comedian posted a video to a Facebook page entitled I Hate When People Misuse the Word Random.

"The word random is the most misused word of our generation — by far," he proclaims to a tittering audience of 20-somethings. "Like, girls will say, 'Oh, God, I met this random on the way home.' First of all, it's not a noun."

Or, Thompson continues, warming up, [they'll say,] " 'Oh, my God, we went to the most random party!' What? No! It was people at a house who decided to have a party, like, in your friend group."

But these uses of the word are not incorrect, according to Jesse Sheidlower. He's the elegant, purple-haired editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary, which includes several definitions of the word random.

"It's described as a colloquial term meaning peculiar, strange, nonsensical, unpredictable or inexplicable; unexpected," he explains, before adding that random started as a noun in the 14th century, meaning "impetuosity, great speed, force or violence in riding, running, striking, et cetera, chiefly in the phrase 'with great random.' "

Well, there's a phrase that deserves resurrection. Sheidlower says that in the 17th century, random started to mean "lacking a definite purpose."

"The specifically mathematical sense we have only from the late 19th century," he observes. "But that's with a highly technical definition — 'governed by or involving equal chances for each of the actual or hypothetical members of a population; also, produced or obtained by such a process and therefore unpredictable in detail.' "

Perhaps unsurprisingly, nerds seized on random in the 1960s as slang. One early example dates from 1971, in a jokey article in the MIT student newspaper calling students "randomized tools." Random as slang showed up in the Hacker's Dictionary, then went mainstream.

"It was in the movie Clueless in 1995, for example," Sheidlower points out. And he points out that Random House was established in 1925 specifically to publish books "at random," in the words of founder Bennett Cerf.

No discussion of random could be complete without a reminder that randomness is vital to life as we know it. That's according to Charlie McDonnell, the enthusiastic young Brit behind the Web series Fun Science.

The message: Life, like language, evolves.

"Every now and then — at random — you end up with something awesome," he burbles. "And this could be anything — like longer feathers, sharper teeth, bigger muscles, a giant brain, anything that can help life survive. And that is why I think randomness is so cool, because it is what gives awesome things the chance to happen."

How's that for a random way to end the week?

The president of the European Central Bank said Friday that the eurozone has yet to emerge from its economic crisis but is on a path to see a recovery by the second half of 2013. But there are still many challenges. Just after that interview, new numbers showed unemployment in the euro zone rose to a record 11.7 percent in October.

Ungracefully aging rockers have long been stock figures of fun at the movies, with Bill Nighy topping the burnout charts in Love, Actually. Lately, though, a slew of former rock kings have enjoyed fresh renown via documentaries like Anvil, The Other F-Word and the upcoming Beware of Mr. Baker, many of which chart a Christ-like saga of meteoric rise, catastrophic fall and painfully slow resurrection. That's if their shot livers don't kill them first.

In a quieter, more reflective mood comes California Solo, a modest but satisfying indie feature directed by Marshall Lewy (Blue State). The movie, about a fictional former Britpop guitarist living under the radar in a Southern Californian backwater, doesn't have a new tale to tell. Yet it treats its themes of guilt and responsibility with delicate tact and a precise eye for the neglected commitments that stubbornly dog a man trying his damnedest to efface himself from the world. It doesn't hurt that the musician is played by Robert Carlyle, who's built a career representing men of ruined promise.

Carlyle's Lachlan MacAldonich is a long-haired Scotsman eking out his days in a small town that delivers organic produce to trendy Los Angeles farmers markets. It's a side of Southern California rarely seen in movies, populated by agrarian Latinos and cagey refugees from failed lives elsewhere, and cinematographer James Laxton invest the place with a sleepy, golden grace that makes it seem like a decent place to put down roots.

Not that Lachlan cares one way or the other. By day he hefts fruit and vegetables. By night he flirts with Beau (Alexia Rasmussen), a glossy-haired aspiring actress who may or may not be otherwise engaged. Otherwise he drinks himself silly, then fumbles his way through Flameouts, a podcast he hosts about rockers who flamed out or met tragically early ends.

