It means, "things said in passing" - a good heading for any OpEd page column. Everything said in newspapers and other periodicals has a "best before" date and suffers from "periodicity". What follows is said in passing.

Among the increasingly competitive appeals for the support of many worthy causes the gross 'take' is up this year but the number of donors is down. Solicitation by telephone can be annoying because it comes between telemarketer calls and surveys of one kind or another that "only take a few minutes". Mass mailings are an expensive part of the 10-15% of a charitable organisation's "public education" budget.

A new approach is the "personal" form letter sent by a volunteer to friends and associates. "I find it hard to ask a person to donate", it begins. It ends, "Just make your cheque payable to the Multiple Needs Society and return it to me". A stamped, addressed envelope is enclosed.

The approach is based on the theory that people give to people more readily than to causes. Everybody knows that it is difficult to say "No" to a friend. Ideally, every earner or pensioner should budget 5% of net income (some would say onetenth) to be apportioned annually to the appeals that give the best 'pie chart' account and progress report of their activities.

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Pressure from their diocesan synods is being felt by Anglican bishops to permit the blessing of 'committed' same-sex couples who have made that commitment in a civil ceremony. The decision should not be left to individual bishops. Disunity in any diocese or province of the Anglican Communion is a dangerous virus in the whole wider body of the Church.

The matter is a perplexing one. Both bishops and priests are fathers of spiritual families, not club presidents. Few parents ban would disown a 'gay' child.

While the Anglican Communion values both its dual Catholic and Evangelical heritage it sees Reason as having a place with Tradition and Scripture in its life. Both canon law and scriptural interpretation are subject to revision and reinterpretation as our understanding of human sexuality changes. Unless one condemns sexual orientation as a conscious choice one may, perhaps, respect any faithful, caring partnership.

The current Anglican problem is not one of doctrine; it is one of authority and discipline. The age of autonomous national churches is past. But for neither the Anglican nor the Eastern Orthodox world is submission to an autocratic papacy and still unreformed Roman Curia the answer. The recent appointment of 23 new cardinals, all clerics, has raised the hope that qualified lay people may soon join their ranks.

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The beginning of December on Saturday reminds me of how many people overdo both giftgiving and home decorations for Christmas. Those who celebrate 'Wintermas' annually have to get their wreaths, Santa Clauses and trees in place as soon as they appear in the shopping malls. I know of someone who is so 'into' the seasonal fantasy that home decorating begins in October. By December 1 there is a wreath or tree in every room of the house.

Warren Clements writes a column called "The Challenge" in the Globe and Mail's Saturday Book Section. A recent challenge was to add or change one letter in the name of a known disease in order to give a new name to a perceived human fault or foible. In response, Patricia Edgar of North Vancouver called a tendency to over-decorate at Christmas "tinselitis". Good advice to such enthusiasts might be "in decorating, less is more".

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Every once in a while I come across one of Ashleigh Brilliant's books of humourous aphorisms. Now that he is 74 one hopes that he is almost past the stage of regretting that alluring women do not yet throw themselves at him in large numbers - or even in small numbers. Not that he did not invite all and sundry to do so in his volume Appreciate Me Now and Avoid the Rush. Modestly, he admits "I may not be totally perfect but parts of me are excellent".

He could have been speaking there for most of us.

My copy of one Brilliant book is inscribed in print "For you alone, Ashleigh". There are about 100,000 copies extant. The dedication before chapter 1 says. "This book would have been dedicated to all the teachers who have inspired and encouraged me - if any of them ever had". He says that, had he been on "Titanic" his first question would have been "Which is the non-smoking lifeboat?".

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The return of December is a reminder of an unsolved mystery. Toronto theatre owner Ambrose Small disappeared on the night of December 1, 1919, three weeks after the first Remembrance Day. His Adelaide Street Grand Theatre was suspected of being the front for all kinds of illegal hankypanky and shenanigans. For all that, Small and his wife, Theresa, frequented the city's high society of the time.

The presumed murder, absent a corpus delicti, was not reported in the press for a month. Some suspected Mrs Small of collusion but she was exonerated. She inherited the $1 million from the sale of the theatre that her husband had deposited in a bank the afternoon before his disappearance. Rumour has it that the unfound body is buried in the Rosedale ravine not far from where Small lived.

And, obiter dicta, one hears that the words "So help me God" can be dropped from a courtroom oath. Now it's just a matter of "Take my word as a sincere atheist".

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After a long and useful life screening out telemarketer calls, my 'telezapper' expired recently. Can it be replaced? I am told not. They say that someone bought the patent and killed it. Another murder most foul.

Finally, in passing, numbers are no longer enough on a telephone call display. The country of origin should be shown. Too many people are trying to sell us things and answer questions in barely understandable English.