Andrew Clavin skewers President F.U.’s ("Fantastico") hollow climate pledges—like swapping "shall" for "should" in Obama’s Paris Agreement—while mocking leftist media bias favoring flops like Girls over hits like Seventh Heaven. He contrasts Bach’s concert at Bel Air Presbyterian, where simulated rain mirrored divine intervention, with modern "banal optimism," tying it to Neoplatonic fleetingness. Dismissing climate alarmism as Orwellian narrative control, he argues innovation—not policy—will curb emissions, ending with Elisha’s fiery chariots as hope’s metaphor and a plug for his memoir The Great Good Thing. [Automatically generated summary]
American President Fantastico Ultimo has announced a new worldwide climate change agreement, which will lead nearly 200 nations to do absolutely nothing about an absolute nothing we can do absolutely nothing about.
Speaking from the right side of history, situated somewhere between tomorrow land and fantasyland, President F.U. said that while others sat around at home popping off about his failure to confront worldwide jihad or the spiraling disaster of Obamacare or an economy perennially faltering under the burden of his incompetence,
he, Fantastico, and his fellow fantastical world leaders had saved the planet by a last-minute series of meaningless and empty pledges that will avert an imaginary catastrophe with imaginary action.
President Fantastico said, quote, future citizens of the worldwide caliphate will enshrine my name next to those of other great heroes, like Prince Valiant and Iron Man, who have achieved no more and no less than what I have done this very day.
And now I will fly back to my fortress of solitude, where I will continue to transform reality using the power of my mind alone.
With that, tying a towel around his neck and shouting, look, mommy, I have a cape like Superman, the president ran in circles around the room and then out the door, promising a new worldwide conference soon in which he would address the desolation of smaug.
To all of which I can only say, hit it, fellas.
The country's in the very best of hands.
Pride in Expansion00:09:29
The best of hands.
The best of hands.
The treasury says the national debt is climbing to the sky.
And government expenditures have never been so high.
It makes a feller get a gleam of pride within his eye to see how our economy expands.
The country's in the very best of hands.
The country's in the very best of hands.
The best of hands.
The best of hands.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
That brilliant song was from Lil Abner, which was based on a comic strip back in the day before there was Doonesbury or The Simpsons.
There were comic strips like Pogo, which was the left-wing comic strip, and Lil Abner, which was the right-wing comic strip.
And they made a movie of Lil Abner with music songs with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, who was one of the great American songwriters.
Anyway, we're back for another week of love and laughter and despair.
Just the way things are going.
But we never despair.
Neil Desperandum, as we used to say in ancient Rome, you know, the thing is, on any given day, the chances are things are going to go pretty well for you.
So just keep your mind on the target.
But as the world goes down the drain, things are going to go pretty well.
Plus, it's Christmas, you know, which is supposed to be a season, that's right, season of hope and joy.
My wife and I went to a Christmas concert yesterday at the Bel Air Presbyterian Church, which is a kind of semi-mega church in LA.
And I have to say, if there were no other evidence of the truth of Christianity, the music alone would be an evidence.
There is no music on earth like great Christian music.
Now, I'm talking about great, I'm not talking about silly, you know, hymns and things.
I'm talking about Bach and the great, even some of the great Christmas carols, which date back to the 18th and 17th century.
Very, very beautiful.
It just express joy, which is a difficult thing to capture.
It's much easier to write about fear and to write about danger than it is to write about true joy.
And there's always, I've noticed this, there's always an element of nostalgia in joy.
And Christmas, if you think about Christmas, it's all nostalgia.
We always think of Christmas guys in top hats.
You know, why should we celebrate Christmas guys in Victorian England?
Although a lot of it has to do with Charles Dickens.
In fact, there's one theory, and this is very plausible to me, that the reason we wish for a white Christmas and we associate Christmas with snow, because after all, if you're in Italy, it's probably not going to snow.
