invasion of the creepy santas

November 30, 2001

This Year's Bird Sightings
2001 Plum Island Bird List

Today's Reading:
Sand Dunes and Salt Marshes by Charles Wendell Townsend, In Search of Clusters by Gregory Pfister

This Year's Reading:
2001 Book List

Photos

View out Starship Startup window at 2:30 in the afternoon

Menacing creepy Santa

Another creepy Santa on someone's cube

Creepy Santa attempting to strangle a smiley face

Looks like November all right. Gray sky. Bare trees. Warm thick fog. Wait a minute. Doesn't feel like November. Warm. It feels warmer outside than it does in my cubicle in fact. This entire autumn has been unusually warm here except for a few seasonably cold days - like maybe three... When is November gonna get here in earnest? Come on. There's snow in Seattle but it's balmy in Boston.

It just feels weird and wrong to me. Just a little off. Just off enough to cause some kind of sub clinical discomfort. Kinda like the strange creepy bendable Santas that have begun to invade Starship Startup. On Monday or Tuesday a couple of them appeared sitting on top of picture frames. By Wednesday there were hordes of them hanging from mailboxes and cubicle walls. Thursday a couple dozen of them mobbed the office of one coworker who had commented on them. Then they started migrating. Nobody sees them move but they appear in the kitchen hanging by one arm from the cabinet doors or sticking out of the coffee pot. I reached for a soda in the drinks cooler and spotted one sitting on a can of iced tea.

Isn't Santa supposed to be a smiling, jolly, fat guy? These emaciated guys with sinister crimson faces look downright threatening. One showed up in a coworker's office apparently attacking a Smiley. Well, maybe he's hugging the Smiley or giving him a boost up to the top of that disk drive or router or whatever it is, but I don't think so.

If they keep reproducing at the rate they have been this week, we're going to need more office space by Christmas. I think they already outnumber employees or maybe it just seems like they do. Somebody has advanced the theory that they are aliens who move really slowly, so slowly we don't see it happening, and they are reporting on our earthling ways to some higher alien authority. I think he got that idea from a comic book or a Third Rock rerun.

Nobody owns up to having introduced this invasive species of Santa. Well, at least they are not yet driving out the native species of Smiley.

In other news, nobody has scored any points yet for identifying the literary references in last Thursday's entry. There've been some guesses that were kind of in the ballpark. Watch this space for answers.

Speaking of news, the other day I was whining about how the news is only ever about war or anthrax and how they never ever report anything like a new species of conifer or something I'd be really interested in. So imagine my surprise when I heard on Monday that scientists have discovered a new species of conifer in Vietnam. Not only that but the announcement was made by the curly-haired conifer guy I met at the Beijing herbarium. Conifers are a small world.