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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Stories That Delighted

Aired December 24, 2004 - 22:00 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

AARON BROWN, HOST: Good evening again. In the nearly 260 broadcasts we've put together in 2004, together we've covered a lot of ground from the news of the day to the important stories beyond the headlines, to the people, famous and not, behind the news, not to mention everything in between. All the stuff, as we like to say that makes NEWSNIGHT, NEWSNIGHT. This Christmas Eve, the program is devoted to those stories. The in between, the stocking stuffers, if you will. Not the largest, most extravagant presents beneath the tree, but those that made us smile and made us wonder and think all the same. In short, they are the stories that delighted. We'll get to the stocking in a moment. First, though, the news of the day from our CNN colleagues in Atlanta.
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello. I'm Fredricka Whitfield. Here's what happens now in the news. A Christmas Eve suicide bombing in Baghdad killed eight people and wounded 20. The bomber drove a tanker truck into a neighborhood near the Sudanese, Libyan and Jordan embassies.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: You know better than anybody what you're up against. You've seen it up close and personal. We face a determined and a vicious enemy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WHITFIELD: U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made a surprise Christmas Eve trip to Iraq. He visited Baghdad, Fallujah, Tikrit and Mosul.

David Letterman was also in Iraq today. He put on a Christmas Eve show for the Marines telling them, quote, if I wanted to face insurgents I would have spent Christmas with my relatives. That's what's happening now in the news. Now back to Aaron Brown and NEWSNIGHT.

BROWN: We can say hands down that one of the most delightful parts of 2004 for NEWSNIGHT was our road trip up and down the west coast and one of our favorite stories from that trip seemed perfect for tonight.

The holidays, it's fair to say, bring to mind visions of home and heart, even if only imagined. From the Cratchits (ph) threadbare living room to George Bailey's Bedford Falls to 34th Street and its miracles, all speak to a sense of place where we choose to live can say a lot about us, indeed.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are Tree House Workshop Incorporated and we design and build tree houses specifically from a play fort to a full live aboard house, fully creature comforted year round.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In the last two years there's been an enormous surge in popularity of our tree houses.

HEIDI DARILCHIK, TREEHOUSE OWNER: Being in the northwest, we do need indoor things to do and having a tree house is like the outside but inside.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It did morph from being just a little one room with a deck overlooking the view into actual 400 square foot tree house!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At this point, we're framing a fairly typical cottage-sized house on top of a well engineered platform in the trees. It's going to have a very significant Swiss chalet flavor to it. That is more of a structure with the children in mind, although with the comfort for them to go and have an overnight, to do their homework in, read.

HALEY HYDE, TREE HOUSE FAN: Well, I'm sure I'll be hanging out there a lot. Probably hideouts when my friends come over, we'll be hiding from the boys, and when the boys come over, we'll be hiding from the girls.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's an old saying that a house is only as good as its foundation and so the word foundation in this case is that connection, that interface we have between the living tree and the structure itself and that connection is our foundation. Trees have a lot to say. They are the oldest living organisms on earth and also the largest. The tree, in fact, will grow into the structure we put into it.

Big leaf maple leaves are wonderful trees to build in and we have grand forests. This is nearly a 200-year-old Douglas fir tree. It's strong and it's stout and it's willing. Really, this one of our favorite tree houses.

ALLYSON BROWN, ISLANDWOOD: The Islandwood is really one of our classrooms, and we bring groups of eight to 10 kids up here to learn about themselves and nature. You may sit in silence and just listen to the world from a different perspective up in the trees.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I've always enjoyed building things, particularly things that are a little bit outside of the usual conventional manner. We have consciously struck out to be serious about our structures and what we do, and we have hung our shingle out to be tree house builders.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still ahead on this Christmas Eve, the little book that exposed our secret fascination with punctuation. Who knew?

Also ahead, to say they like to spell doesn't begin to tell the story, the cutthroat world of competitive Scrabble and its many secrets.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: In many ways, best seller lists are a barometer of the culture. What we read, a reflection of who we are, or at least who we'd like to be. For much of the year the number one best-selling nonfiction book in the country was just a slip of a book with an intriguing, if ambiguous, title, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves." Who knew this would be the breakout year for the comma.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This one little book's dashed to the top of the best selling lists in two countries has been a surprise, period.

LYNNE TRUSS, AUTHOR, "EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES": When every day, your publisher brings (UNINTELLIGIBLE) 60,000 copies a day, I just think, it's about punctuation. How can this possibly be the case?

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Lynne Truss is a journalist, novelist and self-described stickler, whose book is a field guide to what she calls an endangered species, properly placed punctuation marks. Colons, semicolons, quotation marks, apostrophes. She says apostrophes, those airborne commas are especially endangered.

TRUSS: What is happening with the apostrophe is that it's just dying out because people don't know how to use it and think probably best to leave it out.

NISSEN: That's the mistake producers of the Hugh Grant, Sandra Bullock film "Two Weeks' Notice" made on the film's title.

TRUSS: The film "Two Weeks' Notice" should have had an apostrophe after the weeks.

NISSEN: Just as galling to sticklers, sign makers, most of them vendors of fresh produce and groceries, who make the opposite mistake, wrongly putting in an apostrophe to make a word plural.

TRUSS: I should call it the green grocers' apostrophe, which is where a plural has an apostrophe in it that shouldn't be there.

NISSEN: Another thing that get sticklers' knickers in a twist, that's sticklers apostrophe after the S because sticklers is plural. Anyway, another thing that maddens them are signs bearing quotation marks that shouldn't be there.

TRUSS: What we now find really oddly is pizzas or something will have an apostrophe. And they're also coming (UNINTELLIGIBLE) quotation marks, pizzas, as if to say, they might be pizzas, but we're not sure. We're not promising. NISSEN: Punctuation can utterly change the meaning of one's writing. Read this sentence with no internal punctuation. A woman without her man is nothing. Read the same sentence punctuated with a colon and comma. A woman: without her, man is nothing.

TRUSS: I wrote this book because I really thought, how interesting it was that these marks make such a difference in the way we read and write.

NISSEN: Truss blames much of modern day punctuation ignorance and indifference on poor habits developed online.

TRUSS: Because of e-mailing and text messaging and all that, people are writing a great deal, and making up their own punctuation as they go along, because they don't know that there are rules, let alone what the rules are.

NISSEN: So "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" is a rule book for all those who, Truss says, don't know their apostrophe from her elbow. There is guidance here on how to use an exclamation point, sparingly says Truss. It's the punctuation equivalent of canned laughter.

There's a whole chapter on where to place a comma. There shouldn't be one in the title which refers to a joke about a gun toting panda and a badly punctuated wildlife manual. The goal: colon, clear expression, as Truss writes, quote "all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places, period." closed quote Beth Nissen, comma, CNN, comma New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Truth be told, the managing editor of this program didn't exactly jump at this story when Nissen first pitched it. Blame it on his -- or would that be my spell check dependency. There are those in life whose eyes light up at the sight of the latest Scrabble edition under the tree and then, of course, there are the rest of us. That said, we're betting most everyone, spelling challenged or not, will enjoy this.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Initially it looks like the Scrabble you played as a kid but look more closely. This is competitive tournament scrabble.

