When the yuletide whip comes down.

​Porn never sleeps.

You'd think the holy season of baby Jesus and Santa would not be fodder for writers of erotica, both soft-core and not-so-soft-core, but you'd be wrong. Geez, there's probably a subgenre out there of Veteran's Day "romance" novels.

To be sure, Christmas can be romantic, with sincere expressions of love, with running into old flames when you go home for the holidays, with people hoping not to be alone and lowering their standards after a few spiked egg nogs.

Not to mention the pay-for-play head excited wifey gives her husband after getting a red-bowed Lexus.

But the erotica writers of America don't limit themselves to such obvious things. Here are nine examples.

9. This Christmas She Rules, by Jennifer Leland
Synopsis:

It's another gloomy Christmas for Pamela Dane. Not only is it the anniversary of a dark period in her life, but all her friends had the nerve to hook up. It's not easy for a female Domme to find a playmate.

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A new perspective on this odd couple

​It's been -- as always -- a long wait between volumes of Robert Caro's masterful, majestic and compulsively readable biography of Lyndon Johnson.

News has finally come of the new volume, and even better news is that it won't be the last. The new book, Passage to Power, will only cover the years 1958-64, when LBJ took firm control of the presidency.

We have wondered in the past how Caro hoped to contain the 1960 election, the JFK administration and LBJ's White House stint in a single volume; it's excellent to see that won't be the case.

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​It's a long trip to Kathy Patrick's little hair salon/bookstore, Beauty in the Book, nestled just outside the main street of historic Jefferson, Texas, deep in the Piney Woods. But plenty of people make the pilgrimage each year. From up-and-coming authors to members of Patrick's 515-chapter international book club The Pulpwood Queens, any given day at Beauty and the Book, which Kathy calls the only combination salon/bookstore in the world, is bustling with visitors.

It's in the tiny salon where Patrick, the subject of this week's feature, has launched a one-woman literary machine, helping authors reach bestseller lists, bringing the pastime of reading to masses of Pulpwood Queens (and Timber Guys, as male members of the book club are called), and helping develop a kind of mutually beneficial relationship between writers and their audience that allows each unprecedented access to the other.

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Sure to blow her skirt up.

​Today is Respite from Labor Day, which means it's best spent lying on your back for a full 24 hours.

Like seesawing or tie dancing, lazing is best executed with a partner. Partnerless? Never fear. Chicks at the barbecue will be powerless against your arsenal of timely pick-up lines.

If you get the feminist vibe
Who is that winsome womyn? Win her over with some wine coolers and your sex-positivity. Today, K-Y (the company that made the goop you found at the back of your friends' parents' drawers when scrounging for a Q-tip at the sleepover) aired its latest commercial for K-Y Intense, a sex-heightening gel. Normally, you'd want to wait until at least the third date to talk about clitoral arousal, but today's an exception. In a historic moment for television advertising, the commercial features lesbian sex:

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No sale

​We hit up a couple of Borders this past weekend to take advantage of their big "going out of business" sale and...let's just say we were thoroughly underwhelmed.

Big signs talked of savings "up to 40 percent," smaller signs inside indicated that the prices really weren't that much different from a normal Border's day.

Many of the locations -- none in Houston, it appears -- are being taken over by Books-A-Million, and its seems like Borders really isn't looking to get rid of stock to the degree a typical going-out-of-business sale involves.

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Heartwarming (the blurbs said so!!)

​There are some good, honest, entertaining and trenchant books and songs out there done by people about their memories of Dad.

On the other hand, there's a lot of crap. Cloyingly sentimental, predictable, tear-jerking crap.

Five of the worst:

5. Tim Russert's oeuvre
No one could do a profile of inside-the-Beltway favorite Tim Russert without, it seems, mentioning his blue-collar Buffalo roots and the fact that he always drove his kid to school and went to his sporting events -- Presidents and kings be damned!! Which always was annoying, because there are millions of fathers who do such things every day, but they don't feel the need to draw attention to it as some noble endeavor worthy of praise.

