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This is for you, holiday lights nuts.

You know who you are: the guy who can reel off exactly how many tens of thousands of twinkling bulbs there are engulfing his house; the couple with the electric meter about to vibrate off the wall every December, the fanatic with his own FM transmitter that broadcasts music perfectly synched to his 11 blinking Santas.

Once again, The Roanoke Times and roanoke.com are offering our readers a searchable map and database of holiday lights displays in the Roanoke and New River Valleys -- and beyond. And we need you folks with the lighting displays to populate it for us.

You can submit information about your display online using a convenient Web form. We're looking for your address, so people can find your lights, the times you have the lights on, and a description of what visitors will see.

You can even upload a photo of your display if you have one, though that's not a requirement. And if you want to shoot a photo, we have some tips on how to do it from one of our own staff photographers, Eric Brady.

Only a display's owner can submit info, but if it's your neighbor instead of you with all the lights, by all means, encourage them to submit their information.

Once you click submit, your information is instantly available to our visitors at roanoke.com in a searchable database.

So put down that extension cord and get clickin'.

The Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control Board's annual report came out recently, and the latest data on the top selling liquors was featured in The Roanoke Times today in a story by your favorite data delivery editor.

Bubble graph of Virginia's top selling liquors

And, like last year, I've offered the data as interactive graphics in the DataSphere.

Here's the top of the story:

Thirsty, Virginia?

Apparently so. Virginia ABC stores sold about 9.2 million gallons of liquor in fiscal year 2008.

That's more than a gallon and a half for every person of legal drinking age in the state. That's 795,412,236 shots. That's enough to fill 14 Olympic-size swimming pools and still have enough left over to keep a football team schnockered for a good chunk of the off-season.

Statewide, vodka is the big seller, with 28 percent of all liquor sales by volume. But around the southwestern part of the state, it's dark spirits, not clear ones, that rule.

"You're going to skew a lot more brown goods than in an urban area," said John Knutson, director of marketing for Jim Beam bourbon maker Beam Global Spirits & Wine.

Liquor sales representative Michelle Brooks sells Jack Daniel's whiskey products to every one of 130 clients she has in the Roanoke region. Her colleagues elsewhere in the state say "it's like water in these parts. Everybody's got it." (more)

Elvis, even in the paunchy, ill-advised jumpsuit era, could put butts in seats.

Ten thousand at a time at the Roanoke Civic Center back in the mid-1970s.

Even my sweet, Catholic and dearly departed mother saw The King there once. She took my grandmother and sister, too. The phony karate poses, sweaty scarves wafted into the crowd, uncountable sequins, and my mother and grandmother in the crowd You get the picture.

That was in the mid-1970s. Who puts butts in seats these days?

My colleagues Mason Adams and Pete Dybhdal have been working on a package of stories about the future of our local civic centers, in Roanoke and Salem, and the extent to which they have to be subsidized because they aren't profitable on their own.

That got me wondering, of all the events held at these venues, which are the best attended?

Both host numerous events where organizations rent the facilities, but I wasn't interested in those. I wanted to know what people are willing to pay for -- and what it might say about our tastes as a community.

Is it Kid Rock, or Keith Urban? The Wiggles, or WWE? The mud bog or the symphony?

Read more »