Santa, Godzilla and Jesus Walk Into A Bar: Chapter 1: No orphans were harmed in the making of this story.

This might be my favorite Xmas story I ever wrote; if you've read it before, maybe read it again. If you haven't, then here's the first installment of the story, from back in 2011:

"Santa,
Godzilla,
and Jesus
Walk Into A Bar"
a/k/a The Greatest Xmas Story Ever Told.

(By me.)

No orphans were harmed in the making of this story.

And only one orphan was harmed in the telling of it.

On the street in front of Nick, who makes UFOs for a living – it’s a long story, and there’s no time to explain it right now because we’re only moments away from something really important happening --  was a tiny brass trumpet.

It was dirty.

It was covered in soot and laying in a puddle of slush next to a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and looked as though it had a lipstick smear on it, on the wrong end, and maybe some teeth marks, too.

So naturally, Nick picked it up and was just seconds away from blowing into it when the door to the bar he’d just been told to leave opened up behind him and he heard the voice of the man who’d told him to leave, saying:

“Okay, okay. So here’s this one: Santa, Godzilla, and Jesus walk into a bar…”

and Nick paused with the dirty lipstick-smeared horn up to his mouth and listened because with a set up like that who wouldn’t, and then that important thing you were told was going to happen but you already forgot about it happened:

A body slammed to the ground in front of Nick, falling into, as it happens, the exact same puddle that Nick had just pulled the trumpet out of. How’s that for irony? We’re only just getting started, too.

Sirens immediately started up all around Nick, and from both ends of the street – he was in the middle of the block – came cop cars racing towards him, almost as if they’d been waiting for just this.

(They had been.)

Nick squatted down and looked at the body in front of him. It was a large man, laying on his stomach.  His face was turned to the side, his eyes closed. Somehow, the fedora the man wore, which Nick hadn’t noticed until that moment, had stayed on when the man had fallen to the puddle from wherever it was he’d fallen from.

All the buildings on the street being three stories or shorter, Nick didn’t bother looking up above him.  The man had fallen straight down from the sky, Nick knew, because it had happened right in front of his eyes.

“We’ll take care of this, sir,” said the surprisingly sexy cop who was suddenly standing in front of him. Nick blinked up at her, and saw her eyes narrow in a fetchingly cute way.

“Where’d you get that horn?” she said.

Nick looked down at his hand, still poised near his mouth.

“It’s a trumpet,” he said.

The cop reached for her waist, and Nick made his second regrettable decision that day, the first being “admitting to the bartender that he had no money before he ordered.”

He ran.

The third regrettable decision he made a second later when he looked back and saw the sexy lady cop lifting up the dead bum’s jacket, and noticed the dead bum had wings.


PART TWO COMING SOON. Or if you want you can buy the entire story all at once here. 

I think a cool thing to do would be to spend an entire day using ONLY Star Wars quotes.

Boom goes the dynamite

"... Only you can see then, Martin. You want to know why?"

"This is bullshit," Martin said.

"You've got the sight," Harrison said. "The third eye. The sixth sense."

"I don't see dead people," Martin said.

"No, you see worse. I've met people like you before. You have a talent. You don't need a gadget to make it work."

"Is there where you tell me to put away the targeting computer?"

-- We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory.

But with new Loquinex (TM) you can be free of all that (i had this moment)

Bear Comics

The Boys etc etc August!

Miniature golfing:

Swimming at the "Dolphin Pool" (So named for its dolphin-water fountain)

At Zipline Park. 

On our way to the Dolphins' Cove waterpark for Mr Bunches' early birthday present. No pictures from the waterpark, for non-waterproof-camera-related reasons. 

Babysitting Mr F's and Mr Bunches' nephew (my grandson) and taking him to the nature trail...

Mr F & Grandson at the splash park:

Swinging on the last weekend of summer...

Bonus Summer Day: Actually September 1, but I took the day off and we went bowling: 

Mr F has a "Green Machine," a Big Wheel for older kids, but it had already been delivered to the school by the weekend of September 2 (he uses it for phy-ed), so he was relegated to old school Big Wheels when playing outside: 

The boys are tenty-one, part two: pics from July

Sweetie and I agreed summer seemed less full of activities this year -- me busier with a new job and having fewer days off helped that. But we packed a lot in.

Stewart Lake, 

This is our nature walk to the natural springs and then the big hill we call "the mountain." We got to the springs, but this impending thunderstorm called off the hike up the mountain:

Free day at the Milwaukee Public Museum: Mr Bunches in the butterfly room

Us in the European village. 

