pork; chocolate; slippers; more pork; books; toys for kids; show mom how to use digital camera; more chocolate; pens; MST3k video; snow; rain; more snow; more chocolate; sleep.

I post this or mail it every year, and it seems to get more appropriate each time. From E.B. White’s uncredited writing from the New Yorker, December 20, 1952.

From this high midtown hall, undecked with boughs, unfortified with mistletoe, we send forth our tinselled greetings as of old, to friends, to readers, to strangers of many conditions in many places. Merry Christmas to uncertified accountants, to tellers who have made a mistake in addition, to girls who have made a mistake in judgment, to grounded airline passengers, and to all those who can’t eat clams! We greet with particular warmth people who wake and smell smoke. To captains of river boats on snowy mornings we send an answering toot at this holiday time. Merry Christmas to intellectuals and other despised minorities! Merry Christmas to the musicians of Muzak and men whose shoes don’t fit! Greetings of the season to unemployed actors and the blacklisted everywhere who suffer for sins uncommitted; a holly thorn in the thumb of compilers of lists! Greetings to wives who can’t find their glasses and to poets who can’t find their rhymes! Merry Christmas to the unloved, the misunderstood, the overweight. Joy to the authors of books whose titles begin with the word “How” (as though they knew!). Greetings to people with a ringing in their ears; greetings to growers of gourds, to shearers of sheep, and to makers of change in the lonely underground booths! Merry Christmas to old men asleep in libraries! Merry Christmas to people who can’t stay in the same room with a cat! We greet, too, the boarders in boarding houses on 25 December, the duennas in Central Park in fair weather and foul, and young lovers who got nothing in the mail. Merry Christmas to people who plant trees in city streets; merry Christmas to people who save prairie chickens from extinction! Greetings of a purely mechanical sort to machines that think–plus a sprig of artificial holly. Joyous Yule to Cadillac owners whose conduct is unworthy of their car! Merry Christmas to the defeated, the forgotten, the inept; joy to all dandiprats and bunglers! We send, most particularly and most hopefully, our greetings and our prayers to soldiers and guardsmen on land and sea and in the air–the young men doing the hardest things at the hardest time of life. To all such, Merry Christmas, blessings, and good luck! We greet the Secretaries-designate, the President-elect; Merry Christmas to our new leaders, peace on earth, good will, and good management! Merry Christmas to couples unhappy in doorways! Merry Christmas to all who think they are in love but aren’t sure! Greetings to people waiting for trains that will take them in the wrong direction, to people doing up a bundle and the string is too short, to children with sleds and no snow! We greet ministers who can’t think of a moral, gagmen who can’t think of a joke. Greetings, too, to the inhabitants of other planets; see you soon! And last, we greet all skaters on small natural ponds at the edge of woods toward the end of afternoon. Merry Christmas, skaters! Ring, steel! Grow red, sky! Die down, wind! Merry Christmas to all and to all a good morrow!

Courtesy of andrewducker we have the ultimate version of O Holy Night. Stick with it, near the end it really transcends if you know what I mean.

Courtesy of jwz we have confuseme and his excellent “Soundmosaic” program, which produces a fine mix of Our President and a Chimp here

My fellow AmerSCHREEEEEEEEEK!!!

Wow!

My incredible pals at the Vancouver Supercomputing Apartment got me a fabulous rice cooker. I’ve already had two meals from it, one white rice and one brown rice, and it rules. You just dump the rice and water in it and press a button.

stimps,fimmtiu, and halfjack rule.

Monday I get in an aeroplane and fly to the east coast for a week; Philadelphia and a family road trip down to North Carolina somewheres. I come back New Year’s Eve. Apparently it has been rather chilly there this year so I am getting out the winter clothing. It’s nice to see family. Hope the road trip isn’t a DISASTO.

In other ways I am a complete grinch now. Everything about Christmas is an irritant except buying gifts for my family, which I like doing any time. The manic intensity of Christmas sales pitches for donuts or garage doors is distressing, as is the combined war fervor and cutesy “Xmas” behavior one sees. I saw a display in the drugstore of the GI Joe Stealth Bomber next to the Santa Hats. It reminds one of Christmas in the movie Brazil with the torturer wiping off his bloody hands and handing out presents. I think Hitler had it right. A modern totalitarian state needs to scrape away the vestiges of Christmas and just go back to a nice earthy pagan bloodcult that celebrates the slow death of our enemies without so much tinsel and cant.

However, the food is good.

http://members.tripod.com/wrcw/Music.htm

I had no idea. MY HERO!!!

Only 430k, and full of the exuberance that the Wild Man brought to the “music world” during his short career, I bring you: Monkeys Versus Donkeys.

BOW BOPPA BOW BOW

They’re rounding up local Iranian-Americans and detaining them, after said Iranian-Americans showed up as asked to submit their immigration papers for their in-process residency or citizenship applications.

I’m starting to wonder just how bad this is going to get.

A short history of art (sort of).

I dreamed last night that someone had put a stop motion animation on the Internet of turnip doing her laundry, and that she was very bothered by this, but was trying to be cheerful about it.

My absorption in digital reality has gone too far if people whom I have never met but converse with via the ‘net show up in my dreams. I need to go outside and pet a doggy.

People from college have resurfaced in my dreams a lot lately also. The best, I have to say, though, was the one in which I was unable to fly to Singapore with my family due to lack of passport (recurring theme) and instead of course drove to Trondheim, Norway which was remarkably close to Los Angeles. In fact I was much annoyed by the way L.A. sprawl had got north so far; everyone was reading the L.A. Times and speaking English and I paid to park in dollars. What, I thought, was the point of such a long drive if it was just like home?

I’m going on vacation next week, as is my sainted mother, and therefore the cat has no where to go. To add to this,she needs her litter changed daily and possibly her chin scrubbed still, not sure about this. As a result, we find we can ask no one to do all this, and mom is boarding her with the vet for a week. This fills me with angst, remorse, and cross-species guilt. Although I suppose she’ll get good care there. Hrmpf.