…yeah, that’s exactly what a new mother wants after twelve hours of labor, a kid with a drum.
That’s right up there with the Wise Man who broke the agreed-upon $5 limit and brought gold:
…would not result in the other reindeer loving him and shouting out with glee. On December 26th, they would have held a secret meeting, while Rudolph slept one off, to figure out whether to unionize themselves or to simply “get rid of” all these red-nosed reindeers that will soon put them out of work.
“Don’t think this is going to be the last foggy Christmas eve,” says Blitzen. “Santa might be a little slow on the uptake, but one day he’s going to realize our lack of rhinolucence is a liability. Something has to be done, and it has to be drastic.”
The Christmas season has started off with a bang. Today Lindsay is baking cookies for a friend’s party tonight, we’re about to get our tree from the church across the street, and it turns out that Christmas came early/late, as today Lindsay found a gift I bought her last year that I had hidden on top of the washing machine—where we keep the Christmas ornaments.
But on Sirius-XM, they keep playing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and I can’t get over how, if you take away the cheery music, it just sounds like the ravings of a virulent anti-communist threatening his children:
You better watch out
You better not cry
Better not pout
I’m telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to townHe’s making a list
And checking it twice;
Gonna find out Who’s naughty and nice
Santa Claus is coming to townHe sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!O! You better watch out!
You better not cry
Better not pout
I’m telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town. You’ve been warned.
Some great friends we have down in New York are the first folks we personally know of to be hurt by Douche of the Decade Bernie Madoff, the securities trader arrested this month on fraud—the largest fraud in American history.
Today a Christmas card arrived from those friends. It reads in part:
A bit less holiday cheer here: the benefactor of S.’s foundation had her money with Bernard Madoff, so she’s virtually wiped out, the foundation is closing and S. is losing his job.
Guys, Lindsay and I wish you the best for the holidays and know how much fun it can be to turn the page on a year.
I head home to D.C. for Christmas tonight, and I’m hoping, somewhat, that I don’t get the urge to post to FC on my vacation. We’ll see how that goes.
Meanwhile!
The Institute for the Future of the Book just released a robustly commentable version of the Iraq Study Group Report. Come for the report; stay for the brilliant commenting system, which I’m sure they hope will catch on for other long-form writing online. Basically it lets you comment on individual paragraphs. They’re still writing the code to allow user to more easily find and read new comments, but it’s a heck of a start. Imagine using something similar to workshop a fiction piece electronically.
Stumped for information on a topic you’re writing about? Need a new avenue to explore? Try Google Scholar. Not only does it index and link to full-text research papers on anything you might be writing about, it also links out to related research via keywords—so there’s always inspiration for what to investigate next.
What if Philip Glass had written “Twelve Days of Christmas”? Whoa.
I know, I’m an idiot. As soon as I thought that, I felt about as bright as Otto the Busdriver: “You know, they call them fingers, but I’ve never seen them fing. Oh, wait, there they go.”