Lachlan might live and die doing this, if not for a DUI arrest that unearths further bad history and threatens him with deportation back to the United Kingdom, an exile he has reason to dread. Roused at last to action, Lachlan reaches out for help from people who have every reason to send him packing. In fact the music producer (Michael Des Barres, who knows his own way around checkered careers in the biz) who once signed the band in which Lachlan played with his late brother, does just that.

Enlarge Matthew Barnes/Strand Releasing

Beau (Alexia Rasmussen) is among the women Carlyle's Lachlan turns to as he tries to get his life back together.

This month the book club takes to the skies with the Tom Wolfe classic The Right Stuff, a behind-the-curtain look at the 20th century's most famous test pilots—including Chuck Yeager. Yeager joins the club to talk about his long career, and what he considers "the right stuff."

Jake Tapper is the longtime chief White House correspondent for ABC News and has just written a new book called The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor.

We've invited him to play a game called "It's Mr. Bojangles to you." Three questions for a guy named Tapper about an actual tapper: Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, who some say was one of the greatest tap dancers of all time.

Weekend Edition host Scott Simon speaks with New York Times columnist Joe Nocera about the latest boardroom struggle at Hewlett Packard, where questions are being asked about the over-priced acquisition of the U.K. company Autonomy.

A new documentary explores how climate change is affecting the world's glaciers.

As President Barack Obama prepares to enter a second term, he faces a host of foreign policy issues. Syria presents an immediate crisis, China poses a strategic challenge and tensions with Iran continue to escalate.

NPR's Ron Elving and Ken Rudin take you over the cliff in the latest podcast.

This week: a less-than-friendly reception for Susan Rice among Senate Republicans; some in the GOP declare their independence from the no-tax pledge; an update in the battle to succeed Jesse Jackson Jr. in Congress; and the 2013 gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey begin to take shape.

Mohammed Morsi was dismissed by many Egyptians when he stood in the country's first free election after the ouster of the Mubarak regime. Morsi was seen as lacking charisma and was referred to as the Muslim Brotherhood's spare tire, since he wasn't the group's first choice for president. But Morsi has been able to rock the system. He ousted Egypt's top generals, reshuffled the military ranks and now picked what appears to be the perfect time to override the courts and push through a constitution.

Just when you thought you never had to look at another political ad, they're back — this time focused on the big debate in Washington about taxes and spending. Unions, business groups and other special interests have taken their arguments to the nation's living rooms and computer screens.

Islamists approved a draft constitution for Egypt early Friday without the participation of liberal and Christian members, seeking to pre-empt a court ruling that could dissolve their panel with a rushed, marathon vote that further inflames the clash between the opposition and President Mohammed Morsi.

The move advanced a charter with an Islamist bent that rights experts say could give Muslim clerics oversight over legislation and bring restrictions on freedom of speech, women's rights and other liberties.

The draft must now be put to a nationwide referendum within 30 days. Morsi said Thursday it will be held "soon."

The Islamist-dominated assembly that has been working on the constitution for months raced to pass it, voting article by article on the draft's more than 230 articles for more than 16 hours. The lack of inclusion was on display in the nationally televised gathering: Of the 85 members in attendance, there was not a single Christian and only four women, all Islamists. Many of the men wore beards, the hallmark of Muslim conservatives.

For weeks, liberal, secular and Christian members, already a minority on the 100-member panel, have been withdrawing to protest what they call the Islamists' hijacking of the process.

"This constitution represents the diversity of the Egyptian people. All Egyptians, male and female, will find themselves in this constitution," Essam el-Erian, a representative of the Muslim Brotherhood, declared to the assembly after the last articles were passed just after sunrise Friday.

