Some comedian - and I’m 98% sure it was the great Tony V - said “Happy Holidays” to the crowd.  And one guy, out in the audience off towards stage right… booed.  That’s right, a guy booed “Happy Holidays.”  Swear to god.

Most of the crowd was perplexed.  Even among East Coast, hyper-informed Boston comedy fans, there are not all that many people who live inside the bubble of the Hatfield-McCoy Appalachia that is cable news. In fact, if the reason for the booing was readily apparent to you, be warned - you’re inside that bubble.

Tony handled it beautifully, and used the moment to segue into a great riff about Christmas. I’d be willing to bet that he’d run up against it before.

“It” is the new, virulent anger against the idea of saying “Happy Holidays” - which is to some people as horrifying and awful as some commie trying to sneak a “Season’s Greetings” by you - which is in turn as bad as a hearty, happy “Fuck Jesus!” apparently.  It’s a sign that you hate Christmas and Christianity and the Constitution and the principles that our nation was founded upon.  It’s a sign that you hate America, just like the President of the United States.

I love me some Adam Felber, I really do.

In late November 2009, more than 1,000 e-mails between scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia were stolen and made public by an as-yet-unnamed hacker. Climate skeptics are claiming that they show scientific misconduct that amounts to the complete fabrication of man-made global warming. We find that to be unfounded:

• The messages, which span 13 years, show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive. An investigation is underway, but there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.
• Some critics say the e-mails negate the conclusions of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the IPCC report relied on data from a large number of sources, of which CRU was only one.
• E-mails being cited as "smoking guns" have been misrepresented. For instance, one e-mail that refers to "hiding the decline" isn’t talking about a decline in actual temperatures as measured at weather stations. These have continued to rise, and 2009 may turn out to be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. The "decline" actually refers to a problem with recent data from tree rings.

Shocker. Anti-science climate change deniers are wrong again. Huh. Who knew?