2007 Christmas Spectacular!

Cruel and Unusual?


If there's one thing the Christmas season could do with a little bit less of, it's those ridiculous Santa hats that people wear. Let's be honest: they're just not funny. At best, they're incredibly tacky, and slightly creepy. But are they cruel?

Apparently, if the wearer is a Beluga whale, the answer is yes. Not satisfied with protesting actual acts of animal cruelty, a few animal advocates have trained their sights on a particularly egregious threat to the dignity of animals everywhere: a japanese aquarium that places tiny Santa hats on the heads of its performing Belugas:

It's a scene that brings laughter and cheers from visitors to a Japanese aquarium - two white beluga whales wearing Santa hats. But environmentalists are saddened by the sight of what they say is the final humiliation for the whale in a country that hunts them down with harpoons.
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While the white belugas are entertaining the crowds, their humpback cousins are facing a brutal end in cold storage at the hands of Japanese whalers in Antarctica.
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Wildlife officials say the display of the white belugas wearing Santa hats is both sad and ironic against the background of the Antarctic hunts, due to start in the region after Christmas. "While whales are being used for entertainment in Japan, the Japanese fleet is subjecting whales to a cruel death in the Southern Ocean," said Mr Darren Kindleysides, a Sydney-based campaigner for the International Fund for Wildlife. "Sadly, the aquarium owners seem to be showing as little respect for whales as their Government."

I haven't extensively studied the thought-patterns of small arctic whales, so there's always a chance that the whale-huggers could be right. Perhaps Beluga whales are incredibly self-conscious creatures who die a little every time their wicked task-masters force them to don festive holiday headgear.

But, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that -- despite my disdain for Santa hats in general -- those lil' Santa hat wearing Belugas are probably the most adorable things I've seen all year. How can something that looks so right be so wrong?

A Very Merry (Huckabee) Christmas

On a slightly less adorable note, newly-minted Republican frontrunner Mike Huckabee wants you to have a merry Christmas, and he's got a heart-warming video to prove it:




Is that suspiciously cross-like windowpane in the background a coded message to evangelical voters? Probably not. But Ron Paul seems to think it's a harbinger of fascism:





The friendly Fox News guy is right: Mike Huckabee isn't a fascist. He's just a nice politician trying to spread Christmas cheer across key battleground states. Maybe Ron Paul's just ticked off by the fact that his Scrooge-esque mountains of cash have hardly put a dent in his opponents' poll-numbers, while Huckabee's managed to take the lead in Iowa (and the nation) with a paltry sum that could hardly purchase a decent Christmas goose. I guess elections just bring out the humbug in everyone.