JOHN WILLIAMS, NATIONAL SCRABBLE ASSOCIATION: There are over 850 scrabble experts here from 40 states and five or six different countries. The age range here is from 12 years old to I think 93 years old. Scrabble is everywhere and throughout the (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

NISSEN: Well, quietly thrilled. It takes intense concentration to make the highest scoring words using randomly drawn sets of seven titles and place those words strategically on the board before time runs out. Concentration and often obsessive preparation. WILLIAMS: To be a top level tournament scrabble player, one really needs to spend about four or five hours a day on the game, studying word lists, practicing against a computer, doing exercises.

NISSEN: Players memorize lists of words, say all three and four letter words using the letter z, words using the letter q that don't need a U, and of course, all permissible two-letter words.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ab, ab, ad, ae, ag.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ar, as, at.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ba, bo, bi, be.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mm, hm.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hm.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sh.

WILLIAMS: There are 97 two-letter words which every Scrabble tournament player knows by heart.

NISSEN: And needs to know to make parallel plates like this one, hid is a legal word and so are si, and od. Parallel plays rack up the points. So do bingos.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A bingo is when you play all seven of your times. Then you get a 50-point bonus.

NISSEN: To help make bingos, most competitive players arrange their tiles in alphabetical order into alphagrams. Many spent hours, years memorizing all the words that can be made from those letter combinations.

WILLIAMS: I go down the street and I see a sign that says, Marines, I look at it and I also see remains, seminar, everybody here pretty much can look at a group of letters and tell what you words are in there.

NISSEN: Those words can be obscure. In this game between defending national champion Joel Sherman and three-time national champion Joe Edley, words included caid, firth, cowry. What do those words mean? To tournament players, the meanings are meaningless.

JOE EDLEY, FORMER CHAMPION: It's not cost effective to spend time keeping them in your memory. It's just enough to know that they're words.

NISSEN: Even players who know all the words and there are some who have memorized the entire official Scrabble players' dictionary, have to contend with the luck of the draw, theirs and their opponent's.

TREY WRIGHT, TOURNAMENT LEADER: Anything can happen in Scrabble. Any of my opponents can beat me if they draw the right tiles. NISSEN: Players use ritual and talismans so the tile gods will be kind. Not give them a U with no Q. Let them draw a blank -- tile that is.

WILLIAMS: People have their lucky tile bags, their lucky rack, their lucky shirt.

NISSEN: Tournament players aren't in it for the money. Top cash prize at the nationals is $25,000 plus a very nice silver bowl. What draws them is something else, which even amateurs can experience.

WILLIAMS: If you haven't played Scrabble in a while, sit down. It doesn't matter if you play the word cat or you play the word quixotic. You remember how much fun it is to get a bunch of letters and randomly throw them around and then find a word and score.

NISSEN: Word up. Beth Nissen, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still ahead on NEWSNIGHT this Christmas Eve, handbags are her niche. The world's her oyster, at least for now, a young designer on the rise as she heads into 2005.

Also ahead, on the outskirts of your fm dial, jazz 88, fighting the good fight for a quarter of a century and still on the air.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Throughout the year we profiled a number of ambitious and energetic young people. Our "on the rise" segments have run the gamut, the paths to fame and fortune being many and varied. But the one thing that all these rising stars share is an unstoppable belief in themselves and perhaps none more so than Jessica Alpert Goldman. The name of her company pretty much says it all.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JESSICA ALPERT GOLDMAN, WORLD ACCORDING TO JESS: Hi! Welcome to World According to Jess located here in Bergen County, New Jersey.

My name is Jessica Alpert Goldman. I am the owner/hand guru of World According to Jess. My company was started two years ago and I named it for many reasons. When I was little, people used to say to me all the time, the world isn't according to you Jessica. You can't wear polka dots and plaid and you can't wear nine barrettes in your hair to school pictures.

My theory was, the world is according to me and I don't want to live it any other way except the way I want to live it.

Why I started hand bags was, handbags are easy. They don't have to fit your thigh. They don't have to be the perfect size. they're an instant purchase.

Many of my ideas are just childhood memories, the silly things that I went through as a child, mad lists (ph), connect the dots. I love gamey, silly things. I love things that people are unexpected. What is this doing on a bag? Just very fun, unique ideas.

The first bag I made is called sassy traveler and I designed it mainly for myself because I was traveling all the time and I would literally sell them in the airport. People would be basically attacking me at the airport, like, where'd you get this bag? And that's how I started to begin promoting.

I really think that meeting the customers is basically the heartbeat of my company. That is one of my best sellers. It would be Oscar gift bag.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I love it.

GOLDMAN: If you have a lot of dog lovers, it does well.

My customers would say to me, I love the line. Where's the diaper bag?

This is my hey baby diaper bag named after Gwen Stefani. We also have a peek into the diaper bag.

Every truck show I did, I got to meet my customers, got to hear my customer's voice and would meet their demand. My company is solely ran by myself and help from my husband. My handbags are made overseas. I do the design, the samples, the accounts receivable, the invoicing down to the publicity of the whole entire line.

And then I leave a little creative time where I start coming up with some concepts for the next line. I'm presently, I think, at 45 designs and when I was selling 10 boutiques and jumping up for joy for that, I'm probably now in 400 boutiques nationwide and in 24 Nordstrom's along with Japan, Canada and Puerto Rico. The range of the bags are usually from $70 to $300 is the most expensive we have on the line right now. World According to Jess thankfully is profitable. I think this year we've probably hit a $500,000 to $700,000.

When I started this company I decided, you know what? It's just going to be however I want it to be. And if America accepts it and they love the designs then I've got a business. And if they don't, then, you know what? I tried and I realized that I wasn't meant to do this and thankfully, the world has embraced the World According to Jess.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: In a moment, we'll stop by McSorley's old ale house, 150 years old, the house that is, not the ale. And later, high stakes, hand-to-hand combat.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: In addition to a food court where dinner goes for $250 a pop, we have here in our fancy new building, three new concert spaces dedicated to jazz. High temples to jazz, in fact, with views of central park and the New York skyline and just steps away from that fancy food court. But if jazz, after so many years is entitled to a high temple or two, it is the low temples that still nurture it.

Smoky clubs, if you can find smoky clubs anymore and out of the way corners on your fm dial, places like public radio station WBGO in Newark, New Jersey, 25 years old this year. And like the music itself, the station has not had an easy run. But like the music itself it is still there.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHAEL BOURNE, HOST, WBGO JAZZ RADIO: There are less than 10 jazz stations, full-time jazz stations in this country. We get a lot of listeners who are channel-surfing and they get down to the bottom of fm and there's this music and they stay there.

DORTHAAN KIRK, SPECIAL EVENTS & PROGRAMS COORDINATOR: We actually moved into this building here at 54 park place in Newark in January, 1979.

