The universe is dying. Kind of a bummer.

However, there are an infinite number of universes. And in most of them, The Hairball and Kim Kardashian are married. They live quietly together in Wyoming, where they farm rutabagas. Nobody knows them but their neighbors. They went on The Price Is Right once, but they didn't win anything. They have two grown sons, Harmon and Heamblow, who repair tractors.

A Planck person thinks he has observed "an eerie glow" that is "due to matter from a neighbouring universe leaking into ours." That particular universe is an interesting one. In it, The Hairball actually is a rutabaga.

Also, whenever stuff gets sucked into a black hole, it gets spewed out the other side, from a "white hole," as matter for a new universe. Even the Science Men are catching on to that one.

So they're getting born all the time, universes.

Titan, moon of Saturn, looks like Earth. No one knows why.

The humans are now glimpsing baby galaxies "swaddled in dark matter." That one is easy to figure out. Because dark matter is desire.

People with Cheetos dust on their fingers and methamphetamine in their veins have determined through gazing till their eyes bleed at NASA images that there exist humungous doorways on the surface of Mars that open up to underground bases deep within the planet where ZOG is up to some Evil.

Some people think life on Earth came from Mars. Because it felt like it.

My frogs are fucking. Have I mentioned this? I can't remember. Anyway, they are.

They are called fire-belly toads, but actually they are frogs, because people can never get anything straight. They live in rice paddies in China, Korea, and Russia, and also in my house. The "fire belly" part of the name references their bright-red undersides, which in nature-language says they are loaded with toxins, and so, if a predator eats them, it will Barf.

These frogs, as a species, used to be communists, but now, sadly, they are mostly interested in money. I put a little hut/cave in there for my two frogs so they could be warm and be private but almost immediately they transformed it into a busy little workshop where they labored all day on tiny trinkets that they sold on Alibaba. I know this because Alibaba forwards their checks to my mailbox.

They used to live on a table near the French doors, where they could get sunlight. But then winter came. And in this 100-year-old house that means any place near the French doors is like experiencing life in Icepick, Minnesota. So I moved them to another room, the one with the stove, and I got them a light-bulb that is said to simulate natural light.

Almost immediately, they started fucking. They're fairly loud about it, too. The first time I heard the male, deep in the night, as he began the beguine, I thought it was some small, lost, desperate goose, calling from a ways down the road. Neither I nor the older cats had ever heard anything like this. We're sitting up, our heads swiveling, trying to suss out the new strangeness.

But the littlest cat, he knew who was noising right away. Because the littlest cat has always had a special affinity for these frogs, because they are little, like him, and so they are at one in their littleness. He promptly went over and stood on their tank and gazed down upon them. So me and the other cats went over and Looked too. And there they were. The frogs. Fucking. Maybe it was unlawful, watching them. Violating some sort of bestiality voyeurism ordinance. Probably it was rude. 'Cause if they'd wanted people to watch them fucking, they would have made a video, and put it on the intertubes.

Now they're at it all the time. All of the day, and especially all of the night. Now that we know what the sound is, to me and the cats it's kind of comforting. It means life is going on. The female makes noise too, but delicacy prevents me from describing it. The littlest cat still goes over and Looks now and again. Which is fine with me. He has to learn the facts of life some time, from somebody. Better them, than me. And the frogs have more or less abandoned the workshop. The checks are no longer flowing so from Alibaba. I think this is for the best. Fucking should always surmount finance. For finance doesn't exist. While fucking quite definitely does.

I figured out what happened. Moving them to the stove room, and placing the all-day natural light-bulb, convinced the frogs their world had entered spring. And in spring, everybody fucks. And because of the light and the heat, their spring is extending longer than it would in the other wild places where these people live. Basically, they will have spring until March or so. Until winter, here, outdoors, ends. And meanwhile they will keep fucking. I have had to invest in a tiny little spy flashlight to make out the eggs in their water, as these eggs are more miniscule than even Heb Bush's poll numbers. These eggs I carefully transfer to water in another tank. Some of the eggs have begun tadpoling. So I am now a frog farmer. In this, and most of the other universes, too.

Uncle Ben Carson, he is now Sad. His frogs don't fuck, and no one wants to hear any longer about Jesus filling the pyramids with grain for the dinosaurs to eat before people ride them to church. Soon he will not be presidenting any more, and will have to go back to leaving sponges in people's brains. But meanwhile this week he had a Tantrum. Someone had read to him a newspaper with a story in it that said some party Elders were meeting to try to figure out how to get rid of The Hairball. Uncle Ben said that if these Elders tried to rob The Hairball, he would call on the multitudes to ride their dinosaurs on Washington.

