What's up with Whos?

Something has been bothering me for many years, and it's about time I said something about it. Here we go:

What's the deal with the Whos? 

I was a pretty small kid the first time I saw the Chuck Jones adaptation of Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas! Even then I was concerned about the ending. Because the fact is, if I woke up on Christmas morning to find that I'd not only gotten nothing from Santa Claus, but that all our decorations and stuff were missing, I would not drift out to the middle of town with my eyes closed in delight to start singing. I'd have given the Grinch exactly what he hoped to hear -- hysterics.

Santy Claus thinks I've been naughty!!!!! 😭

That seemed to me to be the flaw in the story: It only works if you believe that we, like the Whos, would react with holiness and brotherhood to the Grinch's massive heist. From early childhood, I had my doubts.

Imagine -- the whole town has had everything removed. The presents, all the decorations, the whole shebang. The Grinch didn't just take the food for the big feast, he took all the food, every morsel, every can of Who Hash. These people were in an isolated, snowbound community. They were going to be pretty damned hungry. 

What conclusions could the Whos draw? That not only had everyone in town been really naughty, they had in fact been so incredibly naughty that Santa took things that belonged to them already? What could cause THAT kind of Santa smackdown? I knew we shouldn't have collaborated with the Nazis!  

And that's assuming that Santa Claus is real in the Seussverse. If Mom and Pop had bought all the gifts, the police would be called. When the cops saw how widespread the emergency was, they'd probably figure it was the Grinch. Hmm, who do we know that hates everyone and hates Christmas? Everyone else lives in town and lost all their stuff. It's got to be the old green freak on the mountain! A raid would be ordered on Mount Crumpit, and the Grinch might die in a hail of bullets, defiant to the end. 

We hope Max would get a good home. 

What I'm saying is, I wish I could think of me and the other people I knew of as being like the Whos, who in the face of loss and maybe hunger, still go out to Dahoo Dores in the town square. 

I think in reality the Grinch would have been right on the money -- people would be upset. It doesn't mean that the Grinch is not a big fat jerk, because he is. It just means that home invasion, felony theft, property damage, and the removal of all food, in addition to ruining everyone's Christmas, is no laughing matter. 

It would be a real challenge for any population to resume its duty of faith and gather to praise God (or whatever the Whos were doing with that song) in the face of this situation. I do think normal human Christians would still want to follow their plans and go to church, but they would still be upset, and anyway they'd probably have to spend the day filling out police reports. They certainly would be hard pressed to act like nothing had happened, however devoted to the celebration of the Birth of the Savior. 

The Whos seem to be made of better stuff than we are, which is good for them, but as I say, undermines the story. Because if we were Whos and were just as confounded and hysterical as the Grinch had hoped, then the green a-hole would have felt justified in his Grand Theft Christmas. Which makes it seem like Seuss got it wrong, and we don't really know the true meaning of Christmas. 

Maybe we should view the story as aspirational. Maybe like the Grinch, we should bump up our own hearts a size or two and be more like the Whos. 

But with better presents. I never wanted any great big electro whocarnio flooks. Too loud, too complicated. 

UPDATE! Couldn't resist:

Christmas Eve thoughts.

1) I had considered doing a bit about Dr. Fauci declaring Santa Claus to be a one-man super-spreader event, but you know what? It's not even fun to make fun of that egomaniacal stuffed shirt anymore. In a just world, a bureaucrat having long outlived any purpose but service to his own self-importance would have been thrown into the street years ago--Go see some actual patients, Dr. Science!--but we don't live in a just world. Being Christmastime I will wish him a healthy retirement, starting as soon as humanly possible.

Okay, he's the Grinch. I'm so done with this guy.

2) It's strange that I didn't see one single Christmas special this year. Didn't really miss them, either. Granted, with some old favorites shuffling around cable channels or even streaming services, it's harder than usual to catch them. Things that were Appointment TV for kids when I was a kid are just part of the child's 24/7 media circus now. Over the years shows like Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town went from great joy to nostalgia to poking fun to nostalgia and poking fun to--I've seen it enough, maybe. Although it's always worth checking in on Rudolph to see if this is the year they digitally remove Yukon Cornelius's revolver and edit his shopping list ("cornmeal, gunpowder, ham hocks, and guitar strings"). 

