New Years Day 2026

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Here we are on the first day of a year that is bound to be a roller coaster ride.  The world is poised between plunging into chaos or shaking off the poisonous effects of the woke nightmare we’ve been subjected to since 2008.  Which one wins is anyone’s guess.  But just having the Bad Orange Man there in the White House is proof to me that all hope hasn’t disappeared.  All of his words and deeds rankle the enemies of normalcy whenever he speaks or acts.  He’s a constant source of rage for all of the people I despise so much.  And hopefully this year he’ll up the voltage even higher and burn out all their circuitry in splendid fashion.

As I said, there’s no guarantee that he’ll win.  There are an enormous number of horrible people in this country.  And they’ll stop at nothing to restore the Obama/Biden team in Washington.  And this team is composed of both Democrats and Republicans.  They’re creatures of the Deep State that profit obscenely from the constant siphoning off of the country’s lifeblood into NGOs and other fronts that profit the Left and attack normal people wherever and whenever they can.  But they have been hurt and hurt badly by the DOGE initiatives and Trump’s executive orders and even that law that the House got passed that ended the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by extension cut off the funding for PBS and NPR.  And this proves that fighting these entities is possible.  And if it’s possible we need to give Trump all the help he can get to win the fight.

So, I’ll start the year with a realistic but positive outlook.  Trump won’t win every fight.  He might even lose one or two houses of Congress in the mid-terms.  But that’s nothing new.  It’s almost expected.  But what he has shown is that he can get a hell of a lot done with the right team and the will to make things happen.

Normally people write New Year’s Resolutions.  Instead, I’ll make a list of things I hope happen in 2026.

  • Tim Walz resigns from the governorship of Minnesota.
  • Mayor Mamdani crashes and burns in his first year as Mayor of New York City. By that I mean that he has to renege on all his campaign promises (free busses, frozen rents, city-run grocery stores) and comes begging to Albany and Washington to keep him from being run out of town on a rail.
  • ICE deports several times more illegals in 2026 than in 2025. They’ve been ramping up and I think they’re figuring out the pain points for illegals.
  • The Ukraine War will end. Will Trump get a Nobel Peace Prize.  Nah!
  • Maduro will flee Venezuela for Cuba. The drug traffickers will shift over to Mexico and American oil companies will return to restore their oil industry to some semblance of efficiency.
  • The guy who shot Charlie Kirk will be found guilty and sentenced to death.

Okay, that’s enough.  Happy New Year.

ShatnerKhan X

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Today I spoke to my fellow initiates in Advanced Shatneriana and it was decided that ShatnerKhan X will take place on January 17th at the Compound in the heart of Dunwich.  Now you may ask is this really the tenth ShatnerKhan.  Well, I tried to look back at the records and discovered that in November of 2024 I mentioned ShatnerKhan VIII.  But before that the highest number I could find was III.  So, something seems wrong.  I went farther back and found that ShatnerKhan I occurred on November 1st 2019.

That was over a year after my initial decision to celebrate all things Shatner in my groundbreaking post. “William Shatner a Demigod of Bad Acting.”  It’s required reading at Starfleet Academy.

The actual agenda is not as structured as in ShatnerKhans past.  Will we watch the two Twilight Zone episodes?  Will we review the various Star Trek episodes where Kirk performs his signature shoulder roll?  Will we rate the various alien women he groped?  Will we analyze his interactions with Lieutenant Sulu for any telltale animosity?  Will we do a survey to decide in which episode Kirk looks fattest?  The only thing I’m certain is we will play “Rocket Man.”  After all it’s a short performance and it combines all of Shatner’s signature tics in one package.  It has the weird pauses, the meaningless syllable stress changes in dialog and his truly embarrassing facial expressions trying to convey inappropriate emotions.  It is a masterclass in bad acting with bad singing thrown into the bargain for free.

And it is important to have a ShatnerKhan.  As we all know Bill Shatner was born in 1931.  He will be ninety-five in 2026 if he makes it to March 22nd.  And honestly, he’s starting to look a little raggedy.  So now is definitely a good time to review his many achievements and mock him relentlessly.

In addition, it’s also an excuse to eat extremely fattening foods and sit around and shoot the breeze with my old friends.  We’re not getting any younger either and it’s time to catch up on what’s gone on over the last year or two.  There are milestones and family stuff and plans to make for the upcoming year and now is the best time before we all get swamped with work and other commitments.

So it is with a light heart that I announce this incredible event.  Will we wear the Shatner masks from the “Halloween” movies (probably not, they’re really uncomfortable and would stop us from continuously eating)?  Will we watch any of the Star Trek movies like parts of the Wrath of Khan with the famous “Khaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!!! Moment (probably not, too much work to tee up)?  Will we eat and drink way too much food and dessert?  There I can answer categorically and emphatically Yes!!!  Of course, there is the danger of bad weather upending our plans and causing a cancellation.  This is after all Dunwich, a cursed land with endless evil bleeding into everything including the weather.  But we are intrepid individuals and fear no evil.  So SHATNERKHAN X !!!!!!!

Now You See it, Now You Don’t

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After any significant snowfall we now experience an obligatory freezing rain follow-up.  So, I wake up this morning to both driveways essentially skating rinks.  For fun I took a shovel as a rudder to keep my balance and stepped onto the steep top of the lower driveway and allowed gravity to propel me forward.  It was smooth as glass and by the time I got to the bottom, I was moving pretty fast.  So, I leaned over and headed for a snow bank.

I spent about two hours sanding the top driveway (the bottom one was hopeless) and then went out to buy another 360 pounds of sand for the future.  Of course, after lunch it started raining hard and the 45–50-degree temperature melted most of the ice on both driveways.  Well, what can you do?  Basically, I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t so, “Yay New England!”

So that put the kibosh on my plan to get finished with the marketing chores I need to perform for the book launch.  But I’ll get going soon.

I read some more news items on-line.  This is a seriously mixed-up world both domestically and internationally.  But I remain optimistic that the Trump administration can make a substantial difference in the lives of Americans if he keeps his eyes on the factors that are limiting the ability of young people to marry and have children.  If he finds ways to address this; some kind of Marshall Plan for this country I think he can get the Zoomers solidly in his camp.

And I’m not saying that will be easy.  Our economy is seriously distorted by the off-shoring of manufacturing.  But Trump has a lot of levers he can push to force business to do his bidding.  And I think he should use every last one of them to restore the middle-class.  Everyone since Aristotle has known that only countries with a large thriving middle-class are worth living in.  I think he should build houses and pay women to stay home and have kids.  If enough incentives are offered, I think it would change the direction of our demographic collapse and at the same time make this a much more human and interesting place.

Well, we’ll have to see if Donald is up to the challenge of “making America great again.”  And without a doubt I’m rooting for him.  I hope he doesn’t get too wrapped up with his Venezuela project or spend too much time refereeing the Ukrainians and Russians.  I’m satisfied with leaving the Europeans to muddle through that disaster on their own.  There’s nothing but death and misery happening there.

So, as we approach the New Year, I’m still mostly optimistic about 2026.  I think the economy is starting to show signs of life and that could make a big difference for the mid-year elections.  If by some stroke of luck, we hold onto the House and Senate it’s possible Trump will talk the Senate into abolishing the filibuster and just pass a bunch of laws that will make this country normal again (like having a balanced budget!).

Well, that’s enough for now.