When Santa Drinks.

One year sometime in the early '90s I did some cartoons in MS Paint to amuse my coworkers as Christmas approached. The cartoons have been unseen for years. For a while I'd had them posted on Geocities but it was one of those free disappearing sites that blinked out of existence without warning, (as distinct from the other Geocities sites, which blinked out of existence in October after Yahoo! decided its free crappy websites weren't worth the trouble). Luckily for me - and now for you - the cartoons were saved on our home PC, where they've been trapped since about 2001 - that computer had no CD burner and its replacement, and its replacement, and then that machine's two replacements didn't have floppy drives.

It only occurred to me a few days ago that I might be able to create a small network to connect that old computer to one of our new ones. (Yes, I am also the kind of guy who much later has brilliant comebacks to people's remarks. My rejoinders last week to that guy who made fun of my hair would have shut him up but good, had he not died years ago.) But I digress: my point is that the network worked, the files were transferred, and my cartoons live again.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, I give you When Santa Drinks.






But Christmas isn't just about giving, it's about getting and it's about selling. In keeping with that True Spirit Of Christmas, if you want to get some When Santa Drinks Christmas cards, I will be delighted to sell some When Santa Drinks Christmas cards to you.

So, just for people like you and me and everybody, When Santa Drinks Christmas cards are now on sale at Zazzle! Surely you have a hundred friends you need to send cards to this year! Buy now! Buy often! Buy too many!

Maybe he meant, "there's lots of seasonS left."

Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Luke Schenn told a reporter the other day that the team wasn't happy with its performance.

"We didn't want to start this way," he said, "but there's lots of season left."

So say what you will about the Leafs, but they don't know the meaning of the word "quit," and they certainly don't know how to read a schedule.

Twenty of their season's 82 games have been played and the Leafs have won three of them. At the rate they're going now, they'll be lucky to finish with a dozen wins. (For you non-hockey-fans who may be asking yourself if that's good, ten of the other 29 teams in the league already have 12 or more wins this season, so, no, that's not very good at all.)

Here's how bad the Leafs are: if they were to set for themselves what other teams might consider the modest goal of winning half of their games this season (a goal, incidentally, that 14 of the other 29 teams in the NHL are currently meeting or exceeding), they would have to win 38 of their next 61 games. That's a .623 winning percentage for the rest of the season.

"Surely that's doable, right?" asks the theoretically representative die-hard Toronto fan. Don't bet on it: the last time they did put up numbers like that was in the 2003-2004 season, and the last time before that was in 1961. In fact, they've only ever managed it six times since 1927.

So, anyway, Luke: there's always next season, right?

The fine art of the sales pitch.

In today's mail, a come-on from Vonage: "As a valued former Vonage customer, we have a special limited-time offer just for you: Come Back to Vonage and get" - and then, in big orange letters that got even bigger and oranger as the sentence concluded - offered me exactly the same price as I had been paying before I cancelled the service. Or, to put it another way, twice as much as the rate they offered me two months ago when I called them to cancel.

It's a bold strategy - if at first the customer doesn't go for the lower price, try raising it back to the original price - convince them that not only were they wrong to stop buying it then, their refusal was an insult. An insult! Hell, why not double the price and teach those impertinent peons a lesson?

I'm holding out until Vonage asks for $200 a month, a kidney and the right to crush my testicles on demand. You know, just like my cell phone company.

We're gonna need a bigger Gitmo.

An article by Walter Pincus in The Washington Post says that the FBI told the Senate Judiciary Committee in September that its terrorist watch list contains over four hundred thousand "unique names".

They say "anti-terrorism," I say "paranoid much?"

They're adding about 1,600 names a day to the list, for crying out loud. (For comparison, an FBI agent who served on a CIA–FBI task force hunting bin Laden has said that al Qaeda's membership list in 2001 contained 198 names.)

Four hundred thousand potential terrorists in the USA? Come on. You're telling me that America has twice as many potential terrorists as it does Army Reservists?

If there were 400,000 potential terrorists within the United States, you wouldn't be able to find diesel fuel or fertilizer anywhere.

If there were 400,000 potential terrorists within the United States, there would be explosions in airplanes, subways, shopping malls, airports and football stadiums every day of the week.

If there were 400,000 potential terrorists within the United States, they'd have a company health plan, a 401-K, some sort of employee day care program, and, most importantly, at least one employee stupid enough to blog about what they were up to.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll just go hide in my basement. Wouldn't want the terrorists to get me.