ChuckDoherty.com

Well, that holiday business all out of the way for another year. Phew. During the last week I had chance to spend some very nice time with my terrific son, and I didn’t go into any sort of financial tar pit with gift purchases. I need to stop eating for at least six weeks to make up for all that I consumed during the past two, but what can you do.

In a few more days, I will haul a few of my things down to Baltimore where I expect to be working a quite a bit over the next several months. I leased a studio apartment in Henderson’s Wharf in the heart of Fells Point, which is right on the water in the vicinity of the Inner Harbor. I figure that having a regular place to stay while I am there will be much nicer than dealing with the hassle of checking into and out of a hotel every time I visit.

Here is a site that is very creative and entertaining, check out: It’s Jerry Time

Today’s email offers of great riches include:

$18.5 million from Martins Egobia

$45 million from one Mister IFEDIORAH RICHARD

And yet another $18.5 million from Martins Egobia, but with a different email address.

It’s finally here – the Solstice. The shortest day of the year. From this point on the days grow longer until they reach their peak in late June. Sure, the bulk of winter lies ahead, but just the idea of there being more and more sunlight each day is reassuring. And, Solstice also means that there are just two more days to go until Festivus.

My good friend Guy Michetti just released a demo of a new song he is working on; “Reflections on a Winter Solstice.” You can take a listen or download a copy here.

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution: just purchase something from Jos. A. Bank’s Menswear. Once they get your address in their files they will call, fax, and send you so much advertising in the mail that it will make your head spin. Special private-sale invitations; coupons good for just one day; $25 certificates good toward $100 purchases next Tuesday only; 50% off all outerwear before noon today… phew. Each offer is more thrilling than the last. There are so many savings opportunities that it makes me reluctant to go in the store at all because I just know that another special deal is going to be right around the corner.

Another great pal is Dell. Once they get hold of your name and address they will latch onto it like a pit bull. I used to get multiple copies of their catalogs, one sent to my home and one sent to my P.O. box which is the credit card billing address. I finally disabused them of that, but they have since begun to make up for it by sending catalogs to my home address to the attention of “Brown University or current resident.” I guess these fly-by-night schools often leave no forwarding address when they pull up stakes and skip town, so Dell is just covering its bases.

ps; A quick tip o’ the hat to misters Kojo Masakq and Oyebanji Badmus, both having written me today with yet more offers of incomparable riches. I will be getting back to both of them shortly.

Who says you never get something for nothing? In my email today I was presented with a share of $31.5 million dollars from a Russian oil company; $450,000 from an unnamed company in Paraguay to thank me for my “previous help”, $20,000,000 from a mysterious benefactor to spend as I see fit as long as it is to help spread the gospel of Jesus in the U.S. (a country which desperately needs more Christianity); and 40% of $48,550,000 from an attorney in Scotland handling the estate of a London bomb-blast victim who has somehow tracked me (and the rest of the “undisclosed recipients” of the mail) down as the next-of-kin.

Go ahead, scoff if you want, but as soon as this money arrives (much of it, as you can well understand, is currently secreted away at undisclosed locations in Nigeria) I’ll be waving to the rest of you poor people from the cockpit of my new gold-plated Learjet.

Now is seems that the managing director of Import/Export for a glassware company in the UK is willing to give me 10% of their income just for collecting checks from their clients and forwarding the funds to them via Western Union. I am not quite sure why all these great offers come from executives who need to use free Yahoo email accounts though. I guess that the truly frugal companies are the only ones that have so much money to share.

Some time back, I referred to PETA as “a destructive and disingenuous group of domestic terrorists that should be arrested and thrown in jail.” In retrospect, I have come to realize that I was being far too charitable.

In the news this week is a story that employees of PETA’s HQ in Virginia have been visiting local veterinarian’s offices, taking animals under the pretence that they were finding new homes for them, then simply killing them in the back of a van and dumping their bodies in nearby dumpsters. In fact, it was the discovery of dead puppies along with the bodies of other animals in a supermarket dumpster that alerted the police to this led to the arrests of two PETA employees (they are currently free on bond, thanks to PETA’s funds). When asked about this, the loathsome director of PETA simply said that the bodies should not have been disposed of in this way, not that the act of taking healthy animals and killing them was wrong.

There is no good in PETA. These people would rather see animals dead than as pets, and this revelation shows just how twisted they are. They view themselves as “liberating” animals, but do so by killing them rather than allowing them to live as pets in a loving home.

An interesting part of this story is that trying to find it online is rather difficult thanks to PETA’s press machine which is currently hard at work churning out press releases naming Paris Hilton as their “worst-dressed” person of the year. Every news outlet from here to Oman is putting that piece of fluff on the front of their “People” section because it mentions Hilton. So, PETA gets a ton of press out of that stunt, while distracting people from their true agenda and continuing to act in a manner that should result in their leaders being sent to prison.

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Car rental companies dole out vehicles in different ways. National lets you pick any vehicle you want in a category, while Hertz pre-assigns a car and you get what they selected. This week in Baltimore, they gave me a Ford Taurus equipped with their “Neverlost” GPS system. I didn’t request the GPS; it just happened to have it.

Of the many different car models I have rented over the years, this has to be the most high-strung and pedantic vehicle of the bunch. Unless you do exactly what you should, in just the right order, it will blare one sort of alarm message or another until you obey its wishes. Start the engine without the seatbelt fastened ? BING-BING-BING. Passenger’s seatbelt unfastened? Not for long, once that alarm starts chirping away. Open the door before taking the keys out ? BLOOP-BLOOP-BLOOP. God forbid opening the door before shutting the lights off at night – that results in the same alarm sound as the seatbelt warning, but even faster and more panicked-sounding. It’s like a one-man band in there. Plus, add the BLONK-BLONK sounds that come from the GPS if you should touch any button on it or even turn its volume down, the disembodied woman’s voice offering to give you directions you didn’t ask for in the first place, and every ride is guaranteed to be a symphony from start to finish.

WGBH, the PBS station out of Boston, is currently in the midst of their seasonal “Membership Drive.” I knew this the moment I flipped past that channel today, based on the programming alone. Several times a year, they put together a collection of some of the schmaltziest selections imaginable, including talks by new-agey self-help icons like Wayne Dwyer and Deepak Chopra, and sprinkle in a few musical selections from bands that were popular during the youth of the station’s target demographic (like yours truly). Right now, the Moody Blues are on stage, a painful reminder of my inexorable march toward old age. Like many performers whose salad days have long ago wilted, the original band members are discreetly supplemented by talented session musicians who carry much of the load. To the left of the band’s original drummer you could see another drummer, sitting a bit further back and out of the spotlight. You can bet your PBS Tote Bag that without his playing, the rhythm section would be in sorry shape.

Just before this Concert of the Damned, the station was sucking up to people’s ethnic pride with an airing of “Over Ireland,” a panoramic view of the Auld Sod as seen from a helicopter. Mind you, it was a beautiful production, but it was so old that WGBH’s premium for contribution during this program was a VHS tape of the show. It seems to me that appealing to Irish pride on the part of a Boston-based station is really getting lazy.

I noticed that they have replaced Dr. Atkins as their Diet Expert du jour with someone who is neither dead nor currently in disgrace. Likewise, now that Leo Buscaglia is no longer around to hug people and talk incessantly about his mother, the door was opened to an entire new generation of feel-good lecturers. PBS has them all lined up and ready to go on, unless you call in with your pledge now.