If you're in Rome, it's probably not going to snow for Christmas.
But Charles Dickens, when he was a little boy, had a nice childhood up to a certain point.
And apparently, for the first eight years of his life, it snowed in England, which is very rare in London and all that.
It doesn't snow very often.
But for the first eight years of Dickens' life, it snowed around Christmas time.
And then his father, who was a profligate spender, went into debt and was put in debtors' prison.
And Dickens had to leave school and go to work in a factory, which was the great tragedy of his life.
It was the thing that really informed a lot of his imagination.
So that when he came to write about Christmas, and so many of his Christmas stories that he would write every year inform our imagination about what Christmas would be, it would always be snowing in his Christmas stories.
And he would always think of Christmas because he would look back.
And I think, you know, it's an interesting question of why nostalgia and yearning are always mixed up with joy, that you don't just feel joy is not really dancing around and, you know, and throwing your hat in the air.
It always has this kind of sorrow to it.
And I sometimes wonder if that's because the Neoplatonists are right.
You know, the Neoplatonists were the ones who would say we are born out of God and then we go back to God.
In fact, William Wordsworth, I think I wrote it, I brought it here.
William Wordsworth has a very famous poem in which one of my favorite passages in all of poetry, I have a lot of favorite passages in poetry, but from intimations of immortality, Wordsworth wrote, Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
The soul that rises with us, our life star, hath had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home.
So the idea was you sort of rise in your birth, but you're leaving behind the wonderful world of God, and then you go through this arc like a star, like the sun, and then you set back into God who is our home.
So there was always this kind of nostalgia and sorrow and yearning in joy.
And great Christmas music and great Christian art always partook of that.
When Christianity turned into what the philosopher Schopenhauer called banal optimism, just that everything's going to go great, you know, then it lost its artistic power.
I mean, there is not a lot of great Christian art being created today.
Most Christian art, we've talked about this before, most Christian art now is very bland and kind of happy and sappy, whereas the great Christian art has this aura of sadness.
Anyway, went to this Christmas concert, and it was very cool because this church, Bel Air Press, is a huge church with big windows with an absolutely fantastic view looking down from Malholland Drive over into Burbank.
It's just a spectacular view into the valley.
And for those of you who don't live in California, we've been experiencing this terrible drought.
And a lot of this drought has been exacerbated, has been made worse by the left, the environmentalists, who won't let us build new water facilities and who insist, have passed a law saying we can't collect 50% of the rainfall that gathers because we have to save some kind of weird little fish that they're afraid will become extinct.
And they don't understand.
They keep saying, why should the farmers use all that water?
Because they live in cities and they have no idea where food comes from.
So we have this, so it makes the drought worse.
But California does get these droughts all the time.
So we have this drought.
So the name of this concert was Love Rains Down.
And one of the things they did in it is they read from Isaiah.
And in Isaiah, he talks about this drought.
And he talks about the drought as a metaphor for the absence of God.
And he says, when will it rain?
When will God come back and forgive Israel for its trespasses?
And when will the rain begin?
So they did this cool thing in this concert where they sang about drought and rain and all this.
And then, I've never seen this before.
Maybe it happens all the time.
But they did this thing where the choir rubbed its hands together.
And then slowly some of them would begin snapping their fingers.
And then slowly somebody, have you seen this?
You have.
And then slowly they'd begin.
I've never seen it before.
And it just makes a perfect imitation of rain.
It just sounds exactly like rainfall.
While this is happening, so help me, this is absolutely true.
While this is happening, it starts to rain.
These big windows go dark, and we had one of our very, very rare rainfalls while they're doing this thing.
Nobody mentioned it except my wife and I looked at each other.
We're like, whoa, that was strange.
You know, it is the basic premise, I think, of religious thought that there's a level of meaning and existence beyond the one that we're in, that the flesh is kind of a language for speaking about real life.
That the flesh is language.
