North Korea denounced my dog

At his age, he's more of a hobbling-dog lackey:

Generate your own thrice-cursed denunciations here at Boingboing.

MERRY MERRY Cartoon Brew has 23 Christmas cards by Ward Kimball, the marvelous Disney animator. such as this one from the hard early days of the war:

They get more and more abstract as the years pass.

BOOKS Three more "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" books. Meh. Guardian:

Count me out. I thought the first one was a good mystery, if predictable - an old rich family has secrets! The second started with a long sequence that had nothing to do with anything. and moved on to feature the dullest, most detailed IKEA shopping trip ever. Oh, and she can disable weightlifting Russian bodyguards with a single marial arts move, even though she supposedly has the physique of a hummingbird. Also, crazy hacking skills!

ART Lovely images of houses with Christmas lights, here. But make sure you note the DARK SIDE of this.

SIGNAGE Most roadside signs these days lack interest or character; the days bright neon and extraordinary typefaces blaring the name are long gone, and road trips are duller for it. But some things remain. Atlas Obscura Headline: "This abstract roadside poultry was saved from demolition by outraged drivers and pilots." Here:

how, I'm not sure. But you have to appreciate the entrepreneurial zeal that went into this thing. People will want to sample my chicken if the sign has a movable beak. At least their kids will nag them to try it.

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Whether Johnny Reb's Chick Chuck and Shake was connected to Johnny Reb's Canteen I can't say, but take a look at this gaudy facade. The ads for the restaurants said "Where you win the War Between the Steaks." I had no idea hostilities had been formerly concluded, let alone begun.

Anyway, that's not my point. Zoom in on this sign. which is up the road from the giant chicken:

Probably wasn't an insurance agency. But you should be able to guess what it was, and what the sign originally looked like.

SCIENCE! It'a come to this: a serious website dealing with particle physics has to put out headlines like this for traffic:

It has the basics - the number, which guarantees a format you can easily digest, the "You" which challenges the reader and makes an assumption the reader may want to disprove by reading the article. I don't know. If they'd discovered dark matter and said "whoa, this explains a lot of things for which we had no answers," it would be one thing. It's another when they say "the most satisfying explanation for these mysteries is Substance X, for which we have no proof." The article conflates the "discovery" of dark matter with the theory that posits its necessity. If the original discovery came from observation of a galaxy that should have flown apart because its mass was too small, why can't the extra weight be ascribed to super-ultra-massive black holes?

The Verge says we're about to look closely at our own galaxy's super-huge black hole:

They're looking to capture the event horizon. They've "seen" the black hole by other means.

Finally, today's Plastic Santa: Sly Old Guy archetype.