Russert decided this father stuff could go in either generational direction, getting big bucks for his maudlin Big Russ & Me. Realizing there's gold in them thar Daddy hills, he quickly followed up with Wisdom of Our Fathers: Lessons and Letters from Daughters and Sons. He undoubtedly would have milked dads like colleague Tom Brokaw did "the greatest generation" if his life hadn't ended (way too soon).

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It was the '70s, man.

​The Rapture, as has been reported, is coming tomorrow morning. About this there is no doubt, according to some of the most influential and knowledgeable billboards in the nation.

Being bright-side-of-life kinda people, we've offered five terrific results to come from the apocalypse; now, to further assist your transition to the coming End Times, we provide the five best postapocalyptic books.

The type of apocalypse inflicted upon the world varies -- meteors, vampires, nuclear annihilation -- but the results tend to be the same: pretty grim. So enjoy!!

5. Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Easily the cheesiest book on the list, Lucifer's Hammer is entertaining for a number of reasons. Its first half -- the story of an approaching meteor and getting people to believe it's going to hit earth -- is a great time capsule of 1970s Los Angeles and the television news business at the time. The second half is what happens after the thing hits. It involves cannibalism and a fight over a nuclear plant.

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​Author Michael Lewis wrote this book around the turn of the century that has dominated baseball discussion, for good and bad, ever since. This book, Moneyball, dealt with the efforts of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane to field a competitive team despite not having the payroll to compete for the best players.

Beane went with an approach known as sabermetrics, a form of statistical analysis, to assemble his team. And it was an approach that worked, for a time, for the A's and kept them competitive in a weak division. The approach swept through baseball with the Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers hiring former Beane assistants while the Boston Red Sox, one of those big money clubs, hired Theo Epstein, who employed a sabermetric approach while still being able to throw around as much money as he wanted for free agents.

This moneyball approach has been disliked by many in the old-guard baseball establishment -- the late, lamented Fire Joe Morgan blog found much humor with this dislike and in Joe Morgan's insistence that a book he admitted he hadn't read was to blame for all that was wrong with baseball.

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Dutch received undeserved scorn

​President's Day is a time to reflect on the people who've lived in the White House, and how best to learn more about them.

Presidential biographies have always been a huge industry, with a staggering amount of trees felled for books both incredibly dense and analytical and books with whatever unsubstantiated rumor the author could toss in to juice sales.

Sticking with just the modern-era presidents, here are five books you need to read to get to know your presidents better.

5. Dutch, by Edmund Morris
This book was vilified when it came out because Morris invented a fictional character to carry the story. This was an extremely odd decision, since Morris was a Pulitzer-winning presidential biographer (three great volumes on Teddy Roosevelt) and he had been granted unprecedented access to the president and White House operations during the Reagan administration.

We've recently reread this and it's utterly fascinating, particularly on Reagan's early life. The fictional-character conceit still fails, wincingly at times, but Morris admits that after watching Reagan closely for a very long time, he found the same empty enigma everyone else, even Reagan's family, did, and simply had to admit defeat in trying to put together a traditional bio.

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​Eddie Robinson was one of the greatest head coaches in the history of college football. He overcame the misfortune of being born a black man in the Deep South during the worst years of Jim Crow to produce at Grambling one of the great programs in all of football history. He won over 400 games in a coaching career spanning six decades.

But despite his accomplishments, there are not a lot of books that have been written about Robinson. He released an autobiography in the late 1990s, after he had retired, but other than that, the life and career of a coach who produced some of the greatest football players in history has been largely ignored by those who write about the history of the sport.

Denny Dressman, a former award-winning sportswriter, has set out to right this wrong in Eddie Robinson. Dressman sets himself a high bar with his book, for not only does he attempt to chronicle Robinson the coach, he tries to place Robinson's life and Robinson's attitude on life and country in the context of the Civil Rights Movement that swept through the Deep South, and the rest of the U.S., during a large portion of Robinson's career.

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