In the same way the word tree is not a tree, our bodies are not what we are.
Our bodies are the way we speak about.
We are being spoken to about who we are.
And so there's this other world of what they call in the Bible principalities and powers.
And so help me when you hear, you know, it's like when they give sermons nowadays about Jesus expelling a demon, they'll try and put it into modern terms and they'll say, well, it was really the guy had psychological problems.
He was mad and Jesus did instant psychotherapy or something.
The presence of his presence was so powerful that it washed away this madness that he had.
But I don't see why both things can't be true at once.
I don't see why all of science can't be an absolutely perfect description of matter, but that matter might be a description of something that's happening beyond that.
I mean, have you ever noticed, for instance, that schizophrenias never hear schizophrenics who sometimes have auditory hallucinations, they hear voices, they never hear voices going, you're a great guy, I love you.
You are one of the best.
Schizophrenics hear voices telling them terrible, terrible things, and they're tormented by them.
And artists hear voices, you know, that actually inspire them and lift them up.
I mean, Shakespeare talked about how madmen and lovers and poets all shared an imagination, but the madmen saw demons and the artists saw, you know, gave to spirits a local habitation and a name, that we saw how the world, an artist sees how the world is actually representing spirituality.
So it always seems to me that different things can be going on at once.
And I have to say, when I hear beautiful Christian music, I almost feel like I can see that other world.
This concert was a fantastic concert.
TV Shows and Echo Chambers00:04:24
It was really well done.
And there was this moment when I was just sitting there going like, boy, it's like this veil, this curtain this thin that you could almost see through it and see the world of the spirits.
It's very beautiful.
The other thing that's been happening is we've just been socializing like, I guess this happens to everybody around Christmas.
You get invited to all this stuff and you go.
But for us, it's been really nice this year.
And we had dinner with a relatively new friend of mine who is also a writer in Showbiz.
And we got into this conversation, speaking about hidden truths, okay, speaking about the truth behind the truth.
We got into this conversation about the culture in which he was putting forward this idea that I've thought about before, but he was really expressing it well, about how the left's domination of the media affects our perception of reality.
And he was talking about a show called Seventh Heaven.
Seventh Heaven was a show that was on from the mid-90s into the, you know, about five years into the 2000s.
So it was on for about 10 years.
And it was a show about a pastor, a Protestant preacher and his wife and their seven kids.
So it was called Seventh Heaven.
And it was on for 10 years, during which time it was on the WB for the most part.
I think it did one year on CW, but it was on the WB.
It was the highest rated show the WB had ever had.
It was huge.
It was a very, very successful show.
It's not on any magazines.
Nobody ever wrote about it.
You would not have known it was on.
The one time it was on TV Guide magazine, the cover of TV Guide magazine, the headline was, the best show you're not watching.
And what did they mean you're not watching?
People were watching it, but the people they knew weren't watching it.
And compare that, and this was the conversation we were having, compare that to Jon Stewart or Lena Dunham.
Jon Stewart had a very small audience.
He had really, I mean, if a million people were watching his show at night, and then you can say, okay, well, he had that echo chamber of YouTube and all that stuff.
But if you go on YouTube, his videos don't do any better than my videos or Bill Whittle's videos.
I mean, you know, his videos got an audience, but not a massive audience.
He had a very small audience, but that echo chamber picked him up because he was a left-winger and he was on the cover of everything.
Esquire, Newsweek, I think, you know, Rolling Stone, I think he was on the cover like three times.
Lena Dunham, the same thing.
Do you know what the ratings of that show, Girls, the Lena Dunham Show Girls, is?
They get about 600,000 people watching on HBO an episode.
Statistically, for a TV show, that's zero.
Statistically, for a TV show, 600,000 people is nobody watching.
And she has been on the cover of everything.
Glamour and Vogue and Entertainment Weekly.
And just, you know, she's this big star.
