I HAVE a few New Year's Eve traditions, but nothing glamorous, nothing that's going to put me on the party page next to Kim Hammond and Rhea Feikin, if you know what I mean.

Sometimes I put on my heavy, near-cashmere overcoat and Walter Winchell fedora, stand on my friend's roof deck in Little Italy, and I half-ooh and half-aah at the Inner Harbor fireworks that we used to be able to see in full before they built Scarlett Place.

If I'm home, I usually make and serve lentil soup or black-eyed peas. I also treat myself to one of those pre-fab shrimp cocktails from the Giant -- the kind that comes in a small, lidded glass container you can reuse as a juice glass. That was my mother's idea of a New Year's treat and I consider it my responsibility to uphold the tasteful traditions of the former Rose Popolo.

If I'm still awake at midnight, I stand on the front lawn and bang pots and pans.

I don't like to operate a motorized vehicle on New Year's Eve. But one year, we drove around and crashed parties we'd heard about through friends of friends, and we sampled the dip at each. (I believe the winner of our informal survey was a clam dip at a tasteful party in Original Northwood.)

I would like to crash New Year's Eve parties again, but they have laws against that now. It's called home invasion. Whatever happened to fun?

Fresh start, of a sort

A TJI reader named Michele says she adopted a New Year's tradition from her friend Laura: "I throw out all old underwear! If it's at all questionable, toss it! You might not be able to start the year with a clean slate, but, for gosh sakes, you can start out with good underwear."

Thank you for sharing, Michele.

Along those lines, I'm thinking of finally doing a sock purge. I have too many socks of too many hues -- faded blue, midnight blue, kinda-purple-blue, Goth black, kinda-gray-black, kinda-brown-gray, kinda-puce-tan. It gives me a headache.

The West Virginia guy who won Christmas Powerball -- he could afford a professional sock-sorter to make a house-call once a week. But I'm not there yet. So right now, I'm looking at about 25 socks without a match. I could plumb the laundry room for a day, playing The Match Game while listening to my daughter's Avril Lavigne CD over and over again, but forgetta'bowdit.

So I'm doing a sock purge on New Year's. Only socks matched and balled up by tomorrow at midnight get to stay. The rest I'm turning into hand puppets.

Bugged by the sight

I keep hoping that ugly parking garage at the entrance to Little Italy, at Pratt and President, will disappear in a big poof of spontaneous combustion. But so far, no luck. In fact, the whole scene is about to get worse.

Banners over windows on the ground floor of the garage remind us that it's about to become a Volkswagen dealership. Benvenuto, mein herr! We're supposed to be happy to hear that a car dealership will open in the city, but at the front door of Little Italy, and across from the new museum of African-American history? I think the Italian eye for beauty needs corrective lenses.

Retiring flagging flags

Like a lot of Americans, Pam Fisher, a Girl Scout leader in Randallstown, applauds the displays of patriotism that went up on highway overpasses since Sept. 11, 2001. But Fisher, hip to flag etiquette as a result of her volunteer work with the Girl Scouts, says those who put up the flags need to take responsibility for them.

"My daily Beltway commute takes me under Providence Road, where some patriotic soul placed two U.S. flags, one on each side of the overpass," says Fisher.

"I have watched them deteriorate to tatters. They are faded and discolored to pink, gray, and light blue. One is becoming shredded at the ends. They really need to be retired."

Fisher says she tried to remove the flags herself, but ran into more difficulty than she expected. "Whoever placed them went to great lengths to make sure they were secure -- 8- to 10-foot lengths of PVC pipe fastened to the fencing with a half-dozen plastic cable ties and U-bolts. I did not have the tools to remove them."

Fisher's message to those who put the Stars and Stripes on overpasses:

"Your responsibility does not end with the installation of those flags. If they have become discolored and tattered, they are no longer fit for display and need to be retired. Please remove them soon. If you don't know what to do with them, contact your nearby Girl Scout troop or Boy Scout troop. They will be happy and able to give those tattered flags the proper retirement."

Stern advice

Spotted another variation on the white-on-black Baltimore BELIEVE bumper sticker.

Attached to the rear window of a pickup truck parked outside a building on North Avenue housing a special police unit: BEHAVE.