Bad Santas: Was old Santa this rowdy in his youth? These alt-carols (pdf) are sure to upset the grownups.

China Daily uses the caption that came with its Reuters photo:

Hundreds of Santas leave the South Street Seaport after their first drink of the day in New York December 10, 2005. They were participating in the annual New York SantaCon, which involves hundreds of people in cheap Santa suits walking around the city, singing naughty carols, drinking, and generally spreading holiday cheer and mayhem.

Well-informed books editor and blogger Teresa Nielsen Hayden is ready to fight for their historical place in the culture:

I'm watching this story, just waiting for someone to complain about the demise of traditional Christmas practices.

Bad Santa is older than Christmas, and at least as pervasive. He's the Abbot of Unreason, the Bean King, the Boy Bishop, the Prince des Sots, and the Lord of Misrule. He and his perpetually irrepressible ilk have always turned up at the Feast of Asses, Feast of Fools, Brumaria, and Saturnalia. He probably goes back farther than that, but the records don't.

Besides, Saint Nicholas is good for it. He's the patron saint of New York City, and the guy who laid a smackdown on Arius in a tavern during the Council of Nicaea. The current image of kindly ol' Santa Claus, and Christmas as a quiet family holiday, was a PR campaign cooked up in the Nineteenth Century as an attempt to curb the drunken excesses of public celebration in NYC.

Black Ink Monday: "...a non-violent protest by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), is a response to the Tribune Company's recent elimination of editorial cartooning positions at several of its newspapers, as well as a commentary on newspapers everywhere who have lost sight of the value of having a staff editorial cartoonist."

102 political cartoons participate in the slideshow at the top of that page.


By Rick Cole, The Trentonian, Trenton, N.J.

Hotwiring Your Search Engine: "Google a topic, and the results are based on popularity, right? Wrong. Inside the shadowy world of 'SEOs.'"

This does to search engines what spam does to email -- pollutes the stream. (How many spam emails have you seen that promise to put your site at the top of the search engine results -- all of you.)

How do you blog? Last year, Frank Paynter at Sandhill Trek asked a bunch of bloggers, "Why do you blog?" and a bunch of us responded.

This year he's back with, "How do you blog?" Here's the intro, and the first installment.

Today's responders are all women -- Shelley Powers, Jeneane Sessum, Rebecca Blood and Ronni Bennett. All good reads and, as Frank notes, authentic.

The posts are simulblogged at Sandhill Trek and at Doc Searls IT Garage. Comments and responses from those not originally invited are more than welcome. We were just to prime the pump.

The question came to me at the beginning of a period of "hardware hell" at home -- the desktop dead and the laptop possessed. (Not repossessed, just acting independently.) I let 'er rip.

In the midst of thoughtful and technical responses, I'll be the one ranting about the guy inside my laptop. (I think he steals single socks from the dryer, too.)

But as I write this at work, he's followed me here. Links I click are timing out. I may have to go home to finish this, because there the links work even if the keyboard doesn't.

Years ago, I showed the Web to a painter friend who'd never seen it. After a tour, she slowly said, "It's a... prosthesis... for telepathy."

The prosthesis is pretty clumsy; let's get the telepathy honed.