Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Fight them, without becoming them!

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

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Reader Interactions

92Comments

  3. 3.

    sab

    Air some grievances. That’ll change your mood.

    I watched “The Lion in Winter” this morning. I love to see families at holiday time.
    Husband is warching Bob Hope in “Lemon Drop Kid” right now. Husband is a nicer person than I am.

  6. 6.

    Comrade Colette

    Monsieur Colette, who is often confused on calendar issues, is busy airing his grievances right now! Apparently ordering Chinese food without consulting him was a grave error despite getting all the favorites he always chooses anyway. ?

    Oh well, this too shall pass.

  7. 7.

    HumboldtBlue

    Yeah, I’m watching A Christmas Prince about the young big city girl who is assigned to cover the roguish Crown Prince of Aldovia who is headed to his coronation and she pretends to be a tutor to get inside the palace where she immediately befriends the clever and crippled Crown Princess who is a terror to all tutors and smarter than them too and she and who is the apple of the Prince’s eye and they are gonna fall head over heels in love and it’s all set during Xmas time and she said “there is no loose in this goose” which is some brilliant dialog. So what, you bastards?

  9. 9.

    scav

    If failing the theoretical expectations of pseudonymous readers makes you gleeful, well then . . .  why not?! Merry Merry.

  12. 12.

    sab

    Forgot to light the Advent wreath’s last candle last Sunday. Hope that isn’t bad luck. So lighting it tonight to at least have it done by Christmas.

    ETA Of course the one I forgot was the Peace one

    Hope, Love, Joy, Peace.

  13. 13.

    Steeplejack

    @Comrade Colette:

    People are funny. Now I’m hungry for Chinese food! Maybe I’ll cruise by my favorite spot on the way home from the airport tomorrow and see if they’re open. I mean, as long as I have to be out and about . . .

  15. 15.

    Sister Golden Bear

    I have a grievance: Where are the holiday rom coms where a woman leaves her small town, dumping her… eccentric… boyfriend, and moves to the big city, where she learns to hate Christmas and lives happy ever after with a circle of best friends, while remaining single and pursuing her high-powered career?

  19. 19.

    Gin & Tonic

    Dear wife and I are spending Christmas Eve alone for the first time in ~45 years, since our daughter has not completed her CDC-recommended isolation period after getting Covid recently. Given that everyone is pretty flexible, we simply decided that Christmas Eve will fall on the 28th this year in our household. I mean, Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th anyway, so whatever.

  20. 20.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @dnfree: I’ve always viewed “It’s a Wonderful Life” as a tragedy, a requiem for a dream.

    Bah humbug.

    Admittedly, it’s through my own lens of being the dutiful son (actually daughter) who tried to do what the world expected of me: compliance, sacrifice, resilience — including trying to live as a man until I couldn’t any more.

    It’s obviously not anything the filmmakers intended, but that sense of a dream that seems unobtainable after the all the repeated roadblocks thrown in one’s way definitely that resonates for many trans folks, including myself.

  23. 23.

    OGLiberal

    @Sister Golden Bear: Not exactly that but Rachel Dratch and Ana Gasteyer did a pretty good Hallmark spoof movie this year.  Only funny if you know Hallmark movies and only – well, not really – noticeable as parody unless you know Dratch and Gasteyer.

  24. 24.

    Villago Delenda Est

    OK, so “Festivus Yes, Bagels No” does make sense if you’re striving to be lowering your carbs intake.

  26. 26.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @dnfree: I think we can all agree that Mr. Potter lives on in the boardrooms of corporate America.  Particularly in the financial sector.

  27. 27.

    Comrade Colette

    @HumboldtBlue: I watched that a while back and enjoyed it more than I expected. I feel no shame. I also recommend “A Castle for Christmas” with Brooke Shields.

  28. 28.

    laura

    I did a quick house scour and stashed some top of the credenza detritus. Down went a bag of ever greenery and a dozen bubble lights. A big old crystal vase wedding gift has been filled with twinkle lites and shiny balls and the lites are twinkling in a pleasing pattern. Spouse, both cats and the dog all settling in after a dinner of barbequed pork fried rice. It’s a really nice evening.

  32. 32.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Comrade Colette:

    I am shamelessly on it.

    On another note, Elvis Elfington made 10 phone calls tonight reminding various and sundry children that the man was on the way and that he is somewhere over Joisey City (it’s always Joisey city) and will soon be in your house, so be abed and asleep.

    Waiting on final reviews, so far, very positive.

  33. 33.

    mrmoshpotato

    @laura:

    Spouse, both cats and the dog all settling in after a dinner of barbequed pork fried rice. 

    Did the cats and dog enjoy the BBQ pork fried rice? ?

  34. 34.

    Suzanne

    Does this mean I am happy?

    Whoa whoa whoa, settle down there, Trigger. You are marginally less grumpy. Don’t go getting soft on me now.

  36. 36.

    Ramona Rosario

    @sab: Did you watch the original with Katherine Hepburn, was it Peter O’Toole?, Anthony Hopkins, Timothy Dalton or the relatively newer HBO (IIRC) version with I think Patrick Stewart?

    I had watched the “newer” one several years ago, liked it enough to search out the older version and was completely bowled over by the Hepburn version! The life of Eleanor of Aquitaine is rich fodder for sizzling stories.

  37. 37.

    Benw

    @Sister Golden Bear: excellent. My daughter insisted on leaving a carrot with the cookies and milk this year.

    I’m wishing for peace and joy to you all even and especially if those are hard to come by these days.

  40. 40.

    Jackie

    Waiting for over-stimulated granddaughters to wind down and crash, so Santa’s helpers can start doing their jobs. Eight and ten yr olds are especially wound up this Christmas Eve!

