Nonny Mouse tells us a story:

Our politicians, just about all of them from every country, are like children playing on a beach while the tide goes out and fish flop on the sea bed, ignoring the signs of a coming tsunami, too busy squabbling over toys and kicking sand in each other’s eyes. Our current technology is shackled to oil interests, with alternative energy and its technology insufficiently advanced to make much of a difference. According to the figures whizzing by ever so quickly on an excellent website, Worldometer, we’ve consumed nearly 170,000,000 MWh of energy today alone, 156,700,000 of which is from non-renewable sources. We’ve got 15,676 days left until oil runs out completely.

That’s slightly less than 43 years. That’s all – 43 years, and we’ll have sucked those wells dry as a witch’s… bones. My grandmother was born in 1910, she saw the car replace horse-drawn wagons, and by the time she died, she’d witnessed the birth of the internet and a man walking on the moon. A child born this year, 2010, a mere hundred years later, could possibly see that happen in reverse… should we survive that long. By 2030, energy, water and food shortages will be heading toward a ‘perfect storm’, with major upheavals, destabilization and riots worldwide as food prices will rise to become unaffordable to the majority, starvation increases and millions of refugees flee climate ravaged regions.

Two nights ago, my sister Daria, raised by the same tree-hugging hippies and scientists I was, argued with our stepmommy Darla that we “have to listen to both sides on climate change.” When I heard that last night, I blew up. Life is really fucking short. Life is getting shorter every minute we patiently listen to tales like Jesus rode dinosaurs to make us beholden to British Petroleum. We owe no one patience with this bullshit, because what happens next is a really old story.

[The King] said, “What does a person deserve who drags another out of bed and throws him in the water?” “The wretch deserves nothing better,” answered the old woman, “than to be taken and put in a barrel stuck full of nails, and rolled down hill into the water.” “Then,” said the King, “Thou hast pronounced thine own sentence;” and he ordered such a barrel to be brought, and the old woman to be put into it with her daughter, and then the top was hammered on, and the barrel rolled down hill until it went into the river.

Every day, we are pronouncing our sentence. Every. Day.

Darla, Dad’s third wife, is on her way over to our house. She has a cold, which is not alarming since Pete has one, too. Pete’s baking a loaf of whole wheat bread, heavy on onion and molasses. We’ve spent our New Year’s Day tidying up the house, lounging around and doting on Drusy, Sweetpea and poor Topaz, who is also stuffy and sneezing.

Borscht is simmering on the stove. Soon, we will ladle fragrant soup into bowls and top the soup with fresh homemade yogurt. Hopefully, your year will be peaceful and prosperous.

I’ve had a bit of revelation. It’s not a big thing, so no jumping up and down, shouting, “Eureka!” for you and me, but look here: these are my grandmothers Edith and Gladys on Thanksgiving Day, 1965.

Though I accumulated a handful of additional grammas along the way, these are the two I started out with, and these pictures were recovered from a box of Dad’s slides. As far as anyone knew, these pictures didn’t exist, but when my cousins, sisters and brothers saw these pictures for the first time this fall, it was as if we had a window into the past we barely remember. Mom, all of 25 in these pictures, and Auntie InExcelsisDeo, then a wide-eyed teen, are the only people to ask about faces we don’t remember. Thing is: Mom and Auntie I. don’t remember, either. In forty years, the children of my nieces and nephews may not even have heard my name. Though these pictures were taken by Dad with nothing more in mind – probably – than his recording for himself this day in their shared lives, 44 years later, they become a reason to smile at the camera now and say, “Cheese.”

Daria: In the grocery store, guess what I found next to the green Jell-O?
Tata: Graham crackers and Ipecac?
Daria: Margarita Jell-O and Strawberry Daiquiri Jell-O. So I bought it. You know why?
Tata: We have lots of children to confuse with our enthusiasm for gelatin?
Daria: Because we’re not getting busted for pot brownies.

She’s going to have a great time with the in-laws.

Well, not everything’s fixed. But we’re getting there.

Update: now it’s all working. Siobhan’s a genius!

For most of the day, PIC was hosed. Whoops! Domain names can evaporate faster than expensive shampoo. Anyway: problem solved. Hooray for me! And thank you to everyone who called to ask in what new and exciting way I’d fucked up this time.

So let’s talk about building. The unnamed university closes for ten days. This gives me time to check a few important tasks off my To Do List:

1. See a few of my closest friends, goddamnit. You know: the people I almost never see in person anymore.

2. Those things in this giant old house I never get to clean and drive me out of my tiny mind? I’m going to clean those. Oh yes. I will clean them.

3. My hip is kicking my ass. I’ve been exercising every day, but for the next two weeks, I’m going to try to fit an hour of yoga every day. If I can’t make a dent in the amount of pain and stretch out my short temper, I’ll have to present myself back at the doctor’s for some sort of humbling treatment plan like a normal person. I am not normal! Two weeks of winter yoga concentration will help. Grrr! Bark! Bark!

So there you have it: I’m going to sleep in, rest up, clean up, catch up and stretch out, and when it’s over, I hope to be ready to start fresh with a better fucking attitude. One more day at the office, and then: the real work begins.

What the fuck is wrong with my people?

