when you should be showering your true love(s) with eleven pipers piping. If it's late Saturday night and you have failed to do this, then it doesn't matter that you have already given them or what you have wrapped under the tree: you have sold them all short. This, in not so many words, is the underlying meaning of the song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” It might be more implied, that love=presents, but this is the message nonetheless (everyone sing along!! "Four calling birds, no less, are to-tally required, to make it anywhere with me!").
(Related question: How on earth does a sandwhich and custard shop generate almost 10 gallons of grease? I don't know but it put me off the thought of custard for a while).
I don't see a down side to this plan. Nobody gets any gifts from neighbors in May (or June, or pretty much any time other than Halloween and then you have to go and ask for them), so you know they'll appreciate having only your tasty goodness to savor. You also have one less thing to worry about during the holidays and one less thing to spend money on (not that money is easier to come by later . . . ).
I'm a big fan of egg nog. So much so that when we were freshmen, my roommate dubbed me a "raging nog-aholic." And not a holiday season has gone by since then that it hasn't come up! Huzzah for running gags! 
Inside: Pardon us. Being richer than you makes us a bit silly this time of year.
Front: Happy Christmas and New Year (below) Thanks for not having me or my family on your dinner table!
orable day when for some reason or another SkyMall bravely looked backward into the terrifying, apocalyptic past of professional wrestling and brought forth this mighty tribute to Herculean strength and stretchy, stretchy costumes. Overpriced you say? I say, Hogan vs. Andre: Priceless!!
boarding and cool skateboarding lingo? I do! Gnar! Hammer! Ender ender! The easiest way to break into the "cool" world of "hip" young skaters who "probably won't amount to much"? The SkyMall Skateboard Simulator! Hop on ride those rails and if you put down enough pads, you probably won't break anything!
Gil was nine years old with tousled brown hair with watery blue eyes as bright as a drowning angel. For as long as Gil could remember he had lived within the walls of a poor orphanage. He was just one of ten children supported by what meager contributions the orphan home could 
obtain by defrauding off-shore holding companies. There was very little to eat, but at Christmas time there always seemed to be a little more than usual, and the orphanage seemed a little warmer. But more than this, there was the Christmas chinchilla!
Christmas was the only time of year that such a rare treat was provided and it was treasured by each child like no other food: admiring it, feeling it, prizing it and slowly enjoying each juicy section. Truly, it was the light of each orphan's
Christmas and their best gift of the season. There was an orange tree in the back yard of the orphanage, but all of the orphans were sick and tired of them, and mostly threw them at passing cars. How joyful would be the moment when Gil received his chinchilla!
Unknown to him, Gil had somehow managed to track a small amount of mud through the front door, muddying the new carpet, the new carpet that the orphanage decided to buy before shelling out money for decent Christmas gifts. The punishment was swift and unrelenting, not to mention a complete overkill, though it sets a nice tone for this story: Gil would not be allowed his Christmas chinchilla! It was the only gift he would receive from the harsh world he lived in, (besides a crushing sense of worthlessness and a proclivity toward alcoholism), yet after a year of waiting for his Christmas chinchilla, is was to be denied him.
Tearfully, Gil pleaded that he be forgiven and promised never to track mud into the orphanage again, but to no avail as that surely would ruin the touching ending of the story. Gil cried into his pillow all that night and spent Christmas Day feeling empty and alone. He felt that the other children didn't want to be with a boy who had been 
punished with such a cruel punishment. Maybe, he reasoned, the gulf between him and his friends existed because they feared he would ask for a little of their chinchillas. Gil leapt to several other overblown conclusions that were no doubt included in this story to make absolutely sure that we were empathizing with the poor orphan bereft of his chinchilla. Gil spent the day upstairs, alone, in the unheated dormitory. Huddled under his only blanket, he wondered why the author kept including details about how miserable Gil's life was: unheated dormitory, little to eat, only one blanket. He wondered if readers would sympathize with an orphan who wasn't suffering as much as an orphan could possibly suffer. Probably they could not.
Bedtime came, and worst of all (if you didn’t count the food poisoning in their dinner the orphans would violently learn about early the next morning), Gil couldn't sleep. As he climbed into bed from the cold, hard floor, a soft hand touched Gil shoulder, startling him momentarily and an object was silently placed in his hands. The giver disappeared into the darkness, leaving Gil with what, he did not immediately know! Looking closely at it in the dim light, he saw that it looked like a chinchilla! Not a regular chinchilla, smooth and shiny, but a special chinchilla, very special. Inside a patched together skin were the segments of nine other chinchillas, making one whole chinchilla for Gil! The nine other children in the orphanage had each donated one segment of their own precious chinchillas to make a whole chinchilla as a gift for Gil.