  42. 42.

    BeautifulPlumage

    @sab: loved that movie the time I saw it

    “I’m so miserable, if I were on fire there isn’t anyone who would even piss on me to put the flames”

    Brother pulls out flint ” let’s see”

    (paraphrasing)

  43. 43.

    mali muso

    @sab: If you like Christmas rom-coms, I thoroughly enjoyed Netflix’s “Single all the Way” which centers a gay couple and ticks off all the schlocky beats of the genre.

  44. 44.

    BeautifulPlumage

    Canceled an invite to Chinese food tonight because of Omicron. I don’t have it that I know of, but my some of my coworkers aren’t vaxxed and my booster was less than 2 weeks ago. Hosts are travelling to see his elderly parents & 3 other guests are > 65. I would hate to be asymptomatic and give it to any of them.

     

    Instead, I cooked the turkey I was “gifted” and now the place smells Christmas-y. I’ll be making turkey dishes for the freezer tomorrow!

  50. 50.

    HumboldtBlue

    Uh-oh, technical glitch with a local call… seems messages not going through (could it be the storm, Pa?) may have to resort to actual face-to-face contact and no one wants that.

  51. 51.

    H.E.Wolf

    A nice piece of trivia:  James Goldman, who wrote The Lion in Winter, was the older brother of William Goldman… who wrote The Princess Bride.  :-)

  53. 53.

    NotMax

    “Calling Houston. Are you receiving, Houston?”

    “Houston here. Come in, ISS.”

    “We’re detecting an anomaly somewhere in West Virginia.”

    ;)

  63. 63.

    James E Powell

    @Ramona Rosario:

    The life of Eleanor of Aquitaine is rich fodder for sizzling stories.

    Absolutely. This is the two or three season HBO series that is right there, just dying to be made.

  69. 69.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: On a related note, Mammoth (CA) is supposed to get eight feet of snow (yes eight feet) in the latest storm. They’d already gotten four feet as of this afternoon.

    If it weren’t so hard to get there from the Bay Area I’d be sorely tempted to head over there for powder skiing.

  72. 72.

    dmsilev

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: It actually briefly snowed in Pasadena a couple of years ago. To say that people here were surprised and confused is putting it mildly.

    Not going to happen this week though. Lots of rain, but no frozen stuff in the city.

  77. 77.

    joel hanes

    Merry Christmas, blogfather.

    May the dark give way to light for all the jackals, everywhere, of every creed and persuasion.

    And may 2022 be a better year for all of us.

  80. 80.

    Citizen Alan

    @dnfree:

    This is a heretical take, I know. But I can’t help seeing It’s A Wonderful Life as the story of a man who continually sacrifices all of his personal dreams and ambitions in order to stay in a little hicktown continually cleaning up his family’s mistakes until it drives him to the breaking point. At which point God personally intervenes to show him a contrived “What If” scenario as a way of justifying his lifetime of disappointments.

    Apropos of nothing, I’m back in Hicktown, Mississippi for the holidays. Visiting my nephew who proudly gets all his news from Youtube and his mother, my sister, who just adores Tucker Carlson.

  81. 81.

    Comrade Colette

    @Citizen Alan:

    I’m back in Hicktown, Mississippi for the holidays. Visiting my nephew who proudly gets all his news from Youtube and his mother, my sister, who just adores Tucker Carlson.

    Oh, golly. Wishing you a weekend of intermittent, inexplicable hearing loss and myopia, to be miraculously cured when you shake the dust of that place from your feet.

  82. 82.

    Steeplejack

    @Citizen Alan:

    Progress, dude. I can remember a year or two ago when you thought you were going to live out your miserable life in Mississippi. Now you’re a hard-bitten hipster New Yorker. Somehow you achieved escape velocity. You don’t ever have to go back. Y0ur relatives may never change, but you don’t need them do. There’s a difference between the family you’re born into and the family you choose for yourself. Sometimes they overlap, but not always.

  84. 84.

    Benno

    Grades were due yesterday, so the students in my department had plenty of grievances to air. And, sadly, as the program director they are airing them all to me.

  87. 87.

    Ruckus

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    I watched my sister (lesbian – unknown to me until I met her partner when I was 24) go through this (I think/bet it was an easier journey than you likely had) and then a number of gay folks who I met along her journey. I count being able to watch this to be one of the great joys of my life, watching someone find their real self. I hope that the journey has given you peace and comfort. The last 5 decades has given me a picture of humanity that is both great and far less than it should be. That humans are complicated, selfish, compassionate, not always as they appear, and often incredible. I’ve often wondered what life would be like if a whole lot of people didn’t need to have their their lives justified by demanding that everyone else bend to their rigid pictures of living.

    Merry Christmas everyone, it just turned Saturday here.

  89. 89.

    debbie

    @Ramona Rosario:

    Lauren Groff’s novel Matrix is about Marie de France, one of the children born of Henry’s dalliances. Eleanor makes more than a few appearances. Unpossible, of course, but I definitely see Hepburn in Groff’s Eleanor.

  90. 90.

    Miss Bianca

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I must be the only person in the world who, upon seeing O’Toole and Hepburn chewing up the scenery in this movie, just went, “Meh,” at the end of it.

    @frosty: Actually, apparently (according to my recipe source) it’s only Shepherd’s Pie if you use ground lamb. Ground beef or any other meat-like substance turns it into Cottage Pie.

    Speaking of – I actually made my very first Shepherd’s Pie from scratch last night. Good enough to warrant a re-make in the future.

  92. 92.

    brantl

    @sab: I detested Bob Hope when he was alive, and see no reason to change it, now that he’s dead. He wasn’t funny; he was Richard Nixon made over into a comic. Yech.

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