My dog is my greatest ally in my own personal War on Christmas (Kitsch and Knick Knacks.) Our previous dog was very mellow so my husband used to go to town with his Kristmas Kollectibles fetish, TWO Christmas trees with wrapped presents starting the day after Thanksgiving, hundreds of ornaments, Christmas-themed bowls…

I’m the grandchild of immigrants but I look like I could have been a signer of the Declaration of Independence because I, like the signers, come from Anglo stock. I like when people go off about immigrants, bonus points if they also bring up “the blacks”, because I can say, “Well, my husband is black and his family…

But a lot of that produce doesn’t need to be/shouldn’t be refrigerated, unless the fridge is some kind of cryogenic chamber and she’s planning on eating it in 2038 or something.

You could get something like what Carrie Fisher uses in her show “Magical Drinking.”

Oh, my point was that Alouette was not “subtle and European in its cadence”, I thought it was somehow a French Canadian original. At least that’s what all my French Canadian relatives told me when I was growing up. And just last night I was reading about the Sarkozy-Olsen nuptials and how they passed out bowls of…

I agree. The only thing I took away from the otherwise execrable “War of the Worlds” remake was that if I were Dakota Fanning I’d want his character to be my father. The Scientology-infused couch-jumping Tom Cruise not so much.

Alouette is actually a French Canadian song, not French. Didn’t the fact that the cartoon train passengers weren’t smoking clue you in?

I bet MJ was a good father in his way because he seemed so childlike himself. He probably had limitless patience to play games and sing songs to them and just hang out, and then he had the staff to do the real adult parenting. And he took heroic measures to keep them away from their scheming nutjob aunts and uncles…

Not to sound like Donald Trump with his recovered memories of tailgating New Jersey Muslims after 9/11, but in the 1990s people used to bring torn out endorsement editorials from the New York Times into voting booths with them when they voted in the Democratic primaries. (I lived in a district that had a huge…

I picture C Teig growing up in West Texas learning how to rope steers and now using her skills to rein in errant big cats, fashionable assistants, or any other moving creature that needs to be corraled.

And in the SNL skit didn’t the Coneheads explain away their oddness by claiming to be from France?

In that second picture it looks like she lasso’d someone (an assistant?)

Sometimes in old movies and TV shows you’ll see the host filling up cigarette boxes while they’re getting ready for a party. I used to have a really beautiful gold and black one that someone gave me when I lived in Europe in the 1980s. Over there it wasn’t uncommon for people to bring extra cigarettes to dinners and…

The mother is not lacking in the cranial department either. Even the dog’s face/head ratio seems a bit off. Is that family from Remulak? It would explain so much.

Isn’t that the name of the estate in “The Cherry Orchard”?

Over a long Thanksgiving week I visited several older people very distantly related to me. I’m sure I saw both of those phones in houses that hadn’t been updated since the Soviets sent brave little Laika into orbit.

He’s German. These videos have been around for a (long) while. In others there’s another guy in the car and they speak German to each other and sometimes German to the dog.

Dear God, what kind of industry do you work in?

Do you watch “Downton Abbey”? Like with many characters in the subplots there’s a pig-farmer tenant whose family has supposedly been around for generations but just kind of pops up, has a major role, and fades away.

Truth or Consequences was renamed after a very popular radio game show announced in 1950 that they’d give some kind of prize or recognition to the first town that renamed themselves after the show. (Manhattan might as well secede from NYC at this point and rename itself “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” or “Deal or No…