"We will implement the work of this constitution to hold in high esteem God's law, which was only ink on paper before, and to protect freedoms that were not previously respected," he said.

The sudden rush to finish came as the latest twist in a weeklong crisis pitting Brotherhood veteran Morsi and his Islamist supporters against a mostly secular and liberal opposition and the powerful judiciary. Voting had not been expected for another two months. But the assembly abruptly moved it up in order to pass the draft before Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court rules on Sunday on whether to dissolve the panel.

"I am saddened to see this come out while Egypt is so divided," Egypt's top reform leader, Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei said, speaking on private Al-Nahar TV. But he predicted the document would not last long. "It will be part of political folklore and will go to the garbage bin of history."

A new opposition bloc led by ElBaradei and other liberals said the assembly had lost its legitimacy.

"It is trying to impose a constitution monopolized by one trend and is the furthest from national consensus, produced in a farcical way," the National Salvation Front said in a statement, read by Waheed Abdel-Meguid, one of the assembly members who withdrew.

The Two-Way

In Cairo, Tensions Still High As 'Die-Hards' Continue To Protest

The popular website Intrade allows its users to bet on the odds of almost anything — like whether Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will get ousted by a certain date, or whether the movie Argo will win Best Picture at the Oscars.

This week, Ireland-based Intrade announced that U.S. users will have to unwind their bets and shut down their accounts by the end of the year. That's after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Intrade for operating an unregistered exchange.

Transactions on the site have long resided in a gray area in the U.S., with little clarity as to whether they represent gambling, futures trading or something else that should not be regulated — leaving some questioning the legal basis for cracking down on so-called "prediction markets."

'More Accurate Than Pundits'

"Conceptually, to an economist, there's not a difference between betting and trading — apart from the fact that one sounds more polite than the other," says Justin Wolfers, who grew up in Australia working for bookies taking bets.

Now a University of Michigan professor who's studied Intrade, Wolfers says the site is not just a venue for winning and losing money. It also generates news as a byproduct, he says. That is, the odds on Intrade are almost always right.

"It tends to be more accurate than pundits, it tends to be more accurate than polls, and in the past it's even more accurate than very sophisticated poll-watchers like The New York Times' Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com," Wolfers says.

To use Intrade, members place bets on yes-or-no questions. Much like a stock, the price of placing a bet fluctuates based on demand. And when the outcome is determined, the payout is either $10 or nothing. If you win, your profit is that $10, minus the price you paid to place your bet.

According to Thomas Bell, a professor at Chapman Law School in California, the CFTC considers those transactions enough like pork belly futures — which fall under the commission's authority — to be shut down.

All Bets Are Off: Intrade Shuts Door To U.S. Customers

Otelo, a lanky, reticent 16-year-old, is standing on the beach outside Durban, South Africa watching in disbelief and envy as his friend and periodic rival — the older, aggressive Mandla — does what Otelo has only heard of white people doing. Mandla is surfing.

"That's what people mean when they talk about freedom?" Otelo asks, half-heartedly trying to minimize what he's seen as Mandla, elation on his face, rides in on a wave.

When Otelo (Jafta Mamabolo) dares to pick up a surfboard and go out with Mandla (Sihle Xaba), he finds he feels that same sense of open possibility, as the world drops away and leaves only him, the board and the water. It's almost a moment out of time, but the world painfully remains as it is when Otelo returns to the shore: The feeling surfing provides evaporates as he heads back home to Lamontville, a poor, mostly black township south of Durban.

A heavy-handed but forceful coming-of-age story set circa 1989, against the backdrop of the violent beginning of apartheid's end, Otelo Burning examines different paths to freedom — finding it in moments of escape, fighting others for it — and the significant costs inherent in each approach.

Getting out of Lamontville is foremost on Otelo's mind, so he's truly hooked when Kurt (Matthew Oats), a white surfer with a stoner-uncle vibe, observes that with his talent, Mandla could go professional and reap the rewards of contest winnings and sponsorship. A life of swag and room service appeals to Otelo — considerably, given that the lot he can look forward to otherwise is caring for his younger brother Ntwe (Tshepang Mohlomi) and driving his abusive and neglectful father's taxi.

