I decide to spend Christmas with my family this year. We're not all Buddhist, but we celebrate it anyway, sort of. We do the secular stuff, but none of the religious or spiritual stuff. We don't do the usual meditation or fasting. We don't read the sutras or restrict our diets. We don't even play Yahtzee or lawn darts. We just sort of sit around with the TV on, chat, exchange presents, and eat tuna right out of the can. It's actually been pretty quiet.

It might surprise you to learn that I don't have any particular bits of wisdom to share with you today. Sorry. Instead, I thought I'd give you a little window into my family.

My dad spent most of the morning sorting through the six boxes of Fallen Empires Magic: The Gathering cards that we got him. Then he hinted that he might be willing to try Yu-Gi-Oh for Valentine's Day and promptly fell asleep on top of a pile of Icatian Skirmishers.

My mom tested out tuna all day. You may not know this, but cats don't have the easiest time getting canned tuna. Grocery stores are unwilling to allow cats near the canned fish section for reasons that are, I think, opaque to all of us. It's probably some kind of wacky Victorian bias. Who knows. Anyway, cats usually end up getting canned tuna through a sort of black market. While I'd like to say otherwise, not all of those who run tuna adhere to high standards of quality, and we all do well to check our tuna. Mom opened can after can and had me test it for poisons or taints. So I wouldn't be biased by my eyesight, she blindfolded me and made me eat a little from each can. Then she'd kick me to see if I was dead or not. She works so hard to take care of all of us.

Uncle Pete is, in fact, a tuna runner. He was pretty busy last week importing tuna from Lichtenstein, so he slept on top of a copy of Eddie Izzard's Dressed to Kill until about 3, when he had a hairball. After that, he moved to Circle and went back to sleep.

Pete's wife, Aunt Flora, races cars. Unfortunately for her, she managed to flip her 1:8 scale Testarossa Spyder two days ago and is currently in a full-body cast. She couldn't eat, so Mom made us all put our tuna next to her for a few minutes so she could enjoy the smell.

My cousin Fuffywuffykins is the family gadget geek, and while she's been on my parents' couch for the last month, nobody has successfully spoken with her for more than about six seconds at a time because she is hooked up to her new iPod Zepto, a Nintendo DS, a Blackberry, and iPhone, a Kindle, and a Pocket Fisherman. She did give me a very nice iPod Nano, though. She tossed it my way when her Zepto arrived in the mail. All I have to do now is put all the bits back in and I'll never be away from my music again.

Great-uncle Tamerlane Nobunaga Cochrane Zhuge Skoochybottoms von Nelson is also here for the day. We're not really sure what he does for a living, but he tells the greatest stories. I can't quite remember any of them right now, but I'll see if I can remember some of them later. They're great. You'll laugh.

My nephew Doug was going to join us, but I guess he was kept late at work. He just started a new job as a therapist at a pit bull rescue center, and he probably couldn't get away. He's such a workaholic.

Finally, my other cousin, also named Doug, did manage to make it. He's actually allergic to tuna, so he and I broke out a canister of unagi and played parcheesi.

Anyhow, that's my family, and we all got along really well this holiday season. Hopefully you and yours will get along equally well, whatever you do or do not celebrate. Unagi! Out!

So in the tradition of most of my best birthdays, with "my best" being a seriously limiting factor, I spent most of the day alone without unagi of any kind. As always, I got a card from the ASPCA reminding my "owners" to have me "fixed." Hand-written below that charming birthday wish was, "Already had it done? Have it done again, just to make sure!" *sigh* There are rumors that I'll get unagi, though. I'm running in circles just to get ready for the excitement.

Thanks to those of you who have wished me a happy birthday. Your love and respect makes up for the rambling phone call from Dad at about 1:45 this morning asking if I had any clever ideas for how to use the Necropotence card.

In other news, yet still following on a tradition of lousy birthdays, I suspect the Easter Bunny is way out of my league and I'm actually lucky that it didn't show up here Sunday. We were wondering if the Easter Bunny was male or female or what have you. wintersweet apparently wasn't sure, but concluded that because it produces eggs, it must be a Sidhe. If so, I'm out of luck. No tasty bunny fritters for me, unless I can get access to cold iron fang-caps. Of course, maybe next time I can trick it. I'm a master of riddles. I could whip out something about selling seashells by the seashore or buggy bumpers or pickled peppers. The list is endless, at least if you've got a keen mind like mine.

So I guess one key issue is whether the Bunny is Seelie or Unseelie. What do you think?

Poll #466517
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 35

The Easter Bunny: Seelie or Unseelie?

So I waited all yesterday for the Easter Bunny to sneak into my house, scatter my savory foods, and replace a few of them with toxic chocolate impostures. Some have said that the Easter Bunny does this because of some kind of brain disorder, but I'm not sure. I'll have to think on this. However, I know he didn't show up to screw with my savory goods. I haven't noticed any chocolate tuna or anything like that.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't spotted by the Easter Bunny, since I did an unusually good job of hiding myself. Unbeknighted even to me, I was disguised as a gamer and playing Katamari Damacy for the whole day. I've still got that tune stuck in my head...

