Blog #459                      December 25, 2025

 

Merry Christmas to all my loyal friends and readers!  And Feliz Navidad!  If you celebrate the birth of Christ, my Christmas Carol and I wish you a wonderful, safe holiday.  If you don’t celebrate Christmas, you can still enjoy the lights and the music and the spirit.  It’s 73^o here in St. Louis, and the only white things you can see on this Christmas are the sheets of paper that the Jeffrey Epstein files are written on.  I’ll get back to that.

 

Message from Shakespeare, the three-legged cat:  At Christmas I no more desire a rose than wish a snow in May (Love’s Labour’s Lost).  Purry Christmas.  Deck the halls with bowls of cat-food – meow, meow, meow and purr, purr, purr.

 

Did Santa and his ten reindeer land on your roof last night and drop presents down your chimney?  Ten reindeer, I hear you query?  Yes, ten.  There were Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donder and Blitzen.  And, of course, Rudolph and Olive.  Olive?  Yes, Olive was the other reindeer, the one that was mean to Rudolph.  Olive, the other reindeer, used to laugh and call him names.

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you are feeling festive and well.  I promise this blog will contain no Epstein Files. XXXXXXXXXXX.  There, I’ve redacted something for you.  Does that make you feel better?  I don’t get it.  The only issue in the last ten years that our Congressional representatives have agreed upon in a bi-partisan landslide is that they want to see more dirty pictures.  I guess salacity crosses party lines.  Why are we paying them?

 

And yes, salacity is our Weekly Word.  It means the expression of undue or inappropriate interest in sexual matters.  Let’s move on to something more wholesome, like grandchildren.  Do you ever sit around with your grandchildren and tell them how life was when you were a kid?  Things like:

 

·        In my day our telephones were attached to the wall?

·        I remember when there were only three television channels.

·        Back then, our flag only had 48 stars.  Alaska and Hawaii weren’t states yet.

·        And it only cost four cents to mail a letter.

I wonder what our grandchildren, 40 years from now, will be telling their grandchildren.

 

·        When I was young, we had little copper things called pennies.

·        Back then, our flag only had 50 stars.  Canada and Venezuela weren’t states yet.

·        And people actually drove their own cars.

·        And people actually sent other people pieces of paper, called letters, which were delivered by something called the U.S. Mail.

·        Go ahead and play now, kids.  They just released another six million Jeffrey Epstein photos.

What with all the scandals involving powerful men caught in sexual misbehaviors of one form or another, my wife asked me if, in the many years I had been in business and had many women working under me (that’s a bad phrase, isn’t it?), whether I had been involved in any harassment.  “Well, in all honesty,” I told her, “there was one little incident in High School.  You see, the high-school girls were playing softball and I just couldn’t take my eyes off the shortstop.” 

 

I thrilled to her figure and grace

And loved every view of her face

So I tried to make sport

With the girl who played short

But I couldn’t get past second base.

 

It all worked out fine in the end -- I married her.

 

It’s time for the Award shows.  The American Music Awards is Sunday.  And then Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, Tony, Golden Globe, People’s Choice, Critic’s Choice, SAG.  It seems that every week there’s an extravaganza where gatherings of rich people give themselves awards.  Have you ever really looked at the audience at these award shows?  I certainly hope Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are watching, because if they want to tax the rich, this is the place to be.  There’s violence and antisemitism in the streets, poverty in every large American city, war in the Ukraine. But what do we see at these award shows?  A bunch of Barbie dolls strutting around in their Versace’s and Jimmy Choos, signing $20 million contracts for their next movies.  And a bunch of fat, male directors looking for aspiring starlets to jump on their casting couch.   And when they accept their awards for being rich and skinny, or their awards for being ruthless and powerful, they always take the opportunity to tell us how to live our boring and normal lives.  They wouldn’t know what a normal life was if they ran over one with their Maserati.   Where is the Occupy Oscars crowd?  Where is the outrage?  Is there anybody disgusted besides me?

 

And the funny thing is -- we really don’t care who wins the awards.  We only care about “who” they’re wearing.  It seems to me that all these starlets are either too skinny or too large, and they’re either wearing Bulimia Blass or Oscar de la Tenta.  Which brings up the following question: why do fat chance and slim chance mean the same thing?

 

I celebrated a birthday yesterday.  You see, it was sixteen years ago yesterday that they brought me back to life with that most delicate and clever of medical tricks – massive electric shock.  I truly thought it was all over for me then, but I’m still here and the pacemaker-defibrillator does not seem to have had any residual effects.  Except, of course, that when I cough, the garage door goes up.  But the fun part is that if I’m driving and want to honk the horn, all I have to do is rub a balloon on my hair.  And, of course, there are certain things I have to avoid, like vacuuming, cross-country skiing and getting run over by a reindeer.  I can just picture myself, up in Heaven with a twelve-point rack up my you-know-what.  No electric shock is going to bring me back from that!  And I can just imagine what God would say – MICHAEL, I TRIED TO KILL YOU SIXTEEN YEARS AGO AND THAT DIDN’T WORK.  THIS TIME I SENT RUDOLPH.

 

Alright, you have better things to do, so I’ll let you go now.  Have a Merry Christmas and a wonderful week.  Be sure to stay well and count your blessings.  See you next Thursday

 

Olive                                        Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com