You’ll have noticed I’ve not been around here much in the past few weeks. It’s essay season at uni and writing 12,500 words on social work has left me with very few words for The Zero. After all, there are only 12,504 words in the English language, leaving me with just “bastard”, “plinth” and “truncated cuboctahedron” and it’s tough getting a blog entry out of those. I started one a few weeks ago about plans to sit a truncated cuboctahedron of questionable parentage atop a plinth in Times Square as a piece of consciousness-raising performance art but it just wasn’t hanging together.

I digress. Time now for the traditional announcement of the Charity of the Month, preceded by the more traditional apology for the delay in the announcement of the Charity of the Month. This being December, and December incorporating Christmas, I thought I’d go for something seasonal and festive and Christmassy.

I thought at first of donating to the Cliff Richard Memorial Foundation but after considerable time spent in the office of the Charity Regulators it appears Cliff is sadly still very much alive. I then thought about giving to Christian Aid in this time of Christian celebration but my atheism kicked in and I found myself instead leaving a flaming bag of Richard Dawkins’s poo on the doorstep of our local church. I then thought about giving to a charity supporting homeless people as there’s something particularly awful about people being on the streets at Christmas but I then I realised actually there isn’t. Being homeless on the 2,010th anniversary of a guy’s birthday isn’t any better or any worse than on any other day and I don’t want to feed the idea that concern for homeless people is for Christmas, not just for life. We’ll do them in the new year when no one can mistake our intentions for anything. Long story not actually shortened, this all led me to a group who really do suffer particularly at Christmas: Turkeys.

As we speak millions of them are being Twizzled to within an inch of their life. Then another couple of inches until they’re dead, ready to have stuffing shoved up their lifeless arseholes to make their corpses as tasty as possible. As the saying goes, every time a bell rings a turkey gets hung upside down, dunked in electrified water and killed via a knife to the throat. It’s a lovely tradition, second only to the systemised sodomy of a thousand disabled starlings at Passover.

I’m giving to the Vegetarian Society. They do good stuff for newbie vegetarians like yourself and their site has been useful for the vegetarian section of The Zero. By which I mean they’ve not sued me yet for nicking large parts of it. You can donate too, here, and then track down a slab of unsatisfying nut roast mush for Christmas Day. Festivus wishes to you all!

Photo credit: The Zero