Is the Internet broken?

I can’t seem to get on a bunch of different sites, my Sidekick ain’t kicking any email and everything feels slow. This page works, and I’m using different networks, so, yeah, no more Internet. My sky has fallen.

Other than that, we are pondering a big tree purchase. M. was leaning hard on the artificial limbs, as it were. However, I may have won that battle with a simple fact. A fake Christmas tree (or as I like now that I’ve seen San Jose’s and to fuck with Bill O’Reilly’s broken brain, a fake “Community Giving Tree”) needs to be taken down, put away, stored and ultimately moved when we vacate the house of Nick’s.

Actually, the City of San Jose’s Community Giving Tree seems to pre-date by a couple of decades the current “war on Christmas” by us secular fuckheads who worry about the actual war. (You know the one with bullets and rocket launchers and suicide-bombers and shit.)

So far, my favorite display in the defense of Christmas Fox videos was from some poor family who had the misfortune of moving into a development with home association rules and an inadequate grasp of the fine print. They threw up a lovely, almost lifesize tableau of a light-up holy family, an equally glowing snowman and a jolly-lighted Santa.

It sucks and all to not be able to decorate your house the way you want. But, that’s why a shitload of us don’t move into those kinds of gated communities and whatnot. I couldn’t even cope with a bunch of the shit condos were telling me if I lived in certain buildings. I think the town of Hingham won’t let you decorate with non-white lights. (Actually, I think that’s peer pressure. Nonetheless, it keeps me the fuck out of Hingham.)

However, I gotta question the sacred, faith shit when the display includes a snowman and a santa and everything lights the fuck up. Seriously, my bullshit detector rings. Boohoohoo, they ain’t letting you live freely and religiously in the old, U.S. of A. Glad you found Fox News to listen.

I think “Christmas” in almost all quarters is an allowable adjective, no matter what Fox claims. But, everything doesn’t require it.

And, for the record, that thing with Santa and reindeer and gifts and eggnog is not sacred. The minute they dig up some verifiable scrolls, which the wackjob fundies can follow alongside their misunderstanding of the New Testament as a literal blueprint for good living, that features a chimney and red stockings, it’ll be sacred. Until then, um, ah, it’s capitalism not Christianity, and if stores zig with the zag of a changing demographic, that’s fucking life not war or faith under siege.

I forgot to write about last weekend. We cruised by The Great Dickens Christmas Fair, Christmas hype’s answer to a Ren Fair.

Personally, I was disappointed by the lack of disease, crippled, starving beggar children and chamber pots emptied to the street. But, history’s a funny thing.