BOURNE: The naysayers thoughts -- no news and information. They're not much. The mainstay is not news and information. It's jazz music. You're got to be kidding? And guess what, 25 years later, we ain't kidding.

KIRK: I think you have to look for jazz more now than you did, say, in my generation. Jazz was all over the place. It was everywhere. It was in the community.

BOURNE: I don't know. Once upon a time, jazz was the mainstream music. It was the pop music of the time. And it's been a long time since then.

KIRK: Artists of yesteryear came up in a time where they didn't have certain advantages, such as always flying to a gig. And, instead, they rode the bus. Those artists had something more to play about than just the music that was on the sheet music. They played about life.

BOURNE: We have plenty of people who have been listening all their lives. But we need to get younger audiences. And we do that here. We aim at kids.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What's up? Jazz is up.

KIRK: I coordinate a series for children, a jazz series for children. And our spring series is in collaboration with the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and their teen program. This is for young people learning to play jazz.

BOURNE: You don't really think you have to pay for radio because it's there when you turn it on. But the message we have to get across is, yes, you have to pay for it. Otherwise, it's not there. We exist because of listener support.

KIRK: Thank you for calling WBGO. BOURNE: It is phenomenal to get e-mails from Brazil, somebody who is listening right now in Brussels. We got a pledge. Somebody sent money to keep the music playing in Malaysia.

WALKER: What's at stake in a station like WBGO goes off the air? Will it be a ripple through the economy? No. Will the stock market drop 500 points in one day? No. But I think one of the most important things that this country has given the world will end up on a dusty shelf somewhere.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: That's the work of CNN photojournalist Doug Carroll, who, as you can see, has a pretty good job. When he's not listening to jazz, it turns he's drinking in a century and a half of history at one of better drinking places that ever was, and still is, as it turns out. McSorley's Old Ale House is a New York City institution. It is tiny and it is loved, and every last brick has a story to tell.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MATTY MAHER, OWNER SINCE 1977: Fifty years is something to celebrate in the bar business. A hundred years is phenomenal. A hundred and fifty? It never happened in bar business existence, especially this type of operation, you know, small place in the city of New York.

So how did I know it (UNINTELLIGIBLE) master back in Ireland. And when he came here, he used to brew for the 7th Cavalry before they moved and developed into an old ale house.

GEOFFREY "BART" BARTHOLOMEW, BARTENDER: When I first walked in the doors, in fact, the first night in New York, I came in here in 1967 and it was like walking back into another century. And it still is. It's good conversation. It's good ale. It's all the normal things you think of in an ale house. Plus, you're in a museum.

TERESA MAHER DE LA HABA, FIRST FEMALE BARTENDER: Just whatever was going on at that time when this place was, you know, started, things were put up on the wall. We still add things once in a while, but not as much as, you know, they did back then.

These are the original taps. Like people are amazed that, you know, they haven't been used in 80 years. That's the original stove from the beginning. The wish bones were put up during World War I by regulars before they went off to war. And supposedly, the guys that made it back took a wish bone off. So the ones that are still hanging are in reminiscence of the guys that never made it back.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A lot of fellows never came back, and their chandeliers are left to commemorate their valor for our country.

PEPE ZWARYZLIK, BARTENDER: Everything on these walls has some sort of story attached to it. And we may not necessarily know them all.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: McSorley's is unique. It's the intimacy, just like a small church, the intimacy of the tables.

ZWARYZLIK: Even though every day may seem the same, it's always a little different, always a little different. This time of day, it's still pretty quiet and mellow and nice. As the day guess on, it gets busier, gets a little bit louder, and it sort of builds to a crescendo, you know, just about every night.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I've always thought of it as a microcosm of democracy, because you have stock brokers, artists, grad students, sanitation men, plumbers, electricians, lawyers, and they're all mixed into one, small place.

MAHER: No one knows why it has existed. We just sell ale, nothing else. We don't have any registers, any television, any jukebox, nothing. Nothing, only a good pub.

You know, McSorley's has to roll with the times -- we have to roll with the times -- prohibition, during the civil war we had to roll with times, when the draft fights were out there...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And there's Frank McKenna, who worked in McSorley's, handing an ale out the door to a woman. The woman is the owner. She didn't set foot in her own bar.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Things change.

MAHER: Oh, yes. Time moves on. The more it changes, the more it remains the same.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: In a moment, the wide world of sports. The NEWSNIGHT world of sports, that is. Spanning the globe on Christmas Eve, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Well, we come now to the sports pages. Well, that would be the NEWSNIGHT sports pages. CBS being one of the official networks of the National Football League and ABC having that agony of defeat guy, we here at NEWSNIGHT had to look elsewhere for the human drama of athletic competition. We found it often. We found it first at the gym.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right. On the whistle, first team to win five.

MICHAEL COSTANZA, LA DODGEBALL SOCIETY FOUNDER: My name is Michael Costanza, and I'm the founder of the Los Angeles Dodgeball Society. Our group was founded out of the necessity to have something for guys and girls to do that's just fun, something that's not so sports driven, ultra competitive -- you don't have to be the best athlete. It's mainly suited for the average Joe. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Dodgeball, it's great because you get to go out here and pretend like you're a kid and like just get all your aggressions out.

COSTANZA: A lot of people, probably, the last time they played was in elementary school, so a lot's happened. If you were the chubby kid who was picked last, maybe you've grown into an Adonis. If you were, you know, the goofy kid with glasses, maybe you've had Lasik eye surgery.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Childhood memories suck, because you were never picked on a team and you always got out, and it was always a bully oriented court. And here, it's a lot more egalitarian.

COSTANZA: For a lot of people, it possibly is a chance for redemption to come back and correct all the traumas or the, you know, Paradise-Lost-type things from elementary school.

Groups started very modestly. We've gone from eight in the course of a year to over 600 people that are active in the group that come out and play at least once a month. We've grown a pretty eclectic group. We have guys who are the lead singers for punk rock bands, actors, computer programmers. We've got quite a few attorneys, teachers, doctors.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The first day he came out, everybody's like, "Oh, yeah, Hulk Hogan's here. Let's get him."

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: It's like getting the president out, like you've really taken some power back, you know, for people.

COSTANZA: I think the idea for a dodgeball group came out of my upbringing. The one thing I remembered about it is it was something where anybody on the court has the ability to take out the strongest player, so the weakest player isn't completely useless.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I am the crappiest player on the planet. I'm awful. But I do a great job of distracting people.

COSTANZA: I've helped started up probably a dozen groups like nationwide, and a lot of it kind of ties into the same, you know, reasons that we're having fun doing it, because it reminds you of a simpler time where your biggest care in the world was, you know, "I've got a science quiz" or, you know, spelling-bee-type thing. So it definitely helps keep you grounded.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: The thrill of victory.