The End
me type of dermal infection, resulting in overactive sebaceous glands excreting oil on to the epidermal surface. Or maybe swelling, perhaps to due to some kind of tumor or cyst within the nose caused the skin to be stretched tight and swollen with blood, causing both a shiny appearance and red discoloration. In any case, these maladies would not cause the nose to glow or emit any kind of phosphorescent light of its own. In foggy atmospheric conditions, ambient light would be reduced to almost nothing and certainly no more illumination would have been produced from the animal's nose. Putting him, a probably diseased creature at the head of the team pulling the sleigh was a foolhardy error that showed a serious lack of judgement. In actuality, the other reindeer were probably right to shun him."
List: Actual Colors of Paint that Could Be Smoothy Flavors
Rich D says:
My worst roommate ever ironically was the kid who moved into my apartment over the summer after my most interesting roommate moved out. The interesting roommate was a 7' 1'' Brazilian basketball player from Sao Paulo. He was a cool guy. And even though he wasn't the biggest or the fastest on the team, I never made fun of him. And that was only partially due to the fact that he could have palmed my head and torn it into tiny, Brazil-nut sized chunks. I miss that crazy, huge, skinny guy . . .
But the worst roommate was also crazy, and also skinny, but he was teeny. And when I say crazy I mean it in a pretty literal way. I'll call him Estevan. I had the normal complaints about Estevan that I imagine are bubbling up in your brains right now as you comtemplate your worst roommates. Estevan treated the apartment dishes in much the same way that you or I might treat a paper towel from the bathroom, or perhaps that smart but quiet guy who sits behind you in class and helps you with group answer questions: very convenient, even essencial when it's there for you to use. But after you use them, they make absolutely no impression on your life whatsoever. It is as if those dishes, that paper towell and Eric(?)(Jon? Dave?) never existed at all. It stands to reason that Estevan also wouldn't care about clean clothing or bedding (he slept right on the mattress and pulled his one sheet over him . . . ). After not too long (probably, oh, about a day), my other roommate Mike and I began to see that the battle against the rising, unhygenic practices of Estevan were a lost cause. Mike slept at the apartment still, at least occasionally, but he suddenly discovered how much he loved to eat out and be with other people. People who didn't create unholy smells in places where some of us were known to live.
Those are the basics, and probably I could stop there. But what pushes Estevan into the number one spot were the general eccentricities, the quirks, the peculiarities, the overall feeling of "creepy" that Estevan had running out of his ears and pooling around him. Before moving in with Mike and I, Estevan had spent six months living in Japan in a student exchange program. Somehow near the end of his stay in Japan, Estevan, an ultra-skinny Caucasian with protruding features and a heavy eyebrow (singular, although there were occasionally two, but only in the right light), became aware that modeling agencies in Japan were interested in the aforementioned skinny Caucasian-type with said features. (Their feelings on eyebrows and the plurality thereof are as yet unknown). I do not doubt that this is true. However, this became not just a curious factoid about Japanese culture for Estevan but an actual occupational choice. I also am confident that Estevan could do all right living the lifestyle of a model (heck, even I wanted to throw up when I was around him!). Here are some things that were witnessed, probably daily in my apartment:
- Estevan, waking up (10ish?) and eating his breakfast of banana and flavored water.
- Estevan, shirtless, watching hours of Japanese school-kid dramas (?) and/or comedies.
- Estevan, still shirtless, polishes off a yogurt and a bowl of something that is mostly bran using what I suspect are the bowl and spoon that were wedged between the couch cushions. I know they aren't the bowl and spoon I washed that morning, because I have started keeping a set of my own dishes in my desk drawer and letting the kitchen and sink go to whereever it is going. In a handbasket.
- Estevan, doing sets of pushups, still shirtless, with TV still on something produced in the land of the rising sun. Occasionally these are girl-style (on the knees pushups). There's nothing wrong with that (in principle)(but it does help paint the picture, doesn't it?)
- Estevan, on the phone talking about his modeling prospects with persons unknown (Did he actually ever model? Make money modeling?! This is unknown).
- Estevan (need I say shirtless?) checking his muscle definition in the mirror and making more room for the scads of manscaping products that continued to overflow the sink and countertop.
It occurs to me that none of these things on their own really sound all that bad. Added up however, and you get a skinny, fairly smelly, little Gollum of a Caucasian, Japanese model.
