Operation Fat Man

From way back in 2008! — CS

To: President George W. Bush

From: Homeland Security

Re: Operation Fat Man

This Christmas, the U.S. intelligence community has the opportunity to capture and/or neutralize alleged terrorist, “S. Claus.”

To avoid negative publicity associated with previous intelligence debacles, we have thoroughly vetted said dissident – invoking, as the Brothers Marx call it, the “Sanity Clause” – and found his activities highly suspicious. Working with a diminutive faction known as elves, he is said to create knock-off versions of brand-name toys, electronics and clothing for delivery through a system that circumvents traditional retailing. Need we remind you of the importance of retailing money to Republican campaigns and the influence of the retailers’ lobby?

Claus is said to gain illegal ingress both into the country and onto the roofs of millions of homes by means of a biologically powered aviation system that resembles a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer. A possible ninth reindeer, one Rue Dolph (a German cohort?), is rumored but not confirmed. This sled may use cutting-edge stealth technology to elude radar detection.

Worse, Claus is able to enter the homes of decent, God-fearing Americans through their chimneys. How a person of his girth can accomplish such a feat is unknown, although we suspect a “magic dust” supplied by a Mexican drug cartel.

The target has established a base in a polar mountain hideaway. There, wearing a communist-inspired suit of red, Claus directs a complex disinformation campaign designed to eradicate religion from the Yuletide season and replace it with secular humanism, whatever that is. Given our administration’s attempts to erode the separation of church and state through so-called faith-based initiatives, his actions are nearly treasonous, as he forces the masses to turn even further from what you had hoped would be the official state faith, Christianity. (And not the wimpy New Testament variety, either, but the old-school, eye-for-an-eye stuff.)

A direct link between the activities of Claus and Osama bin Laden has yet to be established, but our cryptologists – no, Mr. President, they study secret writing, not tombs – have discovered that replacing the “m” in Osama with “nt” results in O’Santa, surely no coincidence. This has led to a massive NSA wiretapping effort against both American Muslims and Irish Americans, because knee-jerk reactions initiated by little evidence are our specialty.

Complicating our efforts to gather reliable intelligence about the suspect is his habit of placing duplicates of himself in malls and at non-profit charity fundraisers nationwide. These thousands of Santa simulacrums have yielded little information when subjected to the few interrogation methods that bleeding-heart liberals haven’t exposed as torture. Even playing Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine songs at eardrum-shattering decibels has not dissuaded them from their cover story – that they are ordinary, everyday Americans earning extra money for the holidays. Fat chance.

Mr. President, in these waning days of your administration, we urge you to declare all-out war against the North Pole and dedicate 100 percent of the nation’s available military and law enforcement resources to finding and stamping out the rogue Claus movement. Under separate cover, we are sending you a detailed plan to scour the eastern seaboard with F-22 Raptors and eliminate this scourge. We considered allowing Vice President Cheney to ride along and pull the trigger, but we feared he might take out one of our own operatives instead.

Once the American public understands this operation is vital to national security, we believe it will erase the missteps of the last eight years and cement your legacy as a tough-talking Texan with the strength of his convictions.

Whatever you decide, sir, a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and the missus. We hope you enjoy the fruitcake. Leave any leftovers in the fridge for Obama.




E-mail cschillig@the-review.com.

What we search and write about says so much

’Tis the season for media behemoths and search-engine companies to release lists.

Bestselling books, most downloaded songs, popular words — if you can count it during the year, you can send it out as a press release in December.

Google joined this parade of quantifiability this week with a video recap, “The Year in Search 2021.” It opened with the unsurprising observation that users searched “how to heal” more often this year than in the past.

I say “unsurprising” because if you’ve been paying attention to the people around you, you’ve noticed more of them than usual are hurting.

The media has been awash in coverage of mental health in the last few months. Tales of people coping or failing to cope. The stressors of a pandemic and financial uncertainty. Anxieties about going back to in-person jobs or school.

But I don’t need Google or the evening news to tell me this. All I need to do is count research papers.

An assignment that produces more than its share of angst each semester has recently inspired an overabundance of essays about mental health. I’ve seen it with my students in both high school and college. At least a third of the 100 or so papers I’ve read this month deal with some aspect of anxiety or depression.

The most popular single subject has been social media’s effect on mental health. This is not surprising given the Facebook/Instagram whistleblowing earlier this year, happening just as students were selecting topics. But I’ve also read essays with other mental health focuses: PTSD and veterans, therapy animals, the effect of money on happiness, relationship failure, and how parents’ decision to spank or not to spank affects their children.