The Elders at their meeting considered many plans to cough up The Hairball. There was talk of putting an alligator in his bathtub. Someone else suggested just heaving a plugged-in toaster in there, while The Hairball was in the tub, whaling awash. Others proposed hiring those poisoners who pocked-up Viktor Yuschenko's face to concoct a compound that would cause The Hairball's toupee to fall off.

In the end, a consensus began forming that the best tonic would be to insert another candidate into the race: namely, Voldemort. It was noted that Voldemort's negatives are less than The Hairball's, that Voldemort is more "controllable" than is The Hairball, and that Voldemort is sufficiently evil to suck up most of The Hairball faithful.

"But he can't run as a snake," cautioned one Elder about the pending Voldemort candidacy. "The American people won't go for that. He has to run in something at least resembling a human form."

Speaking of snakes, there is now a new Theory about the snake, the Garden, the apple, and Eve.

Adam could not be sure Eve was not telling the truth when she insisted he had never mentioned the apple to her.

He was pretty sure she was not yet around when he had been warned about the sacred tree and the forbidden fruit.

Had he told her?

He could not ask the serpent, who could not be trusted, and could no longer speak. Did the snake know also about the forbidden apple? Was he there at the time God warned of it? Did he know it was forbidden?

A thought: only Adam knew, and all but Adam, even the snake, were innocent.

This week there were some stock markets. There were some other-one markets too. These markets: they did this; they did that. The astute Australian financial analysts of Mad Cowboy Disease offer below a full Report:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m-iT-Px3u0]

For the Chinese market, the black people have been taken off the poster for the new Star Wars movie. Disney people said this was necessary to make more room for explosions and Harrison Ford. Chinese state media said it could not have been for any nefarious reason, because they don't have racism in China.

In Russia is an insane man named Dmitry Kiselyov, who in 2013 was appointed by Vladimir Putin to head the 2300-person "news" outift Rossiya Segodnya, which, among other things, publishes the pathetic propaganda rag Sputnik. Kiselyov is possessed by many crazed Hates—to wit, "40% of children brought up by homosexuals have venereal diseases"; the hearts and other internal organs of gay people who die in auto accidents should be burned and buried so as not to be inadvertently transplanted into The Normal People.

But Sweden has long caused this froot loop to particularly frenzy: there, sayeth he, is "the radical growth of child abortions, early sex—the norm is nine years old, and at age 12 there is already child impotency."

Word has it that Kiselyov is now pleading with his Patron and Overlord to please work out all the fine new Russian war toys on not only Syria, but also Sweden, since that nation has now permitted a poverty-aid agency to inflict upon all the lands an album consisting solely of the sounds of goats screaming out Christmas carols.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELvsokKcydM]

The nice tellers at my credit union tell me they are working Christmas Eve until 3:00 p.m. And what is that all about? When we watch the true-life documentary film Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, one of the tip-offs that the early Scrooge/Magoo is Bad, is that he makes Bob Cratchit work on Christmas Eve.

I thought all that was over, after the ghosts came, and Scrooge became Good, and Tiny Tim was saved, and all became right with the world.

But no. Scrooge is apparently running this credit union. I should already have known this, when first a teller girl, and then a teller boy, told me what they were paid: only a Scrooge would consider such wages fair. Next time I go in there, I am going to start opening the doors to the back rooms; I know he's back there somewhere, Scrooge Magoo, giddily counting his coins.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OBDf_h5VkM]

There is kind of a bad irony to Cratchit there whining about needing more fire. Because the actor who voiced Cratchit in the Magoo documentary, Jack Cassidy, literally died in a fire.

Some 39 years ago early this morning, Cassidy returned home after dining alone at an Italian restaurant. And proceeded, in his home, to drink and smoke. Which would be fine, normally. Except, on this occasion, Cassidy, he was asleep, while drinking and smoking. The couch caught fire, while he was asleep, and that was that.

Today is also the 100th anniversary of the birth of Frank Sinatra.

This man possessed a non-ordinary physical form. Once, when John Ford was needling her as to why she had married Sinatra, Ava Gardner said: "Well, there's only 10 pounds of Frank. But there's 110 pounds of cock."

The largest penis in the history of American show business is generally accredited to Milton Berle. It was so large that Berle generally stored most of it in the fourth dimension. When Berle died, there occurred a memorial service. During which his friend Freddie Roman intoned: "We are here to honor Milton Berle, who passed away on March 27th. On May 1st and May 2nd, his penis will be buried."