Mr F in front of the Native Americans hunting buffalo display. Clearly excited by it!

We only stayed about 1 hour at the museum. It was supercrowded and Mr Bunches was made nervous by the dinosaur display where the dinosaurs seem VERY real and there are thunder noises in the background.

Swimming, then swinging at the beach down the street from us.

This was when we went to go wading up the river, right at the start. Mr F slipped and cut his ankle, and while it wasn't bad I didn't want it to get infected so we cut the trip short. Then weather kept us from ever finishing the trip, one of three traditional summer activities we had to skip that we'd done every year up to this one. 

The Vilas Zoo in Madison. Free, so we go all the time. 

Sad story alert! This is a splash park where Oldest Daughter brought her son (my grandson) and I took the boys. While Mr F and the grandson had a great time, Mr Bunches kept coming over and telling us that there were "troublemakers" squirting him (as shown below). We both thought he was just having fun and saying they were troublemakers because of the squirting, which, you know, splash park. We learned after we left that it had really bothered him, that he wanted to play with the horse squirters but was trying to get the kids to stop squirting him, and that in fact he wanted our help. I felt guilty for days.

I took him back to the splash park a month later, and he was worried about the troublemakers being there again. So I stuck by him and when a kid tried to squirt him, I explained to the kid that he did not want to be squirted, and Mr Bunches finally had a good time there.

This is what happens when you swim several days in a row...

Mr F finished off July lounging in our lower level, where my home office used to be but now it's becoming a playroom again.

The Boys are Tenty-One

The boys turned 11 yesterday, but I ran out of time to post photos of them. In lieu of the yearly roundup of past pictures of them, I'm going to post a bunch of stuff we did this summer. Today is from June:



Graduation from fourth grade. As 5th graders, they now go to a new building with fifth through eighth graders.

Clearly impressed by his achievements.

Trip to the beach with their nephew. It was the windiest day I've ever seen, but Bucket Helmet (Patent Pending) was an unrelated fashion choice.

Early in the summer, Mr F didn't want to go in the water when we went swimming. So we compromised...

Dad teaches hygiene, Mr Bunches fights back using The Power Of Notes (Patent Pending)

"Cops & Bobbers": free fishing poles for the kids at the park where Sweetie and I had our wedding reception years ago. Mr Bunches caught TWO fish.

Of course without DNA testing we can't say whether
that's a different fish or just the same, really really
gullible, fish.

Most Sundays I go into work for a few hours in the morning. The boys come with me, and then we go do something fun. Here's Mr Bunches playing with the Dollar Store Robots by my fish tank. Oh, yeah, we got goldfish for the office. Mr Bunches named them: the boy is "Sam Alex," and the girl is "Rose Alice."

I am the only lawyer in my office with a working catapult and an easy chair. BOTH ARE NECESSARY.

"Krafty Kids" at the library. Mr F was making an ocean necklace.

On weekend nights, Mr F's nightly ride is the "Capital Route," which takes us down by the Capitol, through the UW campus, and home along the lakeshore. One night, we got this scene:

"Tall Park." Guess why we call it that?

Swinging at the park around the corner from our house.

"Little Park On The Mountain." I don't know why he was posing this way...

But it reminded me of something...

Trumpocalypse: Hurricane Kirstjen has hopefully learned how to read her email.

On the website Above The Law a columnist recently said there should be a website where you could go look up the (lack of) credentials of any Trump Administration appointee. We all know that I will never muster up the efficiency to do that, especially given that most of them leave before their crimes are discovered, as Carl Icahn did after using his post to make a cool half-billion bucks.

But it's Labor Day morning and I'm in the office to do some work after being out all of last week for a trial, and I'm not really ready to look at a hundred zillion emails yet, so I'll at least get a start on it. So I went to the second-to-top post at the Executive Office of the President, as a start. The highest-up post is White House Chief Of Staff; we all know that's that Kelly guy for now until he gets fired. DEPUTY WH Chief of Staff is Kirstjen Nielsen. Do you know her? You don't.

Together with the White House counsel, the press secretary, and a few others, the Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff set the president's appointments and schedule. They serve an average of 18 months (not by law, by choice; only one has lasted a full term) and frequently use the post as a springboard to other appointments or positions in government. Obama's Jack Lew, for example, went on to become Secretary of the Treasury, back when Treasury was headed by someone other than a criminal billionaire whose wife mocks the poor on Instagram.