Enlarge Indigenous Film Distribution

Otelo, Mandla (Silhe Xaba, center) and New Year escape the turmoil around them by taking to the waves and training to compete professionally.

Scott Horsley talks to Melissa Block about who's in the top two percent of American taxpayers. That group would have their taxes raised if President Obama gets his way in the fiscal cliff negotiations.

An eight month investigation into phone hacking and other abuses by British newspapers has concluded that the industry needs a powerful new watchdog with some legal powers to wield carrots and sticks. Judge Brian Leveson, who led the inquiry, says the watchdog would be independent and insists that it "cannot reasonably or fairly be be characterized as statutory regulation of the press." But Prime Minister David Cameron, who commissioned the investigation, voiced doubts about that, saying "I think it would be a dereliction of our duty in this House of Commons that has stood up for freedom and for free press year after year, century after century, to cross a Rubicon of legislating about the press without thinking about it very carefully, first." Cameron's stance angered victims of tabloid hacking. Said one "I think he's gone back on his word and I feel betrayed."

As the White House and Congress debate how to steer clear of the fiscal cliff, one obstacle is President Obama's insistence that the wealthy should pay more in taxes — though recently some Republicans have signaled some openness to raising revenues. One of Obama's proposals is to raise the tax rate on capital gains and dividends.

Twin car bombs ripped through a Damascus suburb on Wednesday, killing at least 34 people and leaving dozens critically wounded, according to state media and hospital officials.

The state news agency, SANA, said two cars packed with explosives detonated early in the morning in the eastern Jaramana suburb, a district that is mostly loyal to President Bashar Assad. The area is populated mostly by Christians and Druse, a minority sect.

A series of blasts have struck regime targets in Damascus and elsewhere since last December, raising fears of a rising Islamic militant element among the forces seeking to topple Assad.

Wednesday's car bombs went off in a parking lot located between two commercial buildings. They were detonated within five minutes of one another as groups of laborers and employees were arriving to work.

The blasts shattered windows in nearby buildings, littering the street with glass and debris. Human remains were scattered on the pavement, amid pools of blood.

There were conflicting reports about the death toll, however.

Two hospital officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, said at least 30 bodies were brought to two nearby hospitals. Activists with the Britain-based Observatory for Human Rights say 29 people were killed. The activist group relies on reports from the ground.

The different tolls could not immediately be reconciled. Syria restricts independent media coverage.

The conflict in Syria started 20 months ago as an uprising against Assad, whose family has ruled the country for four decades. The conflict quickly morphed into a civil war, with rebels taking up arms to fight back against a bloody crackdown by the government. According to activists, some 40,000 people have been killed since March 2011.

Assad blames the revolt on a conspiracy to destroy Syria, saying the uprising is being driven by foreign "terrorists" — a term the authorities use for the rebels — and not Syrians seeking change.

Analysts say most of those fighting Assad's regime are ordinary Syrians and soldiers who have defected, disenchanted with the authoritarian government. But increasingly, foreign fighters and those adhering to an extremist Islamist ideology are turning up on the front lines. The rebels try to play down the Islamists' influence for fear of alienating Western support.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Wednesday's bombings.

Rebels fighting to topple Assad are predominantly members of the Sunni Muslim majority. In their push to take Damascus, they have frequently targeted state institutions and troops around the country. They have also often hit districts around the capital with the country's minority communities, perceived to be allied with Assad's Alawite sect, an offshoot Shiite group that dominates the regime.

Downtown Damascus — the seat of Assad's power — has seen scores of car bombs and mortar attacks, targeting state security institutions and troops, as well as areas with homes of wealthy Syrians, army officers, security officials and other members of the regime.

