What?  You up?

You didn’t party hard enough!

Well, time to grab your Bellinies and hangovers (out of peach nectar?  Mimosas then) and stare bleary eyed at vegetable covered cars, horses, and marching bands.

On broadcast your two choices are NBC and ABC.  Travel Channel has been carrying the pre-parade preparations since 9 am as has TLC.

Next door on Discovery you have the far more entertaining Mythbusters Marathon, but maybe that’s just me.  History Channel is doing Ice Road Truckers and Cartoon Network Looney Tunes.

Of course my great regret is I don’t get BBC so I’m totally missing their Doctor extravaganza.

As my act slowly comes together I’ll bang up some Bowl threads at inappropriate moments and if I have a chance some of your New Year’s essays.  Tomorrow I’m planning on partying down myself so you’ll have to make your own amusument.

Sunday I would suggest that you spare your blood pressure, turn off the TV, and come up with your own Top Ten reasons for why the ‘Oh Noes’ really sucked.

Myth-

A ballpoint pen bomb can be used to completely destroy the top of a mannequin.

Busted-

Using the most powerful explosives they could and a normal sized pen, the Mythbusters demonstrated that a pen bomb could be fatal. However, they needed an unrealistically large pen to completely destroy the top half of the foam dummy they used.

Myth-

Explosive decompression can occur when a bullet is fired through the fuselage of a pressurized airplane, causing the hole to grow dramatically and possibly cause the plane to break up as seen in movies.

Busted-

The pressure is not high enough and the hole is too small. Explosive decompression only occurred when a hole the size of a window was made with explosives. Even then, the rush of air could not suck Buster completely out of the hole. Lastly, there are proven instances of explosive decompression where the plane was still able to maintain control and land.

Fact-

2.8 OZ

Flight 253 terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s bomb was an explosive-packed condom sewn into underwear near his genitals, where al Qaeda operatives figured airport screeners were too squeamish to look, reports said.

What a package it was.

The condom was filled with a powdery substance called PETN — a relative of nitroglycerine. It was to be ignited by a liquid detonator substance, which Abdulmutallab tried to inject into the condom with a syringe, reports say.

Glenn–

Each time the U.S. bombs a new location in the Muslim world, the same pattern emerges.  First, officials from the U.S. or allied governments run to their favorite media outlet to claim — anonymously — that some big, bad, notorious, “top” Al Qaeda leader “may have been” or “likely was” killed in the strike, and this constitutes a “stinging” or “devastating” blow against the Terrorist group.  These compliant media outlets then sensationalistically trumpet that claim as the dominant theme of their “reporting” on the attack, drowning out every other issue.

…

Yet over and over and over, it turns out that these anonymous government assertions — trumpeted by our mindless media — are completely false.  The Big Bad Guy allegedly killed in the strike ends up nowhere near the bombs and missiles.  Sometimes, the very same Big Bad Guy can be used to justify different strikes over the course of many years (we know we said we killed him four times before, but this time we’re pretty sure we got him), or he can turn up alive when it’s time to re-trumpet the Al Qaeda threat (we said before we killed him in that devastating airstrike, but actually he’s alive and more dangerous than ever!!).  Just like the “we killed 30 extremists” claim or the “we got Al Qaeda’s Number 3” boast, this is propaganda in its purest form, disseminated jointly by the U.S. Government and American media, and it happens over and over, compelling a rational person to conclude that it’s clearly intentional by both parties.

My advice?

Stop being a coke mule you C.O.B.R.A. agent, G.I. Joe is sure to capture you.

Bwah hah hah hah hah.

Crossposted @ The Seminal.

I want to start by giving a huge flaming finger to my audience which expects miracles I can’t provide so they can point out the platonic shadows while they freeze to death like a match girl.

Welcome to America 2010.

There was a time softened by the distance of memory when I rode north past Stockbridge Massachusetts in a red VW Microbus with circles and arrows and implements of destruction.

It was a dark and stormy (I miss him, I should look him up) night and we huddled under thin blankets I can still find since like most parsimonious New Englanders (and unlike profligate Washington new money) the Gilmores never throw anything away- including that red VW Microbus with circles and arrows and implements of destruction even after I crashed it into the back of someone’s car (my legs were on the other side) and the engine blew up (this actually happened twice, once while I was driving it and once while my Dad was.  Hello Enfield coast to a stop or charging up a hill to a street named after a classmate who shat themselves in first grade).

But this wasn’t one of those bad nights and we only had to deal with the fact that you just can’t heat a red VW Microbus.

So it was pretty fucking COLD as we drove north to the Lake House and we hadn’t got our Christmas Tree yet so at the gas station we got the least pathetic one.  I want to emphasise at this point that least means beyond Charlie Brown.

So we strapped that on the roof and trundled down to the Lake House and by trundled I mean that if Dad hadn’t jumped an Olympic 90 Meter ski hill we might have missed the driveway.

Which was blocked by a 9 foot snow drift, but when one of your gifts is a toboggan you can kind of make it to the door.

And call Skip the plow guy.

Who doesn’t actually dig you out so much as wade through the snow to tell you your pathetic tree sucks and the cranberry popcorn garland a waste of time.

“Let me fix that for you.”

Skip is mostly famous for surviving without a scratch a high speed collision into a bridge abutment so I don’t want you to get the impression he’s the most reliable guy but my Dad and I went off in his plow to his garage where he walked out the back at random and picked a tree and gave it a few wacks.

In New Hampshire this behavior is considered normal.

But it was undeniably a better tree (did I mention pathetic?) and we dragged the fresh kill back to our lair and after a wee cup o’ yuletide joy we were able to scoot Skip out.

Oh.  It gets weirder.

I rescue the pathetic Charlie Brown Tree for my own because I’m a rank sentimentalist (hit the tissue twenty times just writing this) but my point is The Great Squirrel Hunt

Didn’t I tell you it got weirder?

We’d had bats in our chimneys and rafters but never a flying squirrel.  This one dove out the fire place (now in fairness I must admit we had lighted a fire) for Skip’s tree trunk and ran up and down while I chased it out the porch door armed with oven gloves and a badminton racket.

I am a formidable opponent, especially with a badminton racket.

So I’m off to the Lake House again to sleep on Granddad’s narrow red leather couch and watch Sat TV protected from the cold by the very same red VW Microbus with circles and arrows and implements of destruction thin blankets and will use whatever excuses for tools I can cram on a CD that plugs into Mom’s laptop to stay in touch as best as I can.

But wait-