And if you read the articles about her, they all begin with the hit show girls, which doesn't exist.
There is no hit show girls.
And it's just, they just picked her up and made her into this star.
Whereas shows like Blue Bloods, which is a very conservative show, get very little press, very little notice.
Because when you talk to people in New York, this is absolutely true.
When I talk to friends in New York, they say, everybody's watching girls.
And I say, you know, the numbers show, that's not true.
What they mean is everybody on the island of Manhattan who writes about people writing about other people writing about things, they're all watching girls and writing to each other.
I mean, personally, I think the entire feminist movement is powered by women in the media writing for other women in the media so that women out of the media think this must be what's going on when I don't think it is and I don't think it's what people necessarily want.
Now, there are people on the left who think that this, this echo chamber, is the same as reality, is just as good as reality.
They think if you control the narrative, you then acquire power because people act on what they think is true.
They don't always act on what is true.
And George Orwell wrote about this in 1984, and he put it at its most demonic because he was writing about the Soviet Union.
So he was writing about the left.
1984 is about the left.
The left tries to hide this because it's such a brilliant description of tyranny.
But if you go back, I found this clip from one of the oldest versions.
I don't even know what year they made this film.
I've never seen this version of the film.
This is the torture.
You know, they take the hero or the protagonist of 1984 into a room and they torture him until he no longer knows what reality is.
Torture Of Reality00:15:20
And he just says, basically, reality is whatever the party wants to tell me that it is.
And that's the purpose.
And the torturer, this guy who represents Big Brother, explains to him the theory of narrative.
The party seeks power for its own sake, not as a means but an end.
Power over the human mind and power over all matter, climate, disease, the laws of gravity.
Because we control the mind, reality is inside the skull.
We control the laws of nature.
The stars are not light years, but a few kilometers away.
If we wished we could block them out here, that is power.
In our world, there will be no love but the love of Big Brother.
No laughter but the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy.
No art, no science, no literature, no enjoyment.
But always and only, Winston, there will be the thrill of power.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
Okay, that's the Democratic Party hasn't quite gotten to that level yet, but they are certainly pushing it, baby.
That's the vision looking at it, okay?
And this thing that happened with Obama's Paris climate change deal, he even says in there, did I miss that?
He says, even we can change the climate with our minds.
This deal that Obama announced, this deal is meaningless.
This is a thing where 190 or so nations get together and pledge they're going to voluntarily reduce carbon.
The thing that saved this deal, it was hilarious, Politico, I think it was, maybe Slate, I can't remember.
One of them ran an article saying the deal was saved when John Kerry noticed one word had to be changed.
What was the one word?
The word was shall.
Because if they said that America shall reduce its carbon emissions, then it becomes a treaty.
That means you have to do it.
And if it's a treaty, you have to take it to Congress to ratify it.
And Congress ain't going to ratify it because it would destroy our economy.
Okay, so they had to change shall to should.
And hooray, the deal was saved by making it meaningless because nobody's going to do any of the things they should because nobody ever does any of the things they should.
And you think, like, well, why would developing nations who need carbon emissions, need oil, need fossil fuels to catch up with us, why would they agree with us to do this stuff?
Well, they agreed because we offer them $100 billion in aid a year, which Congress is going to have to agree to.
I mean, Obama can legislate from the Oval Office all he wants, but he doesn't care.
And listen to Obama announcing, this thing is a complete make-believe deal about a make-believe problem because this is not a crisis.
I mean, well, let's listen to Obama first talk about this deal.
It's hilarious, but we're going to let it run.
We're going to let him have his say.
This agreement represents the best chance we've had to save the one planet that we've got.
So I believe this moment can be a turning point for the world.
We've shown that the world has both the will and the ability to take on this challenge.
It won't be easy.
Progress won't always come quick.
We cannot be complacent.
While our generation will see some of the benefits of building a clean energy economy, jobs created, money saved, we may not live to see the full realization of our achievement, but that's okay.
