In the bleak mid-winter

Britain has been Ground Zero for Christmas at least since Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843, helping to transform a religious holiday into an orgy of feasting, gift giving, carol singing and decorating.  The practice of sticking a dead tree in the parlor was imported from Germany by Prince Albert, allegedly, and soon the Royal Mail was delivering millions of mass-produced greetings called Christmas cards.  Even in a multicultural UK, Christmas can't be ignored. 

So it's delicious as plum pudding (if you like that sort of thing) that the downfall of Boris Johnson could be the result of all the seasonal feasting the Tories have done in contravention of their own lockdown rules for everyone else.  It's not just the "bad optics" that all politicians dread -- the police are getting involved.  Members of the opposition parties asked Commissioner Cressida Dick (a wonderfully Dickensian name) to investigate a blowout at Conservative Party Headquarters last year with an eye to criminal charges.  The Tories have already lost a safe seat in North Shropshire to the Lib Dems, which is not supposed to happen; the back-benchers are revolting; and the country saw over ten thousand cases of Omicron covid in just a few hours.  Poor Boris, and with yet another baby in the house.

For collectors of UL-certified irony we have a choice today.  Anti-vax activist and Fauci-hatchet-job author Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., threw a holiday party last week for which guests were encouraged to be vaccinated.  Kennedy blames his wife Cheryl Hines ("I'm not always the boss at my own house") for the outrage.  I wonder if any of the guests exchanged "anti 5G accessories" as gifts.  The ones sold in the Netherlands are not just worthless and pointless, they're radioactive.  "When the curie is worse than the disease," wrote today's internet winner Alex Selby-Boothroyd.  And they resemble little manhole covers.

Elon Musk was named Time's Lifeform of the Year.  I didn't know they were still doing that, or publishing.  Did you know it could have been worse?  No, not Trump.  According to the spectacularly rigged online voting at the messaging app Telegram, the people's choice was Jair Bolsonaro, the Trump of the tropics.  Even Kim Jong-un doesn't crave praise this much.