#655 Vixen Vigaro

It’s the time of year for Christmas decorations again. Will they be mini-lights this year? Or will we return to old-fashioned big bulbs, standing anal-retentively up on the edges of roofs with perfect regularity?
The messy tumbling chaotic masses of icicle lights forgotten with the crazy self-indulgence of earlier times.
Who cares?
The newest rage in Christmas decorations is inflatable lawn ornaments. Big Frostys and Rudolphs, even sleighs complete with 8 tiny reindeer and that jolly old elf—so pretty at night with their internal lighting and full-blown joy.
And in the day, well, in the day, not so good.
Shapeless masses of limp plastic, noticeable mostly as blobs on the lawn.
A lot of Christmas decorations don’t look so good in the day. You got orange extension cords on roofs, wires dangling off bushes, and now, flaccid flaps of plastic. Like gigantic, colored prophylactics in need of a pharmaceutical assist.
Lawn ornament disorder? Drooping reindeer? Try Vigaro Viagra for your limp Vixen.
So I’m worried. You hear a lot about the tipping point lately.
“The tipping point” is the new way of saying critical mass. In the nuclear nineties critical mass was the way of describing when a thing finally hit the point where a chain reaction got underway.
The tipping point is like that. I think the reference comes from those Japanese garden things where a little bit of water drips into a hollow tube on an axis and when it fills up enough it tips over and the water all rushes out at once.
The point is, it only takes one little drop of water to send the contraption over the tipping point. Up until that drop, everything is fine.
So they talk about the tipping point in global warming being when we use that last little bit of greenhouse gas-producing power from a coal plant and the environment is finally and irrevocably, coastal flooded-ly, permafrost melted-ly, out of control.
And so I thought of the electrical power drawn by the little fans inflating flaccid Christmas lawn ornaments across the country.
And the tipping point the single fan that blows up the sagging Santa in my neighbor’s yard.
Merry Christmas.
America, ya gotta love it