Now a sport where a good arm only gets you so far, but magic fingers can carry the day. The thing is, in this sport, there's really no such thing as a sure thing. It always comes down to, on the one hand, on the other hand.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I now declare officially open the 2004 World Rock, Paper, Scissors Championship.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Rock, paper, scissors really hasn't gotten the due it deserves. A lot of people have been under an erroneous perception for years that the game is purely random chance. We happen to know, as many studies have proven, that humans are actually incapable of being random. So it's really about time that the sport had its own world championship.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our championship directors...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We took it upon ourselves, on behalf of the World RPS Society, to have the rebirth of the World Rock, Paper, Scissors Championships.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our current world champion Rob Krueger is just entering the building. This is who you're going to have to fight tonight.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At the world championship level, it sort of follows a game, set, match scenario, where you play a best of three in order to win a set. And you need to take two sets in order to move to the next round.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Scissors cuts paper, point.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you are no longer...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The atmosphere at the world championships, with the lights, the cameras, the media, crowds cheering for you or against you, all of that can be fairly intimidating. So if you haven't planned things out in advance, if you don't know how you're going to play or if you haven't experienced it before and are prepared for sort of the rigors of what happens, it's very easy for people to fall into those patterns and for the expert to take advantage of those patterns.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Probably the most well-known strategic ploy is to tell your opponent what you're going to throw. Because if I tell my opponent what I'm going to throw, then that immediately puts them on the defensive and me on the offensive, because I know if I'm lying or telling the truth. And that's what separates really a pro player from an amateur player.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One of my basic fundamental skills is to always, every day, wage psychological war with the opponent. It's everything from engaging them in the eyes, yelling at them. And it knocks them off their game.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've found again and again that players who are able to successfully intimidate their opponents seem to do a lot better at the game. Rock, paper, scissors really is the ultimate nonviolent conflict resolution mechanism. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We sort of see it as the impartial judge and jury in all those small irresolvable disputes that you have in life. When you're a child, it's about getting the ball over the fence where the mean dog lives. When you're a little bit older, it's who gets to sit in the front seat of the car, who has to get off the couch to get a beer. And then later on in life, it's who has to change the diapers. People sort of have an affectionate place in their heart for it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... 2004 World Rock, Paper, Scissors champion.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: To the three iron laws of rock, paper, scissors you could always add this -- and everybody beats the Red Sox in the end. You could, at least, until this fall, when the Boston Red Sox won their first World Series since Woodrow Wilson was president.

The very idea made some on the staff giddy. Fitz (ph), our loyal and intrepid field producer and always disappointed Red Sox fan, he sang show tunes for a week, mostly in the voice of Ethel Merman, and Nissen. Well, Nissen, being Nissen, broke into verse.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Beantown team Sunday. They trailed the Yankees 0-3 in A.L. Series play. The night before, a loss, 19-8, had been their shame. A pall- like silence fell upon the Sox fans in that game.

But Boston fans do not give up, do not give faith a rest. They cling to hope, which springs eternal in the human breast. They thought, "Of only we can win one game, then two, then three, we're once more in the pennant race, just like 2003."

History was not on their side. Some think the Sox are cursed. It was in 1920 that the Boston bubble burst. That year, a Red Sox pitcher named Babe Ruth was for a fee sold to the Yankees in New York, and since, some say that he, the great Sultan of Swat, the Babe, baseball's diamond prince, doomed Boston. The Sox have not won a World Series since.

For decades now, the Red Sox have edged close, only to see their series hopes dashed cruelly by the dreaded team Yankee.

But, Sunday night, the Red Sox won, beat New York 6-4. And, Monday night they won again, a 14-inning chore, which brought them to New York on Tuesday, down two games to three. If they could win, the Red Sox would make baseball history.

It was a nail-biting game of drama, pitch, swing, whack, a homer that bounced off a fan, a Yankee run called back. The Boston pitcher, Schilling, from an injured ankle bled, turning his Red Sox socks an even deeper shade of red.

With Sox ahead, some Yankees fans through fits and other stuff. NYPD in riot gear deployed in case things got rough. And in the end, post-midnight, Boston won it 4-2, which forced a crucial seventh game. Who would win it? Who?

It's rivalries like this that give a sport its pulse and zest. Two teams upon a field of play striving to be best. For nine innings, or 14, millions are transfixed in the service of small hopes that just won't be deep-sixed.

What happened in that seventh game? Most people know by now. The Red Sox took an early lead, played hard, scored big, and how. BoSox pitcher Alan Embree finally brought it home. O, frabjous day, calloo, callay. Wait, that's another poem.

What of the choked-up Yankees and their fans, unused to losing? There's sympathy, of course, but also philosophic musing. You can't win all the time, and maybe that's the lesson here. There is no joy in Bronxville. Now they wait until next year.

Beth Nissen, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: When we come back, "Season's Gleamings." A break first, around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Finally from us tonight, Christmas Eve. Around about 1962, when high-tech technology was a space-age cocktail of Univacs and Cadillacs and beer cans that, for the first time ever, had these four words on the top: "Lift tab, pull open."

Yep, the first zip-top cans, 1962, Iron City, by the way. Even Christmas trees, they were high-tech, as well. A little Iron City, a little Atlas rocket and, oh, so cool and shiny. Their story is told in the pages of "Season's Gleamings," set in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, aluminum Christmas tree capital of the free world.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN SHIMON, "SEASON'S GLEAMINGS": When people pick up "Season's Gleamings," it might hit them as being not quite right, because I think what you want to see is a book about Christmas collectibles or about Christmas decorating.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There's a lot of visual culture. And I hope that, as people look at the images, that they stop for a moment and ponder just all the little nuances. There was this feeling at the time after the wars that there was this desire for glitz and glamour and luxury, and aluminum trees fit into that, this idea of bring newness to something that was traditional.

MAYOR KEVIN CRAWFORD, MANITOWOC, WISCONSIN: The Aluminum Specialty Company did a variety of unusual small aluminum products, from salt shakers to camping sets. And, in the early '60s, they were invited to produce an aluminum Christmas tree for a specialty sale in Chicago. They produced these trees from about 1960 to about 1968.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They made them rotate. They made them pink. They made them green, gold. They made them with blue tips on the branches. They made all sorts of accoutrements to light them. And so there's all sorts of textures and varieties and colors.

But makers of the trees were very concerned that consumers not hang string electric lights on the branches. If they would do that, they would become electrified and they could be electrocuted. So there was a caution that said, "To avoid electric shock, please do not string lights on the branches." So we did a photograph called "Short Out" showing the tree having been strung with lights and then tipping over.

