A Christmas Message from your Uncle Jackson

Merry Christmas, you little scamps! May you and yours have a lovely time worshiping, ignoring, or denying the existence of the deity or deities of your choice. Personally, my family and I spend the holidays remembering that thousands of years ago a child was born who would grow up to be tortured to death to save us all from some kind of especially nasty metaphysical pigwidget. We do this by giving each other scarves and eating cookies, and occasionally going to a movie none of us really want to see. This is called Catholicism, and it is weird. No one really gets it the first go-round, but fortunately we have an eternity of either damnation or stagnation to think about it after the fact. I subscribe to a service called agnosticism, which means I rightly don't give a shit about the large-bearded-man-in-the-sky and would rather watch disturbing and violent pornography anyway.

As most of you are aware, our friend and colleague Tyler hiked up his grumpy pants recently and clattered out a special Christmas tirade railing against nearly everyone. I would like to take this moment here to let our readers know that Sports Quiz Radio covers all kinds of political ideas--and while Tyler more often represents the Center-With-Mild-Right-Flavorings, I want to assure you that I am here to represent the far left with positions such as mandatory man-marriages and beating unwanted babies to death with socks full of nickel rolls. And, while we're outing our habits, I voted for Barack Obama, may peace be upon him. And I also must agree with Tyler that my fellow supporters of Obama tended to be more annoying. But that's mostly because I hate hipsters in general and that Venn diagram had a hell of a lot of overlap. Just like "McCain Supporters" and "People Who Cannot Read."

But this post is not about politics. It is about Christmas--which is a completely a-political time of year. This year my scattered immediate family collected in Scranton and drove down to my grandmother's house in New Jersey. Somehow my father had procured an audio copy of the only mystery ever written by Abraham Lincoln, and we listened to it on the way there. It was disturbingly awful. It was based on a case in which Lincoln was the defense attorney, and it shows that Lincoln was actually quite bad at his job. His clients managed to get off mostly on sheer luck, and he was never able to offer an explanation of whatever happened--even for the fictionalized story. Most mysteries have some kind of ending, perhaps in which the strangeness of the whole story (the "mystery") gets unraveled and explained (the "solution"). But Lincoln ended his story with what was basically "Well that was all quite a strange occurrence, wasn't it? Too bad we never figured out what the hell happened there. Might have made a good story." Perhaps one day he took off his lawyer-ing hat and put down his mystery writer-ing pen and said to his beastly wife, "Mary, I can't write worth a shit and I'm the worst lawyer in the world, so I might as well give up now and become the President of the United States and free an entire race of people from centuries of institutionalized inhumanity." It is unsettling to see an amazing specimen of human capacity fail spectacularly at something. It was like watching Thomas Jefferson inadvertently fly a hot air balloon directly into the waiting jaws of a crocodile, all the while screaming incoherently and helplessly. Or like watching To Kill a Mockingbird with all the reverent children and black people edited out. Or it's like neither of those things, because they are silly.

Remember, kids, on this most holiest of days, that even a middle-aged Jew with good prospects can fuck it all up.

Merry Christmas, everyone!