It is a delight and quite the Christmas miracle that Brenda Lee — at one of those ages it's not polite to divulge — has a hit all over again with the re-release of her 1958 song, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree." Here's a recently-made video of her lip-syncing to the original record and obviously enjoying the experience. And it even has a guy who looks like David Letterman in it…

And here's a recent version cover which manages to sound very much like the original, except that it took two women to do the job that Brenda did by herself. The performer is Josh Turner and his guitar and band are accompanying two fine vocalists called The Ladybugs…

Almost anything legal that keeps Donald Trump out of the White House is aces with me but I'm feeling odd about today's decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to not allow him on the ballot in their state. Of course, that's assuming this decision is not overturned and I have an inexplicable hunch it will be.

At the risk of agreeing with Chris Christie, I agree with Chris Christie: It would be better if voters defeated Trump, not a 4-3 judicial decision. I don't think Trump has a great chance to win Colorado anyway. He lost there last time by 13 percentage points.

My pal Kliph Nesteroff has a new book out — Outrageous, subtitled "A History of Show Biz and the Culture Wars." I haven't got a copy yet because Kliph wants to bring me one next time we have lunch but I agree with its central premise as discussed in this interview in Rolling Stone.

That central premise is that people are wrong to say that comedy is being massively repressed in this country…or to the extent it is, that's nothing new. There have always been some people profiting — financially and/or politically — for calling for the banning of certain kinds of humor. And I dunno if Kliph feels this way or says this in the book but I think a lot of comics who claim they're not getting booked because their material is too edgy and controversial are actually not being booked because they aren't that good. Or in at least once case that I can think of, are rumored to have priced their services way out of the market.

Anywhere, here's a link if you're not about to have lunch with the author and so have to order your own copy.

Here's this years "TCM Remembers" video from the network that sometimes seems to want to not remember what "TCM" stands for. And no, I still don't know why they release these around the middle of December when there are still plenty of days left for someone to die this year.

Someone asked me last year why the TCM obit reel is always so much better than the ones at the Emmy Awards and Oscars and why it covers more people. Well, one big reason is that the TCM montage isn't edited to be shown before a live audience that will want to applaud many of the people. Norman Lear has 2-3 seconds in this reel. The folks at the next Emmy Awards ceremony are going to clap for him a lot longer than that…

Jim Manley wrote to ask…

You commonly post your memories of some of the artistic folks you've had a chance to meet and work with. How about trying to get in more anecdotes and reminiscences while folks are still around to potentially chime in and enjoy the memories? One person I would like to hear more about is Joe Staton. I had a chance to meet him at a con this year, and he seems to be a lovely man as well as a great artist. I notice he contributed to Destroyer Duck back in the day. Do you have any experiences to share about Joe?

Joe Staton is a lovely man as well as a great artist. And lest Joe read this and get a swollen cranium, let me add that most people I've met working in comics have been lovely human beings and a pretty good percentage of them have been great artists. I've never made a list but I'll take a ballpark guess and say that 93.9% of those I've met — and I've met an awful lot of folks — have been good people. (A question I don't want to answer here so don't ask it is "How do you handle it when you like the person but don't like his or her work?")

Joe and I worked together on a short Blackhawk story and he gave me exactly what I wanted in every panel. A lot of people judge comic book artists by how cool individual panels or drawings are. I judge them more by how right they are: Did the artist draw the right thing or just the pretty thing? Joe always does both.

Joe was the penciler of a Superman-Bugs Bunny mini-series I wrote for DC and it was a rough assignment, juggling all those different characters who live in different worlds and putting them together into the same world.  And adding to the difficulty was that the folks at Warner Animation can be really fussy about how Bugs and Daffy and all the rest are drawn. And to further add to it, we'd been told we could use one particular character in it and then once most of the series was drawn, someone found out there was a legal problem with including that character so finished pages had to be rewritten and redrawn…

…and oh, there were a lot of problems but not because of Joe. Joe did everything right. I don't know him as well as I'd like but I do know that I've never heard a bad word about him anywhere. And you can see for yourself how good he is at drawing just about anything.