A week has elapsed since a ceasefire ended an explosion of violence between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The truce has so far held, despite some disputed incidents which have left one Palestinian dead and a group of Gaza fishermen in Israeli custody. Egypt, as mediator, is now holding separate talks with both sides to hammer out detailed agreements on key issues, including easing Israel's blockade of Gaza, and preventing weapons being smuggled into the region.

Once upon a time when a car company introduced a new car, it was a new new car.

But at this year's L.A. Auto Show, you won't see any revolutionary new rides — at least not on the outside. You'll find the same sameness in your grocery store parking lot. A lot of cars look alike — why is that?

"What they're relying on to distinguish these cars from one another is not so much the mechanical pieces of them or the design," says Brian Moody of Autotrader.com. "They're selling sort of a lifestyle or an experience or a philosophy."

Derrick Jenkins, head of design for Mazda, will reluctantly admit that there's been kind of a convergence in the way cars look.

"If you really line the silhouettes up and really check the dimensions and the width — yeah, there's a lot of similarities," he says, "because the basic architecture has been on a constant evolutionary path and that's where the sweet spot exits."

Jenkins says his job at Mazda is to hit that sweet spot and design cars that sell, so that's why you won't see cars with bubbles or giant fins.

President Obama wants House Republicans to simply pass tax-cut extensions for most Americans and argue about the rich later. It looks like he's found at least one ally — Oklahoma congressman Tom Cole.

Susan Rice is in many ways a prototypical Obama administration official: young, ambitious and accomplished, with a reputation for being direct and — at times — confrontational.

But unlike her colleagues, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is embroiled in a lingering controversy, over what she knew and what she said in the days after September's attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Rice also is a minority woman serving the nation's first African-American president, who just won re-election in a campaign that relied heavily minorities and women. And she may be in line to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That puts her standoff with Senate Republican John McCain of Arizona and others in a more complicated light, perhaps for all the parties involved.

Here's a brief biographical look at Susan Rice:

— Rice, 48, was born and raised in Washington, D.C. Her father, Emmett Rice, was a Cornell University economics professor and the second black governor of the Federal Reserve System. Her mother, Lois Dickson Fitt, is an education policy expert and Brookings Institution scholar.

— Rice earned degrees from Stanford and later Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and entered politics as a foreign policy aide to Democrat Michael Dukakis in his 1988 presidential bid.

— She became a management consultant at McKinsey & Co in Toronto. Then, in 1993, she joined the Clinton administration as director of international organizations and peacekeeping with the National Security Council.

— Rice rose to special assistant to President Clinton as senior director for African affairs at NSC, then assistant secretary of State for African affairs.

— From 2002 to 2009, she was a senior fellow at the nonprofit public policy Brookings Institution, with a 2004 detour to advise the presidential campaign of Democrat John Kerry.

— During the 2008 Democratic primaries, Rice was Barack Obama's senior adviser for national security affairs.

— On Jan. 22, 2009, the Senate confirmed her to become U.S. representative to the United Nations. Rice is married with two children.

The holiday season means parties, shopping and movies. This year brings a new animated feature, Rise of the Guardians, based on William Joyce's series of children's picture books and novels, The Guardians of Childhood. The story follows Santa Claus (voiced by Oscar nominee Alec Baldwin), the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher) and the silent Sandman as they unite to fight off the boogeyman, Pitch (Oscar nominee Jude Law). They also get a big hand from Jack Frost (Chris Pine).

Peter Ramsey directed the film. His long Hollywood resume includes work on Shrek and Shark Tale, but Rise of the Guardians makes him the first African-American director of a big budget computer-generated (CG) animation film.

"It wasn't until my mom and dad read a newspaper article that mentioned that fact — like a few months before we finished — that I understood how much it meant to them. And then it brought it back to me. I stepped away from the work and thought about how I would've felt if I could've seen me making this movie back when I was a kid," he tells Michel Martin, host of NPR's Tell Me More.