To decorate the tree, you would use turning lights, color wheels. You would make the tree rotate, and decorate it very simply with small, colored balls and keep it very minimal.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're very productive community, a blue collar community and very proud of it. And the things that we have made in the past now reining into the future, I think, are very important for our history.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If "Seasons Gleaming's" can make people in Manitowoc think about some of the past and how maybe this company or these things affected their life and what meaning it might have for them, that that would be a really great thing about it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: And that's our Christmas gift for this year. We appreciate your spending part of your Christmas Eve with us. We hope your holiday is peaceful and next year is more peaceful still. Have a good weekend and a good night from all of us at NEWSNIGHT.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com

Aired December 24, 2004 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, HOST: Good evening again. In the nearly 260 broadcasts we've put together in 2004, together we've covered a lot of ground from the news of the day to the important stories beyond the headlines, to the people, famous and not, behind the news, not to mention everything in between. All the stuff, as we like to say that makes NEWSNIGHT, NEWSNIGHT. This Christmas Eve, the program is devoted to those stories. The in between, the stocking stuffers, if you will. Not the largest, most extravagant presents beneath the tree, but those that made us smile and made us wonder and think all the same. In short, they are the stories that delighted. We'll get to the stocking in a moment. First, though, the news of the day from our CNN colleagues in Atlanta.
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello. I'm Fredricka Whitfield. Here's what happens now in the news. A Christmas Eve suicide bombing in Baghdad killed eight people and wounded 20. The bomber drove a tanker truck into a neighborhood near the Sudanese, Libyan and Jordan embassies.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: You know better than anybody what you're up against. You've seen it up close and personal. We face a determined and a vicious enemy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WHITFIELD: U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made a surprise Christmas Eve trip to Iraq. He visited Baghdad, Fallujah, Tikrit and Mosul.

David Letterman was also in Iraq today. He put on a Christmas Eve show for the Marines telling them, quote, if I wanted to face insurgents I would have spent Christmas with my relatives. That's what's happening now in the news. Now back to Aaron Brown and NEWSNIGHT.

BROWN: We can say hands down that one of the most delightful parts of 2004 for NEWSNIGHT was our road trip up and down the west coast and one of our favorite stories from that trip seemed perfect for tonight.

The holidays, it's fair to say, bring to mind visions of home and heart, even if only imagined. From the Cratchits (ph) threadbare living room to George Bailey's Bedford Falls to 34th Street and its miracles, all speak to a sense of place where we choose to live can say a lot about us, indeed.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are Tree House Workshop Incorporated and we design and build tree houses specifically from a play fort to a full live aboard house, fully creature comforted year round.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In the last two years there's been an enormous surge in popularity of our tree houses.

HEIDI DARILCHIK, TREEHOUSE OWNER: Being in the northwest, we do need indoor things to do and having a tree house is like the outside but inside.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It did morph from being just a little one room with a deck overlooking the view into actual 400 square foot tree house!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At this point, we're framing a fairly typical cottage-sized house on top of a well engineered platform in the trees. It's going to have a very significant Swiss chalet flavor to it. That is more of a structure with the children in mind, although with the comfort for them to go and have an overnight, to do their homework in, read.

HALEY HYDE, TREE HOUSE FAN: Well, I'm sure I'll be hanging out there a lot. Probably hideouts when my friends come over, we'll be hiding from the boys, and when the boys come over, we'll be hiding from the girls.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's an old saying that a house is only as good as its foundation and so the word foundation in this case is that connection, that interface we have between the living tree and the structure itself and that connection is our foundation. Trees have a lot to say. They are the oldest living organisms on earth and also the largest. The tree, in fact, will grow into the structure we put into it.

Big leaf maple leaves are wonderful trees to build in and we have grand forests. This is nearly a 200-year-old Douglas fir tree. It's strong and it's stout and it's willing. Really, this one of our favorite tree houses.

ALLYSON BROWN, ISLANDWOOD: The Islandwood is really one of our classrooms, and we bring groups of eight to 10 kids up here to learn about themselves and nature. You may sit in silence and just listen to the world from a different perspective up in the trees.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I've always enjoyed building things, particularly things that are a little bit outside of the usual conventional manner. We have consciously struck out to be serious about our structures and what we do, and we have hung our shingle out to be tree house builders.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still ahead on this Christmas Eve, the little book that exposed our secret fascination with punctuation. Who knew?

Also ahead, to say they like to spell doesn't begin to tell the story, the cutthroat world of competitive Scrabble and its many secrets.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: In many ways, best seller lists are a barometer of the culture. What we read, a reflection of who we are, or at least who we'd like to be. For much of the year the number one best-selling nonfiction book in the country was just a slip of a book with an intriguing, if ambiguous, title, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves." Who knew this would be the breakout year for the comma.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This one little book's dashed to the top of the best selling lists in two countries has been a surprise, period.

LYNNE TRUSS, AUTHOR, "EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES": When every day, your publisher brings (UNINTELLIGIBLE) 60,000 copies a day, I just think, it's about punctuation. How can this possibly be the case?

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Lynne Truss is a journalist, novelist and self-described stickler, whose book is a field guide to what she calls an endangered species, properly placed punctuation marks. Colons, semicolons, quotation marks, apostrophes. She says apostrophes, those airborne commas are especially endangered.

TRUSS: What is happening with the apostrophe is that it's just dying out because people don't know how to use it and think probably best to leave it out.

NISSEN: That's the mistake producers of the Hugh Grant, Sandra Bullock film "Two Weeks' Notice" made on the film's title.

TRUSS: The film "Two Weeks' Notice" should have had an apostrophe after the weeks.

NISSEN: Just as galling to sticklers, sign makers, most of them vendors of fresh produce and groceries, who make the opposite mistake, wrongly putting in an apostrophe to make a word plural.

TRUSS: I should call it the green grocers' apostrophe, which is where a plural has an apostrophe in it that shouldn't be there.

NISSEN: Another thing that get sticklers' knickers in a twist, that's sticklers apostrophe after the S because sticklers is plural. Anyway, another thing that maddens them are signs bearing quotation marks that shouldn't be there.

TRUSS: What we now find really oddly is pizzas or something will have an apostrophe. And they're also coming (UNINTELLIGIBLE) quotation marks, pizzas, as if to say, they might be pizzas, but we're not sure. We're not promising. NISSEN: Punctuation can utterly change the meaning of one's writing. Read this sentence with no internal punctuation. A woman without her man is nothing. Read the same sentence punctuated with a colon and comma. A woman: without her, man is nothing.

TRUSS: I wrote this book because I really thought, how interesting it was that these marks make such a difference in the way we read and write.

NISSEN: Truss blames much of modern day punctuation ignorance and indifference on poor habits developed online.

TRUSS: Because of e-mailing and text messaging and all that, people are writing a great deal, and making up their own punctuation as they go along, because they don't know that there are rules, let alone what the rules are.

NISSEN: So "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" is a rule book for all those who, Truss says, don't know their apostrophe from her elbow. There is guidance here on how to use an exclamation point, sparingly says Truss. It's the punctuation equivalent of canned laughter.

There's a whole chapter on where to place a comma. There shouldn't be one in the title which refers to a joke about a gun toting panda and a badly punctuated wildlife manual. The goal: colon, clear expression, as Truss writes, quote "all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places, period." closed quote Beth Nissen, comma, CNN, comma New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Truth be told, the managing editor of this program didn't exactly jump at this story when Nissen first pitched it. Blame it on his -- or would that be my spell check dependency. There are those in life whose eyes light up at the sight of the latest Scrabble edition under the tree and then, of course, there are the rest of us. That said, we're betting most everyone, spelling challenged or not, will enjoy this.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Initially it looks like the Scrabble you played as a kid but look more closely. This is competitive tournament scrabble.