Making its debut on the countdown is this number by my favorite a cappella group, Voctave. It's "We Need a Little Christmas," written by Jerry Herman for the Broadway musical, Mame…

And while we've got these folks on stage in front of microphones, it's lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you…

A very powerful message…

In most of the political-type speeches I see these days from folks running for election or re-election, I hear the candidate saying they have solid plans to fix a given problem or that they have incontrovertible evidence of some crime committed by their opponents…

…but they don't tell us much (sometimes, anything) about those plans or they don't divulge that evidence. It's always to be revealed at some future time and in most cases, it always will be. Donald Trump, for instance, has this wonderful health care plan that will replace Obamacare and be so much better and cheaper for everyone…and he has all these mountains of proof that he won the 2020 Presidential Election in a landslide.

I think we all instinctively realize that when a politician claims to have something like that and doesn't release it, it isn't what he or she says it is or, more likely, doesn't exist at all. I wish people — journalists, especially — would be more openly skeptical about such claims. I also wish the journalists would track them better even when they're made by people I might wind up voting for.

We should think of it like this: You're playing poker with someone and he announces, "I have a royal flush. I'll show it to you one of these days!"

That subject line is the whole point of this post. I started this blog on December 18, 2000 with the idea of "Well, let's see how long I feel like doing this." You could have won a lot of money then by betting me that I'd still feel like doing it after ten years, let alone 'til now and beyond. It's work that pays almost nothing, true…but 95% of it is writing and I became a writer because I enjoy writing. I have decreasing patience with people who complain about putting in long hours in their chosen profession. I keep using the analogy of a plumber who bitches about having to fix toilets.

You may not be interested in the following numbers but I am: This blog has been online for exactly 8,400 days. This is Posting #31,485 and of those, 242 have been "encore" reruns. Not counting this posting, I have typed the name "Jack Kirby" 827 times, "Sergio Aragonés" 520 times, "Frank Ferrante" 370 times and "Vivek Ramaswamy" once. In the future, I shall try to cut back on mentions of "Vivek Ramaswamy."

Thank you to all of you who read this blog and a special thanks to you if you (a) donate to its upkeep and/or (b) link to it from other sites and/or (c) send me corrections or additional information. The sense that there are people out there who are more than just casual clickers is why I've been able to do it as long as I have.

Coming in at #9 on our countdown — and yes, I know I sound like Casey Kasem doing this — is a video by a performer that several folks have told me is "The Barry Manilow of Mexico." I'm not sure they all meant that as a compliment but if I were a singer, I sure wouldn't mind being the Barry Manilow of anywhere.

The gent's name is Emmanuel — born Jesús Emmanuel Arturo Acha Martinez sez Wikipedia — and even though my Spanish is rustier than Jack Haley by the side of the road, I like Emmanuel's rendition of "Jingle Bell Rock." I especially like the way he brings in all these folks who I assume are celebrities in Mexico to pretend they're actually singing or playing musical instruments and how half the time, they don't even pretend very much…

Jason [last name withheld] wrote to ask me — and I'll try to make this the last mention of Rudy Giuliani on this site for a while — the following question…

If your friend Jake Tapper stuck a microphone in your face and asked you what you think has been going on with Giuliani in this trial, what would you say?

Well, first of all, my "friendship" with Jake Tapper consists of talking with him for about 15 minutes at a National Cartoonist Society convention and we spent 13 of those minutes talking about newspaper cartoonists, Walt Kelly especially. So that's a pretty loose application of the word "friend."

I think what's been going on with Giuliani in his recent trial has been a matter of trying to have it both ways: To settle the lawsuit for the lowest amount of cash and to retain whatever credibility and popularity he might still have with the MAGA crowd…and I don't think that was humanly possible. Earlier this year, his attorneys in the defamation case submitted this stipulation…

Defendant Giuliani, for the purposes of litigation only, does not contest that, to the extent the statements were statements of fact and other wise actionable, such actionable factual statements were false.

In other words: Giuliani's lawyers conceded on his behalf that he lied. But that doesn't sit well with the portion of MAGA World that still wants to believe there's all this evidence that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. It's a key component of Trump's popularity with them that he never apologizes, never admits when he's wrong, insist he won in every instance when he loses, and that he never allows that "the other side" might be anything other than stupid and/or evil. Giuliani is not the only Trump-wannabe who tries to emulate those principles.