The unmarried teenaged homeless wandering woman Mary was impregnanted with Jesus of Nazareth by a dove. Which does not have a penis. Instead it has a cloaca. Which does not have any length at all. As it is a hole. If Mary had mated instead with an Argentine lake duck, she would have been subjected to a 16-inch corkscrew penis, laced with spines.

All creatures. Great and small.

In the Night Gallery, there is an episode wherein John Astin is a hippie (yes, I know, I know: Rod Serling knew many things, but not hippies) who weaves off the road in his car and crashes and there is an explosion and then he is sent down a chute into a room where is playing really bad music while a senile old man drones endlessly about crop rotation as two loud bubbly fat married persons ebulliently narrate their ceaselessly flashing 8500-slide-strong trip to Tijuana.

The hippie, eventually, understands he has descended to Hell. And he will never get out. This, forever, will be his Reality.

That is how I felt the first time I saw Bill Murray do his sleazy lounge-singer act on Saturday Night Live. I immediately went into toxic shock: not all the Medicine on the continent, would have been enough to calm me. This, to me, to this day, would be Hell: to be interred, in a room, for any amount of time, with that man.

As a result, Bill Murray, in any project, always needs to win me anew. I do not trust him. Not even after Groundhog Day. Where he was perfectly cast. As the perfect prick. Who has to live 1001-millennia of the same day, and 1001-millennia of the same night. Before he gets that life is not about what you do for yourself, but what you do for others.

When finally he starts to become awake, it is because he realizes there is one man in his world, that absolutely cannot be saved. There is nothing he can do. Not even now that he is awake. On that day, that man, is always going to die. Always.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NjNOAncIlI]

So then he sets about seeing what he can do, for the rest. As long as, eternally, he's sentenced to his Hell: why not try to bring, as modest as he can, into the Hell, where he can, a little bit of Heaven?

In recent years, in real life, Murray has become a sort of reanimated resurrection of a form of long-extinct jester that used to wander around Europe four or five hundred years ago.

There was a specific name for these sorts of people, and it's driving me crazy that I can't remember what it is, the name, particularly because I wrote a whole long damn freaking article about it, maybe 20 years ago . . . but that was pretty much before the tubes, it was in a now-long-dead newspaper, and so there is no way to get to that article, or the ancient arcane book from which I drew the Knowledge, without clawing through the boxes in the basement, where these source materials may lie, and I know I am not going to go down there and try that, at least until I am in a wheelchair and on an oxygen tank, and thereby basically have nothing else left to do.

Anyway. What these people, whose name I cannot remember, four- or five-hundred years ago, used to do, was wander around, and occasionally, completely (ha) randomly, briefly, interact with people, at which time, through verbiage, verse, song, dance, dialogue, mime, playing dead, whatever, they would, hopefully, subtly, cause those people's neurons to fire.

Like Murray did, in the video below, when one night he was just trying to eat in a restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, and some y-chrome inebriates accosted him, to ask him to come to the bar to buck up their bachelor party. Which, after first demurring, eventually, he did.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBFvU0YbKTI]

On Netflix currently is streaming a thing called A Very Murray Christmas. In which Bill Murray is an old drunken sadsack. Basically playing himself. He is supposed to be broadcasting live a Christmas TV special, but New York is buried in snow, and none of his scheduled guests—George Clooney, Paul McCartney, Pope Francis—show up. It is all a howling disaster. And then, mercifully, the power goes out. Which allows Murray to descend to the bowels of his hotel. To become blind drunk, with the chefs and the waitresses and whatnot. To experience there the Pogues' eternal "Fairy Tale Of New York."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYUjdzXTP5U]

And so Murray passes out. At which time, in unconsciousness, he experiences his TV special, as he'd meant it to be. Even George Clooney shows up. And as Albert King.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_raJkhZujs]

This thing was the idea of Sofia Coppola. Formerly she had worked with Murray in Lost in Translation, where together they presented what may be the best moment in American cinema in this millennium: there, at film's end, Murray bends to whisper in Scarlett Johanssons's ear, and we aren't given the slightest fucking clue what he says.

Here, Coppola wanted Murray to anchor a riff on the old Christmas TV specials. Where someone like Andy Williams or Dean Martin would weave out to wrassle a passel of other show-biz inebriates into singing Christmas songs, and thereby, hopefully, spread to the people, spreading in their seats at home, something like Christmas cheer.

This is like that. But it's very post-modern. And very sad. And you watch and you wonder: what would this be like, if these people stopped mocking themselves.

And then they do that. Stop mocking.

And Miley Cyrus sings "Silent Night." And it is not what you'd think.

Because, you know, in this and all the other lives, in this and all the other universes, nothing, really, ever is.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io-fgDPm5go]