JOHN WILLIAMS, NATIONAL SCRABBLE ASSOCIATION: There are over 850 scrabble experts here from 40 states and five or six different countries. The age range here is from 12 years old to I think 93 years old. Scrabble is everywhere and throughout the (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

NISSEN: Well, quietly thrilled. It takes intense concentration to make the highest scoring words using randomly drawn sets of seven titles and place those words strategically on the board before time runs out. Concentration and often obsessive preparation. WILLIAMS: To be a top level tournament scrabble player, one really needs to spend about four or five hours a day on the game, studying word lists, practicing against a computer, doing exercises.

NISSEN: Players memorize lists of words, say all three and four letter words using the letter z, words using the letter q that don't need a U, and of course, all permissible two-letter words.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ab, ab, ad, ae, ag.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ar, as, at.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ba, bo, bi, be.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mm, hm.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hm.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sh.

WILLIAMS: There are 97 two-letter words which every Scrabble tournament player knows by heart.

NISSEN: And needs to know to make parallel plates like this one, hid is a legal word and so are si, and od. Parallel plays rack up the points. So do bingos.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A bingo is when you play all seven of your times. Then you get a 50-point bonus.

NISSEN: To help make bingos, most competitive players arrange their tiles in alphabetical order into alphagrams. Many spent hours, years memorizing all the words that can be made from those letter combinations.

WILLIAMS: I go down the street and I see a sign that says, Marines, I look at it and I also see remains, seminar, everybody here pretty much can look at a group of letters and tell what you words are in there.

NISSEN: Those words can be obscure. In this game between defending national champion Joel Sherman and three-time national champion Joe Edley, words included caid, firth, cowry. What do those words mean? To tournament players, the meanings are meaningless.

JOE EDLEY, FORMER CHAMPION: It's not cost effective to spend time keeping them in your memory. It's just enough to know that they're words.

NISSEN: Even players who know all the words and there are some who have memorized the entire official Scrabble players' dictionary, have to contend with the luck of the draw, theirs and their opponent's.

TREY WRIGHT, TOURNAMENT LEADER: Anything can happen in Scrabble. Any of my opponents can beat me if they draw the right tiles. NISSEN: Players use ritual and talismans so the tile gods will be kind. Not give them a U with no Q. Let them draw a blank -- tile that is.

WILLIAMS: People have their lucky tile bags, their lucky rack, their lucky shirt.

NISSEN: Tournament players aren't in it for the money. Top cash prize at the nationals is $25,000 plus a very nice silver bowl. What draws them is something else, which even amateurs can experience.

WILLIAMS: If you haven't played Scrabble in a while, sit down. It doesn't matter if you play the word cat or you play the word quixotic. You remember how much fun it is to get a bunch of letters and randomly throw them around and then find a word and score.

NISSEN: Word up. Beth Nissen, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still ahead on NEWSNIGHT this Christmas Eve, handbags are her niche. The world's her oyster, at least for now, a young designer on the rise as she heads into 2005.

Also ahead, on the outskirts of your fm dial, jazz 88, fighting the good fight for a quarter of a century and still on the air.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Throughout the year we profiled a number of ambitious and energetic young people. Our "on the rise" segments have run the gamut, the paths to fame and fortune being many and varied. But the one thing that all these rising stars share is an unstoppable belief in themselves and perhaps none more so than Jessica Alpert Goldman. The name of her company pretty much says it all.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JESSICA ALPERT GOLDMAN, WORLD ACCORDING TO JESS: Hi! Welcome to World According to Jess located here in Bergen County, New Jersey.

My name is Jessica Alpert Goldman. I am the owner/hand guru of World According to Jess. My company was started two years ago and I named it for many reasons. When I was little, people used to say to me all the time, the world isn't according to you Jessica. You can't wear polka dots and plaid and you can't wear nine barrettes in your hair to school pictures.

My theory was, the world is according to me and I don't want to live it any other way except the way I want to live it.

Why I started hand bags was, handbags are easy. They don't have to fit your thigh. They don't have to be the perfect size. they're an instant purchase.

Many of my ideas are just childhood memories, the silly things that I went through as a child, mad lists (ph), connect the dots. I love gamey, silly things. I love things that people are unexpected. What is this doing on a bag? Just very fun, unique ideas.

The first bag I made is called sassy traveler and I designed it mainly for myself because I was traveling all the time and I would literally sell them in the airport. People would be basically attacking me at the airport, like, where'd you get this bag? And that's how I started to begin promoting.

I really think that meeting the customers is basically the heartbeat of my company. That is one of my best sellers. It would be Oscar gift bag.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I love it.

GOLDMAN: If you have a lot of dog lovers, it does well.

My customers would say to me, I love the line. Where's the diaper bag?

This is my hey baby diaper bag named after Gwen Stefani. We also have a peek into the diaper bag.

Every truck show I did, I got to meet my customers, got to hear my customer's voice and would meet their demand. My company is solely ran by myself and help from my husband. My handbags are made overseas. I do the design, the samples, the accounts receivable, the invoicing down to the publicity of the whole entire line.

And then I leave a little creative time where I start coming up with some concepts for the next line. I'm presently, I think, at 45 designs and when I was selling 10 boutiques and jumping up for joy for that, I'm probably now in 400 boutiques nationwide and in 24 Nordstrom's along with Japan, Canada and Puerto Rico. The range of the bags are usually from $70 to $300 is the most expensive we have on the line right now. World According to Jess thankfully is profitable. I think this year we've probably hit a $500,000 to $700,000.

When I started this company I decided, you know what? It's just going to be however I want it to be. And if America accepts it and they love the designs then I've got a business. And if they don't, then, you know what? I tried and I realized that I wasn't meant to do this and thankfully, the world has embraced the World According to Jess.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: In a moment, we'll stop by McSorley's old ale house, 150 years old, the house that is, not the ale. And later, high stakes, hand-to-hand combat.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: In addition to a food court where dinner goes for $250 a pop, we have here in our fancy new building, three new concert spaces dedicated to jazz. High temples to jazz, in fact, with views of central park and the New York skyline and just steps away from that fancy food court. But if jazz, after so many years is entitled to a high temple or two, it is the low temples that still nurture it.

Smoky clubs, if you can find smoky clubs anymore and out of the way corners on your fm dial, places like public radio station WBGO in Newark, New Jersey, 25 years old this year. And like the music itself, the station has not had an easy run. But like the music itself it is still there.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHAEL BOURNE, HOST, WBGO JAZZ RADIO: There are less than 10 jazz stations, full-time jazz stations in this country. We get a lot of listeners who are channel-surfing and they get down to the bottom of fm and there's this music and they stay there.

DORTHAAN KIRK, SPECIAL EVENTS & PROGRAMS COORDINATOR: We actually moved into this building here at 54 park place in Newark in January, 1979.

