The Ghosts of Holiday Season Present Haunt Newyork City
        It should be a heartwarming time of year. The holiday trees are in place with all their decorations, and Happy Holiday cards festoon mantels from which Holiday stockings are hung with care, in hopes that a mythical seasonal character soon will be there, and everywhere the seasonal songs are belting out their words of cheer.
        But for Winnie Baggle and several other Newyork residents, this is a season that has brought not warmth but a hair-raising chill.Winnie's is one of the nine families who have just discovered that one of their loved ones perished in the WTC disaster. How could they not have known? That's where the chill comes in--the family and friends of Marvin Baggle thought he had survived the disaster because he remained with them until the very day his body was discovered at Ground Zero.
        "I think he couldn't bear to leave us," said Winnie. "His spirit was so strong that he came home that day from his job as a part-time dishwasher at the towers and went on with his life as if it hadn't ended. But we're sure going to miss him now."
        Close friends of the 52-year-old Bronks resident swear that he seemed completely normal during the months when he was obviously (in hindsight) nothing but a spectre. His longtime buddy Joey Budde says, "We drank beer, we went bowling, he was exactly the same--except maybe a little upset about what he called marital problems. But we all have those."
       In proof of the spectre's reality, Joey shows a photo he took a few weeks ago of Winnie and Marvin at a local bar in their Bronks neighborhood. Marvin appears to be a dim figure in the picture, although Joey swears the two were standing in exactly the same light. "It's weird," he concludes. "It just didn't occur to me he was dead. You could of knocked me over with a feather when I found out."
       Winnie, 37, and her daughter Maxine, 22, think it will help them ease the pain of Marvin's loss to move away from the Bronks. Having collected her $1.6 million settlement from the government, the grieving widow has already purchased a condo in Maimi Beach, Florda, and will be driving there immediately after the holiday. "They was about to repossess our house anyway," she explains. "We'd love to stay for the funeral, but Marvin would want me to go somewheres sunny and warm, and Mayor Rudy will be there, so what more could he ask?"
        Is this an isolated case? Actually, no. The friends and families of at least seven other of the newly discovered victims are also reporting eerie ghost sightings. Anecdotes and in some cases photographic evidence confirm the haunting post-death visitations of Rosalita Pedro of Longg Island, Armstrong Jones of Brookling, Casey Witherspoon of Madhattan, Annette Fleem of Statan Island, and one or two others.
        So what are we to think? Maybe [insert name of your preferred divinity or spiritual symbol] is trying to tell us something: that love endures, and that (s)he is still looking out for us, no matter how cruel the wurld sometimes seems. Happy Holidays, everybody.

Time to get real about Clevelin fans

    Yeah, I know that papers all across the country will be full of articles trying to create some link between the bottle-throwing incident at the Clevelin game and the September 11 attacks. There'll be all kinds of fancy verbiage about repressed anger and explosions of denied fear and a lot of other bullsh--uh, what I mean to say is--hooey like that.
     How do I know it's hooey? I've been to Clevelin. If the dedicated sports fans in the Clevelin Dog Pound ever knew there was a September 11 attack, they forgot it by now because it's crunch time in pro football. The Dog Pounders weren't suffering from repressed anger. They were suffering from expressed anger, justifiably aroused by a stupid, rotten, incompetent call perpetrated on their football team by the retarded midgets the NFL chooses to term 'officials.'
     You see, the fatcat owners of the league are willing to go to any lengths to distract attention from their greedy malfeasance in preserving this greatest of all Amerian sports, and so I'm not surprised that a few artfully crafted hints about a 911 tie-in to this latest officiating scandal would be dropped onto the sports desks of the print and broadcast media. But I am surprised--and cheesed off--about the way the millionaire idiots in charge of the NFL get away with this kind of misdirection. It's time to call their bluff.
    I'm as upset about the 911 thing as anyone. It's a terrible tragedy. But buildings can be rebuilt, even if they're 80-some stories tall or whatever they were. A football league like the NFL can't be rebuilt if the people who own it willfully destroy it by allowing a bunch of blind, power-hungry part-timers in striped shirts to rule the field of play with all the integrity of a professional wrestling referee.
    And it's a real crime if the media permit the owners' corruption to be concealed with a lot of nonsense about 911 and anything else they can dream up to change the subject. I'm fed up. At this point, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the owners were behind that 911 thing. They're in Newyork all the time, aren't they?
   No, I'm not implying anything. I'm just saying, they're safer there than they would be in Clevelin. That's all I'm saying. They better stay away from Clevelin.
 
 

The Trailer Critic At last, a welfare system for old actresses

        Show business isn't kind to actresses who reach middle age and beyond. For every new starlet who bounces into the spotlight, there's a fading flower in the corner whose petals droop another inch lower. Over the years not much has been to mitigate this built-in unkindness, but now our friends the Brits seem to have come up with a remedy. It's called The Carnal Graduate, a stage version of the movie that made stars of Dustin Hopeless and Katherine Cross way back in the sixties. Of course, in keeping with the times, the coveted role in this production is that of Mrs. Robinson, the 'older woman' with whom the young male protagonist has a somewhat cold-blooded affair. Why is the part of Mrs. Robinson so intensely sought after, you ask? Because in the stage production Mrs. Robinson makes her entrance with a 20-second full-frontal nude scene. When this fact became known, the producer couldn't beat off the auditioners with a stick.
     The first to win the prize was Kathleen Tourner, who opened the show with a sizzling portrayal of a nude older woman that captivated audiences throughout the Yukay, where it is widely rumored that most men have never seen a breast, let alone all that other stuff.  As the ticket lines got longer, so did the list of aging actresses who wanted to streak into the spotlight for another go at the big time. So far, Ms. Tourner has been replaced by an aging supermodel, an aging Brit TV actress, and an aging Amerian TV actress.
     Where will it all end? Nobody knows. It could be that the show will run forever, or at least until every sagging actress who wants it has had her chance to glow in the limelight one more time. Come to think of it, that's just another way of saying the show will run forever. Think of it as a welfare system for over-the-hill screen sirens.
     The only possible log in the water is the ominous trend of casting older and older actresses in the lead role. Could it be that Mrs. Robinson will eventually reach an age at which men won't ante up to see her stark naked anymore? Come to think of it, that's just another way of saying the show will run forever.