“If people quit smoking their depressive symptoms go down and if they relapse, their mood goes back to where they were. An effective antidepressant should look like that.”
 — Brown University Professor Christopher Kahler discusses his recent study showing that people who quit smoking are happier than those who stick it out. This seems patently ridiculous to me, despite the sample size of 236 participants. A close reading of the article allowed me to find the flaw in the research: “Professor Kahler said he was confident the results apply to most people, even though the smokers in this study were also heavy drinkers.” AH-HA! Anyone who has ever smoked and then tried to quit notices that one of the first things that happens to you when you’ve given up cigarettes is you get drunk much faster. Of course heavy drinkers are going to feel “happier;” they’re totally blitzed? And who’s not happy being blitzed? Back to the lab with you, Professor. I discard your theories.

In what at first seems like the oddest of pairings, but then starts to make a perfect type of record-collector-geek sense when you think about it a minute, the great and recently rediscovered Chicago soul master Syl Johnson will play a special Hanukkah concert with the wonderful indie-rock heroes Yo La Tengo on Saturday at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, which is kind of like Yo La Tengo’s basement.

I saw Johnson play in Brooklyn last year, and he appeared to be, umm, a little too drunk, maybe? I feel kind of bad saying that; the guy is 74, and was famously jerked-over by record companies and under-appreciated artistically for a very long time; he deserves a drink or two or four to calm his nerves before going onstage. But his music — so crisp and sharp and restrained — doesn’t suit a stumbling-around, missing-cues performance as well as that of, say, Guided by Voices. Even if the overall experience was diminished, though, he pulled it together and delivered on a couple of his greatest songs, 1969’s “Is It Because I’m Black” being one of them.

We were recently discussing how Johnson’s songs have been heavily sampled by hip-hop producers over the years. At the concert I saw, Johnson angrily scolded the Wu-Tang Clan for doing so. “Shame on a nigga!” he said, throwing one of the group’s song-titles back at them. (Sadly, the show happened to be taking place on the fifth anniversary of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s death, too. Though I’m not sure Johnson was aware of that.) He apparently felt like they hadn’t paid him enough, though, as he crows today, to the Times’ Ben Sisario, “I’m sitting in the house that Wu-Tang built with their money.”

Yo La Tengo is always great live, too. I’ve never seen them during their annual 8-days-of-Hanukkah run. But judging from this ripping version (Oh, Ira!) of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” they played Thursday night, they’ll be as wonderful as ever — if not even more so.

I bet the whole show will be great. Especially if Johnson lays off the Manischewitz some.

Music critics can’t even be bothered to bitch about the Grammys anymore, apparently.

Ah, this just in from the new “Take Back Our Country From the Fat Cat Special Interests” election of 2012, in the great state of Wisconsin.

• “Republican Gov.-elect Scott Walker plans to give any excess money raised for his inauguration to his campaign fund and the state Republican Party — instead of to charity — in a move that drew ridicule Wednesday.”

• “Sen.-elect Ron Johnson has just hired his chief of staff, Don Kent. While the official release describes Kent as a former Dept. of Homeland Security worker, that’s not Kent’s only job experience. After leaving DHS, where Kent worked for Michael Chertoff, Kent became a lobbyist at Navigators Global, where he ‘heads up the Homeland Security practice.’”

A woman in Britain — an island nation that is close to collapse after a bout of inclement weather — has been chastised by police after calling the emergency services to report the theft of her snowman. “Police said she thought it demanded their involvement because she had used pound coins for the eyes and teaspoons for the arms.” In better news for the country, Justin Bieber declares that the place is “depressing,” and that he would never want to live there.

Everyone’s building a social networking tool! From Jumo (for do-gooders) to Vyou (for camwhores) to Formspring (for narcissists) to Honestly (for slagging off former coworkers) to Quora (for truth-telling!). One thing that many of these new tools has built in is the ability to trash, annoy and threaten people anonymously. And so here we are: “Formspring proves popular with teens and their tormentors.” Yup, $10 million in Series B funding and the newspaper headlines are “Web site brings out the bullies.”

The word “freestyle” used to mean rhyming improv, making it up as you went along. It hasn’t really meant that in a long time. And Kanye West protege Cyhi Da Prynce obviously had these lines memorized before going on Tony Touch’s radio show. (That’s Tony, freestyling in the strictest sense at the beginning of the clip — wait him out.) But they are still impressive.

ABC has news: “After an extensive search, award-winning journalist, bestselling author and Internet entrepreneur Ben Sherwood has been named the new President of ABC News, it was announced today by Anne Sweeney, co-chair, Disney Media Networks and President, Disney/ABC Television Group, to whom he will report.” Would you like to know more about this remarkable man? Of course you would. We just so happen to have a rather enjoyable piece about him here.

The Ronni Chasen thing is so out of hand. It’s unfortunate that her rather remarkable life — a lovely person; not a rare thing in this world, until you know that she was a Hollywood publicist — is being eclipsed by the matter of her murder. Now, two weeks on, everyone is left to chase not only the extremely bizarre shooting but now the confusing (from the outside, at least) police investigation. For those not paying attention, at a bit after midnight on November 16, at Whittier Dr. and Sunset in Beverly Hills, Chasen was shot at five times while in her car and hit three times. (Not through the windshield, but through the passenger window — and the driver’s side airbag had gone off, though presumably after the shooting, when (presumably) the right front of the car hit a lamppost.) And so then this week the police went to visit a man, described as not a “suspect,” but who was supposedly fingered by viewers of “America’s Most Wanted.” The man shot himself in the head in the presence of the police. And so now? The folks at the Daily Beast think he’s a red herring pretty much.

And while we wait, we’re forced to examine Chasen’s 1994 will

, which isn’t even her most recent, apparently.

Amazing:

In that document, Chasen explicitly snubbed her niece Jill Gatsby, whom she “intentionally and with full knowledge of the consequences” left $10. When The Daily Beast reached Gatsby by telephone on Thursday, she laughed at the notion that her aunt had left her such a paltry sum. “Whatever — Ronni was a funny person,” she said, and, when asked to elaborate, laughed even harder. “Ronni would hate it if I was talking to the press!” she said. And then she hung up.

As in all such situations, the state of not knowing anything is surely torturous for her friends. It’s that thing all people have, where the lack of sense-making becomes an itch that you just can’t scratch.

Here’s a classic story about Silvio Berlusconi being a scumbag. Shockingly, this one does not involve hookers.