While none of these topics are necessarily new, the approach has changed. Fewer papers dwell solely on the causes of stress or anxiety, while more time and space is allotted to recovery. This change in emphasis is saddening in one respect — the societal equivalent of saying “hey, stuff happens” — but hopeful in another, a recognition that no situation is so intractable that it can’t be improved.

This semester’s emphasis on mental health topics could be a chicken-or-egg scenario, I suppose. Is mental health top of mind because it’s covered so often by the media, which then influences students’ papers? Or is all that media coverage a reflection of boots-on-the-ground reality, which is also manifested in my students’ topics?

The truth is probably somewhere between. Still, it is hard to deny changes in the scope of the mental health problem. The non-profit Mental Health America notes that suicidal ideation was on the rise in 2021, and that “the percentage of adults with a mental illness who report unmet need for treatment has increased every year since 2011.”

Additionally, the New York Times recently reported a 30-percent increase in American overdose deaths, which topped 100,000 from May 2020 to April 2021, a grim milestone. The figure, the paper notes, is “more than the toll of car crashes and gun fatalities combined.”

It is often said that suicides increase near the holidays, but this is not accurate. Suicide attempts decrease at Christmastime and peak in the summer months. Still, the warning signs should never be overlooked.

If anything, this extra focus on mental health — in students, the media and the larger society — is welcome, whatever the origins. The more people talk about it, the more people normalize it, decreasing a stigma that contributes to far too many people avoiding treatment.

Which is a tragedy waiting to happen in any season.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays

From 2013, here's a look at Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays. — CS

Friends who know I am not religious will sometimes ask if I’m offended by the term, “Merry Christmas.”

That’s ridiculous. It’s not ridiculous that they ask, mind you, but that anybody would take offense to an expression — any expression — that wishes happiness to another.

This War Against Christmas that certain segments of the media (Fox News, I’m talking to you) accuse liberals of waging is really just a political version of the TV weather scam.

You know what I’m talking about: Television executives have realized that talking up the weather is great for ratings, which means that every flurry and icy patch merits its own scrolling alert along the bottom of our screens, accompanied by an announcement to stay tuned for school closings.

In the old days, when we determined weather by sticking our heads out the window and looking up, we didn’t need constant warnings to be cautious and that road conditions could change at any time. We just figured it out.

The same thing with “Merry Christmas” vs. “Happy Holidays.” Somewhere, some broadcasters and politicians recognized that talking about taking Christ out of Christmas — and secular society’s decision to wish “Seasons Greetings” to honor the diversity of beliefs among constituents — was good for ratings, and that people would stay tuned for long, circuitous arguments and/or rants about the topic. Some of us will even vote for particular candidates if they espouse a strong enough view of America as a Christian nation around the holidays, despite whatever shenanigans they are up to the rest of the year.

But in the old days, we could hear “Merry Christmas,” “Season’s Greetings,” “Happy Holidays,” “Happy Hanukkah” or “Happy Kwanzaa” and recognize it was merely a speaker’s way of sharing his or her own joy, not a personal attack. We didn’t need any conservatives or liberals to translate for us, and we didn’t need to bristle and announce ourselves as Christians or Jews or atheists or space aliens or whatever. We just smiled and said, “Thanks, same to you.”

There, isn’t that easy?

On a related note, people sometimes ask me why I bother to celebrate Christmas at all, as I am not a believer in the “reason for the season.” This is also a fair question.

The bottom line is that much of what passes for Christmas these days is not, in point of fact, religious. Even fixing Jesus’ birthday as Dec. 25 has more to do with early Christianity’s attempts to attach itself to a pagan celebration of the sun than to any historical record. Our modern mythology of Santa, Rudolph, elves, talking snowmen and the like demonstrates that religious and non-religious elements of the holiday have made an uneasy peace, mixing and mingling over the years like ingredients in a pot of stew. (The most repulsive example of this cross-pollination are those painted images of Santa kneeling before the manger.)

I wonder how so many people square their bloated, consumer Christmas (complete with running over their fellow men with shopping carts to get to a big deal) with recent comments from Pope Francis warning against excessive capitalism. Shopping until we drop doesn’t seem particularly spiritual to me, but what does an old pagan know?

Our reasons to celebrate are multi-faceted, then. Some see Christmas as a monument to the birth of a person who came to redeem humanity, some as a gift-grab, others as an excuse to hum “Frosty the Snowman” under their breaths, and still others as a season to brighten an otherwise dark and dreary time of year. That last is my “reason for the season,” along with being happy for my friends and family who find a deeper reason. While some may decry my choices as sad and superficial, they suffice for me.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t take offense to Merry Christmas or Season’s Greetings or even Happy Festivus (for the rest of us). Anytime somebody reaches beyond themselves to extend sincere wishes, that’s cause for happiness in my book.

