Leonard has been with me for almost 5 years now, but I fear he is dying.

Leonard is my 1996 Chevy Lumina. I do not mean to lead my faithful listeners into lust and envy by describing such a vehicle - I am merely a lucky man who has been fortunate enough to command one of the most powerful and dynamic machines ever to grace American roadways. The Lumina.

When I sit in Leonard, I often feel the urge to hold my sword aloft and shout, “To Valhalla!” as he speeds me away from my lonely, miserable existance, and onward towards the light of honor and freedom. When I am in the bowels of my steed Leonard, I no longer feel that I am unpleasant to look at, or that my presence saps the energy of all around me because I can’t shut up about whatever it is I’m obsessed with on that particular day. No, Leonard makes me into more than an awkward, annoying man. In Leonard I am a Norse god, thundering across the skies like a Viking warship with an automatic transmission and busted water pump. In Leonard, I swiftly dispense justice to the masses writhing below, leaking oil and antifreeze onto them like a benevolent deity, quenching the oil-lust of the teeming earth-bound mortals that I keep vigil over.

So long story short, Leonard’s pretty sweet. I’m going to miss that dirty blue piece of crap.

I’m a dear fan of the Simpsons - I think it’s one of the greatest shows of all time, and I watch it nearly every day.

Having said that, it has become clear to me that Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons, is a corporate whore.

One of the little stocking-stuffers I got for Christmas was a Simpsons 2004 day-by-day calendar. It was a nice little gift, but when I opened it up at my desk this morning it became clear that the item itself was cheap, flimsy, and posessed nary an ounce of the wit and humor of the show itself.

This has been true from the earliest days of those godforsaken “Don’t have a cow, man!” Bart t-shirts, and pop crossover songs urging all of us to do the Bartman.

Even a cursory browse through a Simpsons fan site will demonstrate the volume of crappy merchanidise is out there with the Simpsons logo cynically slapped onto it. Simpsons playing cards! Simpsons trading cards! Simpsons trivia game! Simpsons Monopoly! Simpsons dioramas! Simpsons action figures! Simpsons cough drops! Simpsons leaf blowers! Simpsons herbal conditioner!

If the show weren’t as good as it is, it’d be enough to make me hate it. As it is, it’s only enough to make me hold a grudge against Mr. Groening.

But no matter how big a fan I am, there is no possible excuse for this abomination:

I got sucker punched yesterday.

I’m a Minnesota Vikings fan, and this game left me a shell of a man.

A few years back, a columnist on ESPN.com wrote an article called the Levels of Losing. In it, he detailed the degrees of how your team losing affects their fans. The Vikings loss yesterday ranks up at a Level II: The Sucker Punch. The guy who wrote this is called the Sports Guy, and his stuff is definitely worth checking out, as it’s regularly hilarious.

So I had some ideas on a funny “Welcome Back!!!!!!” kind of blog entry for today, but I’m just not feeling up to it. I’m not feeling suicidal or anything, it just feels like a general malaise has fallen. I feel as if my soul has eaten too much fruit and now it’s feeling kind of sick and wants to go to the bathroom, but nothing comes out and so it just sits on the toilet for a while until the blood flow to its legs gets cut off but it doesn’t care because it feels dead anyway and because it’s reading a harrowing tale of survival in Readers Digest.

I’ll be back tomorrow with more jovial frivolity and good-natured merriment. Until then, you’ll find me with a dazed look in my eyes and my soul trying to take a crap while reading Readers Digest back issues.

The John Larroquette project will be going on a short hiatus over the Christmas holiday, as I will be travelling to visit my family. My family lives without internet access in the black Austro-Hungarian forests with a band of cave-dwelling gypsies and magyars, and I will have to adapt to their dark mysticisms and centuries-old superstitions that forbid blogging or any blog titles that reference Emmy-winning actors from the mid-80’s. If my clan were to find out about the John Larroquette Project, it would surely tear them apart and I would be banished to the cold Hessian seaports or a Bavarian hut-village.

To keep you happy during this weeklong break, I would like to share this with you:

My favorite Onion article of all time.

It is so brutally and inappropriately hilarious that I might even categorize it as sublime.

Happy holidays!

My sister Julia is in China at the moment. She spent almost a year there last year teaching English before being sent home because of SARS, and now she’s back for her sentimental farewell tour.

Some of the stuff she told me about her experiences were amazing, some disgusting (the sight of a dead woman floating in the Yellow River, for instance), and some hilarious. I always particularly enjoyed hearing about the Americanized names that her students chose. She liked to suggest names from her family to them, but whenever she suggested the name Peter, they had trouble pronouncing it, and it came out sounding like Beetle. In the end, I think we can all agree that Beetle’s a pretty awesome name anyway, so one guy in China lucked out there.

Other students liked picking words that described them for their names. So she had a student named Lazy. A good friend of hers was named Super. What goes on in the mind of a man who decides that he is such a tremendous person that his name must be changed to Super? “Wow, I am incredibly amazing. I am awesome. I can’t even fathom my own greatness! Henceforth, I’d like all of you to refer to me as Super. Thanks everybody!”

One student was named Spray. SPRAY. I love that this person couldn’t find a suitable adjective to describe themselves, so they chose an arbitrary word. I love the idea so much that from here on out, my new name is Stapler.

I also enjoyed hearing about the popular music in China. For example the song, “Right Here Waiting” by Richard Marx is just about the most popular song in the history of China. It gets pulled out and performed over and over again. Julia told me of a few tours that she went on which ended with the tour guide saying “Thank you for coming on the tour with us today. You’ve been a wonderful group. I would like to sing to you. ‘Wewewer you go, whatewer you do, I wiw be wight hewe waiting fow you’”

So from the communism of Karl Marx…

To the sweet pop stylings of Richard Marx…

You’ve come a long way China! Keep it up with your growing economic power and that whole forced abortions thing!

Every now and again, I hope to use the John Larroquette Project to direct people to other internet sites or blogs that I really enjoy.

My friend Pete lives out in LA and works for a show currently on the WB network. This is a moderately interesting-sounding profession that has allowed him to meet some cool people. Pete recently told me about his friend who has a blog called The Sneeze. I checked it out, and it’s probably the most consistantly entertaining blog I’ve come across on the web. His style is incicisive and sometimes a bit crude, but entertainingly bizarre and suprisingly well-researched.

Click here for my personal favorite article from The Sneeze!

In other news, my workplace has recently added some holiday decorations. At first, the decorations were limited to some paper snowflakes hanging from the ceiling and a few innocuous red bows hanging from cubicle walls.

However, they’ve now taken it upon themselves to include a few beligerant decorations in the area immediately surrounding my cube. So now I’ve got a huge tissue-paper Christmas tree and about 800 silver balloons floating in my immediate vicinity that I have to look at all day. The silver balloons are particularly annoying as they keep reflecting light back at me and it’s distracting.

I think I need to find whoever thought that this would boost holiday spirit around this place and punch them right in their fat mouth. Then, as that person lurches forward, bleeding from their mouth and moaning haggardly, they would hopefully fall right into the column of balloons and maybe one of the ballons would pop and fly down their throat, choking them to death in an darkly ironic display of death by holiday cheer.

Happy holidays to all of you!