The Year of Living Dangerously was a 1983 movie starring Mel Gibson. It received decent reviews, played to moderately full houses, and was gone.

Gone? Well, not quite. The movie, or at least its title, enjoys a bizarre afterlife in the stunted imaginations of the nation's headline writers, and never more so than in this season of journalistic despair, the week between Christmas and New Year's.

Ordinarily, the headline is one of the few things at which the journalistic trade excels. At its best, it achieves the kind of intensity of expression usually found only in poetry, its nameless authors deserving of the same exalted place in literary history as the stupendously prolific Anon. But at year's end, something seems to inhibit the synapses; otherwise literate copy editors suddenly find enormous fulfillment working infinite witless variations on a 13-year-old movie title.

The Year of Living Ridiculously. The Year of Living Indiscreetly. The Year of Living Digitally. Even, The Year of Mining Dangerously. That's just one week's worth of headlines -- in one paper (to remain nameless). The propensity to live adverbially does not seem to have diminished as the years drag by and the movie recedes from memory. If anything it has accelerated.

In recent years the same paper has advertised †the past 12 months, or sometimes the 12 just ahead, as The Year of Living Famously, Aimlessly, Curiously, Dysfunctionally, Wimpishly, Cautiously, Honorably, and -- my personal favourite -- Ranger-ously (for a hockey feature on the New York Rangers.)

This is but the most obnoxious example of a general tendency to pap at this time of year. Not that journalism is an especially elevated craft the other 51 weeks. Most of what we do is fairly pointless, and the part that isn't we do poorly. When we are not actually printing lies, we spend most of our time peddling sentimental stories about airport meetings between long-lost twins, or priests who have found religion, or the like, studded throughout with clichés and bromides and those strange words that only journalists use: words like garner, or transpired, or whopping. About the only thing that keeps most of us going is the certain knowledge that hardly anyone reads past the first two paragraphs of what we've written.

But all of the bilge and ephemera produced in the rest of the year might be hand-lettered copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls beside the frenzied banality of that final week. What passes for news and commentary at year-end generally falls into one of two sorts. There is the traditional Year in Review, in which it is revealed that the events already reported to have happened in the preceding 12 months did in fact happen. And there is the traditional New Year's Forecast, in which journalists who generally cannot get the events of the past day right attempt to predict what will happen a year from now, with the extra security of knowing that even if anyone reads what they have written, they will have forgotten it in the meantime.

What will quickly be noticed about both of these sorts of year-end stories -- what everyone already knows, and what nobody on Earth could possibly know -- is that neither of them count as actual news. Which is only logical, because at this time of year there is no news. Most people with real jobs have seized the chance to renew acquaintance with their families. The banks are closed half the time, the stock markets are barely functioning, and Parliament and the several provincial legislatures have taken a much- deserved break from the important business of tormenting the country.

By comparison, the nation's journalists look impressively busy. It's just that there's nothing for them to do -- not even with half of them gone on holiday.

If the other notably newsless time of the year, mid-August, is known as the silly season, late December is the musical interlude. Yet day after day, the newspapers continue to publish, just as if there were something to report. It is a fiction and a fraud, and everyone knows it. Yet no one does anything about it.

It is time this sham was ended. If the only reason to put out a paper at this time of year is to house the Boxing Day ads, let us be open about it. Shut the papers down for a week, and use the presses for flyers. Admit what is evident -- there is no news, there is never any news -- and give us all a rest, the readers as much as the writers. Just call it The Week of Living Quietly.