Kirstjen Nielsen would like to be known as an expert in "homeland security," and although I've been beating this drum for 16 years I'm going to say again how much the word "homeland" creeps me out. When Worst President Ever created the Department of Homeland Security I thought it sounded Nazi-ish. Turns out I was right. But Nielsen's expertise in securing the homeland does not, apparently, extend to natural disasters. Two Congressional reports said she was one of the Bush Administration's officials who dropped the ball on Katrina. (Ironic that she was named to her post as Harvey hit land.) Nielsen was said to have received a series of warnings via email about Katrina's impending severity, yet the White House never acted on them. Nielsen was fired in April, 2007 by Bush. Imagine being fired by the Worst President Ever (like the NFL Hall of Fame, people currently on the job are not eligible for this award).

What Nielsen really is is a lobbyist for tech and aerospace industries. Her bio also says she is "general counsel" for "Civitas Group LLC," a position that helped her be one of "The Most Influential People in Security 2016".  (Her bio for that award mentions her role in the Bush Administration as being "crisis manager for major events and emergencies." Hey, it didn't say she was a good crisis manager!)

Nielsen also lists herself on Twitter as the "President" of "Sunesis Consulting." Sunesis' specialty is helping companies comply with "Sarbanes-Oxley." That's the law the Bush administration passed in the wake of Enron and other scandals.  I bet with all the attention being given to the economic collapse of 2008, you entirely forgot about its little brother, the collapse of eleven major companies in 2002 due to the fact that they were (to use a technical term) "criminally fraudulent enterprises that cooked the books to ensure profits for the head CEOs."  Bush called the law (which [passed the Senate 99-1)

"the most far-reaching reforms of American business practices since the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The era of low standards and false profits is over; no boardroom in America is above or beyond the law."

What do you want to bet that just as Carl Icahn broke the law in trying to get cap-and-trade changed so he could make more than just $500,000,000, we will see the Trump administration start to roll back boardroom regulations that were put in place by the previous Republican administration?

Don't place that bet yet: In March Trump ordered that the Treasury Secretary review regulations including Sarbanes-Oxley specifically. Now would be a good time to pull your money out of the stock market.

I had this moment...

10 Minutes About "The Illustrated Man"

I first read The Illustrated Man when I was maybe 12, and my Uncle Steve loaned it to me. I had the feeling that the book was taboo, and wasn't sure that my uncle (who was about 20 years older than me) should have loaned it to me.

That concern was doubled by the actual book, which at 12 freaked me out. Those stories were so scary that they stuck in my head for years and years and years: madmen on Venus and puppets locking people in boxes and stuff like that.

I think I re-read the book again maybe in college, but I can't really remember. Now I'm listening to it on audio, and it's been, so far, somewhat of a letdown.

It was written in 1951, and like a lot of scifi written in the 1950s and into the 1960s, it has a completely different tone, if tone is the right word. A lot of the stories I've read from back then -- from Theodore Sturgeon, Bradbury, and even Phillip K. Dick -- are hamhanded, with rather obvious, Twilight-Zonish twists.





So far, I've gotten through the first 4 1/2 stories. Of them, only  two stand up so far.The Veldt  is okay: a straightforward, somewhat predictable but still creepy story of two little spoiled kids in a rich family who have a room that's basically a holodeck from Star Trek; they program it to be set on Africa, with lions, with rather predictable results. That's not much of a spoiler; you can see the ending coming from about ten million miles away but it's done well.

Kaleidoscope still manages to be excellent, although less creepy to 48-year-old me than 12-year-old me; it's the story of a bunch of guys whose rocket blows up, and they all drift off in separate ways into space, talking over their radios about what it all means to them. It's sad and amazing and even with a hokey ending still a great story.

But The Other Foot, about what happens when the first white man lands on Mars after it was colonized 20 years earlier by blacks, is drivelish "Magical Negro" type of writing, essentially wish-fulfillment for white people who would like to think that black people might forget about all the ill treatment and just shake hands. And The Highway, about a man who lives by a highway and sees a bunch of people fleeing the "atom war" that has ended the world, just feels pointless.

There are still fourteen stories left; tonight I left off halfway through The Man, about astronauts landing on another planet where, apparently, Jesus has just come and gone. It's not very good either but I've got hopes for the next 2/3 of the book that it will live up to what I remembered.