BOURNE: The naysayers thoughts -- no news and information. They're not much. The mainstay is not news and information. It's jazz music. You're got to be kidding? And guess what, 25 years later, we ain't kidding.

KIRK: I think you have to look for jazz more now than you did, say, in my generation. Jazz was all over the place. It was everywhere. It was in the community.

BOURNE: I don't know. Once upon a time, jazz was the mainstream music. It was the pop music of the time. And it's been a long time since then.

KIRK: Artists of yesteryear came up in a time where they didn't have certain advantages, such as always flying to a gig. And, instead, they rode the bus. Those artists had something more to play about than just the music that was on the sheet music. They played about life.

BOURNE: We have plenty of people who have been listening all their lives. But we need to get younger audiences. And we do that here. We aim at kids.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What's up? Jazz is up.

KIRK: I coordinate a series for children, a jazz series for children. And our spring series is in collaboration with the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and their teen program. This is for young people learning to play jazz.

BOURNE: You don't really think you have to pay for radio because it's there when you turn it on. But the message we have to get across is, yes, you have to pay for it. Otherwise, it's not there. We exist because of listener support.

KIRK: Thank you for calling WBGO. BOURNE: It is phenomenal to get e-mails from Brazil, somebody who is listening right now in Brussels. We got a pledge. Somebody sent money to keep the music playing in Malaysia.

WALKER: What's at stake in a station like WBGO goes off the air? Will it be a ripple through the economy? No. Will the stock market drop 500 points in one day? No. But I think one of the most important things that this country has given the world will end up on a dusty shelf somewhere.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: That's the work of CNN photojournalist Doug Carroll, who, as you can see, has a pretty good job. When he's not listening to jazz, it turns he's drinking in a century and a half of history at one of better drinking places that ever was, and still is, as it turns out. McSorley's Old Ale House is a New York City institution. It is tiny and it is loved, and every last brick has a story to tell.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MATTY MAHER, OWNER SINCE 1977: Fifty years is something to celebrate in the bar business. A hundred years is phenomenal. A hundred and fifty? It never happened in bar business existence, especially this type of operation, you know, small place in the city of New York.

So how did I know it (UNINTELLIGIBLE) master back in Ireland. And when he came here, he used to brew for the 7th Cavalry before they moved and developed into an old ale house.

GEOFFREY "BART" BARTHOLOMEW, BARTENDER: When I first walked in the doors, in fact, the first night in New York, I came in here in 1967 and it was like walking back into another century. And it still is. It's good conversation. It's good ale. It's all the normal things you think of in an ale house. Plus, you're in a museum.

TERESA MAHER DE LA HABA, FIRST FEMALE BARTENDER: Just whatever was going on at that time when this place was, you know, started, things were put up on the wall. We still add things once in a while, but not as much as, you know, they did back then.

These are the original taps. Like people are amazed that, you know, they haven't been used in 80 years. That's the original stove from the beginning. The wish bones were put up during World War I by regulars before they went off to war. And supposedly, the guys that made it back took a wish bone off. So the ones that are still hanging are in reminiscence of the guys that never made it back.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A lot of fellows never came back, and their chandeliers are left to commemorate their valor for our country.

PEPE ZWARYZLIK, BARTENDER: Everything on these walls has some sort of story attached to it. And we may not necessarily know them all.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: McSorley's is unique. It's the intimacy, just like a small church, the intimacy of the tables.

ZWARYZLIK: Even though every day may seem the same, it's always a little different, always a little different. This time of day, it's still pretty quiet and mellow and nice. As the day guess on, it gets busier, gets a little bit louder, and it sort of builds to a crescendo, you know, just about every night.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I've always thought of it as a microcosm of democracy, because you have stock brokers, artists, grad students, sanitation men, plumbers, electricians, lawyers, and they're all mixed into one, small place.

MAHER: No one knows why it has existed. We just sell ale, nothing else. We don't have any registers, any television, any jukebox, nothing. Nothing, only a good pub.

You know, McSorley's has to roll with the times -- we have to roll with the times -- prohibition, during the civil war we had to roll with times, when the draft fights were out there...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And there's Frank McKenna, who worked in McSorley's, handing an ale out the door to a woman. The woman is the owner. She didn't set foot in her own bar.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Things change.

MAHER: Oh, yes. Time moves on. The more it changes, the more it remains the same.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: In a moment, the wide world of sports. The NEWSNIGHT world of sports, that is. Spanning the globe on Christmas Eve, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Well, we come now to the sports pages. Well, that would be the NEWSNIGHT sports pages. CBS being one of the official networks of the National Football League and ABC having that agony of defeat guy, we here at NEWSNIGHT had to look elsewhere for the human drama of athletic competition. We found it often. We found it first at the gym.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right. On the whistle, first team to win five.

MICHAEL COSTANZA, LA DODGEBALL SOCIETY FOUNDER: My name is Michael Costanza, and I'm the founder of the Los Angeles Dodgeball Society. Our group was founded out of the necessity to have something for guys and girls to do that's just fun, something that's not so sports driven, ultra competitive -- you don't have to be the best athlete. It's mainly suited for the average Joe. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Dodgeball, it's great because you get to go out here and pretend like you're a kid and like just get all your aggressions out.

COSTANZA: A lot of people, probably, the last time they played was in elementary school, so a lot's happened. If you were the chubby kid who was picked last, maybe you've grown into an Adonis. If you were, you know, the goofy kid with glasses, maybe you've had Lasik eye surgery.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Childhood memories suck, because you were never picked on a team and you always got out, and it was always a bully oriented court. And here, it's a lot more egalitarian.

COSTANZA: For a lot of people, it possibly is a chance for redemption to come back and correct all the traumas or the, you know, Paradise-Lost-type things from elementary school.

Groups started very modestly. We've gone from eight in the course of a year to over 600 people that are active in the group that come out and play at least once a month. We've grown a pretty eclectic group. We have guys who are the lead singers for punk rock bands, actors, computer programmers. We've got quite a few attorneys, teachers, doctors.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The first day he came out, everybody's like, "Oh, yeah, Hulk Hogan's here. Let's get him."

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: It's like getting the president out, like you've really taken some power back, you know, for people.

COSTANZA: I think the idea for a dodgeball group came out of my upbringing. The one thing I remembered about it is it was something where anybody on the court has the ability to take out the strongest player, so the weakest player isn't completely useless.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I am the crappiest player on the planet. I'm awful. But I do a great job of distracting people.

COSTANZA: I've helped started up probably a dozen groups like nationwide, and a lot of it kind of ties into the same, you know, reasons that we're having fun doing it, because it reminds you of a simpler time where your biggest care in the world was, you know, "I've got a science quiz" or, you know, spelling-bee-type thing. So it definitely helps keep you grounded.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: The thrill of victory.

