Twelve Years of Christmas

I know it’s a bit late for this… but I just wanted to take a moment to type a very “Merry Christmas!” to everyone who gets offended by people typing Merry Christmas. Oh and also — to be fair — a hearty “Happy Holidays!” to everyone who gets offended by people typing Happy Holidays.

Ever since I stopped dropping faux-literary f-bombs all over the place I’ve been searching for something new to help me keep my edge. And what’s edgier than mis-targeted holiday salutations?

• Milk?
• Chocolate Milk? (gasp!)
• Not liking baby Yoda?
• Liking baby Yoda?
• “Placing the punctuation outside of the quotation marks”? (omg!)

Yeah, I’ve still got the touch.

I only wrote two posts this entire year, which, obviously, is pathetic and I’m sorry. However, those two posts were enough to have me summoned to an awkward federal court hearing where I had to answer for myself… something my hundreds of other cult-busting posts didn’t managed to “achieve”. So… efficiency increase, doing more with less, six sigma.

Herbalife’s lawyers argued to the court that I should not be allowed to see any of the confidential evidence in a case where I prolly do need to see (and already have seen) the evidence. Their argument was that, well, it was like, you know, because, well … I’m always going around mentioning chocolate milk in polite company and so I’m probably a crazy person.

No, not really… there was nothing about the chocolate milk. They just implied that the two trivial 2019 SaltyDroid posts were some kind of (very) veiled threat that I was gonna post a bunch of this (mostly boring) discovery stuff to the world wide internets. They’ve been implying — or straight up saying — that the whole time.

But that’s not really how this works in my view. You can’t just dump a bunch of data on the internet like an albino lunatic.

1. Mostly, sadly, nobody — but robocall scrapers and MLM spammers — will care. Data dumps? Sounds like math. Have you met America? America don’t want no maths.

2. With some very important exceptions, it is irresponsible to dump data… the risk of negative unintended consequences is way too high.

3. A lot of this stuff involves information about people I see as tragic victims. Not protecting their privacy would be extremely off-brand.

No, this site has never “dumped”. It’s more like: collect the data; look at the data; process the data; cross-check the data; make calls about the data; stare at the data until the onset of eyeball carpal tunnel… then, maybe, try to write a fun funny story about something extremely sad (and hope that people will read it because sometimes they won’t even though somebody has clearly done a gloriously delightful job writing it).

Anyway, Herbalife’s ploy didn’t work. The fact that I was — am — and always will be — the SaltyDroid wasn’t enough to have me banished from the kingdom of lawyers. The Judge warned, to quote from the order, of a “parade of personal and professional horribles” should I ever deliberately fail to respect the court’s confidentiality orders. But that was never going to be a thing — I don’t like parades.

SaltyDroid 2020 … Year Twelve (gasp!)

C

Maybe this year I’ll write more. Or, maybe I won’t. But substantial stuff is happening and, eventually, I promise, this will be a fun funny story about something extremely sad. I hope you’ll read it.

Happy New Year!