A Very Mutant Christmas!

To Whom It May Concern:
I wanted to send some sort of holiday greeting to my friends and colleagues, but it is so difficult in today's world to know exactly what to say without offending someone. So I met with my solicitor yesterday, and on his advice I wish to say the following:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced with the most enjoyable traditions of religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.

I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted Gregorian calendar year 2011, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make our country great and without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishes.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms: This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher. No trees or animals were harmed in the sending of this message.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

And since this is the season to be jolly, please enjoy the following -

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Printed in the Miami Herald

A mutant tree all aglowBY DAVE BARRY
[This classic Dave Barry column was originally published Dec. 14, 1997.]

Tis that special time of year, The Holiday Retail Purchasing Season, a time when we traditionally print heartwarming human-interest stories designed to make you feel better about running up a level of debt normally associated with Mexico.
I have such a heartwarming story, which was published by The London Times and sent in by alert reader John Nicholls. The story, which I am not making up, concerns a man named Neil from Devon, England, who discovered an owl nesting in his garden. Each night, Neil would go outside and hoot to the owl. To his delight, he'd hear a hoot in reply; then he'd hoot some more.
This went on night after night, month after month; Neil even kept a log of his conversations with the owl. Then one day, Neil's wife got to talking about this with a neighbor, who said that her husband, whose name is Fred, had also been going out every night to hoot to the owl. At this point, the women realized that their husbands had in fact spent an entire year hooting to each other. The owl was not involved at all. The owl was probably inviting its owl friends over to drink owl beer and listen to these two hooting twits and laugh until they fell off the branch.
I admit that this heartwarming story is not directly related to the holiday season, but doesn't it make you feel better? You can say to yourself: "Maybe I will go broke this holiday season, and maybe I will wind up hospitalized with injuries sustained in hand-to-hand combat with other parents over who gets to buy the last Beanie Baby at the Toys Sure `R' Expensive store, but at least I will not be spending my evenings standing in some cold, damp English garden exchanging hoots with a man named Fred!''
Yes, this is a time of year to count our blessings. Here's another one: Thanks to science, we may soon have a new, mutant Christmas tree. I have here an Associated Press article, sent in by many alert readers, about a plant scientist at the University of California at Davis who has isolated a certain gene from a fish that glows in the dark. The scientist's idea is to put this gene into a Christmas tree, which would result in -- you guessed it -- a Christmas tree that eats worms!
No, seriously, it will be a Christmas tree that glows in the dark. Isn't that wonderful?
No, it is not. I speak on behalf of every person who has ever attempted to put a Christmas tree into a Christmas-tree stand, only to wind up on the floor, covered with sap and thousands of pine-needle stab marks. Because the Christmas tree is the most vicious predator in the entire tree kingdom. You know how sometimes hikers disappear in the forest, and their decomposed bodies are found months later, and the authorities blame it on ``exposure''?
Did you ever stop to ask yourself: Exposure to what? I'll tell you what: Christmas trees. They travel in packs and can strike like lightning with a variety of weapons.
FIRST CORONER: What do we have here?
SECOND CORONER: It appears to be another victim of ''exposure.'' Take a look at this.
FIRST CORONER: Wow! I've never seen a pine cone there before!
But as dangerous as Christmas trees can be in the wild, they are far more deadly when you corner one in your house and try to put a tree stand on it.
So here's what I want to know: If scientists are going to impart a new quality to Christmas trees, why would that quality be the ability to glow in the dark? What we consumers want in our Christmas trees is the quality of not poking us in the eye, combined with the quality of not always keeling over like fraternity brothers on Intravenous Vodka Night. I say if we're going to inject genes into Christmas trees, let's take these genes from some rigid, immobile organism, such as Robert Stack.
Maybe what we're dealing with here is a scientific fad. I say this because of another AP story, also sent in by many alert readers, concerning scientists at Osaka University in Japan who have, using DNA obtained from a jellyfish, managed to create -- I am not making this up, either -- a glow-in-the-dark mouse. Why would they do this? Do they think regular mice are not already alarming enough? Do they think we want to come into our kitchen at 3 a.m. to enjoy a nutritious snack of congealed pizza, only to be confronted by glowing rodents scuttling around like something out of ''The X-Files''? And what will happen when -- it's only a matter of time -- some scientist has one too many glasses of sake and decides to put some jellyfish DNA into a Christmas tree? Good luck getting THAT thing into a tree stand!
FIRST CORONER: Take a look at this.
SECOND CORONER: Wow! Looks like that pine cone was inserted with some kind of tentacle!

I've run out of space here, so let me just close this heartwarming holiday column by extending my sincerest generic wishes to each and every one of you, especially Neil and Fred, to whom I say, from the bottom of my heart: "Hoot."