As the first snow fell at the foot of the Italian Alps, the centre of Coccaglio presented an idyllic scene. In front of its 18th-century church, the flakes came to rest on a magnificent Christmas tree, rising almost to the height of the Roman tower opposite.

But in this town of 8,000 inhabitants between Milan and Venice, the approach to Christianity’s most sacred festival has been marked in a very special way. On orders from the local council, controlled by the conservative Northern League, police have been carrying out house-to-house searches for illegal immigrants in an action dubbed Operation White Christmas. The operation is due to finish on December 25.

No, really. What the fuck is wrong with my people?

The migrant population has soared in Italy’s industrial heartland, making it fertile territory for the League, with its xenophobic rhetoric. A League poster at the last general election showed three white sheep kicking out a black one.

Coccaglio’s registered, non-Italian population rose from 177 to 1,562 in the 10 years to 2008. In Brescia, non-Italians outnumber natives in the centre, which is lined with halal butchers, African markets, Chinese bazaars and takeaway kebab shops. Suspicions exploded into fury last month in the town nearest Coccaglio, when a Moroccan man was arrested on suspicion of attacking and raping a local woman. Eyewitnesses said he risked being lynched as he was escorted from the carabinieri barracks.

Franco Claretti, Coccaglio’s mayor, confirmed the police operation would end on Christmas Day but that was a coincidence and claimed the White Christmas tag was invented by a local newspaper headline-writer rather than his council.

This time, I goddamn mean it.

laretti said he tried to set the record straight when he was first contacted by the national media, but the resulting report had a more explosive element: a comment attributed to one of his councillors that “for me, Christmas is not a festival of hospitality, but one of Christian tradition, of our identity”. Again, Claretti said the councillor was misquoted and that what he really said was that hospitality had to be extended all year, not just at Christmas.

In his rectory on the outskirts of Brescia, Father Mario Toffari, head of the diocesan office for the pastoral care of immigrants, lifted his shoulders and opened his arms in a classic Italian gesture of scepticism.

“If that is the way it was, all they needed to do was take it back,” he said.

The League had repeatedly exploited Christian symbols for its own ends “and the symbols of Christianity ought not to be used against anyone”, said Toffari.

Christ Almighty, it’s like people have never read that book they jabber on about.

The operation in Coccaglio is the product of legislation promoted by the Berlusconi government giving mayors wider powers to flush out illegal immigrants. Under Italian law, councils can withdraw the right of abode six months after the expiry of an immigrant’s residence permit if he or she cannot show an application has been submitted for renewal.Claretti said the police were delivering letters telling immigrants whose permits had expired to prove they had applied to renew them. But Toffari said the normal procedure was to post a letter inviting the recipient to go to the town hall. Sending round the police was “like saying these people could be dangerous and need to be checked in a special way”. Claretti said that dispatching registered letters would have cost his council €3,000 it could ill afford.

“Besides, if there is a letter they just put it to one side; if they see a police officer, they take it seriously. As far as I’m concerned, this is a gesture of politeness. If someone has nothing to hide, he or she has nothing to fear.”

After l’affair d’Amanda Knox, which I saw coming on the Italian news from the very beginning, I’ve been wondering what’s going on in Italy, and now I know. It’s become Maricopa County, Arizona, which has become Rwanda, which is the Jim Crow South, which is Medieval Spain, which is Palestine, which is Weimar Germany, which is anywhere decent people are out-numbered by violent xenophobes.

The people whose history provides the road map for what happens next cheerfully repeat that history. It’s so far beyond stupid I can hardly believe my eyes.

I declare today never happened.

Tomorrow: we have a do-over.

Yours is the coming snow.

Yours is the sun to follow.

Now, let’s agree that Little Debbie cakes are an abomination you should never, ever stuff into your socks and we won’t speak of this unfortunate incident again.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been driving around with a car that throws hissyfits and shuts itself off in traffic, repeatedly getting the same tooth fixed because neither dentalwork nor BandAids stick to me, working on a PC that only plays music in 4:33 segments and a laptop with a dead disk drive, and I might be a little testy about all of it. Yesterday, I drove home on a flat tire and I couldn’t even be annoyed. At least, I was going to get a nap. Which I did. It was full of delicious sleeping, which is what we nap-takers and nap-havers enjoy about naps. Fuck that flat tire. I had logs to saw.

You: But but but – Ta darling, you can’t do that!
Tata: Watch me!

Not only do all the tires occasionally flatten themselves for the hell of it, but the front ones will not re-inflate unless the car’s jacked up. Pete figured that out. I figured out I could add air to my tires until I ran out of quarters and nothing changed, so last night, Pete jacked up the car in a light rain and re-inflated the tire I could not. And a good thing he did because the rear tire on the passenger side was flat this morning, just for fun. Fortunately, I was in a hurry and had just polished my nails, so I was highly motivated to limp to the gas station and wreck my plans.

Events have been like this for about six weeks. I’ve been too busy to even complain, which is ridiculous. I am an absolute champion complainer, and I’m neglecting my sport. Maybe I just have to complain faster, because at this level, one slip and the competition’ll take me out. Oh, all my beautiful Evil!

As Suzette knows, I’m no pink ribbon waver. I wouldn’t have given this video a second’s consideration if it didn’t make fun of early MTV, but the reason I’m posting it is the Madness Stomp in the middle. Who can resist dancing nerds? Not me!