Holiday Letter Written in a State of Sunny, Even Batty Outlook

Hello to the other 49 of you from the original ‘49ers! Happy holidays to our fellow states!

Hope that your 2001 is winding up on a happier note. So many shoppers out and about--it kind of makes the ol’ sales-tax coffers go ting-a-ling, doesn’t it?

As for us, the California family has had its share of ups and downs--or should we say darks and lights--what with the blackouts and power crisis and all, ha ha.

Of course, we’re all still feeling for New York, and weighing in with as much help as we can muster, and all we can say to that is, “You go, states! We love ya, New York!”

On a bookkeeping note, DON’T FORGET to return your cyber-ballot on whether Washington, D.C., should be added to the states’ newsletter list. Last time we took a vote on this, some of you (hello, Idaho) said D.C. wasn’t worth the stamp to mail your vote, so this year, it’s all by e-mail. Change happens, folks.

Anyway, it’s been very enriching, hearing from some of you about “your year.”

Utah, those Olympic bribery scandals are over, now let the games begin! And after all the Germans go home, you can bring those empty beer bottles to California and get a nickel each!

Alaska, we especially liked your vacation photos from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Hang on to those; they’ll be worth money someday when the oil wells go in and the place winds up looking like Oklahoma with permafrost. Oops, sorry, Oklahoma--we meant it’ll wind up looking like Kuwait.

As for us, let’s see: L.A. is growing--duh, what a surprise. We took away San Jose’s allowance and computer after all that dot-com stuff got out of hand. San Diego is still crazy about baseball and football, even though it can’t play worth saltwater taffy. San Francisco goes its own ditsy way, naturally, and Sacramento--well, everyone says when Sacramento grows up, it’ll end up in San Quentin or the White House.

Anyhoo, we’ll just say that our Santas still wear Ray-Bans, and we’re working our way back to normal! We don’t know what “back to normal” means where you hail from, but here it means little snippets of life like this:

The lawsuit is going nowhere between the Grateful Dead and a Bay Area guitar maker, the guy Jerry Garcia bequeathed five guitars to, including the guitars named Wolf and Tiger. And in some other courtroom in San Francisco, two grown men are fighting over who owns Barry Bonds’ 73rd home-run baseball, not so much for love of the game but probably for love of the million bucks the thing could bring.

And this San Fran muni power election got so weird that the lids of eight ballot boxes were found floating in the bay. Brother and sister states, that is progress: a hundred years ago, it would have been the candidates found floating in the bay.

L.A. International has brought back curbside passenger drop-offs (at last!), and Santa Clarita has started up curbside recycling of disposable diapers--landfills, rejoice!

And our favorite “new normal” moment was when this famous left-wing defense attorney was due in court in L.A. for his client, who helped some of the SLA people who kidnapped Patty Hearst back in 1974, then supposedly tried to bomb police cars, then took it on the lam for about six presidents’ worth of years. So this attorney misses his plane to L.A., decides it’s karma, he heads back to bed, and now she’s heading for the slammer.

Is there really such a thing as an ex-Beatle? Anyway, ex-Beatle George Harrison’s family put down a nonexistent L.A. address as the place where George died, three years after Paul McCartney’s PR guy told the world that Linda McCartney had died in Santa Barbara, which she did not. Reminds me of a riff on a Beatles’ song: “Something in the Way They Move.”

Checking the civic Xmas stocking, we see . . . cop dolls! The LAPD union has brought out your basic doll priced at $32, with future dolls to be priced higher, like Barbie, thanks to accessories such as SWAT gear and helicopters.

In social notes, Vivendi Universal marries USA Networks. The French, who complain louder than anybody but the Taliban about American cultural imperialism, are now at least making some money out of it.

There’s so much, there’s just no room for it all: the Simi Valley stripper who used to be a WWF wrestler (there’s a resume for you) accused of cyber-stalking a Vegas newspaper cartoonist she had an affair with . . . Clint Eastwood is now a state parks and rec commissioner . . . an L.A. man is suing the drugstore where a clerk processed his pix of his marijuana plants and then showed the snapshots to the cops, who busted the guy.

Really, it’s almost like old times again--thank goodness!

So: how are things in your neck of the woods?

Love till next year,

California