Mail Call: The holiday-season mail into West...

Mail Call: The holiday-season mail into West Palm Beach, Fla., wasn’t all holiday cheer for the judge who presided over the William Kennedy Smith rape trial. Mary Lupo has received a torrent of hate mail along with good wishes and even lasagna recipes. One note skewered her instructions to the jury as “a nonsensical, rambling diatribe.” Another: “I close this letter by spitting in your face.” But one “slightly disconcerted viewer of current conditions” praised her conduct. The message was from New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.

* ‘Tis the Season I: The grinch may have stolen Christmas, but for the Benjamin family of York, Pa., the IRS was just as mean. After Charles Benjamin, a recently laid-off plumber, claimed his 10 children as deductions, an IRS agent told him “no family has 10 kids these days,” according to a whistle-blowers group. Even the children’s birth certificates, Social Security cards and notarized school records weren’t good enough: IRS agents seized more than $4,000 in family savings. But now some local legislators are demanding answers from the tax man.

* Flowery Prose: Henry David Thoreau not only wrote about the beauty of nature in Walden Pond but also left behind some of the real thing. Scholar Robert Sattelmeyer Jr. came across the author’s flower-collecting habits while poring over Thoreau’s journals at a New York library: “You’ll be looking through the (diaries) and a petal he put in 150 years ago will fall out. It’s kind of a kick.”

* ‘Tis the Season II: This week, a group of actors, senators, governors, a folk singer, an airline captain, a machinery salesman and a manufacturer of space-age ballpoint pens have one thing in common: They are among the record 67 candidates in New Hampshire’s Feb. 18 presidential primary. The Democratic ballot, designed for 34 names, is so crowded with 37 that the type size is being reduced to squeeze everybody in.