XMASTIME

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Questions and Ideas. I Have Them.

Moi Say Moi back in 2021:

Larry David claims to have never watched a single minute of Seinfeld after he left the show after Season 7. Aaron Sorkin claims the same thing about The West Wing after he left. Why can't these people have podcasts where they go through each episode after they left and talk about it?

And so speaking of J.D. Salinger earlier today as I was, my nest questions is can AI please create holograms of Salinger and Harper Lee so the two of them could also do a podcast about their singularly American books and the lives they led afterwards?

Crummy Goddamit.

Like anyone, The Catcher in the Rye had a hold on me in my youth. But at the end of the day, Holden Caulfield is your average Williamsburg hipster in a nouveau-rock art fusion no-bass-included Japanese haiku band; Holden we're fairly certain will simply end up at another private school for fellow rich kids, and in a few years he will look back on his melo-dramatic teen years and laugh. - XMASTIME, 2010

The Catcher in the Rye is celebrating it's 75th anniversary:

Pour out a Scotch and soda — make that a malted milk — for this spry codger of a novel that’s stayed on the dance floor long past when might be expected, leaping over book bans from the right and dodging cancellation from the left. “Catcher” has somehow inspired artists as disparate as John Guare and Guns N’ Roses, its denunciation of phoniness presaging the social-media demand for “authenticity.

It also inspired someone to murder John Lennon, but I don't wanna bring anybody down.

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), "didn't you drop the single greatest truthbomb about Holden Caulfield all the way back in 2016?"

Sigh. Yes I did, faithful readers, YES I did:

Can someone please write the movie in which we find out Holden Caulfield grows up to be Pete Campbell so I don't have to thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanks.

I Will Now Solve the MLB All-Star Game, Thank You Very Much.

The score of this year's game was 4-0.
Yawn.
No players wanna play the game.
They spent years & years trying to make the game mean something, anything, and it was exactly as worthless an idea as you'd expect.
The romanticism of AL vs. NL has been dead since interleague play began almost 30- years ago.
All that pitchers know how to do anymore is completely unload their arms with every pitch-counted pitch, so they hafta be worried about injuries with every pitch they throw at what is nothing more than an exhibition game.

MEANWHILE

More & more, managers are having position players finish pitching games that have gotten out of control.
It's a signal that the rest of the game doesn't matter and lightens things up while reducing needless pitching injuries.
Here's my all-time favorite instance of this!

SO

They should have position players pitch the All-Star Game.

Set a scoring cap at 20 runs and the winner's whoever gets there first, or stop at 6 innings, whatever; my rather brilliant idea in my rather humble opinion will make the game purely about joyous fun while reducing injuries YOU ARE WELCOME, MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL AND MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL FANS!!

This One's for Marley! 🤗🕺

Watching people keep giving Trump a pass because they still think he'll eventually do the right thing is like watching someone the first time they watch Whitney Cummings do stand-up.

Monday, July 20, 2026

XMASTIME 20 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Comments Section Edition

Sunday, July 19, 2026

Rainy Day with Scooter

One of us was loving the rain, and the other one was Scooter. 😜🤗❤️🐶

Friday, July 17, 2026

You Are.

Thursday, July 16, 2026

Wonderful, Wonderful Worlds Colliding 🤗🇬🇧

Moi Say Moi back when I was making a few connections between the brilliant Extras and the brilliant Only Fools and Horses, and rather brilliantly mused as I do about Stephen Merchant, a very-much avowed superfan of OFAH:

I can't find a clip of it but I distinctly remember Merchant pretty much re-creating the Del Boy bar scene at a fitness center vending machine in a scene from his HBO series Hello Ladies.

SWEET, HORRIBLE VINDICATION people, via Stephen Merchant himself! Enjoy! And yes, you ARE welcome, Earf!!

In America.

We live in an absurdly & terrifyingly over-policed state whose authoritarian thirst for cruelty will be pushed to its bounds by Trump so I generally don’t love bringing up the police in the first place but I would like to live in world that doesn’t include our having to chain down the rocking chairs outside Cracker Barrel.

Presenting to You "A Haunting but Succinct Note from a Stranger", by Xmastime 😔

Insta du Jour

MUKLUKS: paintingsoflondon

A Note on Our President

One of Trump's many, many infantile Achilles heels is that even after being handed all of the cookies at the table but one, no matter how underserving he is in the first place, he can’t let that one go & inevitably that’s what unspools everything in the end, drowned out by his endless bitching & screeching about how unfair everything is except that instead of him at some point being taught a lesson to just shut the fuck up and enjoy the cookies he was handed for no fucking reason, eventually someone gets tired of the whining & gives him the last cookie, therein setting off the same toddler Olympic game for the next time.

RIP Hal Williams

Hal Williams died yesterday; I don’t think I could’ve pulled his name out of my own head, but I also feel like when I was a kid the odds of him turning up on whatever tv show I was watching was always pretty high. You’d always feel good whenever he’d show up onscreen, and it’s a credit to him that someone like me could feel even a tiny bit of loss upon hearing of his death, which certainly makes him deserving of my generation in particular taking a minute to say thanks for always being such a positive presence in all our lives, even if from so far away.