Incoming!!

It's going to happen. Really soon. You know it is.

The annual not-news story on just how much, in today's money, it would cost someone to actually give their true love all the presents cited in "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Every damn year they haul out this piece of crap, update it, and hand it out to chuckling anchors at local news stations, where it is read just as if it is the cutest thing imaginable and has never been heard of before.

Kill me now.

Let's see... What other poxy repeats are we treated to every year at this time? The just-past stupid news story about the President "pardoning" a Thanksgiving turkey. Traffic reports centering on access roads leading to shopping malls. Anti-fur demonstrators. Nervous reports on whether retail sales are up to expectations. All culminating in the ridiculous play-acting on Dec. 24 in which TV weathermen pretend to use "their" weather radar to track Santa's progress.

It's bad enough that worthy stories are crowded off the news because they're too much trouble to investigate and too controversial to broadcast. But when the opposite happens -- when the news fills up with junk on slow news days -- the television newscasts are still just as long. The amount of news expands to fill the time allotted; and if it's broadcast on a news show, it's "news," right?

This just in: there really are such things as reindeer.