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Diego sleeps under the Christmas tree.

Now that I've got my Xbox camera to play nice with Windows, maybe I'll have more to say in the future.

Also! new comic today!

And lots of Digital Savant updates.

Every year, I bust out the James Brown Christmas CD and annoy my whole family, but this year, for some reason, it just slipped my mind and the CD's been sitting on my shelves.

Then James Brown dies on Christmas day.

Yeah, coincidence, I know. But still... spooooookymar!

I won't embed the videos here, but Google Video's got that famous Dana Carvey sketch where Tom Brokaw fake-reports on Gerald Ford being eaten by wolves.

I also really like this Sifl & Olly short (featuring the Grim Reaper!) that was on a recent Liam Lynch podcast.

... and rots!

A few jokes of mine made it into last week's Almost Late Show monologue.

Here's one that didn't:

10 players were ejected from an NBA game in New York between the Knicks and the Denver Nuggets over the weekend after a violent brawl. Based on paternity records, it's safe to say this was the most number of NBA members to be pulled out without finishing in one night.

Eh? Ehhhh?... Aw, whaddayou know from funny?

Also, I wrote the "Bank of America" joke in te following video. One of my rejected jokes for this one was calling them (in a shout-out to Earth, Wind and Fire) "Birth, Wench and Firecrotch." Yeah, that one's not as good, I know.

I did a story for our travel section about direct flights to Mexico City out of Austin that ran Sunday.

Back to work today. Was it really Christmas just yesterday?

I didn't even know we were publishing a Christmas-day comic until late last night, but it's up and ready to peruse! A Christmas miracle! Credit goes to PJ for this for working through the holidays for you, the reader (and for Kennie).

We're down in the Valley.

While here, I have access to only a dial-up connection, which closely mirrors how time slows down when we visit. It's sloooow. Today has lasted about 30 hours so far, which is fine because it allows me to catch up on some reading and try to beat Elite Beat Agents. That last song is hard!

I'm reading the TWoP book, which due to its diminutive size I thought would be a quick afternoon read. It may be small, but there's a damn lot of good stuff in there and I'm still on the "T"s. The best part of the book is that I can hear Sars and Wing Chun (and in some entries, some Glark) reading the entries. Good times, y'all.

We finally got our camera (a Nikon D50) in the mail after nearly a year of deliberating on whether we should buy one. We got it on Amazon via Adorama and got a pretty great deal on the basic kit + Nikkor 18-55mm lens. It was our early Christmas gift to each other

Through excellent planning, however, we left the SD card I bought for it at home, so now the only pictures I'm taking on it are pretty pretend ones.

I've got this panicky feeling being away from work right now. With my old job, unless I was on an actual planned-out vacation, I couldn't really be out of the office for more than a day or two at a time and my Sundays were always work-from-home days. Now all that's gone and a day off really means a day off. A Christmas break means no checking in or obsessively checking e-mail to make sure there's no major stuff happening.

It's odd and leaves me feeling a little strange. But I'm not complaining. I'm just trying very hard to relax. Last night, I laid awake trying to calm my brain down, to do the psychic equivalent of stroking the back of my head and saying, "There there, brain, stop thinking... settle down... think about blankness."

My dad says my blog entries have been a little weird lately and that may be because I've been in a bit of a weird frame of mind. Christmas, as it usually does, came fast and furious again this year and even though I wasn't completely unprepared, I still have trouble remembering that it's Dec. 24 and that everything is closing right now.

We bought the Luby's cookbook (a fairly gorgeous, oversized coffee table book) and have been making the Candied Yams + Candied Pecans recipe. So, so good, folks...

Anyway, we're off to a menudo party (no, seriously. We're having a party about menudo). Merry Christmas, everyone.