Holidazed

Happy Year-End Holiday of your choosing.

My primary Christmas present from the Fabulous Robyn is the Oxford English Dictionary -- this is the Shorter version, two volumes containing only 600,000 and change words (a vocabulary *cough* marginally larger *cough* than my own), which is also updated quarterly on-line, adding an average of 2000 words per update. So I could look up the derivation of, for example, flummadiddle.

And its variant spellings, including flummerdiddle and fummadiddle. And don't get me started on fustilarian fustilugs, not to mention funambulists.

Among the various gifts bestowed upon the Fabulous Robyn in return, her favorite (and mine!) is a black leather-look complete Batgirl costume, with cape, gauntlets, over-the-knee boot tops, and utility belt. To paraphrase Eartha Kitt: Me-friggin'-YOW.

Semi-intellectual rumination.

An anchor on CNN this morning was ruminating, in their typically middle-brow fashion, on the fact that December is the "final month of the decade," completely ignoring that the actual final month of the decade is next December (if one is speaking of the First Decade of the 21st Century, as opposed to the Decade of Double-Aughts), but who's counting. Other than me. As Fox Mulder once trenchantly observed, "Nobody likes a math geek, Scully."

It did, however, occasion a comparison with December of 2000. Does anyone remember the burning political question (other than whether the US Supreme Court should have stolen a presidential election) of the day?

It was whether we should use the Federal budget surplus to fully fund Medicare and Social Security, or use it to pay down the national debt.

Option three was apparently (as was actually accomplished, of course) to spray rich people with honey and let them run naked through the US Treasury.