A Mighty Wind

Hello World,

And so here we are at last, hard upon the very last Sunday in Advent, ready or not, and nothing left between us and the jolly old elf himself, except for a few measly days, and after that, all bets are off. For the woefully unprepared among us (and believe me, we know who we are) these last few days will be a mad scramble to the stores at the last minute, and hoping to make gifts out of things like alarm clocks, scented candles, fuel injector cleaner and other items commonly found in supermarkets. This is no time for the faint-hearted, and I can already tell you from experience that wishing it away is also not going to solve any problems at this point. But I will say to those smug over-achievers out there who have long since wrapped up their holiday details to perfection, and way ahead of time, if anyone comes up to you on Christmas morning with a hastily wrapped set of steak knives or tire pressure gauge, please be kind.

In other seasonal news, last Saturday we took a trip to our local VFW to pick out a Christmas tree, as we do every year, and glad to have a beautiful day for the occasion as well. Although I will say that shopping for a tree in the rain, snow, or bitter cold does tend to cut down on the crowds dramatically, as we have found out over the years when we've done exactly that. We didn't really find much to like in the selection this time around, as the larger trees seemed much too overwhelming, and the others seemed too puny or unremarkable. Of course, it can be difficult to tell when they're outside, and we always think the trees are too small, and yet when we finally get one home, we find out that it's just right, and lucky that it fits into our living room without having to cut a lot off of it. That happened once again, where we settled on one with a nice shape, but not tall, and when we put it in the tree stand and stood it up, it just barely had room enough at the top for the angel, and if she had a bouffant hairdo, she never would have made it at all. This tree is not as broad around as many of our gargantuan trees of the past, which turned out to be just as well under the circumstances. Alert readers may recall that we now have so much extra stuff in living room - for instance, my camping supplies and Halloween decorations that I don't dare put back in the attic because of the darned furry varmints chewing on them, thanks not - that if it was any wider, there would not be room to get around it on any side. Bill did his usual heroic job putting all the sparkling lights on it, and now it looks just like a beautiful Christmas card, that is, if your typical Christmas card had camping supplies and Halloween decorations in the background.

Speaking of trees, we had our own early Christmas mini miracle recently, when a nasty storm squall moved through the area, and while it seemed no big deal at the time, it still managed to leave a narrow swath of damage in its wake. Although not on a grand scale, it was still disruptive, with local street flooding, households without electricity, and the odd tree that toppled over here or there. One of the topplers was our neighbors' dogwood, and we were sorry to see it go, as its cheery white blossoms in the spring have been a perennial treat over the years. Dogwoods aren't tall trees, but as close as it was, if it had fallen straight sideways, it would have easily taken out the whole side of our house, and made a heck of a mess in the process. If it had gone the other way, it would have crashed right through our neighbors' verandah, and in almost any other direction, would have collided with the other trees and bushes around it. The miracle was that it somehow managed to tumble over into our driveway, in the only direction where it absolutely missed every single thing it would have hit at any other angle, so that besides itself, the only other casualty of the disaster was the poor ratty spindly fence with all the missing slats. The tree was right next to the fence, so there was no place to go, and it took out a 12-foot section of it, which was no great loss, since most of that section had no slats as it was, and just the rail segments were left to indicate where the fence should have been. Bill came home from work and spotted it while he was backing up the driveway as usual, which was a good thing, because if it had been me, I probably would have driven right into it, not expecting it to be there, even though it was right in front of my face. The neighbors bustled on over and had it all cleaned up in a hurry, and seemed glad for an excuse to buy a new chainsaw for the purpose, which prompted me to trot out that age-old adage, "It's an ill wind that blows no good." Unfortunately, we noticed later that it was that same old ill wind that also blew out one of the windows in our porch downstairs, and took out the poor vintage wind-chimes right along with it, which after many decades of hanging around unmolested indoors, were no match for sudden violent winds that ripped through the empty window pane, and the ill-fated chimes flew apart in every direction. I was able to rescue the frame and a couple of the pieces are still attached, but having nothing to be in direct contact with, what we basically have now is the Marcel Marceau version of wind-chimes, certainly not an improvement over the originals, I can tell you that.

And while we're on the subject of new and improved, Bill discovered that there has been a new version of Sherlock Holmes running on public television, which is set in modern times and is very entertaining. They have taken the original stories by A. Conan Doyle and revised them to reflect modern technology and methods, while still retaining the unique qualities of the characters and their interactions. Purists may scoff, but it's really very inventive and charming in its own quirky way. The narrative never lags, and the tales tend to charge along like a runaway freight train, and at the end of another breathless bumpy ride, you realize once again that this is not your grandfather's Sherlock Holmes. You might be on the lookout for it if you're interested, and it's from our friends at Mantelpiece Theater, who are famous for their high quality productions, although most people know them by a different name. It was probably 40 years ago that PBS asked Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame) to record a fund-raising announcement for their pledge drive, which he did with good grace and patented deadpan humor. He asked for viewer support so that the stations could continue to provide the esteemed programming they were so well known for, such as what he described as: "Sesame Sleep," "The Ascent of Bill Moyers Journal," and "Mantelpiece Theater." These were close enough to the actual titles to sound vaguely plausible, especially with a cultured British accent, but when you think about it, were really pretty funny. I always thought that Mantelpiece Theater was a great name, perhaps better than the real one, and find myself using it more often than not. By the way, can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Sleep?

