Joel Krupnik and Mildred Castellanos seem to have got quite annoyed at the commercialisation and secularisation of Christmas. And so they’ve come up with some, ahem, ‘different’ decorations:

[They have] decked the front of their Manhattan mansion this year with a scene that includes a knife-wielding 5-foot-tall St. Nick and a tree full of decapitated Barbie dolls. Hidden partly behind a tree, the merry old elf grasps a disembodied doll’s head with fake blood streaming from its eye sockets.

And their exact justification for this?

“Christmas has religious origins,” he said. “It’s in the Bible. Santa is not in the Bible. He’s not a religious symbol.”

Of course, whether or not Christmas has religious origins largely depends on your point of view. Even if you accept that the Christmas story is a religious basis for Christmas, the celebration is very much a Roman thing, instituted by the Emperor Constantine when he was converted to Christianity.

And either way, these decorations don’t really spread any Christian message… But I guess they are quite funny.

Regular visitors will have noticed the re-appearance of ads on the site. There is one ad per page, up at the top.

The site has been ad-free for a number of months now, but sites cost money to run, and as traffic continues to grow, so do costs. So ads are back, at least for a trial period, but the site remains, of course, completely free of commercial interference in the decisions taken as to what is posted. If that makes sense. Frankly, it probably doesn’t, so just read the legal bumpf found at the bottom of the sidebar if you’re especially worried. Which, frankly, you’re not.

Since I haven’t done a ‘This Blogging Month’ type post for a while, I might as well give you a quick update on site performance: The site’s millionth hit this year was reached last month, and the site is continuing to attract over 4,000 hits per day, or over 120,000 per month. Most visitors to the site are from the States (nearly a third, in fact).

So there’s a very brief update for you, and I hope you don’t find the advertising too intrusive.

Who can resist Simon Hoggart’s description of Hilary Armstrong’s ridiculous behaviour at PMQs, and Cameron’s rebuke yesterday:

Hilary Armstrong, the Labour chief whip, started shouting, as she often does. She is the Commons’ bag lady, railing against anyone who hasn’t given her 20p. Mr Cameron broke off. “That’s the problem with these exchanges. The chief whip on the Labour side shouting like a child. Now, has she finished?” he yelled at her. “Have you finished? Right!”

It was a terrific coup de theatre.

I personally thought Cameron did extremely well at his first PMQs, and quite clearly left Blair flustered. I have to say, though, that I was far more impressed with his fantasically timed ‘absolutely’ when questioned about education reforms, than with his clearly rehearsed ‘You were the future once’. However, he certainly did much better than I had previously expected, and it makes his appointment all the more interesting.

Keeping with the Tories, but away from Camerson, The Grauny’s Wrap really amused me today, in relation to the Express’s response to Margaret Thatcher’s brief hospital admission:

The Express … front page, like the Mirror’s, is given over to Margaret Thatcher’s admission to hospital last night after complaining of feeling faint.

The former PM, now 80, is “stable and comfortable”, the Guardian reports, but it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the Express, while an unabashed fan of the Iron Lady, would prefer it if her condition was worse. A strap at the bottom of the front page, inviting you to turn to page five, tells readers that Baroness Thatcher was “weak and frail in last interview with the Daily Express.”

Whether this is technically correct in the sense that the Express intends to conduct no further interviews with her, a person normally has to die before you can start talking about the “last interview”.

You have to love the tabloids.

Pre-budget statement? African earthquake? Saddam trial?

No way… Not when there’s ‘MAN OFFERS GIRL, 11, LIFT IN HIS CAR‘. Stop the presses!

You’ve got to love local news:

The man … is believed to be in his 40s and bald, with only a little bit of hair at the sides

You really couldn’t make it up.

As the Conservative leadership content heats up to an almost tepid finale, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the next General Election will be fought between Gordon Brown and David. But which David? Well, Cameron, most probably. Let’s be realistic here. The chances of David Davis winning are – well – low. This represents an interesting moment in modern politics – the heavyweight, overbearing Labourite vs the touchy-feely everyman Conservative. Reverse the party allegiances, and that could’ve been written ten years ago. Well, maybe not. John Major was never exactly heavyweight or overbearing, but he was clearly very ‘establishment’, which Brown also has a flavour of. Or summert.

My point (if I have one) is that the electorate appear to be looking for a change in leadership style, and bizarrely it’s Labour who are likely to supply this, while the Conservatives are desperately trying to emulate Blair. Which is somewhat unusual, and seemingly unwise.

But perhaps the Conservatives aren’t going for the Blairite approach at all. Perhaps they’re actually trying on the ‘chat-show Charlie’ Lib Dem approach, given that Charlie Kennedy is seemingly the most liked of the party leaders. If Cameron can manage to turn the Conservatives into something resembling a modern party, where a wide range of views are held, openly discussed, and considered, instead of the Labour approach of everybody being whipped into Tone-clones, then maybe he’ll be very successful. But then, when the Conservative party get talking, they seem to suddenly discover that they really don’t like each other, and re-enter the wilderness years where a number of factions roughly equal to the number of Conservative MPs appear, and no-one quite knows what’s going on, or what the party stand for, but are united in their dislike for the current leader. And the next leader. And possibly the one after that, too.

It seems rather cruel to criticise Cameron before he’s even taken office. But heck, since when has that stopped me? At the end of the day, in all likelihood he’ll do a reasonably good job. But without the united support of the party, that’ll mean nothing.