What matters is that today we can be more confident that this planet is going to be in better shape for the next generation.
And that's what I care about.
I imagine taking my grandkids, if I'm lucky enough to have some, to the park someday and holding their hands and hearing their laughter and watching a quiet sunset, all the while knowing that our work today prevented an alternate future that could have been grim.
That our work here and now gave future generations cleaner air and cleaner water and a more sustainable planet.
And what could be more important than that?
You know, one thing that could be more important than that is making sure that your grandkids aren't named Muhammad and Abdul, you know, because you might want to deal with the real problems in front of the world.
I mean, this is that classic left-wing thing where there's no proof.
He's telling you there can be no proof that what he has done has had any effect, and I guarantee you it will have no effect.
I mean, listen for just a minute.
You know, Michael Crichton was this wonderful best-selling author.
He wrote Jurassic Park, and he wrote an Andromeda Spring.
And toward the end of his life, he died tragically young, but toward the end of his life, he started to do a novel.
He did a novel called State of Fear on this climate change panic.
And he was really a left-winger.
He was kind of a liberal.
And the left went nuts.
You know, they say, oh my God, we've been betrayed by this guy telling the truth.
But he sits down.
This is an interview he gave before he died, obviously before he died, with Charlie Rose, where he explains what is bothering him about climate change panic.
You can talk to scientists and you say, what do you think of that shop corner with a neon sign that says psychic reading and somebody's going to tell you the future?
They go, oh, that's a fraud.
That's a charlatan.
No one can do that.
You go, great.
What do you think about telling me what the global temperature of the climate, predict the climate, no one can predict the weather for a month, the climate, 100 years from now, and they go, oh, that's science, that's important.
Pay $500 million for that, a billion dollars.
I mean, it's bizarre to me.
No one can predict the future.
No one can predict the future.
And the climate models, one of the things that Crichton said, Crichton at the end of State of Fear has an author's message because there are different people.
You know, it's a very political book, people expressing different opinions.
And he says at the end that people are going to want to know what he thinks.
And so he puts a list of things.
He says, I suspect that part of the observed surface warming of the Earth will ultimately be attributable to human activity.
I mean, of course it will.
Each of us is a little battery emitting heat.
We warm up the earth just by being here.
And when we have factories, that's going to send up some warming things.
He goes on to say, I suspect that the principal human effect will come from land use and that the atmospheric component will be minor.
So don't panic.
He says, but before making expensive policy decisions on the basis of climate models, I think it is reasonable to require that those models predict future temperatures accurately for a period of 10 years.
20 years would be better.
How simple is that?
How basic is that?
Before you waste your time gathering all the nations of the world together, because look, look, all of us want a good environment.
None of us is saying that we should pollute and we shouldn't take care.
Let me tell you, I will, since no one can predict the future, I will tell you that you're in the one place where we can predict the future.
I will tell you what is going to happen with carbon fuels.
We are going to use fewer and fewer carbon fuels for one simple reason.
Some nerd in his garage is going to, he's going to come home from being bullied at school because the government's attempts to have no tolerance for bullying isn't going to work.
So that's not going to work.
So he's going to get bullied at school.
He's going to come home and say, I'll show them by showing everybody how brilliant I am.
He's going to walk into his garage and he's going to invent a battery.
That's what's missing.
That's the next stage.
It is.
It's a battery that can hold energy for a long period, a lot of energy for a long period of time.
That's when things like solar energy and wind energy, which are now virtually useless, I mean, virtually present nothing.
I mean, you would basically have to populate the United States with fans to organize enough wind energy to send a plane around the world.
But if you could store that energy, all of that would change.
Government donations, you know, while this was going on, Bill Gates is going around trying to get millionaires and billionaires to contribute. to the creation of a battery, to research, because he knows, he knows this stuff isn't going to do a damn thing.
Why?
Because the government doesn't know what the next thing is.