So whatever you celebrate, enjoy.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig at Twitter

What sweater is this?

From 2018, another Christmas column. — CS 

Cows with reindeer antlers.

Cats sporting snowflake pajamas.

An elf, patterned after the bad boy from those Ford bumper stickers, “writing” Noel on yellow snow.

Some trends, not even the Internet can quantify.

Ugly Christmas sweaters are one example. After a recent foray to a retail giant where a tacky top set me back $20, I did an online search to learn how how huge the seasonal-sweater industry has become.

Surprisingly, I found few recent numbers.

Oh, I discovered many stories about the craze. One, from Alaina Demopoulos at Daily Beast, talks about the 26,000 holiday sweaters sold from September to November this year on eBay alone.

Another, from Crain’s Detroit Business, focuses on UglyChristmasSweater.com. The company expects to grow its sales 35 percent this year, shipping between $6.5 to $7 million in holiday-themed apparel.

In 2016, GQ reported that “stores move tens of millions of novelty knits every holiday season.” That same year, CNBC did a story on the startup company Tipsy Elves, noting that five-year sales had topped $20 million.

But no source gave an overall estimate of how much money Americans are expected to spend to look tacky over the next week or so. Maybe because it’s just too embarrassing for even the “fake” news media to report.

Call me a purist, but I believe a sweater is ugly only to the extent that somebody else finds it beautiful. When companies begin to design intentionally repulsive clothing, they miss two essential holiday ingredients — love and sincerity.

Think about it: In the days of old, when dear old Aunt Ida — and didn’t everybody have an Aunt Ida? — gave you a tacky sweater, she sincerely believed it was gorgeous. She thought it would make you look splendiloquent as you went about your holiday business — shopping, caroling, cleaning grease traps. She didn’t send a sweater because she thought it was hideous or because she wanted to embarrass you.

And you wore it out of a dreary, but laudable, sense of duty. Because you knew, deep in your heart of hearts, that’s what Aunt Ida wanted. It's the same reason Americans eat fruitcake — not because we like it, but because we have to.

If I may mix my holidays, it reminds me of Linus from “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” He’s camping out in the pumpkin patch, certain the Great Pumpkin will grace him with his (its?) presence.

“He’s gotta pick this one,” Linus asserts. “He’s got to. I don’t see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there’s not a sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.”

Ugly Christmas sweaters were much the same — a sincere attempt to give a loving gift. But no more. Now, you can’t be sure if the Aunt Idas of the world are mocking recipients with their sweater choices.

Think of little Ralphie in “A Christmas Story,” mortified by the pink bunny pajamas from his Aunt Clara. If the movie took place today, audiences would be forced to consider Aunt Clara’s gift as cutting commentary on her nephew.

Hypocrisy as far as the eye can see.

But what do I know? Maybe Aunt Ida has always selected sweaters because they’re grotesque. Maybe she’s just that twisted and bitter after Uncle Charlie ran off with the meter maid.

And regardless of what I might believe about the sad state of sincerity at the holidays, I too participated in the ugly sweater craze, selecting an image of two dinosaurs in Santa hats dancing under a disco ball.

The damn thing lights up, too.

It would be just my luck to electrocute myself on Christmas Eve. Maybe they can bury me in my newest ugly sweater.

Aunt Ida, I’ll tell Uncle Charlie you said Merry Christmas.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Get ready for Porch Pirates: The Movie this holiday season

From 12-19-19, here is a column of Christmas past. — CS

Christmas movies on Lifetime have borrowed a trick from Marvel.

In many films on the network this season, characters are delayed by Winter Storm Megan (or Meghan), leading to speculation that they all take place in a LIfetime Cinematic Universe, similar to how all Marvel movies take place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

So with a connection, however tenuous, between Lifetime and Marvel, how long before an enterprising producer pitches a Lifetime Christmas superhero movie?

It’s not such a stretch, really. Christmas has always had a connection with the supernatural, going all the way back to the original Bible story. After all, what is the Nativity if not an origin story for Jesus, a man who later walks on water and spontaneously resurrects?

In “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens gives readers ghosts and time travel among all the Victorian trappings of the holiday.

And Santa Claus, the jolly old elf himself, must have abilities far beyond those of ordinary mortals to manufacture all those toys and then transport and deliver them in one night. To say nothing of the laws of physics he violates with a sleigh propelled by flying reindeer.