3) Christmas on a Saturday feels kind of weird. Is Friday a holiday or not? Not for me, but I'm a freelancer. My wife got it as a floating holiday. We have trash pickup today. It's a federal holiday, but the post office lists Christmas Day as a holiday in 2021 but says it falls on Friday. So I have no idea if the mail is coming today. Glad to say the packages I shipped on Monday did arrive at their destinations intact and unmolested by porch pirates. I don't know what's going on, but I'm staying away from the stores, that's for sure.

4) I did take baby Izzy, my 70-pound seven-month old, with me on my rounds the other day. We saw a housebound friend, got his anti-flea-tick-etc. drug from the vet, and went to PetSmart--Izzy's first trip to a retail establishment. He was very excited. I was a little sad that no one said how cute he was or wanted to pet him; he's a Golden, for goodness sake, and was smiling and happy. Everyone just seemed grumpy. Well, I hope their days got better. Iz had fun anyhow. 

5) Little snow this morning; not much but enough to make old dude Tralfaz happy. He loves to romp in snow, eat snow, pee in snow, stick his head in snow, etc. etc. And for Izzy it's just his second experience with snow and he's enthralled. I'm glad for them. I'm freezing.

And so Christmas is about to descend, but I'll post tomorrow. God bless us, everybody! (Tiny Tim is suing for copyright infringement this year.) 

The dog ate my phone.

Okay, not really, but really enough. 

I could actually blame it on the wind as much as the puppy, or on my bad back, or on my annoying friend whom I'll call Roger. But the worst thing is, it's probably my fault more than anyone or anything else's. 

Let's take it from the top. 

📱🐕

You may have thought I was kidding yesterday about baby dog Izzy eating ornaments, but I'm totally serious. There isn't much around here that he has not at least tried to bite. If you drop anything around this guy--food, tools, tissues, bottles, papers, gold Krugerrands, radioactive ingots--anything at all he will be on it before you can bend over to pick it up. He's discovering the world by biting it, one thing at a time, and he drives me batty. So no, I don't think he'd try to bite a glass ornament, but I'm not ruling it out, either. 

I mentioned last year that since my brief but wildly expensive hospitalization for crushing back pain I have been prescribed the antidepressant duloxetine, which hasn't helped my mood at all but has done wonders for the musculoskeletal pain. I've wanted to get off the drug, though, because it often leaves me very sleepy. Since I work at home I can take a nap if I absolutely must. And when the dogs are a whimpering mess or fear because of a windstorm outside all night long, you can bet there will be a nappin' come the dawn.

That's what happened on Saturday night. The boys took turns being fearful or just wakeful, and I thus had to take them out, soothe them back to sleep. So Sunday morning came, the wind eased up, and I was dying for a nap. So were the dogs. So I crashed on the sofa, as I often do.

Somewhere in there Roger called. Roger usually has little to say but chooses the most inopportune times to say it. Am I asleep? Check. On the highway? Check. On the can? Checkeroo. In the shower? Check and recheck. He's not a bad guy at all, but his timing is just terrible. So he woke me from my nap, we spoke briefly, and I went back to sleep, tucking my phone in the pocket of my sweatpants. 

OR DID I?

Because sometime later I awoke to my wife shouting and Izzy chomping away merrily on my iPhone right on the floor in front of me.

The good news is, he didn't completely break it, and he didn't get hurt. This is because I have broken a phone in the past by dropping it on the floor (yeah, real galaxy brain here) so I have an Otter Box to protect this one. The bad news is, he broke the Home button anyway. You can see the chomp marks around the button on the Otter Box. 

Those clever chaps at Apple have a workaround, though, and once I'd cleaned the slobber off the phone I discovered that my iPhone had self-diagnosed the breakage and put an on-screen Home button where I could use it. There is, however, no way to fix the actual Home button.

So, at my wife's urging, I did not punt Izzy like I was at my own five-yard line, but rather got on my laptop and ordered a new phone. I can use all the features on the old phone in the meanwhile, so Roger can rest assured that it will be taking his call next time I'm in the shower.  

