Merry Christmas, 
bunny_hugger. Thank you for spending the year with me.
So you may wonder what are our possibly innocently-annoying neighbors doing? The well-decorated house across the street, with the U-Haul-type truck outside, did something unexpected Monday. I saw them backing the truck into the driveway, and parking a regular car in front of that, so there wasn't anything on the street overnight and we could see the decoration. bunny_hugger supposed that was because they weren't going to move the truck at all for a couple days, what with Christmas and all, although on Tuesday they'd taken the truck out again, presumably to work.
For the other neighbors, the chowder (?) has been cleaned off, although I admit not by the neighbors getting around to it. We had a comfortably warm day so I got a bucket, a mop, and a sponge and it all swept off pleasantly quickly. I haven't seen the neighbors since then so hopefully all will pass into vague memory lest we have an awkward conversation about how the heck the mess happened in the first place.
And the humor blog? It continues apace, at about one thing per day. Please enjoy; the stuff that's run the past week includes:
- Is That Enough?, last week's major piece, about Christmas carols and the problems with new ones.
- Popeye: Swee’Pea Soup, continuing the tour of this series with King Blozo and a surprisingly evil Dr O G Wotasnozzle.
- Statistics Saturday: How Much I Think About Getting Address Labels, a function over time.
- The Tangle At Meijer’s, in which I really overreact to kitsch.
- Robert Benchley: A Christmas Spectacle, a great humorist writing about children's pageants.
- Groovy Caterpillar Aliens, Plus Math Comics, because Mandrake the Magician is being all weird again.
- Stickering Around, about a very minor Christmastime tradition.
- Why This Mouse Situation Doesn’t Need Controlling, regarding an advertising flyer that I'm probably overreacting to.
Trivia: In 2004 Germany exported 482,000 (trailer-equivalent units) containerized cargo boxes to the United States; the United States sent 190,000 to Germany. Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy.
Currently Reading: Wheels Stop: The Tragedies and Triumphs of the Space Shuttle Program, 1986 - 2011, Rick Houston.
PS: The Arthur Christmas Problem, gathering a bunch of related posts from my math blog of two years ago, where they can be read again with a bit of convenience.
