This Is Not a Serious Post

Consider it a skirmish in the war on Christmas

I don’t have a contract with Substack, but if I did, it would probably call on me to post frequently — which is easy, given all the stuff happening out there — but to take major holidays off, if only to help keep both me and my readers from going crazy. Yes, there is a sanity clause.

Speaking of which: Trump is back on the Greenland thing. Nobody seems to know who put that worm in his brain; attempts to provide a reasonable rationale sound like sanewashing to me. One theory is that he looked at a map, and is unaware that the Mercator projection — shown above — greatly exaggerates the size of regions near the poles. (Greenland is, in fact, much smaller than the continental United States.)

But this is implausible; Sharpie skills aside, I don’t believe Trump can read maps.

My preferred hypothesis is that someone told Trump that Santa’s workshop is in Greenland, and he wants to seize it to prevent delivery of toys to children of immigrants and unfriendly journalists.

Meanwhile, about the Panama Canal: Has anyone noticed that Panama is one of the few countries in the world with which we run a large trade surplus? Since Trump says that we’re subsidizing Mexico and Canada because we run bilateral trade deficits, doesn’t that mean that Panama is subsidizing us to the tune of around $10 billion a year?

Anyway, that’s Trump. What about the incoming president? Well, he apparently still believes that he can make policy based on what Some Guy on the Internet said:

In reality, subway ridership has recovered strongly from the pandemic; it’s still below prepandemic levels, but that’s mainly because remote and hybrid work is still holding down the number of people going to the office:

Personal testimony: I recently made a brief trip to NYC from my current undisclosed location, landing at Newark during rush hour. Even though I knew that transiting the Lincoln Tunnel would be relatively fast because I was going contra flow, I also knew that the traffic on the other side would be a nightmare. So I took NJ Transit and the subway, which worked fine (except that the subway was crowded!) Fear of crime never even entered my mind.

This dormant newsletter came back to life less than 2 weeks ago. Based on conversations and correspondence, quite a few past readers don’t yet know that my retirement from the Times didn’t mean that I was, you know, retiring. But people seem to be figuring it out:

Anyway, thanks for reading. And bah humbug to all.

MUSICAL CODA

Some relatives from my parents’ generation really did sound like that