Every year as we approach Christmas (or Hanooka, or Swanee, or whatever ridiculously named made-up holiday it is that your niche ethnic group celebrates), I welcome the incoming Seattle winter as a time to stay indoors, reflect on the past year, and work on my memoir (the fifth volume of which—tentatively titled Travels with Imelda—nears completion and will be out soon as part of my multibook contract with Regnery Publishing, the same fine house that brought you Chuck Norris's Black Belt Patriotism and The Case Against Barack Obama). Unfortunately, my usual winter reverie has been upended due to the disturbing fact that, for the second time this month, my weekly shipment of Cadenhead's Old Raj Dry Gin has been canceled due to inclement weather. Instead, I have had to resort to the far inferior (and saffron-free!) Hendrick's in my daily martinis. Needless to say, these Dickensian conditions have left me in a foul mood.
This mood was not helped by the annual arrival of The Stranger's Regrets Issue, in which the drunkards and sex-slavers behind this undignified paper snicker at their own ineptitude. All year round, The Stranger straight-facedly destroys the private lives and careers of Seattleites. Then, in the last issue of the year, the paper pulls back the journalist mask—just kidding!—and admits what they really are: a capering cavalcade of incompetents and hate-mongers.
Further, many of these regrets are outright fiction. My good man John McCain did not actually write for The Stranger; the thought that the Honorable Senator from Arizona even knows about this Mickey Mouse drug-and-bestiality-fanzine is laughable. Further, pieces written by SARAH PALIN, RON SIMS, the comely and wise MONICA GUZMAN, NICK LICATA, the CITY OF SEATTLE, the FREMONT BRIDGE, and the ACT OF BRAIDING were not actually written by those people, architectural constructs, and acts. In the banking industry, we would call this identity theft; here, alas, it's a business plan. My Christmas wish is to see the entire staff dragged into the street in leg irons and shipped to prison for the rest of their natural lives. Accuse me of being uncharitable during yuletide if you will, but note that this is not an unmerciful thought: Deviant prison sex would presumably be pleasurable for this ragtag band of sodomites and feminists. Everyone wins.
But—miracle of miracles!—the next best thing has happened. This week's Stranger is a double issue, meaning there will be no new issue of the paper to plague our city for next week's New Year's celebration. Ostensibly, this "skip week" is because both Christmas and New Year's fall on shipping days for the paper, but this is plainly a ruse invented by lazy drug addicts. Perhaps my annual New Year's wish—-that The Stranger will cease publication altogether—-will finally come true in 2009. Which calls, I would say, for another subpar martini. 