Now a sport where a good arm only gets you so far, but magic fingers can carry the day. The thing is, in this sport, there's really no such thing as a sure thing. It always comes down to, on the one hand, on the other hand.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I now declare officially open the 2004 World Rock, Paper, Scissors Championship.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Rock, paper, scissors really hasn't gotten the due it deserves. A lot of people have been under an erroneous perception for years that the game is purely random chance. We happen to know, as many studies have proven, that humans are actually incapable of being random. So it's really about time that the sport had its own world championship.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our championship directors...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We took it upon ourselves, on behalf of the World RPS Society, to have the rebirth of the World Rock, Paper, Scissors Championships.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our current world champion Rob Krueger is just entering the building. This is who you're going to have to fight tonight.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At the world championship level, it sort of follows a game, set, match scenario, where you play a best of three in order to win a set. And you need to take two sets in order to move to the next round.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Scissors cuts paper, point.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you are no longer...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The atmosphere at the world championships, with the lights, the cameras, the media, crowds cheering for you or against you, all of that can be fairly intimidating. So if you haven't planned things out in advance, if you don't know how you're going to play or if you haven't experienced it before and are prepared for sort of the rigors of what happens, it's very easy for people to fall into those patterns and for the expert to take advantage of those patterns.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Probably the most well-known strategic ploy is to tell your opponent what you're going to throw. Because if I tell my opponent what I'm going to throw, then that immediately puts them on the defensive and me on the offensive, because I know if I'm lying or telling the truth. And that's what separates really a pro player from an amateur player.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One of my basic fundamental skills is to always, every day, wage psychological war with the opponent. It's everything from engaging them in the eyes, yelling at them. And it knocks them off their game.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've found again and again that players who are able to successfully intimidate their opponents seem to do a lot better at the game. Rock, paper, scissors really is the ultimate nonviolent conflict resolution mechanism. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We sort of see it as the impartial judge and jury in all those small irresolvable disputes that you have in life. When you're a child, it's about getting the ball over the fence where the mean dog lives. When you're a little bit older, it's who gets to sit in the front seat of the car, who has to get off the couch to get a beer. And then later on in life, it's who has to change the diapers. People sort of have an affectionate place in their heart for it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... 2004 World Rock, Paper, Scissors champion.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: To the three iron laws of rock, paper, scissors you could always add this -- and everybody beats the Red Sox in the end. You could, at least, until this fall, when the Boston Red Sox won their first World Series since Woodrow Wilson was president.

The very idea made some on the staff giddy. Fitz (ph), our loyal and intrepid field producer and always disappointed Red Sox fan, he sang show tunes for a week, mostly in the voice of Ethel Merman, and Nissen. Well, Nissen, being Nissen, broke into verse.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Beantown team Sunday. They trailed the Yankees 0-3 in A.L. Series play. The night before, a loss, 19-8, had been their shame. A pall- like silence fell upon the Sox fans in that game.

But Boston fans do not give up, do not give faith a rest. They cling to hope, which springs eternal in the human breast. They thought, "Of only we can win one game, then two, then three, we're once more in the pennant race, just like 2003."

History was not on their side. Some think the Sox are cursed. It was in 1920 that the Boston bubble burst. That year, a Red Sox pitcher named Babe Ruth was for a fee sold to the Yankees in New York, and since, some say that he, the great Sultan of Swat, the Babe, baseball's diamond prince, doomed Boston. The Sox have not won a World Series since.

For decades now, the Red Sox have edged close, only to see their series hopes dashed cruelly by the dreaded team Yankee.

But, Sunday night, the Red Sox won, beat New York 6-4. And, Monday night they won again, a 14-inning chore, which brought them to New York on Tuesday, down two games to three. If they could win, the Red Sox would make baseball history.

It was a nail-biting game of drama, pitch, swing, whack, a homer that bounced off a fan, a Yankee run called back. The Boston pitcher, Schilling, from an injured ankle bled, turning his Red Sox socks an even deeper shade of red.

With Sox ahead, some Yankees fans through fits and other stuff. NYPD in riot gear deployed in case things got rough. And in the end, post-midnight, Boston won it 4-2, which forced a crucial seventh game. Who would win it? Who?

It's rivalries like this that give a sport its pulse and zest. Two teams upon a field of play striving to be best. For nine innings, or 14, millions are transfixed in the service of small hopes that just won't be deep-sixed.

What happened in that seventh game? Most people know by now. The Red Sox took an early lead, played hard, scored big, and how. BoSox pitcher Alan Embree finally brought it home. O, frabjous day, calloo, callay. Wait, that's another poem.

What of the choked-up Yankees and their fans, unused to losing? There's sympathy, of course, but also philosophic musing. You can't win all the time, and maybe that's the lesson here. There is no joy in Bronxville. Now they wait until next year.

Beth Nissen, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: When we come back, "Season's Gleamings." A break first, around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Finally from us tonight, Christmas Eve. Around about 1962, when high-tech technology was a space-age cocktail of Univacs and Cadillacs and beer cans that, for the first time ever, had these four words on the top: "Lift tab, pull open."

Yep, the first zip-top cans, 1962, Iron City, by the way. Even Christmas trees, they were high-tech, as well. A little Iron City, a little Atlas rocket and, oh, so cool and shiny. Their story is told in the pages of "Season's Gleamings," set in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, aluminum Christmas tree capital of the free world.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN SHIMON, "SEASON'S GLEAMINGS": When people pick up "Season's Gleamings," it might hit them as being not quite right, because I think what you want to see is a book about Christmas collectibles or about Christmas decorating.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There's a lot of visual culture. And I hope that, as people look at the images, that they stop for a moment and ponder just all the little nuances. There was this feeling at the time after the wars that there was this desire for glitz and glamour and luxury, and aluminum trees fit into that, this idea of bring newness to something that was traditional.

MAYOR KEVIN CRAWFORD, MANITOWOC, WISCONSIN: The Aluminum Specialty Company did a variety of unusual small aluminum products, from salt shakers to camping sets. And, in the early '60s, they were invited to produce an aluminum Christmas tree for a specialty sale in Chicago. They produced these trees from about 1960 to about 1968.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They made them rotate. They made them pink. They made them green, gold. They made them with blue tips on the branches. They made all sorts of accoutrements to light them. And so there's all sorts of textures and varieties and colors.

But makers of the trees were very concerned that consumers not hang string electric lights on the branches. If they would do that, they would become electrified and they could be electrocuted. So there was a caution that said, "To avoid electric shock, please do not string lights on the branches." So we did a photograph called "Short Out" showing the tree having been strung with lights and then tipping over.

To decorate the tree, you would use turning lights, color wheels. You would make the tree rotate, and decorate it very simply with small, colored balls and keep it very minimal.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're very productive community, a blue collar community and very proud of it. And the things that we have made in the past now reining into the future, I think, are very important for our history.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: If "Seasons Gleaming's" can make people in Manitowoc think about some of the past and how maybe this company or these things affected their life and what meaning it might have for them, that that would be a really great thing about it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: And that's our Christmas gift for this year. We appreciate your spending part of your Christmas Eve with us. We hope your holiday is peaceful and next year is more peaceful still. Have a good weekend and a good night from all of us at NEWSNIGHT.

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