So a Christmas superhero is a natural.

I’m thinking Yule Man, dressed all in green with a red cape, the Mastercard logo emblazoned across his chest. His powers include zooming from store to store, clearing snow-filled parking lots and helping elderly customers carry bags to their cars.

Rocketed to Earth as an infant from the doomed planet Tinsel, he was raised by kindly Dollar General managers to use his great powers to support American capitalism and shoddily-made foreign imports.

His x-ray vision can tell shoppers when a doorbuster is truly sold out or when there are more ferreted away in the stockroom. And his super hearing can detect the true identity of every Secret Santa.

Or maybe XMas-Men, a team of mutants born with enhanced shopping genes, who can conspicuously consume from 12:01 a.m. on Black Friday right through Boxing Day on Dec. 26. Shunned by most of humanity, they nonetheless are responsible for almost single handedly driving up the GNP and moving retailers out of the red and into the black.

Of course, what are superheroes without villains?

The Porch Pirates don’t even have to be invented, and they already have an alliterative name and a hissable modus operandi.

A battle between Yule Man and the Porch Pirates could be pretty epic, raging above residential neighborhoods before moving into more urban areas, where the two sides could punch each other into buildings and buses, all while shouting lines like, “You’ll never get this box of shrink-wrapped fruitcakes, Yule Man!” Eventually, Yule Man must say, “Delivery complete!” as he knocks out the last pirate.

One problem is that Lifetime Christmas movies have notoriously low budgets, so typical superhero shenanigans aren’t feasible. Plus, any storyline in the movies, from magic shoes to saving a cultural landmark, must take a backseat to a budding romance between the two leads.

So our hypothetical superhero movie must involve an enterprising female reporter seeking to solve the mystery of the town’s new hero, who is performing random acts of kindness. She is competing for this scoop against a rival male reporter who looks like the stud on the cover of every GQ.

The stud is eventually revealed as Yule Man, who along the way falls in love with the heroine and yadda yadda yadda, Winter Storm Megan, yadda yadda yadda, true love always.

I already have a title: “Christmas Cape-ers.” Get it?

It seems like a winner. In the true spirit of Christmas, does anybody have a couple of million they’d like to invest?

chris.schillig@yahoo.com



@cschillig on Twitter

Something's fishy about this Christmas tradition

From Dec. 19, 2020, here is the story of my family's Christmas preoccupation with fish. As a bonus, I've linked to my imitation of Ringo Starr's infamous "peace and love" message.

Every family, I’m convinced, no matter how straitlaced and proper, has an oddball holiday tradition.

For my family, it is fish.

Not a Christmas Day meal. Not an expedition where we cut a hole in an icy lake and squat in a shanty, waiting for a nibble on our cane poles.

No, this is a ceramic fish.

It is a cross between Big Mouth Billy Bass and Flounder from Disney’s “Little Mermaid,” if the latter were drawn by a singularly untalented four-year-old and bereft of any aesthetic appeal.

Technically, this hideous sculpture is a koi (not the real McKoi), but I’m not one to carp about labels. Whatever it is, it is truly horrific, with bulging eyes and a gaping mouth questing upward, ever upward, in search of some elusive worm. Or possibly human flesh.

The fish travels back and forth between our house and my sister-in-law and her husband’s house each year, sometimes wrapped as a gag gift — emphasis on the gag — and sometimes secreted outside, on top of a car, or dangling from a tree.

Legend has it this piscine monstrosity was once the size of a tennis ball, but has been painted so many times over the years it has ballooned to its present size, roughly the dimensions of Rosemary’s Baby or some other dark denizen of the netherworld.

One year, the fish was pink and teal. Another, it was yellow and black, a nod to a certain team in Pittsburgh whose name shall not be spoken. Occasionally, it has been adorned with battery-operated lights or pinwheels or pictures of loved ones in compromising positions. (OK, not that compromising — we’re not that kind of family.)

Two years ago, my wife and I plastered peace and love stickers across its scaly surface and affixed it with a QR code. The code led to a YouTube video where I imitated Ringo Starr’s passive-aggressive message to fans to stop mailing him merchandise to be signed. We shipped the fish special delivery, requiring a signature by the recipient.

This was where I learned two horrible lessons. First, marking “fragile” sixteen times on a box is still no guarantee mailroom gorillas won’t play catch with a package. Second, ceramic fish can break.

The fish arrived a few days before Christmas in pieces. (I am tempted to say “in Pisces.”) Photos were sent. Services were arranged. The fish, we assumed, would receive a burial at sea. Another custom lost to the vagaries of the USPS.

