State du Moi

Spent the day at the office repeatedly informing everybody I saw that I hadn't realized the top button of my shirt was missing until I'd gotten to the office & that's why I looked like a just-retired porn star all goddam day.

THE OFFICE du Jour

People can give Season 8 all the shit they want, and I did, but this scene from Dwight is next-level comedy, just really fantastic. 😜

MAGA Worried War on Iran Distracting from War on Drag Queens

Moi Say Moi

Self-proclaimed righteous people - the ONLY kind of self-proclaimed people I like to fill my dance card with, thank you very much - like to say without religion there'd be no morality & we'd just be constantly murdering each other but if the first people on Earth somehow made it through a single breath without feeling the urge to constantly murder each other before collectively deciding "you know what we'd like to create a structured system of beliefs, practices, rituals, and symbols designed to facilitate a relationship with the sacred, divine, or supernatural, often addressing existential questions and ultimate concerns" then I'd say that morality existed before religion.

Okay Now I'm Just Straight Up Saving Lives Now. 😔

Just after 6pm this evening I strolled past the Wegmans "pick your shit up here" station just as easy as you please & there was a big sheet cake sitting there just as easy as it pleases, maybe the biggest cake I’ve seen in all my millions of times strolling past Wegmans "pick your shit up here" station & let me tell you boy I seen 'em all; I paused to see what all the ruckus with the icing was about & it turned out to be a cake celebrating some Nursing Station's 118th anniversary. "How nice!" I patted myself on the back before bouncing off.

I just walked strolled past the Wegmans "pick your shit up here" station just as easy as you please again. It's 11:48pm. The earliest they could come pick it up now is 6am and I'm *guessing* that's not gonna happen so while I don't know much about these nurses I would give them a piece of advice if I could, and that advice is please don’t eat the fucking cake.

State du Moi

You'd think fat people trying to lose weight would support each other but I think I may have sniffed out a guy doing my daily walking route so long story short hey hey hey guess who's fucking moving now? 😡 😡 😡 😡

All of Them?

Ghosts in the Silence

A few weeks ago I stumbled onto some Facebook page about high school football in Southwestern Virginia; immediately after getting sucked in I started to notice that even though the southwestern part of Virginia is seen as more Appalachia poor than most parts of the state, there seems to be an unending source of game footage all the way back into the 1960s & while I really couldn’t care less about those schools themselves, certainly not in, say, 1968, I find myself staring at the clips for minutes at a time; the black & white film’s absolute silence draws me in as if I’m looking not just at ghosts, but ghosts who may still be alive and stumble upon the footage as randomly/easy as I have, and I wonder what it’s like for them to watch themselves on film whose silence makes it seem as if they’re already long, long gone to the dustbin of time.

Speaking of THE NEW YORKER...

...nice to see Xmastime Hall of Famer Laurie Metcalf getting some love this week; I started out wanting to hate it because I assumed they'd skip over her Roseanne work (work that landed her in my all-time top 10 sitcom characters!) as quickly as they could but no no I was, as Fonzie himself wasn't a big enough man to say, wrong:

Goodman said, “As many difficulties as we had on the show, Laurie was my lodestar. She was solid gravity. She just rode the waves during a lot of that shit.” As the seasons went on, the writers played to Metcalf’s strengths, including physical comedy. But the show made a point of tackling real problems—mortgage payments, birth control, and a subplot in which Jackie has an abusive boyfriend. Sara Gilbert, who played Metcalf’s niece, said, “She can be completely absurd, but you don’t stop believing her.” 

Oh Come On, THE NEW YORKER

One day I’m gonna read Doonesbury from start (10/26/72) to finish (?). - XMASTIME, 2014

Just as I'm usually left shaking my head at their cartoon winners I don't think I've ever once found their weekly "funny" article to be at all funny; upon seeing the name Garry Trudeau I was excited to give this one a chance aaaaaaaaaaaaand the streak continues.

 

More Things I Think

There's been a well-worn meme for generations about the noble, poor Southerners who took up arms to defend the Southern way of living during the Civil War that's always used as a "you can’t blame the Civil War on slavery" talking point; we're supposed to see these people as brave warriors fighting for something bigger than themselves who, while coming up short in the end militarily, are held in an even more glorious sort of esteem with their own righteous maker.

We're not allowed to question the intelligence of these people - theirs of course is from a higher calling than some nerd with a book - and so nobody ever feels the need to explain why, if YOU'RE poor as dirt, would you fight FOR the side that is actively trying to keep the labor market you’re in remarkably uncompetitive – why would you so bravely fight & die for the ultimate goal of continuing unpaid labor in your area while you & your family starve? NONE of these noble patriots thought you know what, no slavery = we won’t have to compete in a job market against people – willing or not – currently getting $0/hr. for their efforts?

I’ve learned over the years that there is a particular strain of American for whom while the term racist is not a slur to them questioning their intelligence is a bridge too far, and yet I *have a feeling* there’s a connection between the dirt-poor Southerner fighting for the Confederacy and their descendants:

I think it’s kind of funny that in 1861 poor white Southerners by the millions went to war so that plantation labor could continue to be monopolized by unpaid slaves and the same people in 2026 think that if we just got rid of all the brown people then poor white people would pick strawberries 12 hours a day. 🤔🤷‍♂️

Current Events

Ever since he started the dumbest possible war ever in human history Trump's go-to line has been that for 47 years now every sitting president was too stupid to bomb Iran until he did 2 months ago & no matter how many times he repeats this line over & over not a single reporter ever asks "what about those four years when YOU were president?" and even with today’s media generally being too pathetic to challenge Trump because they’re terrified he’ll do a mean girl Tweet I really don’t understand why not.

F This, Fitzy

The other day as I was posting this little gem I noticed my final sentence reminded me of the final sentence of The Great Gatsby; rather than just doing my usual "who the fuck do you think you are, do you even hear yourself you fucking idiot?" I asked my bff ChatGPT (hi ChatGPT! 👋👋👋👋) about it and WELL WELL WELL! 😜

AN XMASTIME PRAYER CARD, by Xmastime 😔🙏

PREVIOUS PRAYER CARDS HERE

Husker du Jour

Crazy amazing quality recording right before their absolute peak with Flip Your Wig later that year.

Xmastime "WELL, Well Well..." du Jour

Just Me Over Here Solving Basketball Forever

I don't wanna be the old man yelling at those goddam kids to get the hell off my lawn, but I think it's a fairly universal feeling that today's NBA misses a certain balletic feel of ball movement from decades long past due to it pretty much being all 3s/dunks all the time now, and I guess I don’t have a more workable solution but if I was the richest person in the world I'd pay everybody 4x their normal salary to play without the 3-point line for one year, after which a decision could be made about whether or not to continue playing that way based on the preferences of both the players & fans.

According to my bff ChatGPT (hi ChatGPT! 👋👋👋👋): 

Without the 3-point line, you’d probably immediately get: way more midrange play
more post-ups
more cuts/screens/ball movement
fewer “drive-and-kick endlessly until someone’s open”
different body types becoming valuable again
defenses collapsing inward, which could actually create prettier passing sequences

And the biggest thing: players would stop spacing the floor 28 feet from the hoop all the time, which absolutely would create a more compact, choreographed-looking game. “Balletic” is honestly the right word. 

YOU’RE WELCOME, EARF!!

Oh Dear du Jour

Due to the fact that I rarely ever see other human beings in my building despite it having like a hundred apartments and the fact that it’s about 10 minutes from the airport, longtime Xmastime buddy Marley has a theory that the building's actually a layover station for professional assassins, an idea we all had fun chuckling at until I saw this shit outside earlier today.

 

Me!

I don't have clinical depression but I do have a penchant to attach melancholy onto unearned nostalgia, but much like people talk about being able to recognize the onset of depression I'm able to recognize it and laugh at myself about it, so.

Know Thyself

Because I have crappy long-distance vision I was moseying around Wegmans wondering if the scenario ever presented itself wherein I found myself walking toward someone with a deformity & appeared to be gawking at them would I have what it takes in that moment to pretend I was blind?