This is the time of year in which I pick up three cheap columns by looking back at readers’ comments during the past 12 months and by taking a whimsical look forward at the new year.

For openers, I showcase some of the brickbats that have been thrown through email or the U.S. Postal Service. As I grow older and more lovable, these brickbats are harder to find, but a few of them arrived via AOL and my street-side mailbox. Next week, I’ll bask in the compliments. But this week, I’m leading with my chin.

One reader was incensed at a reference I made to President Obama. I’ve generally been gentle with the president, who I believe was born in Hawaii and is of the Protestant faith. But my angry correspondent sounded off about some reference that came from “the stable of crackpots.” He was reasonably familiar with my hometown of Graniteville, S.C., and I suspect that what set him off was a column I did about a T-shirt designed by my high-school classmate, Owen Clary. It bore the slogan, “South Carolina: We don’t make these things up.” I used it as the springboard toward a column dealing with the quirky nature of my native state and some of its native sons.

One of those quirky natives I mentioned was a state senator commenting on the candidacy of the lovely Nikki Haley, whose parents came to South Carolina from India, and who subsequently was elected governor of the state. His comment: “We already got one raghead in the White House; we don’t need another in the governor’s mansion.”

My correspondent apparently associated me with the “stable of crackpots,” and wrote:

“Could you and the incredibly nasty bloviators on the lunatic fringe find one more name to call the pres? It’s old. But look at what it’s generated. Mr. Limbaugh, now more than ever looking like that 35-pound blue hubbard squash gone to sag, is reported to be worth a billion. The Southernization of a once-good party. Graniteville does have an interesting history; we’ll never hear it from your side. Instead, this rubbish. Yuk! Keep up the bad work. There is an actual writer relocated to Anderson. Writes articles for Sports Illustrated and The New York Times. Good ones, too! Not that I believe you’d be at all interested in ANYTHING a Times writer has to say.”

Shucks, man. A good percentage of my articles are inspired by things I read in the New York Times. And if the writer who relocated to Anderson would care to get in touch, I’d like to chat with him over beers to discuss this fascinating state in which we live.

Another writer teed off on me after I wrote a piece criticizing Tiger Woods’ grammar. An English teacher from Oklahoma wanted me to say something about Tiger’s use of the reflexive pronoun “myself” without an “I” to reflect on. “That’s something between Stevie and myself,” Quoth Tiger.

I wrote: “‘Myself’ is never properly used as a subject, and is proper as an object only when there’s an ‘I’ around for it to point back to.” Tiger should have said, “between Stevie and me,” I suggested.

Mind you, I wasn’t criticizing Tiger’s golf swing, or even his habit of swinging outside his marriage, but a reader jumped on me with a 9 iron — or maybe it was a tire iron. He claimed he had looked it up in his American Heritage and the dictionary contradicted me. If you’re wondering who’s correct, you can look it up.

A friendlier reader took issue with my criticism of the author who sought to sanitize Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by substituting the word “slave” for the “N” word.

“A few years ago, I would have agreed with you, Gene,” he wrote. “I defer to no one in my near-worship of Mark Twain, America’s Charles Dickens, and would have felt his words to be sacrosanct. But Huckleberry Finn isn’t being read; it isn’t being assigned by teachers; it isn’t recommended by librarians because of that awful word. And now, when I think of it, ‘slave’ seems to me to define Jim better than that word does. It isn’t because Jim is black that Huck would be considered a traitor for befriending and harboring him; it is because Jim is a runaway slave.”

Another reader corrected my firearms terminology. I wrote about an incident in which I found a dying raccoon on a vacant lot in the neighborhood where I now live. I found a young woman named Meghan who was happy to use her handgun to put the animal out of its misery. Only thing is, I called it an automatic pistol.

“By now, I am sure someone has pointed out that Meghan’s ‘black automatic pistol’ was in fact a semi-automatic hand gun,” my correspondent wrote. “One (and only one) shot with each pull of the trigger. Probably good that you are not a gun owner, but accuracy counts, both in writing and using a firearm.”

Amen to that, Brother.

A reader from Mobile, Ala., was bugged by my use of “chiggers” to designate a bug that lurks in blackberry patches and bores into human skin in an irritating way.

“I am a 63-year-old native Mobilian, and growing up we only called these little irritating jokers ‘redbugs,’” I was told. “Having enjoyed the company of redbugs far too many times, I just found you calling them ‘chiggers’ a little surprising.”

All I can say is that a redbug by any other name would still make you itch. But mama’n’em’s blackberry cobblers made the ordeal worth while. She made them from scratch, of course.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 104 Belspring Lane, Anderson SC 29621 or email him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.