I'm still playing a bit of catch-up after talking about a half of a week off for the holiday, but wanted to make a spot to send best wishes and speedy recovery to Sports Illustrated's Paul Zimmerman. Dr. Z, as he's known within the magazine, suffered back-to-back strokes late in November, but according to Peter King, the longtime SI scribe is slowly but surely own his way to recovery. Via SI's Monday Morning Quarterback....

It is Saturday morning. The best football writer of our time is sitting in a chair in room 106 of St. Clare's Hospital, looking very much like Paul Zimmerman. In fact, a little better. He's lost some weight, maybe 15 pounds, and he has the beginnings of a Hemingway beard of gray stubble. For a man who had two strokes a week ago -- one on Saturday, the next on Sunday -- his gestures and facial expressions when I speak to him are precisely the same as the last time I saw him. Dr. Z is still most definitely all there. It's the cogent speech, for now, that's not. Temporarily. But that's not going to stop him from trying.

"He still talks all day,'' says his smiling and wonderfully devoted wife, Linda, a.k.a. The Flaming Redhead from all those Zim columns on SI.com.

I write today to tell so many of his friends and acquaintances in the league and in his reading public about him. I wasn't sure how. I thought it might be good to just tell you about him and how he's doing because I know you'd want to know. And then, because so many people who read Web sites are young, I wanted to give those readers a chance to find out what all the fuss is about. Why, you might ask, with so many interesting things happening in the football world -- the idiotic Plaxico Burress tragicomedy, teams going into the playoff home stretch, the Packers and Chargers and Saints falling out of the race with bad losses -- would I lead the column thusly? It's because you need to either learn about how well Zim captures the essence of this great game, or you need to be reminded of his brilliance because you haven't seen the breadth of it in a while.