Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

My S.O. and I recently received the first award we have gotten as a couple. She gets awards by herself all the time, because she is a respected academic, so it is particularly gratifying for me to get this letter of congratulations, both because I never get awards for anything, and that the bestowing of this honor upon us is entirely my doing.

This award is for our Christmas decorating scheme, which consisted of a single string of Christmas lights tacked across our patio cover. I found the lights while cleaning out the garage, and hung them up at her insistence (So she deserves some credit, I guess). They are only half Christmas lights. The other half are Hanukkah lights, shaped like little dreidels. You have to get pretty close to see that, though, and it means walking across a frequently watered lawn in order to do so. We’ll never know if the awards committee got close enough to take that into consideration, and whether it had an effect on their decision. In any case, the lights' appearance of being Christmasy, instead of ecumenical, is probably protecting us from the alt-right.

Neither one of us knows why we deserve this award over our neighbors, many of whom have much grander displays. A substantial number of them spent entire weekends and buckets of nails wrapping their entire dwellings in Christmas lights, creating high-wattage displays that burn Christmas into the retina. I am sure they are disappointed and resentful at our grabbing the local Oscar of holiday ornamentation from underneath their noses.

The Hanukkah lights are appropriate, because my S.O. is Jewish. I am not sure about the others, because I am not Christian, but they don’t make atheist lights with a little “A” glowing in them, that I know of. I don’t even know if I would decorate with them if they did, because I am more of an apathetic agnostic. I certainly wouldn’t put little “AA” lights all over the patio, though, because that would remind me of those meetings people sometimes say I ought to go to.

Also of the size battery we most frequently run out of.

This season of Santa is now officially over, and while I have said before in these pages that the only difference between Santa and Jesus is that, eventually, your parents have to tell you that there is no Santa, I am not sure that is the best way to raise children. Perhaps we should give children the choice, at a certain age, to decide if they want to continue believing in either Santa or Jesus. Those that chose faith in Santa may have an easier time of it in adulthood. They may try earnestly to be good and worthy of the gifts they have begged for all season, but there will be that one, but only one, morning a year when they have to wake up to the realization that all is ashes, that they have disappointed their Deity despite all their efforts to behave, and they deserve nothing.

Whereas, if you chose Christianity, you can feel that bummed out every single day.

All hail Santa!

This ad, from a pro-Trump PAC funded by his fellow billionaires, features a little girl thanking Trump “for letting us say Merry Christmas again.”
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The Caucasian-in-Chief is noted for taking credit for things he doesn’t do, like the economy and Melania, but claiming he restored Christmas to its place in the pantheon of American holidays is a bold new advance in the chutzpah field, even for him. If any of you recall Christmas being defunct during the years BT, raise your hand.

No, Christmas continued with all of its tinselly splendor throughout the Obama Administration and many eons prior. That man even had the nerve to put up a big Christmas tree in front of the White House and wish us “Merry Christmas” every single year he stained America’s honor by being a black guy running the country. The image of him standing there, being black, with his black wife and his black kids, and having Christmas is burned indelibly into some people’s brains. For eight years, they couldn’t even listen to “White Christmas” without falling into a black rage.

The privilege of saying “Merry Christmas” never went away, however. Sure, some, if not all, major corporations went with “Happy Holidays,” instead, recognizing that they were making money off of non-believers as well as Christians, and did not want to offend them and cause them to go off and contribute to some other corporation’s profits. If you listen carefully, you’ll notice they still do. None of them have started saying, “Merry Christmas in your face, Jews.”

The rest of us were free to say “Merry Christmas,” “Ho, ho, ho,” “Bah, humbug,” or even “If I have to listen to All I Want for Christmas Is You one more fucking time before December 25th I’m going on a rampage, I swear,” as much as we wanted.

Like most of the things Trump claims to have done, he didn’t really do it and it doesn’t really matter. If you think the season is best celebrated by a fat billionaire lolling around his mansion in Florida with his five spoiled kids from three wives, stuffing his face with food and bragging to all of his cronies about the big tax break he just handed them for the holidays, rather than watching that black fellow and his family sitting in the pews at some mundane Episcopalian church in DC, this Christmas is an occasion for joy for you.

Or you may think a bigger and more disgusting parallel could not be drawn between the humble manger scene and the spectacle of selfish splendor that Trump constructs around himself every day of the year.

You have to admit that Jesus and Trump have something in common, though—they both demand you kiss their asses before they’ll do anything for you.
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Guess I've aired enough grievances for today. Happy Festivus, everybody.

​What’s been made clear in the last couple of weeks is that if there are aliens out there, they are pretty keen to avoid us.
 
An object flying through the solar system from interstellar space, called Oumuamua, has been suspected of being an alien spacecraft instead of a stray asteroid, because it is cigar-shaped, like a spaceship (Also like a zeppelin, a submarine, a cheesesteak, or, let’s face it, a cigar). But nobody suspects it of being A Giant Stogie from Beyond, because we are scanning it for signs of alien life.
 
And we are not finding any, but that, according to some thinkers, is not enough to rule out Oumuamua from being a space vessel crammed full of aliens. These people think that the aliens aboard the thing have gone silent, even turning off their cell phones, so we don’t figure out what they are up to. They are like the crew of a U-boat, keeping deadly quiet to keep sonar from pinging them, until one fat Nazi drops a wrench on the floor and they get the shit depth-charged out of them. We’ve all seen that movie.
 
This assumes that the aliens are afraid of being attacked by us. Why they would be, nobody knows, except maybe they know humans have always attacked anything they ran across, most especially each other, and the aliens may just be exhibiting an abundance of caution, figuring that if we knew they existed, we would start a crash program to build a ship faster than theirs, with the express purpose of catching them and blowing them into stardust.
 
In the meantime, the Oumuamuans are heading out to the stars at 190,000 or so miles an hour, which, to put it in more comprehensible terms, is disappearing nearly as fast as a friend who owes you money.
 
You can’t blame them for that, though. Assuming aliens would make contact peacefully, which is a possibility as long as they land anywhere on Earth outside of the southern United States, what are they going to do with us? There are only a couple of conceivable outcomes. One, they could attempt to raise us to be an advanced star-faring civilization like they are, staying chill for century upon century while exploring the galaxy.  This would be a crap-ton of work for them, considering most of us can barely sit still on an airplane for a few hours without at least a bag of nuts and a cocktail.
 
Secondly, they could conquer us and make us their slaves. This might have been a good idea a hundred years ago, when people used to work, but now that most of us just share pictures of our genitals via smartphone and consider that an accomplishment, turning us into productive forced labor probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.
 
Thirdly, they could exterminate us and take over the Earth. It’s probably more cost-effective for them to let us exterminate ourselves, however, which seems more likely by the day, and move into the vacant property.
 
You don't even have to be that advanced to figure that one out.

The Trump Administration set out to gang-bang science over the weekend by telling the Center for Disease Control seven words that it could no longer use when requesting money from the taxpayers to keep them from getting sick, because while scientists are nice, they can be a little opinionated, especially when they think they've "discovered" something. The CDC is getting its mouth washed out with soap for repeatedly using the words “fetus,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” ”science-based,” “evidence-based,” and “diversity.”

Yep, that rumbling noise is George Carlin and George Orwell both rotating in their graves.

The CDC was only provided with a minimal number of substitutes for the banned terms, the most graceful of which was "Instead of “science-based” or ­“evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.”

Before you can think WTF does that even mean? though, this column is ready to step in and provide sturdy substitutes for the banned words so that science can continue its forward march. You’re welcome.
 
FETUS: “Big boy sperm,” “Zygote afloat,” and “Little blessing that makes me puke every morning.”

TRANSGENDER: “Size thirteen heels,” “Slut with a schlong,” and “Go pee in the woods.”

VULNERABLE: “Pussy,” “Candyass,” and “You was asking for it.”

ENTITLEMENT: “No,” “Fuck you,” and “If you set a foot on my yard, I’ll shoot.”

SCIENCE-BASED: “Why you think about things like that, I’ll never know,” “Don’t be such a smarty-pants,” and “Jesus, take the wheel.”

EVIDENCE-BASED: “Don’t make no sense,” “Iffen you say so,” and “Alternatively factually.”

DIVERSITY: ”Muricans,” “What kind of English is that?” and “This parking spot reserved for NASCAR fans only.”

Late at night. JUDGE ROY MOORE, lately defeated Senate candidate from Alabama, is in his office, performing his last chore of the day, erasing his browser history so his wife won’t see the search term PORNHUB TEENS when she boots up his computer as part of her wifely duties the next morning. GOD ALMIGHTY suddenly appears, materializing in a divine glow.

ROY MOORE: (taken aback) Who are you?

GOD: It is I, God Almighty, Yahweh, He of a Thousand Names, Creator of the Universe, etc., etc. Most people don’t have any problem recognizing Me. Who did you think I was?

ROY MOORE: (falling to his knees) Forgive me, oh Lord. I thought you were the Ghost of Christmas Past. His nagging ass usually shows up this time of year. But I welcome You into my home. I presume you are here to encourage me in my forlorn campaign to convince the people of Alabama that I, in fact, won the election the forces of evil keep saying I lost.

GOD: No, Roy, I’m here to tell you to knock it off. You lost. I’m only here because Trump and Bannon saying it weren’t enough to convince you. I mean, I respect the fact that nobody really believes a word those guys say, but this one time you should have listened to them.

ROY MOORE: Really?

GOD: You betcha. Doug Jones will be a fine Senator. You would have hated being in DC, anyway. My Will is for you to stay in Alabama. You can keep hanging around the mall, though.

ROY MOORE: Thank you God. I always knew it was Your Plan I was following when I was craving the fruits of young girls.

GOD: Yeah, not so much, Roy. I try to keep My Plans a little less icky. It’s true I created teenage girls, but I also created teenage boys to breathe heavily into their innocent ears and fondle them clumsily if they got the chance. Your assistance was not required. I also created premature ejaculation, but that was not specifically for you. It was just for lawlz. 

ROY MOORE: But Lord, You created me. You made me with that issue. You also made me with those urges. 

GOD: I’m just going to flat-out deny that, Roy. When you get to be My age, which is Eternal, you’ve mastered the art of diffusing responsibility. Why do you think I made Satan?

ROY MOORE: So, it was the Evil One guiding my hand towards the panties of pubescent girls? Save me, oh God!

GOD: Puh-leeze! You don’t know how many times a day I hear that. From people who are just late to work to people that are actually being eaten by crocodiles, it’s save me, save me, save me. Not interested.

ROY MOORE: But I don’t want to be cast into the Pit of Darkness!

GOD: You’ll do fine there, Roy. There are no gays and no abortions in Hell, so you can quit being browned off about them all the time. The only Jew there will be your lawyer. And all those guys that you love having statues of? Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and that crew? They’re all there. They’ll be happy to borrow a pitchfork and do you the honor of carving their autographs into your back. There’s only one thing about the place you might not like…

ROY MOORE: What is that, oh Lord?
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GOD: No teenage girls, Roy. You’ve put them through Hell already.

Walking our Chihuahua, Cujo, is a household chore that belongs to me most days, and the main purpose of the walk is to get him to perform his excretory duties outside. Mostly I encourage him to make his little dog poopies in the mulched flower beds maintained by the HOA. His efforts blend in well there, and relieve me of the responsibility of bagging them and carrying them around for the remainder of our sojourn.

When he does poop on naked asphalt or concrete, I bag it as any dog owner should. This is not universal among my neighbors, though, as the Cuje and I discovered few days ago. A much larger dog had done his job right in front of the community mailboxes, and his or her owner had just left the poop chunks lie in that well-trafficked spot.

It was almost inevitable that someone would step in them, as my neighborhood is populated by old people whose sight and smell has deteriorated, and nothing excites them more than getting mail. They stampede the boxes the minute the mail person has finished stuffing them. One of them was going to get dog doo on their shoes.

I was going to pick up the specimens myself, but then I noticed someone else had already seen the offending load. They did not pick it up, but strove to warn the neighborhood by sprinkling glitter all over it.

I found myself failing to appreciate the thoughtfulness of this gesture, however. It would have been just as easy to go get a bag and remove the dog dirt as to return with glitter with which to decorate it. Unless of course you customarily carried glitter on your person, which would mean you were a stripper. None of my neighbors look like strippers, which I regard as one of the disadvantages of bunking here, but moving to a location where more strippers lived would be a hard sell to my Significant Other.

The glitter had been applied hastily—much of it had missed its intended targets and lay on the concrete around it. It was a generous handful, though, thrown by someone with an ample supply of the sparkly stuff. An arts and crafty person. Many of my neighbors look like they might be the type to spend hours with glue, yarn, glitter and tinsel, making clever handmade things. These people I generally admire, because I know I would last about two minutes at crafting before dumping all my supplies in the trash and going out for a beer.

Or was this a salute to the season? Did someone, after putting up a tree and stringing lights across their porch, and, still not weary from their decorating labors, say to themselves “Let’s spruce up that dog shit over there, too. After all, it’s Christmas.”

All of these glitter-and-poo thoughts ran through my head, but Cujo was thinking about something else entirely. Inspired, he pooped right next to his predecessors’ pile, beneath the mailbox post.
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And as long as I had the bag out anyway… 

Better write something about Roy Moore this Monday since it’s not certain he is going to be in the Senate Wednesday morning and he’s likely to be utterly forgotten if he’s not, because, unlike Al Franken, he has zero comedic talent to fall back on.

Of course, he could win. The voters of the state of Alabama could easily decide that having a child molester representing them would be better than having the Antichrist, which any Democrat can be conveniently viewed as after a couple of hours of viewing FOX News.

Whether the Judge would be welcomed by the rest of the Senate enthusiastically is doubtful. Particularly, the lady Democrats in that august body might be reluctant to shake the same hand that the Judge has been using to guide the fingers of underage girls into his tightie whities.

But it’s plain that one man in DC would proudly shake that hand, and maybe not even wash it afterwards. I speak, of course, of the Pussy Grabber-in Chief, a man whose short fingers have been in many places they were not welcome. Because in this Year of One AT (after Trump) one thing has become certain about our politics.

It’s all about the pussy.

The lesson we have learned from the past month is that Democrats want their politicians to keep their hands to themselves, while Republicans want their candidates to have a résumé in digging for clam.

Or going for the gusto, as it’s sometimes called. Cupping cootchie. Seizing snatch. Feeling up the fur biscuit. 

Oh, yeah. Bet you can tell we've been in a locker room or two.

This is necessary for Republicans, because they are the party of family values, and many times the most valued member of a family is the one that really knows how to help himself to a slice of hair pie. Whether he keeps that talent in-house, or branches out to fondle the public at large is optional for him, but he is a bulwark against abortion and homosexuality, so you need to tolerate his mitt on your muffin, even if he was mistaken in his belief that you were hoping for a groping. 

Of course, here in California we allow the girls to make up their own minds about abortion, and we embrace our gay neighbors because they help keep our property values insanely high, so we wouldn’t be inclined to vote for the Judge. And we have two lady Senators, both of whom may have contingency plans to wear hazmat gear when they go to work on Wednesday.
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But that all depends on Alabama. 

The War on Christmas seems muted this year. This column is always in favor of a robust War on Christmas, although the chance of victory is always nearly nonexistent. Only the Sweet Meteor of Doom could put an end to this season of men wearing fake white beards in malls and putting plastic reindeer on one’s roof.

Oh, sure, some people are out there fighting…people who humorously vandalize nativity scenes and atheists who pay for billboards that piss off their neighbors—billboards that say things like “The only difference between Jesus and Santa Claus is that, eventually, your parents have to tell you there is no Santa Claus.”
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Starbucks always gets in trouble for its Christmas cups. Last year they were too plain—just solid reds and greens. They were not Christmasy enough for Christmas partisans, who demanded that Starbucks produce cups as holiday festive as one of those neighborhoods where the HOA makes you use the equivalent of the national budget of Honduras burning Christmas lights for a month.

Starbucks responded by really frilling up their cups this year, but its critics are not satisfied, because some of them think they see a pair of “lesbian hands” clasped together on the cup.

Why this is an anti-Yule message they do not make clear. Is Christmas a holiday for everyone except lesbians? Are lesbians not allowed to snuggle by the fireplace in lesbian Christmases? Because they certainly are in lesbian porn.

Here we just think “Lesbian Hands” would be an okay name for an all-male punk rock band. We don’t find lesbian hands, if that’s what they are, particularly offensive or even noticeable, especially when that Starbuck’s Christmas cup holds the coffee that we hope will at least partially offset the blinding holiday hangover we woke up with.

Certainly, none of the vapid Christmas specials that clog the cable channels this time of year are titled “A Lesbian Christmas,” or something equivalent, although this column is grateful that they don’t make that show, because there are already plenty of syrupy Hallmark Channel Christmas movies out there, movies that force you to wonder whether it’s the hack writing, the wooden acting or the terrible music that is the worst thing about them.

Inevitably, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” catches us unaware when we are passing in front of the TV and we flinch, because around here, we don’t give a crap about what kind of Christmas dimensionally challenged imaginary children are having.

In the meantime, the Caucasian-in-Chief plans on giving himself, his family, his Cabinet and assorted other billionaires something to be thankful for when the sun comes up on Christmas, a brand spanking new tax break that will make them all even richer. But that is in the spirit of the season, because we all give our most precious gifts to our family and friends, and for passing strangers we care not a bit, unless they come to our door singing carols.

Then we might give them a dollop of eggnog, like we might get a hundred bucks extra back from the IRS for a few years, and send them on their way thinking they ought to be grateful for it.
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And they should be. Grateful for the eggnog, that is. It really helps with those hangovers. 

Special Counsel Robert Mueller woke up this morning to find his home had been tp-ed. Sources in the White House quickly confirmed that the act of minor vandalism had been ordered by President Trump and carried out by Seal Team Six.

“It’s what he used to do to people he didn’t like before there was Twitter,” said large land animal Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “The President has plainly expressed his desire to have the Russian probe finished up with a nice exoneration of him personally by Christmas. Mueller has ignored him. Therefore, the President decided that Mueller can spend the day cleaning up his yard instead of indicting and prosecuting people that the President has already fired and whom he barely knows.”

When asked if the toilet-papering had been prompted by last Friday’s guilty plea by once National Security Advisor and former full-time Trump campaign bro Michael Flynn, Huckabee deflected the question by describing the actions of Seal Team Six. “Each member of the squad was armed with twelve double rolls of Charmin, purchased at a Wal-Mart whose location must remain undisclosed for security reasons. Stealth and silence were the order of the day. Quickly and efficiently, in a pinpoint strike, team members lobbed their armaments over the Special Counsel’s roof, trees, vehicles and adjacent shrubberies. No civilians were harmed. There was a friendly fire incident—one Seal accidently tp-ed another Seal, but these things happen in the fog of war. The injured man was evacuated to a field hospital and is expected to fully recover.”

Asked how this new special forces skill might be applied in other conflicts, Huckabee replied, "Three words. Kim Jong Un."