Ah, the busy holiday season

People often say they're especially busy during the holiday season. Well, this year, it's true for me. Wife came up with a back sprain last week, and so I've had to take over some of the chores and shopping she would have normally been doing. Of course, all that gets piled on addition to the normal duties at work. Ah, exhaustion...
One thing we dropped was decorating the house. Since we're not having any guests over this year, it's no matter. We're visiting relatives both Saturday and Sunday. Strangely enough, no neighbor within eyeshot has decorated, so we don't look bad.
Needless to say, I haven't done any writing in a few weeks. But it hardly matters - all the editors are on holiday hiatus, anyway. Strange Horizons and Futurismic are flat-out closed to subs until Jan. 1. But I'm accumulating a nice backlog of story ideas.
Last Friday I was covering a basketball game, and I was idly thinking about the story that Bill Rupp wants to run in his magazine, Continuum. I suddenly remembered that name of the "Mad Professor" in the story. It's an amalgam of the names of two newspaper editors that worked for a competitor once. A real pair of "running dog lackeys", if you know what I mean - always willing to kiss the ass of whatever crooks were in control of city hall. Of course, if you're a moron, you don't have any talent to rely upon - you'd better kiss ass.
Also of course, there's really not much of a free press left in this country, thanks to the godless money-grubbing Republicans. You only have full citizenship rights - including free speech - if you're rich. That's a big reason the media is this country as such a bunch of ass kissers. Even Jay Leno joked about it, after that soldier buttonholed Rumsfield over the cheap ass protection offered by Hummers (surely, someone took a bribe from some rich asshole Republican corporate pirate to overlook the bid specs). Leno quipped Rumsfield got asked an honest question by a soldier - because back home in America, no one in the corporate media would.
Well, enough of a rant. We hold these goofs to be self-evident, to mangle a phrase of Thomas Jefferson's. Time to take care of some last-minute Christmas chores.