Christmas Eve-Eve drive-by blogging

Since we'll all be busy living our lives offline for the next few days, here are some tide-me-overs ...

-- In Oaxaca Mexico, they're taking time off from the recent strife to celebrate Noche de Rábanos; Night of the Radishes. Do NOT miss seeing the pictures.

-- "Flogs", blogs that are actually promotional campaigns for products, stores, even opinion influence, are lately all the rage. They happen to be a violation of federal law, specifically the Federal Trade Commission guidelines protecting consumers against misleading information.

-- Yesterday's holiday weekend document dump included the admission that the Department of Homeland Security violated the Privacy Act -- back in 2004 when it was first caught by the GAO -- by collecting too much information from US airline passengers.

Do you feel safer yet?

-- It appears that a US president did have bin Laden in his gunsights, as the ABC docu-drama "Path to 9/11" revealed, but the president was Bush and not Clinton.

-- I give our local paper a hard time, but they have some interesting news up lately (these links will be good for a week or two before the Chron moves them into the pay-per-view archives) ...

• The Selective Service System is testing its military draft machinery for the first time since 1998.
• Accenture didn't exactly get fired from their state contract, but they lost a lot of it. For essentially shitty performance. You may know Accenture as the former Andersen Consulting, of the now-defunct Arthur Andersen accounting firm (the biggest loser in the Enron affair).
• Texas gained almost 600,000 new residents this year. That is nearly the sum of one Congressional district. About 160,000 came from Louisiana alone. One word: Katrina.
• Loren Steffy reminds us that the cost of our employer-provided health insurance isn't just a financial one.
• On September 11, 1977, Bing Crosby and David Bowie sang the duet Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy for a Christmas TV special. Bing died of a heart attack a month later. But the song nearly didn't happen because Ziggy Stardust hated Little Drummer Boy and didn't want to sing it.

-- Barack Obama isn't considered by many African-Americans as "one of us". A startling and somewhat fascinating opinion here (from a white boy's POV, anyway) . I don't know whether this is insightful deconstruction or a destructive whisper campaign. I cannot imagine that this sort of thing would keep anyone from voting for him, but I would still be interested in the responses to this article from African-American readers of this blog.

The Great Wall lays down the smack

Our man just keeps on improving, his game and his English.



Tip of the backwards cap to HouStoned.

Fox News to surge forces in War on Christmas

"FNC will present a three hour primetime O’Reilly Factor Christmas Marathon beginning on Monday, December 25th at 8PM EST," a Fox News release states. Also, Shoutin' Sean Hannity will host a one-hour special, "A Nashville New Year", starring several of country music's leading Republican freaks.

Under the President's directive to "go shopping more", Orally will no doubt release some casualty figures related to victory, such as ...

-- the number of credit card accounts maxed out

-- the percentages of parking lot capacities at shopping malls around the country during the week before Christmas, and

-- a panel of pundits predicting the amount of the next rise in interest rates by the Fed due to inflation fears.

The day after (the trade, the election, the rest)

-- So after the Philadelphia 76ers swapped their malcontent superstar to the Denver Nuggets yesterday, it appears that Allen Iverson and Carmelo Anthony might be headed for a *ahem* rocky relationship. The league's two leading scorers forced to share the ball? The Answer, the perpetual adolescent -- rebellious, sullen -- suddenly recast as thirty-something sage and imparter of been-there, done-that wisdom to Melo?

"A.I. will love it there for the next 14 games," one Eastern Conference official laughed on Tuesday afternoon, a reference to the suspension Anthony is serving for fighting in Madison Square Garden last week.

Carmelo will return to the court on January 20 in Houston against the Rockets, and the problems could start as soon as he takes the floor with Iverson that night. That's when the question first gets asked: "Whose team is this?" In these selfish times, the answer is probably not "ours". The dynamic of Carmelo Anthony and the Nuggets changed dramatically last Saturday night in New York; Anthony showed himself to be a flawed young man with that sucker punch, an error in emotional judgment compounded with the way he swung and started running back on defense in a sight never seen before in his basketball career.

Just a guess, but I don't think Melo is going to like fitting into A.I.'s game. This was Carmelo Anthony's ball and his team until he gave Iverson the opening to take it away.

-- The runoff in HD-29 will be between two Republicans. Anthony Di Novo and his gang of volunteers -- including Hal, muse, and K-T (multiple postings from the field at each of those locations)-- worked hard, but the blue wave was turned back by the Texas red levee again.

Perhaps some of these conservatives can be dispatched to New Orleans to help with flood control. That is, if they don't choose to help serve their President in Iraq.

-- Judith Regan, the book publisher who green-lighted OJ Simpson's "If I Did It", was fired by HarperCollins over the weekend. You may recall her previous co-starring role as the girlfriend of slimy former NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik. She seems perfectly suited for a position in the Trump organization counseling wayward girls, don't you think? Second chances and all?

-- If Fidel Castro is reported to be dead sooner or later, officials fear a mass exodus from Cuba. Even here in Houston they are preparing for it.

Preparations are underway for the traditional Cuban celebration of Noche Buena in my father-in-law's household. About ten of us with Cuban and Salvadoran roots will gather and celebrate. Here's a good description of the celebration, complete with the roast pig.