Thank God for safety glass.

With your voice.

Doesn't drop a glass.

There really is no way to recover from this.

Honestly, who hasn't done something like this?

Look at his little scrunched up face...playing with his own reflection.

My consultation with Genghis Khan notwithstanding, the real front lines of this war are in Australia, where Victorian Premiere Ted Ballieu has taken on the Scrooge role and told everyone in Parliament that just because they're the government, they shouldn't be drunk on the job - even during Christmas! At least the article features a picture of a really cool tray that holds 8 glasses of beer. I bet that tray was headed to someone who, like Mr. Ballieu's colleagues, understands the true meaning of Christmas: making sure you pass out face-down in a safe area.

Make hay when the sun shines. That's David Beresford-Redman's motto. After ignoring the media since his son, Bruce, who is a former producer of Survivor, was accused of murdering his wife in Mexico, David decided he'd make the media work for him. To sell cars. He handed out fliers to reporters the other day, promising an on-camera interview to the organization that found buyers for the three vehicles. The '03 Porsche Targa was described as a "gorgeous, fast, clean car". I've got no reason not to believe him, and I don't want to risk pissing his son off by bad-mouthing his car. Of course, the most interesting aspect of this story is that DBR is one of those guys who wears brown-tinted sunglasses, which I thought only existed in pictures of my Dad and uncles from the seventies. The Beresford-Redmans are no relation to rapper Redman.

Christmas. Yeah, we're going there. I never said this would be a smooth ride. Christmas is of course the celebration of the day Jesus was born and placed in a manger because there was "no room at the inn". Seriously?  Who was running this inn? Messianic prophecy or not, it's a couple who had a baby 5 minutes ago, you can't make some space? Hell wouldn't even pull that shit, and we're talking about a place that dedicates an entire high-rise to gleefully forcing glass shards under the eyelids of false witnesses.

Christmas is also the beginning of Christmastide, the so-called 12 days of Christmas, made famous in the song of the same name. Allow me to take a breath before going into this one. Let's think about this. The first 4 days, the singer's "true love" - and I put that in quotations because I'm not sure I buy that designation for reasons I'll explain - gives her (Yeah, her. I've lived so long I stopped counting my age when we went from Roman to Arabic numerals, and I can tell you this: chicks don't buy guys multiple swans. Sorry boys, ain't gonna happen.) a partridge (with tree), 2 turtle doves, 3 french hens, and 4 colly birds. The song seems to suggest that these things are stacked every day, so on the first day it's a partridge in a pear tree, and on the second day it's 2 turtle doves and a second partridge in a pear tree, and so on. I'm going to assume that's not the case, and that each subsequent mentioning of a gift is a reference to the original, and not a duplicate gift. If I'm wrong, then what I took to be merely absurd is actually whatever is above absurd. Preposterous?

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Apparently he doesn't understand that the glass door is gone.

Well, it's happened again. You've blasted through another year and suddenly it's Thanksgiving again. We do a big Thanksgiving down here. It's a good holiday for a diverse crowd, since it's secular and you don't really need to explain much, even to people who have never heard of it. Have a big feast, open a few bottles of wine. Everybody "gets it". And holidays that center around cooking are big in Hell, since heat is easy to come by in a lake of fire that burns hotter than the hottest earthly flame.

I'm hosting this year like I always do. It used to be a real treat for everyone to come to my place, since I lived in the most exclusive neighborhood in all of Hell. Guests would make jokes like "What's the cover charge going to be?" But while my neighborhood was nice when I moved in, it's pretty shitty now. One of the hazards of eternity, I guess, unless you want to move every hundred years. Now the place is really run down and all the businesses have left. I knew we'd hit the skids when I drove by a Souplantation with my neighbor Ron and he said, without irony, "It would be really cool if we could get one of those". It's come to that. Now people make jokes like "Yeah, we'll be there, just let me get my flak jacket out of the attic".

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I once ran, full speed, into a glass door. It hurt, but I was grateful I didn't go through it.