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Dog rest ye, merry gentlemen (and ladies!). All the source info here, credit due for providing today’s header cuteness: https://open.substack.com/pub/martiniambassador/p/puppies-in-christmas-hats

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Do you know how much sugar is already in my system? and now you are giving me sleepy puppies in Santa hats? Aaaaaagh. (but in a good way)

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ohmigosh! Martini's shooting all the cute into our veins!

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Does anyone else remember Tom Lehrer's song that (to the tune of "The First Noel) began "When the first bombs fell, all the generals did say, we must retaliate in a positive way, In a positive way So they don't think we're sheep, We can't back out now so what the hell? Oh well, Oh well, Oh well, Oh well, We can't back down now so what the hell?" Been Googling it through page after page, but no dice. I did learn that he put all his songs and recordings into the public domain ten years ago.

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My mom had a Tom Lehrer album. It was one of my favorites. I don't recall that song though.

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I wonder how they got the little hats on the husky's ears.

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God dressed ye Merry gentlemen in funny looking clothes.....

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I got Tater a Santa hat. He wouldn't wear it, but he liked to pick it up in his mouth, throw it across the room and chase after it.

Rinse and repeat until a sloppy mess is made of said hat.

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I managed to get a hat on my cat, but I couldn't get a photo because of all the bleeding (mine).

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Soggy Santa! Good thing Tater's so cute!

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Fun* Fact: The original lyrics are parsed as "God rest ye merry, gentlemen." As in, "Gentlemen, may God keep you merry."

*may not be fun

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🎶...and a parse drudge in a pear tree.🎶

Actually, well done.

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Deck us all with Boston Charlie,

Walla Walla Wash, and Kalamazoo.

Nora's freezing on the trolley,

Swaller dollar cauliflower, alley-ga-roo.

Don't we know archaic barrel,

Lullaby, lily-boy, Louisville Lou.

Trolley Molly don't love Harold,

Boola-boola Pensacoola, hulla-ba-loo!

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Up fist for Pogo!

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No no no no .... It's "Bark us all bow-wows of folly!"

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(goes to search for the original "Pogo" comic strip to check)

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Walt Kelly wrote more than one version of the lyrics- see also "Good King Wimklehoff looked out On his feets uneven There the snoo lay round and bout All kerchew achievin'"- in some versions, it was Good King Sauerkraut Look out!"

(Bewitched-"Snoo?

Bothered- "What snoo with you?")

Bewitched, Bothered and Bemildred were three little bats wearing one-strap black overalls and bowler hats.

Dammit, Winklehoff, but I can't scroll up to the first lines to fix it via Edit.

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No, Richard, you're correct.

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Isn’t the original definition for merry drunk?

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That’s why the Pilgrims hated Christmas so much - everyone spent the whole time soused instead of wailing about sin all the time.

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I hope so.

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The problem is that song is sometimes sung like a funeral dirge. Puts me off.

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I was once rested merry. I didn't care for it.

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It's being arrested for those acts of criminal merriment that I hate.

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That husky and the little ear hats OMG

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That’s an Alaskan Malamute.

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The crêam de la crêam! LMAO!

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Merry Boopmas!

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Why does no one halfway decent ever run for sheriff? It's always a choice between two greater evils.

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His hands live on....

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I did the silent retreat in Australia. It was valuable. I never experienced talking lessons during the meditations though. I will go again for a refresher someday.

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re: article on retail shrinkage due to "organized retail crime" and how that became linked to pictures of mobs grabbing a bunch of crap out of CVS. Whatever happened to organized crime stealing from stores by hijacking trucks, etc? It seems like it would be a LOT more profitable for an organized criminal group to pay some stoned employee in an under-staffed store to look the other way while they take a few cases out the back than it would be to organize a bunch of people to grab stuff off shelves. "Stuff grabbed off of shelves" seems like it would be REAL hard to fence.

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I'm not saying this is the greatest Christmas song but Todrick Hall provides a much needed break from the 7000th rendition of White Christmas. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjl_D5qCPXA

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Christmas brunch at the O house consists of champagne and quiche.

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It's leftover cookies for us.

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My friend’s husband is the founding member of a category I came up with called “Useless Husbands” and he regularly goes on 10-day meditation retreats. Dude hasn’t had gainful employment in probably 8 years, but thinks if he just takes /one more/ online course, he’s going to walk into a corner office in Silicon Valley doing tech work. He’s not even throwing apps out, just thinks when he’s ready, then he can apply and of course he’ll be hired. Eternal eye roll. He takes their car to those retreats, so my friend has to bum rides everywhere for the time he’s away. She does way more mothering of him than wife-ing, and I am about out of patience with her griping about him, because she’s rocking that enabler role. But given he’s the only one I know who does stuff like those retreats, I have a pretty low opinion of them.

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Try being married to a Scientologist! They go to: "do their Levels," at thousands of dollars at a pop. Mine went and then stayed away.

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Oof - that’s quite a dear hobby!

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Sadly it’s a destructive cult. It ruined our marriage

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Meditation Retreat Libelz....

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Fair point - I am open to the idea that my bias is showing

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More on Roodles' current financial situation can be found in this excellent Daily Kos article: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/20/2212951/-In-scathing-ruling-federal-judge-orders-Giuliani-to-pay-defamed-election-workers-now-not-later?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_2&pm_medium=web

Bottom line is that Ruby and Shaye can and SHOULD be at Roodles' townhouse today or tomorrow, with a moving truck and some sheriff's deputies, and start hauling his crap away to be sold.

Hey ladies - get that Yankees World Series ring first!

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Oh man, bagels and smoked salmon sounds like a fabulous idea for Christmas breakfast. I used to make beignets, but that is just too much work and too much mess to clean up on a busy day, so I pivoted to cinnamon rolls (the kind that comes in a can), but it always felt like too much sugar on a day where there's already tons of it. Thanks Rebecca!

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Granted that there is a strong principled argument for Trump's disqualification from federal elections, there is an easy route for SCOTUS to take if they want to quash Colorado's challenge. The 14th Amendment says that Congress shall make the rules to carry out its provisions, and somehow Congress has never gotten around to establishing rules for disqualifying insurrectionists from federal elections. So Trump's lawyers (even they're not the brightest lights on the Christmas tree) can argue that Colorado has no right to establish 14th Amendment rules, and the procedure the state did establish denied Trump's right to due process. So let's not get too smug about SCOTUS's decision on this appeal...

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Follow-on from yesterday's Cruz/Turning Point "weenie" write-up (from HuffPo article on Seth Meyer's coverage:

""At Turning Point USA’s “AmericaFest,” Cruz tried to crack wise as he railed against Democrats, claiming Joe Biden’s team has to carry around an extra pair of trousers in case the president “has poopy pants.”

“I have a question. What is politics now? Like, for real, what are we doing?” Meyers asked on “Late Night” Wednesday.

“Everybody thinks the Ivy Leagues are ‘too woke,’ meanwhile, this dude is a senator. He went to Princeton and Harvard. He’s doing bad stand-up about an old dude shitting their pants and liberals are bad at fucking,” he said."

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Ugh... I was not prepared to hear that corrupt POS Alex Villanueva is running for Board of Supervisors. Not my district, but still....

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The cat has decided that she will not eat food at the eating food place anymore. I had to move the eating food place.

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All Hail the true Master!

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Elections can be very weird. In 2000 Missouri was electing a Senator, and our two choices were Democrat Governor Mel Carnahan and the incumbent Republican Senator John Ashcroft. Carnahan was killed in a plane crash 2 weeks before the election, long after the deadline for changing the ballots, and so we got to vote for a dead man. The dead man won.

The problem was that this made John Ashcroft unemployed and available for a job with the George W. Bush administration, and GWB nominated him for US Attorney General, and he got the job. He wielded much more power as US AG than he would have as the Senator from Missouri. He was a key supporter of passage of the USA Patriot Act.

However, in March 2004, the Justice Department under Ashcroft ruled President Bush's domestic intelligence program illegal. Shortly afterward, he was hospitalized with acute gallstone pancreatitis. White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card went to Ashcroft's bedside in the hospital intensive-care unit, to persuade Ashcroft to sign a document to reauthorize the program. Acting AG James Comey alerted FBI Director Robert Mueller of this plan, and rushed to the hospital, arriving ahead of Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, "summoning the strength to lift his head and speak", refused to sign. He did the right thing, possibly for the first and only time in his life.

And so I don't know if we did right to elect the dead man instead of re-elect Ashcroft. Maybe we did, maybe we didn't, there's no way to know, which is why I say elections can be very weird sometimes.

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right. i forgot about THAT ashcroft. i just remember him covering up the naughty bits on the statues.

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Happy News! Judge Beryl Howell has granted a request by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss to waive the 30-day wait requirement before attempting to collect on their judgement. They can go after Roodles' assets TODAY and I bet they will. They damn sure should!

Roodles is, I am sure, very familiar with the term "transfer liability". If he isn't, he soon will be!

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