But it was not to be. By Christmas Day, the fish had been resurrected, shades of Danny DeVito’s Penguin, who bragged to Batman that “a lot of tape and a little patience make all the difference.”

Not tape, but glue allowed my in-laws to stitch Frankenfish back together and re-gift it, with bolts on each side of its neck. Later that year, they stole it out of our house on Mother’s Day and gave it to us again last Christmas. This time, it was green, white and red, wearing a tie.

It has lived a hellish half-life in our basement ever since, awaiting another chance to rise and thwart our revels.

My wife and I are plotting what to do with Mr. Chips this year, aware time is running out, especially if we want to find a way to get it inside our victims’ … er, family’s house without them knowing. Thank goodness they don’t read the paper.

Some years, I’ll be honest, the fish has been a damn — or is it dam? — nuisance. But this year, when so many other traditions have been postponed or canceled, it has provided a sense of continuity and familiarity, an activity we can complete in isolation and deliver while social distancing.

Provided the backdoor key we have still works.

Shhh. Don’t tell. And Happy Haddock Days to you and yours.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Where in the world is ... ?

The ideal place for me to live is Hilo, Hawaii.

This is not random musing. No, it’s science, baby! Or maybe pseudo-science. OK, maybe just a silly online quiz.

But said quiz has a better pedigree than many. For one thing, it doesn’t seem to be fishing — or is that phishing? — for personal data. By contrast, some Facebook “quizzes” ask you to input your age and birthday in exchange for learning what movie star you resemble or which cartoon character shares your personality. Those are sketchy, especially when my matinee match is Paul Reubens as PeeWee Herman and my cartoon caricature is Homer Simpson.

But I digress. This particular quiz, called “Where Should You Live?,” is from The New York Times, You can Google it if it isn’t behind a paywall, if you’re confident that brushing up against a liberal publication won’t turn you blue forever, and if my publisher is copacetic with a plug for a news rival.

Click a few preferences to get started. Click some preferences twice to indicate their importance.

For me, double-clicks were “commute” (as in, a short one) and “health care” (I’m not getting any younger). Single clicks went to “schools,” “air quality,” and “less snow,” among others. (Hey, I’m not revealing all my secrets.)

If I limit the results to the Northeast, I say aloha to Hawaii and hello to Arlington, New York, population 3,674.

(I just learned “aloha” means both hello and goodbye in Hawaiian, so it makes sense for a Hawaiian city to be my top match, as I seldom know if I’m coming or going.)

If I limit results again to the Midwest, then I’m bound for Peoria, Illinois, with a much larger population of 113,532.

So from Hawaii to New York to Illinois. Talk about around the world in a daze.

For kicks, I searched for my current location — Alliance, Ohio — on the quiz’s database. It was only a 50 percent match for me, compared to Hilo’s 88 percent. Alliance’s attributes include “affordability” and average price per square foot for homeownership ($76).

“Summer in Alliance is hot,” the site says. “Winter is cold and very snowy.” Accurate, if unappealing.

The Carnation City also ranks 7/10 for commute, 9/10 for health care, and 10/10 for air quality.

Less inviting are availability of live music, 4/10; income mobility, 3/10; low crime, 3/10; and jobs, 2/10. I was surprised that Alliance only earned a 5/10 for trees, especially since it has been designated as a Tree City for the last 39 years, according to the Arbor Day Foundation’s website. I was not surprised by its mountain rating, a 0/10. Flat to a fault.

This is the point where the columnist leaps to an obligatory defense of his adopted hometown, if “adopted” is the right descriptor for a place I’ve lived the majority of my life, yet managed through an accident of geography to avoid being born in.

Alliance, like all places, has its strengths and weaknesses. It is also greater than the sum of its parts. These expressions are also obligatory (and cliche), but that doesn’t make them less heartfelt.

My wife and I have pondered on occasion a move away from northeast Ohio — but never, it must be said, to Hilo, Hawaii. What keeps us here is largely entropy, to be sure, but also family, fulfilling careers and a fondness for the people and the area.

I mean, where else can you be mowing the grass in shorts one weekend and then salting down ice sheets in your driveway the next?

And what other city has Polinori’s? Worth a trip if you haven’t been. Worth a trip if you have.

Besides, who puts much stock in an online quiz, anyway?

Not even editors for The New York Times, who admit their quiz is “absolutely” biased and that if you check enough boxes, “you’ll start to match with more and more places in California, the country’s most populous state.”

No thanks. Maybe I’m the biased one, but I’ll stick with Alliance.

Reach Chris chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig