Combat! blog was down much of this morning for reasons I still don’t understand, forcing me to assume that we were pirated by 1980s cola advertisement/conceptual art project/daylight hallucination Max Headroom. Remember that guy or possibly thing? It took a particular society and moment to produce such a baffling quantum of culture, and I remember he felt Very Important at the time.* Particularly in his weirdly dystopian television show, Max Headroom seemed a harbinger of things to come. Watching him now, one is struck by A) how oddly slow-paced he seems and B) how apt a prediction he was. Our discursive world is weird. An outside perspective might call it surreal. Don’t click on “More…” unless you want to explode your brain.

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It’s seven degrees below zero in Montana, and the world is as fresh as a newborn babe completely encased in ice. Happy New Year to you and yours from me and me. I’ll be setting out for the wooded mountains in a few hours, where I will have a great time and/or die. Provided one or neither of those things happens, we’ll be back on Monday with a bold new perspective that looks remarkably similar to our old one. We’ll have a bunch of gym-related rules for ourselves, though.

…and lands in a blizzard. Seriously, it was clear when I touched down in Missoula, and ten minutes later it was snowing sideways and banshees emerged from the ground. Okay, maybe not literal banshees, but something has to be making that sound. The interns and I are going to spend the rest of the day digging a path to my door, digging a space for my truck, digging a route to the grocery store, digging my new wool sweater, etc. We’ll be back tomorrow with more of the holiday half-assery you’ve come to depend on. In the meantime, how about this?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMpOhwUTUwc

It’s Christmas Eve, which means I have to spend the day adjusting the harness and breathing apparatus that will allow me to hang motionless in the center of the chimney until 12:01 am. In the meantime, why don’t you enjoy the last New York Times trend piece of the year? It’s about how men who haven’t bought Christmas presents often purchase jewelry at the last minute—hint hint, boyfriend of New York Times reporter Stephanie Clifford. Props to Mike Sebba for the link and for pointing out this sentence:

“Last year, for instance, more than $709 million was spent on jewelry on Dec. 23 and 24 alone, representing 10 percent of the entire month’s jewelry sales, according to SpendingPulse.”

Yeah, December 23rd and 24th are one day less than 10% of the month of December. If that sort of childlike wonder at normal distribution doesn’t put you in a festive mood, there’s also this interactive feature about dead people. And to all a good night!