Sssh. Do not tell. The Czar has completed his Christmas shopping for the others. Fortunately, as you know, they do not actually read the Czar’s posts, so we can be quite safe here.

For GorT, the Czar got him one of those Kinect boxes for the Xbox 360. We do not actually have a 360 at the Castle; but GorT wants to attach one to his ocular inputs to see what it sees. You have to remember that GorT is an impressive piece of 51st Century technology; Christmas is a little different in the future. Actually, it is a lot different. Christmas trees are gone, of course, because of the totally unpredicted Global Stabilization of the 22rd Century. Santa has been reduced to a 30-second public service announcement on radio, and the Bible 3.1 podcast is available for download at Starbucks Megamalls. Oddly, though, A Christmas Story still shows 24 hours a day.

For ‘Puter, he just gets the cardboard box the Kinect came in. He’ll stand there for hours in front of it, dancing and wiggling, and trying to get Sleestak’s attention. Of course, it’ll just be a cardboard box. ‘Puter probably won’t even put it near a television.

The Mandarin is tough to shop for. We bought him a Wii last year, and he turned it into an orbiting weapon platform. One does not wish to guess how one uses the DeathChucks that he created for it. But he did get himself a Blu-Ray player, so the Czar was going to get him some Region 51 titles for it. Maybe Toto…Live At the Budokan, Blown Away, Hauptmann Unterwassermensch und die Himmelunkraut von Neptun, Never Been Kissed, and Iron Man 4.

As for the Volgi, he’s getting a book he’s been after for a while: Yumuşak: How the Turks Opted For A Háček Symbol Rather Than An Umlaut Or Cedilla. Bit of a dry read, one fears. 611 pages (not including notes, bibliography, and index). Curiously, it is outselling Olbermann’s by a wide margin on Amazon. The Czar owes him, because the Volgi was nice enough to get us a book last year called Things You Stick Through People. That was an awesome book. Came with a pull-out poster that is still taped to the wall of our Castle cubicle.

You might wonder about Sleestak, who takes an awful lot of crap from us but does a pretty good job of running things at the Castle (including most of the Tcho-Tchos, except the hotel cleaning staff, who report to Mrs. Pestitch). The Czar is getting him a box of those giant hissing cockroaches and a bottle of vişinată. Kind of a gift basket, you know?

Dat Ho gets nothing because he has been beyond bad. The other day, the Czar caught him momentarily looking out a window, doubtless thinking about stealing some of Mandarin’s expensive cufflinks to fence on the streets so he can buy medicine. But Dat has a bad attitude about Christmas anyway. You should see the ridiculous Christmas picture he drew on the inside of his sleeping box—it was a picture of him beating Santa Claus with a hammer! The kid is so goofy—first, he draws Santa with a black beard like the Czar’s, and for some reason he drew Santa wearing our clothing and talking like us. Crazy kid. Ya wonder what goes on in his little head.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.