The little nerd who's been bullied, he knows.
He knows.
And the more they contribute, personally, I think even Bill Gates giving money to inventors is going to slow the process down.
I think if we just leave people alone, somebody's going to figure this out.
I'm not a scientist.
I know we need a battery.
I know we need new ways of storing things.
Nobody knows the future, but that's the way things happen.
That's the kind of thing that is going to change all of this.
And it's not going to take one government pack, not $100 billion aid package to some tyrant who's just going to use it to buy more hookers and a bigger palace and seven more palaces to keep his hookers in.
That is not what is going to save us from fossil fuels, which do have to be cut back ultimately, ultimately, not today, not tomorrow, but ultimately, and they will be as soon as this crazy nerd who we don't know who he is invents his battery.
And that's going to save the world.
But let me challenge you for just a second.
Last week I was talking about the fact that political broadcasting is really not politics.
It's really show business.
And because the first rule of show business is give the people what they want, political broadcasters flatter you.
You turn them on and they tell you your own opinions back at you.
Obama, to cover up his uselessness, his incompetence, his stupidity and his narcissism and his anti-American foolishness, is off doing this Fantastico climate change thing.
And by predicting disaster, he gets his people all worked up and they think that, you know, if you read the op-ed in the New York Times, it's a hilarious, hilarious comedy of disaster.
You know, it could be the original Seventh-day Adventist, you know, the world is about to come to an end is in the New York Times op-ed.
But listen for just a minute.
Do you remember when Turkey shot down a Russian jet?
Neither do I.
And it was only about three weeks ago, okay?
It was only about three weeks ago.
Listen for a minute to my friend Glenn Becken.
I don't mean to single him out because there was a lot of this, but listen to him announce the news on his radio show.
This morning, we have news from Turkey.
We have news that Turkish, Turkish forces have shot down a Russian jet.
They warned the Russians 10 times.
The Russians did not evacuate their airspace.
This is World War III, gang.
Or maybe not.
Maybe it's not World War III.
Maybe, you know, it's just a kind of international crisis and it'll pass off without anything happening.
And again, I'm not making fun of Glenn.
You know, that radio show he does is absolutely terrific.
He's hilariously funny, you know, a really talented broadcaster.
I heard a lot of this from a lot of conservative people.
You know, oh, it's World War III, it's World War III.
And I'm asking myself, just because nobody knows the future, I'm not saying it wasn't a dangerous moment.
It was a dangerous moment.
Why is it that we believe disaster scenarios so readily?
Why is it on the right and on the left, because we're all human beings, we all have the same frailties, why is it we go for that stuff right away?
You know, that just makes sense to us.
It sounds like realism, where a guy who says what is obviously the truth is most days are going to go all right.
Most days it's going to be fine.
Most days, that guy, we hate that guy.
What's wrong with him?
And you could come up with some kind of evolutionary theory that the caveman who comes, who every day comes in and says, boy, a saber-toothed tiger is going to eat us, maybe the guy who survives instead of the guy who's smoking a joint saying, ah, we'll be fine.
So maybe that's evolution.
But I personally hate evolutionary descriptions of things because what Stephen Jay Gould, the famous Harvard biologist, he called them just-so stories, because Rudyard Kipling wrote these just-so stories, these legends, how the leopard got its spots, how the elephant got its trunk.
So evolutionary descriptions just take something we already know to be true and they invent an explanation.
Well, you survived if you did.
I can do that about anything.
I can make that explanation.
There's nothing scientific about it.
Just because evolution may be scientific, there's nothing scientific about these back-engineered explanations.
But just on my own observation, just looking at myself and looking at other people, I think disaster scenarios give us a sense of power over our feeling of suspense.
Suspense is, I've been a suspense writer my whole life.
Suspense is one of the most painful emotions.
And I think we get a sense of triumph over it when we say the worst is going to happen.