Ramsey has been on the creative teams of several live-action movies featuring heavy CG effects, such as Independence Day, Men in Black and Minority Report. He says doing animation is a lot like doing live action, but things are broken up into different phases.

For a CG film, he explains, you're not standing on one set with everything lit and actors dressed in costumes.

"It's not all in one place — you end up doing it element by element," he says, "And you know, when it comes to the performances in an animated film, you know, I'm in the recording booth coaching the actors, and giving them their motivations, and putting them in the right head-space — all that stuff that you would do in any live-action project. It's just that there's another step, which is me going to the animators and working with them to create the nuances of the physical performance."

Enlarge DreamWorks Animation

North and his Yetis lead the ensemble of immortals fighting off an assault from the malicious Pitch.

The Monday after Thanksgiving is known as Cyber Monday because of all the online shopping deals that are offered up. And this year, online retailers had a field day. A survey by IBM of 500 online businesses found sales jumped 30 percent over last year, as millions of people went online to get their fix of holiday gadgets.

The holidays come in on a rush of cookies and snow (if you are so lucky) and parties and lists, and suddenly it's Jan. 1 and we're wiping the crumbs away and wondering where the year went. I'm currently tiptoeing into the season, my brain still basking in Indian Summer despite the rain slated to descend on San Francisco in the coming weeks. "Ready" or not, the time is upon us.

What helps to get me in the mood is baking. Always, always baking. I'm plotting my edible gifts — some candies of course, along with jars of jam I canned this spring that I'll tuck inside gift packages to send across the country — and devising new twists on old favorites. Butter, sugar, eggs — the usual suspects, but they are what ground me in the kitchen during this hectic season.

In recent years, the start of the holiday shopping season has meant nothing but gloom for independent bookstores. But this year, the mood seems to be lifting, and a lot of booksellers are feeling optimistic. Even President Obama kicked off his Christmas shopping at a neighborhood bookstore in Northern Virginia.

Even so, booksellers are still having trouble enticing customers to plunk down cash for expensive hardcovers when e-books are so popular. Steve Bercu has been in the book business for 40 years. His store, BookPeople in Austin, Texas, has survived the threat of big chains, competition from Amazon and now the popularity of e-books. These days, Bercu says the brick-and-mortar bookstores that are still standing have a loyal following.

"People choose to come to this store to do their Christmas shopping on a regular basis. It's a place you can bring your family; it does not have the overwhelming intensity of a shopping mall; it's a single store," he says. "And it's just part of the season here in Austin."

The holidays, Bercu adds, are definitely the season for hardcovers. Any other time of year, you might settle for a paperback or prefer the convenience of an e-book. But at this time of year, customers are looking for something special for someone special — that novel that won the National Book Award, or maybe the biography everyone is talking about, or one of those glossy coffee-table books filled with beautiful photos and artwork.

Read More (Please!)

Books

End Of Days For Bookstores? Not If They Can Help It

When Philip Hensher realized he didn't know what his best friend's handwriting looked like, he decided to write a book. Host Rachel Martin speaks with Hensher about that book, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting.

For merchants, the stars are lining up — at least so far.

Online sales were going strong Monday. And the National Retail Federation says Thanksgiving weekend spending shot up to $59.1 billion, nearly 13 percent more than last year's $52 billion.

Fortunately for retailers, those good numbers may keep coming because the heavens have lined up in such a way that the 2012 calendar "is a real plus," says Chris Christopher, an economist with IHS Global Insight, a forecasting firm. "There are more shopping days" than we've had in years, he notes.

That's because Thanksgiving fell on the earliest date possible. Since most people don't begin holiday shopping until Black Friday, separating the Thanksgiving turkey from the Christmas goose by as many days as possible is a good thing for retailers.

An Extra Weekend

But there are two other timing factors that may really help this year. One is that Christmas Eve lands on a Monday. Procrastinators — and you know who you are — will have both Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 22 and 23, to go to the mall. Retailers love it when they have a whole weekend to lure last-minute shoppers just as the Christmas Eve pressure is peaking.