Rudy, I suspect, feels he can't afford to lose whatever portion of that mob hasn't already turned on him for not flipping that '20 election. After all, when he fundraises for loot to pay his legal fees and the massive judgement, those are the only folks who might donate. So that explains why outside the courtroom, he's telling reporters (and therefore, his followers) that he would take the stand and make "definitively clear" that what he said about the two campaign workers "was true" while inside the courthouse, his attorneys were saying the opposite.

Trying to have it both ways. Trump has gotten away with that a number of times and Rudy has, too. When he was spearheading all those lawsuits to get states to toss out the results of their vote count in '20 or even just award the state to Trump, what Rudy said in speeches and soundbites was very different from what was presented in court. He tried the same thing in this defamation case and it worked just as poorly as it did there.

That's what I've concluded from my Rudywatching and I'm going to try to look away for a while.

Once again, we begin the annual Christmas tradition here on newsfromme.com. It's Mark's Xmas Video Countdown — ten days of holiday songs carefully selected by our judges, all of whom are me. Some of these songs have appeared before on this website and some haven't.

We start with a "haven't" — a "novelty record" as they used to call them. Wikipedia tells us it was written in 1944 by Donald Yetter Gardner, who was teaching music at a public school in Smithtown, New York. They go on to say…

He asked his second grade class what they wanted for Christmas, and noticed that almost all of the students had at least one front tooth missing as they answered in a lisp. Gardner wrote the song in 30 minutes. In a 1995 interview, Gardner said, "I was amazed at the way that silly little song was picked up by the whole country." The song was published in 1948 after an employee of Witmark music company heard Gardner sing it at a music teachers' conference.

"All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth" was soon recorded by an awful lot of performers but the top seller was this rendition from Spike Jones and His City Slickers. The gent singing it is George Rock, who was a trumpet player and a vital component of Spike's band. Apologies for the not-great video image…

Among the many other recording artists who took a swing at this one was Danny Kaye, backed up by Patty Andrews…

And even the great Nat King Cole recorded it…

And while we're on the subject, here's a more recent rendition of the tune, courtesy of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy…

…and finally a version by Elmo from Sesame Street and Michael Bublé…

If that's not enough for you, YouTube is filled with videos of the song performed by actual children who are actually missing their two front teeth. But I'll let you find those for yourself if you're interested.

First off, I could use more questions for my ASK me posts. After doing this blog for two days shy of 23 years, I need some help figuring out what to write about here. Send those questions to askme@newsfromme.com and tell me if you'd like me to leave your name out of any public reply.

Secondly, about names: For some reason, my e-mailbox gets a lot of mail from folks who hide behind handles. I think it's a common courtesy to use your real name — or at least something that looks like a real name — when you write to someone who is under his or her own real name. I've been answering most of the ones from the hiders but I'm going to stop or at least move their messages to the bottom of the To Be Answered folder. Please…sign your real name. Or if you're terrified for me to know it, make up something that sounds like a real name and use it consistently when you write to me.

And lastly, if your name is David Schwartz, Steve Thompson or Michael Lee, be aware that I know an awful lot of David Schwartzes, Steve Thompsons and Michael Lees and I can't always tell you guys apart. Thank you. Oh — and I have no idea what some old comic book or piece of artwork you possess is worth.

We will probably never fully understand how Rudy Giuliani made that bizarre transformation from the revered figure of 9/11 to what we've seen on display in recent years.  When he claims he has "no regrets" about anything he said about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, you get a clear picture of how this man is not living in the same reality that I — and for your sake, I hope you — live in. He reminds me of so many people I've encountered in my life who, to use a phrase I've used before here — think that never admitting you're wrong is the same thing as always being right.

Some, especially those who knew him well as Mayor of New York, would argue that he's always been like this; that all that's happened to him in recent years is that his true self has oozed out. Well, maybe…but the man he used to be had tremendous earning power and didn't have to put his apartment up for sale and do some of the demeaning things he's done lately for cash. He won not only occasionally but often.

One of the truest phrases in the English language was written by screenwriter William Goldman for the movie, All the President's Men. The phrase is "Follow the money" and it's the answer to so many questions in this world. I feel like that explains some of Giuliani's transition from America's Mayor to America's Laughingstock…but it doesn't explain everything.

Sorry if this seems off the topic of this blog to some of you. But sometimes, I can't sleep until I write something down and then I need a place to put it. Good night.

Wow.