Creative Endeavors

Black Friday has come and gone, hopefully the majority of you survived it to “fight another day.”  One more reason for me to be “ashamed of being American.”

Now it appears that the official “I have to buy something to be happy season” is now in full swing.  Let us pray the casualties will be light this year as everyone dives into the commercialism of Christmas and forgets about “the baby.”

How did this tradition of decorating the house in multiple colored lights become Christmas?  It seems as if it has been around forever and now a days it is even starting earlier.  I saw some houses decorated and blinking in the night sky as early a week before Thanksgiving.

There is however good news, “if you live in Oklahoma, and are lazy, you don’t take your Christmas Lights down at the end of the season.  You just leave them hanging there all year long and re-illuminate the following season.”

Okies are like that.

I prefer the image of what I call “the Coca Cola Santa Claus.”  He just seems to cheer me on, how about you?  Do you want to know the secret to his success?    His “jolliness” this time of the year, even though his responsibilities are numerous, delegates the majority of the hard work out to the elves.

He leaves the drudgework to those under him, while he parties on the couch, chugging eggnog and dialing his sports representative (bookie) for the latest line on the football games for the holidays.

Sometimes it pays to be able to multi-task in this day and age.

Don’t You Just Hate It When …. You ever notice that when you are working on a truck or a car, and you drop a tool, it will for some strange reason, “automatically roll to the exact center of the truck or car” and then stop.  Can you imagine what happens when you drop a tool in space?

Astronaut Heldemarle Stefanyahy-Piper who was repairing a solar panel on the space-station when she accidentally let go of a tool bag and then watched it float away into the void (I assume to the exact center of the Universe, but I am not sure).

“Oh great” she muttered, which is kind of like hearing the wife in the kitchen saying “shoot” we all know it is the other word, that is spelled without the “two O’s.”  The thing that really got me going was the name …. Heldemarle Stefanyahy-Piper … Ah, there is a name to remember.

Hard Times In The Hollars … Huntington West Virginia has been named as the unhealthiest city in the USA.  About half the adults there are obese, and half of its senior citizens have no teeth.  Since the economy in Huntington is so poor, the subject of overeating “doesn’t come up much” said the mayor who is also obese.  I suppose the sale of Jell-o is big at the local super-center too.  Lucille, pass me another bowl of them thar marshmallows … the melted ones

Dancin With The Stars Reject … A 64 year old North Carolina woman has been awarded $275,000 after her town banned her from its weekly community dances.  She danced in short skirts, “simulating sexual intercourse with her partner, who hunched on the floor.” (sounds like a good clean community atmosphere to me, yeah right).  The town decided to settle her lawsuit and made a somewhat tacit admission that it had infringed upon her freedom of expression.

Giving Martha The Finger … An Iowa man who injured his finger moving a Martha Stewart branded chair is suing the homemaking champion claiming that he lost earning capacity when the finger was re-attached to his hand.  He is, I am not making this up, he is a “hand model and magician.”  The injury has effectively restricted his abilities to do slight of hand tricks and play the banjo at the same time.  It is a tough job, but someone has to do it.

Merry Christmas here is your pink slip … Colorado Springs Colorado Evangelical group, Focus On The Family is laying off 150 people after Thanksgiving and cutting their workforce of some 1,150 people.  They are citing bad economic hard times as the reason.  They also state that “donations to the organization” are down and they attribute that to the recession.

They will now stop publishing four of its eight magazines and I assume, lay off pumping huge amounts of cash into the fight to stop proposition same-sex marriage proposals on the California ballot.  Which always confuses me to no end, I can’t ever get it right.  Transsexuals are the things that grow down from the ceiling and transvestites are the ones that grow up from the floor … right?

User Name and Password Please … Barack Obama plans to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office, thus becoming the first sitting U.S. President to do this.  He’ll probably have to give up using email, since emails can be hacked and subpoenaed by the government. Thanks to John Ashcroft and the Bush Posse nothing is sacred any more.  It would behoove Mr. Obama to remember:  “All human beings have three lives.  Public, private and secret.”

No word on whether or not he will continue to read Creative Endeavors.  (Yeah I know, that is rich isn’t it.  Sorry just couldn’t pass it up)  Well he did admit to reading “Harry Potter.”

I changed my mind … I am sorry … Please let me go … More than 100 requests for presidential pardons have poured into the White House hoping Bush will wipe their records clean.  Among those requesting pardons are former junk-bond king Michael Milken, who systematically wiped out the accounts of hundreds of thousands of American Senior Citizens.  Olympic sprinter and steroid abuser Marion Jones, and John Walker Lindh.  The poor little rich kid from Marin County California, “The American Taliban” who got 20 years and should have to serve every treasonous day of it as far as I am concerned.

Well that is about it for Monday morning, I can wrap this up and get back to my new book I am reading.  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for the twenty-first Century, It has recently been updated and this year, has totally new words for the public and gives my life new meaning.  On Sale $24.95 Borderbound.

• Chapter One:  Internet addiction … How to upload files and download material, right, the first time.
  
• Chapter Two:  Parental Alienation Syndrome … How to wean yourself off of Margaret & Helen safely and painlessly.
  
• Chapter Three: Compulsive Buying Disorder … Buying up Wall Street Banks and Corrupt Insurance Companies for fun and zero profit.
  
• Chapter Four:  Apathy Disorder… Not finding yourself really concerned where Sarah Palin happens to be at the present time, or actually caring if Dubya and Laura find a suitable house in Dallas.

Headed down to the river to ride my bike.  Which brings me to another thing.  “Unless you’re a professional cyclist or have lost a bet, take off the tight black Lycra biking shorts. And then burn them.

But then again, “I am old school” and everyone knows that.

000

The November index is now up and complete.  65 articles and 41,000 words … check it out.  “The cartoon courtesy of Center for American Progress” (online)