Elf

The FBI is looking for help in finding the owner of a box. Drivers who were regular commuters on the Schuylkill Expressway in October 2004 might remember it as the box that caused a four-hour logjam on a Monday-night ride home. Four years later, the case has gone cold, and the FBI is hoping to generate fresh leads. "We haven't given up on trying to determine who is responsible for this," said spokesman J.J. Klaver. The metal box with "ELF" written on a side was found near the Belmont Avenue exit, attached to a Peco Energy tower with clamps and industrial glue.

David Berenbaum wants you to know that Aldo's Pizzarama on Bustleton Avenue in the Great Northeast serves the best pizza on the planet. "And I've checked out a lot of pizza," insists the Philadelphia native, now residing in Beverly Hills, where, he laments, "the pizza is horrible. " There's a joke about pizza places - New York City's ubiquitous Ray's - in Elf, the cheerfully screwy Christmas comedy that earned a whopping $31.1 million when it opened this weekend. Santa, played by Ed Asner, is counseling Buddy the Elf - actually, a 6-foot-3 human raised among the pointy-eared helpers of the North Pole - as he's set to leave his foundling home in search of his dad in the Big Apple.

PORTRAYING a saxophone-playing elf, Billy Bach unsuccessfully tries to get Lemuel Rivera, 8, to sing along during a Christmas party at Shriners Hospital. The annual event on Monday was sponsored by the Seventh District police. A magician, clown and police band also attended.

Seventeen years ago, David Sedaris made his debut on National Public Radio with The Santaland Diaries, a ridiculously sublime account of his tenure as a Macy's holiday elf. Since then, he has released seven collections of stories and essays (several of them best-sellers), won a Grammy Award, and influenced a generation of humorists with deadpan, wickedly funny observations about his fellow humans. But Santaland has proved the most enduring of all his work, as evidenced by Flashpoint Theatre, which is producing its sixth consecutive iteration of the staged version.

BAD SANTA. Tasteless, vile, sometimes funny black comedy about mall Santa (Billy Bob Thornton) and elf (Tony Cox) who rob stores. (R) B- BUS 174. Based on the hostage-taking incident aboard a bus in Rio de Janeiro, and contributes to the theory that this year's the best in history for documentaries. Wire services. (Not rated) A- THE CAT IN THE HAT. Drat. It's flat. Cat (Mike Myers) goads two kids into trashing mom's house. A betrayal of everything Dr. Seuss championed. (PG)

AND THEY SAY THAT VIRTUE IS ITS OWN REWARD Jill Sherrod may, in fact, be a goody two-shoes. Now she has four bad wheels to prove it. "I'm going to go off-roading," said Sherrod, a senior at Lake Howell High School in Sanford, Fla., after winning a sleek, black 4-by-4 Nissan pickup truck - just for being well-behaved at school. Sheriff Don Eslinger came up with the idea to reward students who aren't necessarily top scholars or star athletes, but who come to class on time and generally keep their noses clean.

BABY SONGS CHRISTMAS Western Publishing / $14.95 This compilation of Christmas songs accompanied by a variety of images almost has the feel of a home video. For a song called "We're Cooking Supper for Santa," children blithely cook up a meal in a vignette that feels straight out of the '50s, shot on a home-movie camera by a doting dad. Other songs include "The 12 Days of Christmas," sung while a second-grade class gets ready for its Christmas pageant, and "Jingle Bell Rock," with children building a snowman.

Ho, ho . . . whoa! It's the Christmas Crashers! Fred Claus announces himself like a lumbering Elf looking for loopholes in The Santa Clause. Vince Vaughn plays Fred, Santa's big, bitter brother, a repo man who puts the crime in Christmas. Fred's been stewing for years because Mom (Kathy Bates) wants him to be more like Nicholas (Paul Giamatti, better known as St. Nicholas Claus), that smiley-face with the giving fetish. While his cheery bro runs the family business up at the North Pole, Fred's in the taking business: The glowering Chicago repo man keeps the loot he repossesses and lies to his girlfriend (Rachel Weisz)

The suspicious metal box that forced the closure of the Schuylkill Expressway and backed up traffic for three hours Monday night contained wood mixed with an adhesive - not a bomb, FBI and law enforcement officials said yesterday. "It's a hoax," Jerri Williams, an FBI spokeswoman, said. "The device was discovered not to be explosive. " It had been clamped to a Peco Energy Co. transmission tower near the Belmont Avenue exit. Bomb technicians with the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department forced the box open with explosive charges Monday night.