Was it Izzy's fault? No, he's just a kid. Was it my fault for leaving the phone out? I think it may have fallen out of my pocket while I was sleeping, but if that was caused by the fatigue I was suffering, can I blame the windy weather? Or the makers of duloxetine? Or can I blame Rog, without whose call I would have left the phone safely where it was? 

It simply seems that these kinds of dumb expenses come right at the most expensive time of year. The credit card was already steaming, and now it's got to carry the freight for a new phone, thanks to my goat-like puppy. This is the kind of thing that makes people turn off the Grinch cartoon right as he's about to dump all the Who gifts off of Mount Crumpit and yell "That's a happy ending!"

Anyway, I'm blaming Rog. He can take it.

Bingle balls and whofoo fluff.

Trim up the tree with christmas stuff

Like bingle balls and whofoo fluff

Trim up the tree with googoo gums and bizzle-binks and wumms...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All the Whos down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot. Why? Because they could just throw crap on a tree and it would stick. 

Who's Who among Whos of Whoville

Don't get me wrong; I love to decorate for Christmas. It's fun, satisfying, and gets great acclaim and gratitude. But what it doesn't get is help. For a variety of reasons, none emanating from me, I decorate alone these days. And it's very time-consuming. Everybody wants to see it; nobody wants to help. Unfortunately time is in short supply, especially as I am having to YES every job that comes my way to keep the wolf from the door. (I told the wolf I now live at Nancy Pelosi's place, but he doesn't believe me.)

One thing that's changed the dynamic is new puppy, Izzy. Izzmeister deals poorly with separation anxiety and makes high-pitched whines when left alone, which drives my work-from-home wife nuts. And I can't have him with me while I decorate, or he'd eat ornaments. Best-case scenario there, he poops tinsel but is otherwise unharmed. I've cut back on the overall decorating plan, since he can't be trusted near decorations. But I've also had to cut back on the opportunities to get the bizzle-binks and wumms up because he needs babysitting. So, the time is still crunched. 

I wish I could just 

Trim up the tree with fuzzel fuzz

And whiffer bloofs, and wuzzel wuzz

Trim up your uncle and your aunt

With yards of whofut flant

Which, in the Chuck Jones Grinch cartoon, is just hurled at trees and walls and ceilings and sticks beautifully. Not the case here.

🎄🎄🎄

Tangent: Is the Grinch microscopic?

Think about it. In Horton Hears a Who!, the presumably normal-size Horton the Elephant discovers that there is an entire civilization of Whos living in a dandelion or something. (I hated that story. Terrifying.) That civilization contains a town called Whoville. Does that mean that Mount Crumpit is also in the speck? Is the Grinch himself is so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye? Perhaps microscopic to the level of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's TEAM 0.5 electron microscope? Makes you think, doesn't it?

I don't know about what, but doesn't it?

Took the last can of Noo Yawk hash.

So in addition to getting an Emmy for his portrayal of a tough-tawking asshole, lahge and in chahge, while sending COVID-infected patients to kill grannies in nursing homes, our illustrious Governor Sonny Corleone has received the Edward M. Kennedy Award for Inspired Leadership. And I think that's just great. Teddy is best remembered now as a driving force, literally driving into the river and leaving his girlfriend to die in the car. Cuomo is driving our state with the same vision and apparently the same goal.

I suspect that Cuomo's book American Crisis: How I Screwed New York and Killed Thousands Who Didn't Need to Die (I may have the subtitle wrong) will also garner a lot of awards. I remember how the Grammys sucked up to Obama by tossing awards at him for reading the books he “wrote” (much in the way Teddy's brother Jack "wrote" Profiles in Courage). Cuomo narrated his audiobook, which may have been the first time he ever read it. I am sure the Grammys will toss him an award too.

The Grannys, however, will probably not. His policies bumped off thousands of them.

Whoville PD.

We were working the graveyard when a call came in to the station. The jing-tingle of the phone startled Detective Joey Who, who almost dropped his cards on the floor -- and he had just pulled to an inside straight. I could tell by the way his whiskers twitched.

"Precinct," said Desk Sgt. Flinia Who. "What? Robbery? On Christmas Eve? Gotta be a mistake."

My ears pricked up. This sounded like trouble.