I actually like Katamari Damacy. It's a cute game, and I encourage all of you to try it. However, I think it can be adapted to better please a feline audience without serious trouble. I present to you my plans, tentacularly entitled Kittymari Damacy. First, we'd toss the King of All Cosmos. He's a dork. We'd replace him with Miss Kitty. I'm cool. I've got friends on the Internet, even. I probably wouldn't have destroyed all the stars after getting really drunk, but I'd be hungry or something like that. The Hard-working Prince would have to get a katamari and roll up all kinds of tasty things for me to eat. Mice... cheese... elephants... Earth sure is full of tasty stuff! Of course, there would have to be some kind of penalty for rolling up nasty stuff like deodorant, shoes, chipotle, or erasers. I'd probably bite the Hard-working Prince.

For Miss Kitty, do your best!
Make her meal taste so good!
Oishii na afternoon!
Unagi no midnight yeah!

I've been waiting for the GD Easter Bunny since late last night. He'll come. I know it. I've placed a bunch of eggs, tuna, chicken fingers, and other yummy stuff at the top of the stairs. He'll have to hop up there if he wants to hide them or replace them with kitty-killing chocolate fakes. I've hidden myself downstairs somewhere. I'm not sure where. I did a really good job hiding myself. Anyhow, when I hear that sinistral "hop... .... hop... snicker... hop...," I'll sneak out of my hiding place, figure out where I am, and block off the bottom of the stairs. He'll be trapped, and his cotton tail will be mine.

It's Christmas, so I had planned to write a little essay on peace and
goodwill and all that jazz, but as I started doing my research, I learned
something amazing. You'll hear arguments about where Christmas came from.
Is it Christian? Is it Jewish? Was it invented by the Mayans to increase
jade sales in the cold winter months? Well, you'd be surprised. It turns
out that Christmas is actually a Buddhist holiday. You might be tipped off
by the emphasis on peace, harmony, and the cessation of desire, but you
can't always trust things like that. Cessation of Desire Day sounds
Buddhist by that crude definition, and we all know it was invented by
greeting card executives in 1992.

No, the way you can tell where a holiday came from is by looking at
traditional songs associated with it. Cessation of Desire Day songs
include "Buy Our Cards, You Lazy Bastards!" and "Silent Night." Songs
often played around Christmas include "Shakyamuni is Coming to Town,"
"Good King Ashoka," and Pachelbel's "Kannon." In addition, there is
Dickens's famous "A Christmas Carroll," in which mean old Lewis Carroll is
visited by the Buddhas of the Past, Present, and Future in an attempt to
covert him to Buddhism. Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future, shows him the
distant year 1987, when people eat food pills, travel with rocket packs,
have colonies on distant planets, and have all the cheap, clean energy the
could ever need produced by orbiting nuclear stations. In this future,
Carroll has been reincarnated as a space baron who has a monopoly on
interplanetary travel. I should point out that this story was written in
the middle of a massive downturn in Buddhist conversions and was,
predictably, unable to stop the trend.

I just thought you should all know this. I'm going to try to extinguish my
desires, but while I do that, I want some unagi. Merry Christmas,
everyone!

I'm not that fond of newspaper comics. I will admit that the art is usually quite good, but I'm not generally taken by the humor. It's usually crude, involving bodily functions, cheap shots and laughing at the stupid or ignorant. Peanuts, for example, is just full of cheap bathroom humor. I do like Doonesbury and Get Fuzzy, however. Get Fuzzy packs a lot of humor into each litlte picture, and it has Satch. He's *so* cute. Doonesbury is actually one of the hardest-hitting sources for news outside of The Daily Show. They don't pull punches for anybody, and they do some pretty fine science segments, too. I have fond memories of the time they took a safari in Ronald Reagan's brain, and that time they went inside Bush's head to take a close look at his morals. The last segment never actually made it to the newspapers, though. The people who did that Powers of 10 book and movie thought the intro sequence where they were shrunk down enough to actually see his morals was too similar to something in their book.

Also, I like The Far Side. The art is really funny, even if the words don't make any sense.

However, while reading Sunday's comics, I noticed that Clear Blue Water had a profound and, to my mind, unanswerable question:

"Why do punkins gots triangle eyes?"

I did some research, and I can only conclude that I have no idea, but a quick check on Google's image search confirms that it is true.

I'm a bit ashamed to admit that my investing skills have failed in this case, but I have to say in my defense that my family wasn't really that big on Easter. I remember when we tried to celebrate it during the year I lived at home. Mom had the grill and the fireworks all set up when Dad pointed out that he was an Orangeman, so it was kind of stupid to celebrate. Then he collapsed face-first into a huge pile of Magic: The Gathering cards.