It's Christmastime (in Hollis, Queens) and money's tight. Thankfully, there's an easy option more and more folks are using to shore up precious cash: bilking the United States Navy for millions of dollars! It's easy, apparently, and everyone's doing it.

Orwhy not save cash by helping along your nation's proud tradition of gluttony and violent consumer greed?

Meanwhile, your military is doing its part to bolster our reputation abroad. Even as the US presses Afghanistan to sign an agreement allowing soldiers to stay in the country another decade, we droned a toddler Thursday.

I'm tired—dog tired—of slipping morose updates about healthcare.gov into these things. But this one's different! The Obama Administration is saying it will meet a promised December 1 deadline for ratcheting up the site's capabilities. Which is great, except for all the other problems.

China just sort of imagined a new "defense zone" over the East China Sea a week ago, and has since been tautologically forbidding anyone to fly through without its express permission. No one's paying that much mind, which prompted the country to launch fighter jets Friday to determine just who was making their way through the zone. It was us and the Japanese. Air carriers are being warned to steer clear of the zone, for now.

An 85-year-old Korean War veteran who thought it would probably be a good idea to travel to North Korea—it never is—has been held prisoner for around a month. Now, the North Korean government has released a video of Merrill Newman confessing to sundry misdeeds—war crimes, some, but also bringing a book critical of North Korea into North Korea. Sadly, it appears Merrill's English is slipping in his twilight years, because the Guardian notes the statement was "riddled with stilted English and grammatical errors, such as 'I want not punish me'." Curious.

A former US Marine, accused in a "thrill-kill rampage" in which he stabbed four homeless people, apparently was able to slowly collect small amounts of the cleanser Ajax while in jail. He ate it all Wednesday. He won't face murder charges, after all.

Thai protestors seeking the ouster of the country's prime minister have grown newly violent in recent days.

In airborne mayhem: A police helicopter crashes into a Glasgow pub packed with Glaswegians. Probably there is a joke, here. Also a lot of terror and tragedy. And a small plane goes down in remote Alaska.

Serious question: If Alabama is the pre-eminent college football state in the country, what precisely does that say about college football?

Someone tell my computer it's after 8 am. There is NO REASON why that widget needs to be purple.

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This, judging from the reaction, was one of the best things my girlfriend had ever seen. I was amused but sad, too, because probably what you don't see is all the dicks—literal, physical dicks— that sat on screen through this guy's performance. Chatroulette, y'all. It's still a thing. (Potentially NSFW, but dick free.)