Question: Just for fun, could you speculate on what health problems Santa Claus might have? Answer: Since I'm not the personal physician for the "jolly big guy," this is all conjecture. Given his advanced age, occupational hazards and obvious obesity, he might be dealing with several chronic medical conditions. Starting at the head, he's probably already dealt with cataracts and has some degree of hearing loss given his advanced age. He probably also has a bit of age-related atrophy of the brain (which explains his need for numerous personal assistants at the North Pole)

Beer people are proving, as a whole, to be remarkably, surprisingly and frustratingly over-prompt - especially when it comes to seasonal drinking. Oktoberfest beers? Gone by the end of September. Pumpkin beer? You're a total loser if you wait till Halloween. So it's no surprise then that one of my favorite Christmas beers - Mad Elf Ale from Tröegs in Harrisburg - had already been nearly cleared out from local distributors while the Thanksgiving turkey was still warm. I understand the Mad Elf madness.

Repertory Films Bryn Mawr Film Institute 824 W. Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr; 610-527-9898. www.brynmawrfilm.org . Going Gaga. $7. 12/14. A Christmas Story (1983) $5; $4 children. 12/10. 11 am. Red Desert (Italy, 1964) $10; $7 seniors, students with ID and children under 18. 12/13. 7 pm. Colonial Theatre 227 Bridge St., Phoenixville; 610-917-1228. www.thecolonialtheatre.com . Holiday Pipe Organ Concert. $5-$10. 12/11. 3 pm. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Calling himself Secret Santa, an anonymous businessman doled out scores of $100 bills Tuesday in Reading, one of America's poorest cities. In all, about $20,000 was given out by the light-haired, clean-shaven man, who sported a red shirt and a red cap with the word Elf on the back as he was accompanied by police at a bus station and other locations. The generosity brought at least two people to tears, as seen on a Reading Eagle video. "There's a lot of happiness that comes of this," he says in the footage.

NEW YORK - For the grand opening of Gaga's Workshop, it seemed as if Lady Gaga chartered a sleigh, picked up Santa Claus and Willy Wonka along the way, and landed Monday night at Barneys New York flagship on Madison Avenue. The Workshop is the retailer's in-store holiday shop, conceived, designed, and christened by Lady Gaga - 5,500 square feet of bright colors, crazy shapes, and a gigantic cartoon statue of the superstar herself in a pinup pose surrounded by jagged mirrors and sitting atop thousands of black plastic disks.

Seventeen years ago, David Sedaris made his debut on National Public Radio with The Santaland Diaries, a ridiculously sublime account of his tenure as a Macy's holiday elf. Since then, he has released seven collections of stories and essays (several of them best-sellers), won a Grammy Award, and influenced a generation of humorists with deadpan, wickedly funny observations about his fellow humans. But Santaland has proved the most enduring of all his work, as evidenced by Flashpoint Theatre, which is producing its sixth consecutive iteration of the staged version.

The world of Vic Chesnutt is at once wondrous and mundane. His songs waltz unsteadily across the border between airy naturalism and Southern gothic, weaving between minute details and surreal whimsy. Moody and mercurial, Chesnutt seems like the quintessential solitary visionary, but he occasionally has drafted preexisting bands to serve as his backing ensemble, as the Athens, Ga., quintet Elf Power did at the North Star on Sunday night. Chesnutt, who has been partly paralyzed since a car accident in his teens, performs in a wheelchair, but that doesn't stop his songs from wandering far and wide, sometimes at the expense of cohesion.

Despite an economy that's going down the chimney, there's a bit of dough-ho-ho this season for Mount Airy's Bill Hartery, a musical-theater actor and professional Santa Claus. A 5-foot-11, 245-pound tenor who appeared in the national tour of Cats, Hartery purrs your playlist of choice while accompanying himself on a full-size electric keyboard. From "Deck the Halls" to "Hey Jude," this Santa sings them all. "I absolutely love Christmas," says Hartery, 30, an emigre from the north.

The FBI is looking for help in finding the owner of a box. Drivers who were regular commuters on the Schuylkill Expressway in October 2004 might remember it as the box that caused a four-hour logjam on a Monday-night ride home. Four years later, the case has gone cold, and the FBI is hoping to generate fresh leads. "We haven't given up on trying to determine who is responsible for this," said spokesman J.J. Klaver. The metal box with "ELF" written on a side was found near the Belmont Avenue exit, attached to a Peco Energy tower with clamps and industrial glue.