With the holidays upon us, 'tis the season to shop till we drop. As another recent piece pointed out, Americans spend hundreds of billions on gifts, including Christmas trees. Like the well-reviewed "The Christmas Tree Incident," "Shoplifting 101" flies in the face of yuletide commercialism. Both pieces revive an anti-establishment, devil-may-care ethos I associate with the 1960s. I welcome the slapdash humor here, though PDs may be dour as Scrooges.

"Stocky, well-tattooed, wide-eyed, sporting a fedora cap and wide grin," August Bleed is a socialistic egalitarian who would like to spread the wealth. His name suggests his skills at bleeding, or liberating, merchandise from store shelves with the august savoir faire of a master shoplifter. His five-part "manifesto" on the art of larceny is briskly entertaining. You will especially yuck it up when you hear Bleed describe the "five-finger asana," in which the pilferer takes a deep yogic breath, sucking in his abdomen to form a pocket beneath the rib cage. Into this pocket goes a 19-inch monitor or, for that matter, a laptop.

What Bleed ignores of course are electronic surveillance devices designed to go off like air-raid sirens when "merchandise liberators" march through doors at Wal-Mart and Target -- or as Bleed fashionably pronounces it, "Tarzhay."

Far be it for me to call the store detectives on August Bleed and producer Eric Zassenhaus. They've given us all some precious stolen goods uncommon during these weeks of strait-laced holiday mayhem.