The worst is going to happen because now we can't be surprised.
It's just like the guy who says, well, at least if I expect the worst, I won't be disappointed when it happens.
Yeah, but you've ruined your entire life up until that moment by worrying about the worst.
And it really is not worth it.
Let me tell you, I will end by telling you one of my favorite Bible stories.
I think it's from 2 Kings, a story of the prophet Alicia.
The Syrians, to make it absolutely contemporary, the Syrians are trying to kill the Jews.
What else is new, right?
Nothing changes.
The Syrians are trying to kill the Jews.
And they keep setting up ambushes for the Israelis.
And the Israeli king keeps getting warned by Alicia, this prophet.
So the Syrian king thinks we must have a traitor in our ranks, a spy who's telling the king.
And his people say, no, they've got a prophet, and the prophet is getting information from God.
So they go to kill the prophet.
So one morning, the prophet's servant goes out into the city, and he looks up with Alicia the prophet.
And the servant looks up, and the city is surrounded by Syrian chariots and warriors.
And the servant panics.
And he says to Alicia, Alicia, oh my God, we're surrounded.
What do we do?
And Alicia says, don't be afraid.
Look again.
And he looks again.
The servant looks again.
And the chariots of the Syrians are surrounded by chariots of fire, the chariots of God.
And Alicia says, those who are with us are more than those who are against us.
This is a really dangerous time.
It really is.
Obama is a complete incompetent.
He is one of the truly worst presidents I have ever seen in my life.
He has let the Middle East spin out of control.
Our economy is really weighted down with the stupid Obamacare, Obamacare is falling apart everywhere.
But, but, you know, just because it is a dangerous time, but there are ways forward.
And the likelihood is, the likelihood is we will find a way forward through the dangers.
And because there is a level of reality beyond the one we see, even though God will not stop us from making the most destructive choices, he will not stop us from destroying the world if that's what we want to do, those who are with us are more than those who are against us.
And so listening to this stuff is just a way of like soothing yourself.
And there truly is reason for hope, and you're not a fool for hoping.
Just to let you know.
Christmas Mysteries Anthology00:02:02
Let me get to Christmas stuff I like.
Before I get to Christmas stuff I like, let me say with Christmas stuff I like, I hope you will go on Amazon or Barnes and Noble and pre-order my memoir, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
I think you will really like it.
I really do.
I think it's one of the best things I've ever written.
And I think You'll really enjoy it.
So you can go on, and if you, it doesn't come out until September, but it's worth it to pre-order it.
It's certainly worth it to me.
So, you know, I've been talking about Christmas stuff I like and how hard it is to come up with stuff that you haven't heard of.
And one of the things I wanted to do is I wanted to talk about all the great mystery stories that are written around Christmas.
And I was trying to pick out, you know, which mystery story to go.
There's like the Blue Carbuncle, I think, is the Sherlock Holmes one.
And then there's The Flying Stars, G.K. Chesterton, Father Brown stories.
And then I just thought, why not get them all?
Okay, so there's a book called The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited by Otto Penzler.
And Otto Penzler, and it's huge, this book.
I mean, it's really big.
Otto Penzler, a friend of mine, one of the great experts on crime fiction and one of the great anthologists.
In fact, if you go into most bookstores, if there are any bookstores left, and you look at anthologies, they're almost all edited by Otto Pensler.
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries has all the classics in it and has modern stories as well, as well as one by your genial host.
I have a story called The Killer Christian, which is one of my most anthologized stories, and that is in the Big Book of Christmas Mysteries.
But it's really good.
It really is.
Otto does a great job of selecting the stories, and it's just a really entertaining book.
And you get them all.
So it saves me from having to do more mystery stories for the rest of the Christmas season.
That's our show for today.
Come back tomorrow if there is a tomorrow.
We're good now because Obama has saved the world, so there'll be a tomorrow.
And I will be here in that tomorrow and do my show again.