In an effort to increase my enjoyment of the holiday season, I decided to stop reading the daily newspaper, stop checking the news feed on my cell phone, and stop watching the news on TV from Dec. 15 through New Year’s Day. My experiment was wildly successful, and we had a lovely Christmas, complete with the requisite overeating and under-exercising, plenty of quality time with friends and family, and the usual orgy of gift unwrapping. It was everything a Christmas should be – sweet and warm with occasion forays into loud and raucous.
On New Year’s Eve, I returned to the real world and took a quick scan of the major headlines of the past several weeks. I may have missed some key details and nuances, but at first glance, it appears that during my absence from the news the United States has declared war on Panama, moved to annex Canada into the US, and demanded that we be allowed to purchase Greenland from Denmark.
I gather the beef with Panama is that they are over-charging the US for use of the canal, which makes perfect sense coming from someone who has been hawking overpriced bibles, guitars and gold boots while promising to let businesses operate free from the jackboots of government regulation on their necks. The interest in Greenland is a little harder to understand, although it may be based on a mistaken belief that Greenland is where they make breakfast Danish, which would obviously appeal to the health-conscious new administration. Annexing Canada would be fine with me despite the language barrier and the whole metric thing. Better yet, maybe we can work out a trade in which we get British Columbia and Toronto, and we give Canada Texas and Florida.
I also noticed that Elon Musk grabbed a lot of headlines, which I think raises an interesting presidential succession question: if, God forbid, Musk were to die while in office, who would succeed him to the presidency? Would it be Vice President-Elect JD Vance or Donald Trump? Or perhaps Vivek Ramaswamy? Herschel Walker?
I also saw that President-Elect Trump (as opposed to President-Not Elect Musk) confirmed his plans to carry out its threat/promise to begin the largest mass deportation in U.S. history…right after it extends and increases the availability of H-1B visas to educated immigrants who are willing to work for Musk and Vivek at below-market rates.
Again, I may be missing some details, and I’m sure that everything will be made clear in coming weeks as we near the inauguration Jan. 20, which I understand Trump has confirmed is the largest crowd that has not yet gathered for an inauguration, although I think the projected crowd size includes a large contingent of attendees from the new State of Canada.
The other big news story I missed was a shocking story from California where, after a 12-year study, researchers at the University of California at Davis have confirmed that our friend the California ground squirrel has expanded its traditional diet of acorns, seeds, nuts and fruit to include voles and other smaller rodents that the newly carnivorous squirrels hunt down and consume. The results of the study appeared in the Journal of Ethology – and no, that’s not a typo. Ethology is a branch of zoology that studies the behavior of non-human animals, as opposed to the study of the behavior of human animals, which I believe is called high school.
I’m not one to jump to conclusions or spread conspiracy theories, but could this news about the surprisingly voracious ground squirrel behavior and the incoming administration’s revived interest in buying Greenland be related? Besides having large deposits of ice and minerals and possibly breakfast pastries, Greenland has lots of forests that might serve as a breeding ground for an enhanced strain of carnivorous ground squirrels that could be unleashed as a furry weapon of war on an unsuspecting population resisting our country’s expansion efforts. Worse yet, I bet with some pretty elementary DNA work, those meat-hungry ground squirrels could be genetically combined with chromosomes from larger predators such as tigers or grizzly bears and dropped say, into the jungles of Panama to secure the canal.
On second thought, perhaps I’ll extend my new blackout for just a bit longer.
Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.