"No, no, Mr. Who, that's all right. I'm sure your daughter's not lying. Gimme the address and we'll get out there right now. Thanks." She jotted the information on a pad.

Joey and I got up, the game forgotten. At least for us; the other players, janitor Squeaky Cleen Who and town drunk Booey Who, took a look at our cards. The doctor on call, a guy named Who, would have done just as much, but he wasn't there that night. He disappears on us sometimes.

"What's the story, Flinia?" I asked, getting my coat.

"This guy says his daughter saw Santa Claus in her living room," she said.

"So?"

"Well, Santa gives her a drink and sends her to bed, right? So, of course, an hour later she has to use the euphemism. Then she sees that this so-called Santa has taken everything! All the presents, the tree, the food, everything."

"Not the Who Hash?"

"Everything to the last crumb. So she's upset and her father's having a fit. You better get over there, Harry."

"On the way. C'mon, Joey."

We headed out into the cold night. Whoville PD has a rep to uphold, for crack service.

By the time we got to East Who Street, the whole block was in an uproar, everyone milling around outside. This Who guy had been going around to his neighbors, and it turned out they'd had everything stolen, too.

"About time you got here!" he said. "I'm Townshend Who, and this is my daughter, Cindy-Lou. She saw the culprit."

"Okay if I talk with her?"

"Yes, go ahead."

I sent Joey around to check if anyone else'd seen the perp while I jawed with the kid. "All right, little girl, thank you for alerting your folks," I said, trying to sound calm. "So you met someone claiming to be Santa, right?"

"Uh-huh," she said. A perky little kid, not shy or anything. "I heard him stuffing the tree up our chimbley and I asked him why he was taking it. He said something about a light being broken. But then why did he take everything?"

"Good question. What did he look like? Red suit, beard?"

"No beard. He was green."

"Wait, he was wearing a green suit?"

"No, a red suit. He was green."

"Well, I'll be a-- Cindy, you've been a great help. Why don't you folks go inside and get warm? We're on the case."

"Do you know who did it already?" asked the dad.

"Not Who," I said. "More of a what."

I talked to a couple of other people, but Cindy-Lou was the only eyewitness. A peek in the windows confirmed their stories -- nothing left, no presents, no decorations, no yule log, nothing but hooks and some wire.

Joey's findings confirmed my suspicions.

"I looked around the snow," he said. "Reindeer tracks, you know? Found 'em, but with the snow falling looked like three or four hours ago. Sled tracks too."

"You're like a one-man Whoville CSI, you know that?"

"But there was second sled, more recent, and no reindeer tracks. You know what I seen instead?"

"Dog tracks."

"Yeah."

"The three words that best describe this case," I said, "are as follows, and I quote: stink, stank, stunk."

"Grinch," he said.

"Call it in," I said. "If he's hit all these houses, he might be working the whole town, trying to steal Christmas."

"We're probably too late," grumbled Joey. "Grinches are strong, fast, and sneaky. He's probably heading back up Mount Crumpit with the loot already. We'll never find him up there."

"You're right," I said, "but these kids are gonna be crushed when they see there's no floofloovers, no tartookas, no whohoopers or gardookas. What'll they do without trumtookas, slooslunkas, or blumbloopas? And the whowonkas! That's the hottest toy this year!"

"I know, I know," said Joey. "And what's Christmas without a game of zoozittacarzay?"

I shook my head. No Christmas was coming. And no breakfast. Everyone on the block said that the green jerk took all the food. This was gonna be a hungry town.

Then I got an idea.

"Hey, Joey," I said. "You still on the PBA choir?"

"Yeah."

"And you guys know the other singing groups in town, right?"

"Yeah... where you going with this?"

"Y'know," I said, "the problem with Grinches is their tiny little hearts. Sad, shriveled little things. But they're suckers for music."

Joey started to smile. "You're a good detective, Harry Who."

I smiled back. "Quick," I said, "before he dumps everything. Get everyone in the town square. We got some Fahoo Forays to sing!"

----

Author's Note: I haven't seen the new Grinch cartoon yet, or in fact the Ron Howard Grinch movie, and I have no idea if either features the detective work of the Whoville PD. If either movie used any of the above gags, rest assured they somehow stole my idea. That goes double for reader Mr. Philbin.

CSI: Whoville.