And online dawdlers also can shop on that final weekend and still get the gifts delivered before sunset on Monday. Yes, you may pay more for the service, but Express Mail, UPS, FedEx and others will be making delivery rounds on Monday, Dec. 24. "This year is the best of times for people who like to wait until the last minute to shop," Christopher said.

But there's yet another calendar event that offers a sort of Powerball bonus. It's the fiscal cliff. If retailers' timing luck holds, that political and economic threat will be eliminated just in time to spur a celebratory round of shopping on the weekend before Christmas.

A Fiscal Cliff Surprise?

Here's how it may play out: Congress must fix the so-called fiscal cliff — a complex cluster of federal spending cuts and tax-break expirations that all come together at year's end.

Lawmakers are scrambling to put together a deal in this calendar year, and most economists and pundits think they will find some way to compromise. But for now the threat of inaction may be dampening many people's enthusiasm for shopping.

For example, it's not yet clear how many automatic spending cuts will kick in next year. If Congress were to allow all of the currently scheduled reductions to take effect, many government contractors would lose their jobs next year. And many taxpayers know their tax bills may shoot up in January. None of that puts people in the mood to spend.

The White House is certainly aware of the threat hanging over the economy. On Monday morning, it issued a report in which its economic advisers say that "as we approach the holiday season, which accounts for close to one-fifth of industry sales, retailers can't afford the threat of tax increases on middle-class families."

In a statement on the White House report, National Retail Federation CEO Matthew Shay agreed that congressional inaction would lead to "stifled job creation, and dampened consumer confidence, which will ultimately lead to lower retail sales and potentially another recession."

Optimists note that lawmakers are not just members of Congress. They also are human beings who would like to be home for the holidays.

An Incentive For Lawmakers

So members of Congress have a great deal of incentive to wrap up any legislative package dealing with the fiscal cliff by Friday, Dec. 21. Christopher said he believes a compromise will be reached by that date.

If he's right, the cloud of uncertainty would lift just in time to brighten Americans' economic mood as they go shopping on that final weekend before Christmas.

Of course, the gamble could go the other way. If Congress remains hopelessly deadlocked as of Dec. 21, it could throw a big wet blanket over the economy and discourage shopping in those crucial days leading up to Christmas.

For now, the retailers are crossing their fingers. "It is encouraging to see the Administration's acknowledgement that retailers and their customers will be among the hardest hit if our elected officials fail to address ongoing economic uncertainty," says Shay, in the retail trade group's statement. "The time for action is now."

So, sure, the Mayan calendar may say the world is ending on Dec. 21, but the countdown calendar for the fiscal cliff and Christmas Eve is pointing to good times.

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'Giving Tuesday': The Start Of A Holiday Tradition? Nov. 26, 2012

Melissa Block talks to Steve Henn about Cyber Monday.

The new film Life of Pi tells the story of a teenage Indian boy who survives a shipwreck, only to find himself in another ordeal: stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. The movie is based on the best-selling novel of the same name, and is being mentioned as an Oscar contender by many critics.

Life of Pi

Director: Ang Lee

Genre: Adventure

Running time: 127 minutes

Rated PG for emotional thematic content throughout, and some scary action sequences and peril

With: Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Adil Hussain

Host Rachel Martin talks with P.J. Crowley, who served on the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, about the role of the United States in the negotiations between Israel and Hamas and the cease-fire in Gaza. Crowley also served as the U.S. assistant secretary of state for public affairs from 2009 to 2011.

In truth, nobody knows whether the U.S. will indeed go hurtling over the fiscal cliff into recession, or inch back from the edge of the precipice. Since all economies are linked globally, host Rachel Martin speaks with Borzou Daragahi, the Middle East bureau chief for The Financial Times, about how that region views the U.S. negotiations.