… and jump, and steal, and slink: my cat annie.

Found in my travels; definitely worth a visit.

Santa Claus was very, very good to OneWoman this year. Among the pile of loot under the tree, this appeared this morning. Oh, there was lots of other good stuff, but I won’t bore you with my joy over the newly acquired first season of Twin Peaks on DVD.

This will allow me to stream my ridiculous collection of MP3 music (currently at something north of 60GB. all perfectly legal. really.) anywhere in the house I care to listen to it! Too cool for words!!

Well, OK, Santa was really the SO. He has sprouted the requisite seasonal facial hair, but I couldn’t quite convince him to get into the red suit. Maybe next year

And so, here we are. A log on the fire, lights twinkling on the tree, packages strewn all over the living room. The stores are closed - either you got it done in time, or it’s too late to worry now. So, while you put away the wrapping paper and get ready to crack open the eggnog, I have a few Christmas Eve tidbits for you.

At last check, NORAD’s radar had Santa somewhere in the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower. Although, if The Daily Ripper is to be believed, Santa’s just about had it with that particular invasion of privacy. It seems to me though that a certain group of 15 year-olds in Ales, France committed a much bigger invasion of The Red One’s privacy when they mugged him on Wednesday. According to the BBC, as reported by the AFP news agency, Father Christmas suffered multiple bruises and has lodged a criminal complaint.

But The Red One can be pretty terrifying himself. We all have family photos like these somewhere in a dusty photo album, don’t we? Kind of makes you wonder why he didn’t just ho-ho-ho those teenagers into submission…

All of this got me to mulling over that age-old conundrum: How does he do it? You know - cover the entire planet in a single night; drop down chimneys and deliver loot wherever he goes? We all know that those reindeer can move pretty quickly, but still… The Wikipedia has calculated the velocity at which The Red-Suited One travels: as .03 times the speed of light, or 8 million meters per second. Wow!

Unfortunately, there are those who would just as soon that dear Santa stay put at the North Pole and stay clear of their children. According to The Landover Baptist Church, Satan is Santa Claus. Well, we’re all entitled to our opinions, I suppose…

And finally, our friends at JibJab.com have given us yet another laugh-out-loud production. No more milk and cookies for the man. He has more, umm… practical needs.

A peaceful (insert winter holiday of your choice here) to you and yours from OneSmartWoman.

Don’t get me wrong, this is one of those rare movies that I’ll run out and see as soon as it hits the theaters. I’m pretty excited at the prospect to tell the truth. And it would be kind of disappointing if the movie followed the book exactly, but according to Ain’t It Cool, Zaphod’s second head is in the wrong place!

Come on, people! Some things are just sacred and should not be messed with.

Additional detail here.

They’re everywhere! In the last couple of days, reports have surfaced that both Movable Type and MSDN have been slammed by comment spam, and from reading through much of the commentary, we’re all getting hit by the same spammers.

In the case of MT, a bug in the software was apparently causing blogs to consume huge amounts of bandwidth, rebuilding constantly even if the spam went into the blogger’s moderation queue. Six Apart fixed the bug in short order, but the problem looms large for bloggers of all flavors.

Ugh.

Sean Gallagher blames Google’s page rank algorithm for much of this, and I can’t say that I disagree. If they didn’t stand to gain from throwing their links up anywhere on the net that they can, we’d likely have a much cleaner blogsphere.

My latest solution appears to have done the trick though. Since I added SpamWordBlock, not only has my moderation queue been free of drivel, but I haven’t seen a single one slip through to the blog itself.