A NIGHTMARE OF A BLACK CHRISTMAS

The 2006th Christmas is about to dawn (2005 plus the first one), and still nothing has been done about the ineluctable advance of global-overheating. It is as if people have decided that they want its lethal consequences.

The oil companies are still looking for lakes of black stuff of the liquid kind, black stuff of the solid kind is still being mined in vast quantities, countries are still so looney that they reckon their material wealth on both, long pipelines are still being built here there and everwhere, 775 million machines powered by serial Molotov Cocktails are still being driven about fouling the air on the only planet we can live on in the entire univers... and so on and so on and so on.

The crooner's dream of a white Christmas will become a distant memory as rising temperatures make snow less and less likely anywhere. The skies will grow ever fouler, and ever more likely to erupt with extreme weather.

But, in spite of that, have a merry and blessed Christmas wherever you are, and a happy New Year. Preferably a year in which you do what you can in your small corner to help this tired old globe and its self-beleagured inhabitants.