Also not saying what they mean (one hopes) the new interim pastor at our church recently used the term "falling on my sword" in a sermon, in a way that would have made the language perfectionists run screaming for the exits. He chose it as a bad idiom that he wanted to mean "all screwed up" or "making a mess of things," in the same way you might say "I really blew it" or "I had the chance, but I shot myself in the foot." The dinosaurs and other curmudgeons (who shall remain nameless but look suspiciously like me) didn't sleep right through that, because as far as I'm aware, it doesn't mean that at all. If you look up idioms with our friends at The Free Dictionary online, you'll find that they say it means to accept defeat, and especially in a figurative sense to be willing (or more usually, in the negative sense of being unwilling) to act as a scapegoat and make a show of accepting responsibility for a defeat, often in place of someone more culpable. This sense is routinely used in politics or big business shenanigans, when the usual sports metaphors are simply inadequate. Of course, idioms can be slippery characters and hard to pin down, but I always caution against using them when you're not entirely sure that it conveys the meaning that is called for. Nothing shoots down a comparison faster than a misused idiom, especially when trying to make a point. One of my coworkers would regularly use the term "pushing the envelope" to describe her children getting on her nerves, while another calls on "outside of the box" in the place of "outside of the loop," and yet another just told me that we "had to get all our ducks in a row" when we were putting chairs around a table. Frankly, I was going to call out the Idiom Police before things got completely out of hand, but I just noticed that it's way past my bedtime, and long past the hour that I should be getting to Sesame Sleep.

Elle

Pay The Piper

Hello World,

Of course, everyone knows how I hate to be an alarmist, but the 12th will be the third Sunday in Advent already, as impossible as that might appear to believe at this point, with Christmas itself still seemingly weeks away yet, and plenty of candles remaining to go in Advent. The problem is that Christmas is on a Saturday this year, so there is actually a whole week left after the fourth Sunday in Advent before Christmas ever gets here, and so Advent seems to have started way too early, while that is not actually the case. Depending on whether the 25th falls on a Saturday, Sunday or Monday, November 27th is the earliest that you can have the first Sunday in Advent, and December 3rd is the latest it can happen. This time around, it was November 28th, which is pretty darned early, and seems like we're going to have to break out the wreath stretcher to make Advent last all the way until Christmas finally gets around to being here. I'm thinking that Santa's got to have some juice in that sleigh to pull this one off, or everyone's going to be standing around on Christmas morning and wondering where it all went wrong. Personally, I'd be checking the Advent schedulers to see if they got into the holiday eggnog a little too early this year.

Speaking of holiday cheer, it was at work earlier this week when I happened to overhear the Vice President of Finance apparently giving a pep talk to a vendor who had come to the hospital to complain about not being paid. The VP didn't want the poor man to feel singled out in this manner, and must have thought it would cheer him up to know that he was in the same boat as numerous other creditors all anxiously waiting for their money, and hopefully not in vain. "Don't worry!" he exclaimed, clapping the fellow on the back jovially, "It's the same way for everyone else too. It's not just you, we haven't been paying anybody. I've been telling everybody that we're like crime, and you know, crime doesn't pay." I actually thought that was a pretty funny line for what is essentially a glorified bean counter at the hospital, although perhaps not exactly the moral high road that we might have been aiming for.

In the realm of technology news, we inadvertently found a way to save a lot of money, which should come in handy these days with the economy the way it is, and we weren't even trying at the time. We have a very old hand-made four-poster bed, and unlike modern beds, has plenty of room underneath - perhaps in the event, 150 years ago, that someone needed to suddenly hide from marauding bandits, there would be someplace right at hand for this purpose. With both the mattress and box spring, the surface of the bed is almost 36 inches above the floor, and having something to step up on is more a necessity than a luxury. In fact, there are some days when the thought of a step ladder doesn't seem like such a bad idea after all. In any case, having so much room under the bed makes it an ideal place to store off-season clothes or blankets, or other bulky items that simply have no place else to be stored. I have some zippered garment bags that I use for sheets, bedspreads, sweaters and the like, to keep them out of sight while still being close at hand. We noticed recently that one of our cats has taken to sleeping on top of the storage bags under the bed, and not limiting her options, moved from one to another, perhaps to find just the right fit. As a result, we discovered that we didn't need to buy any of those fancy expensive vacuum storage bags that they sell in late-night infomercials on TV, because she had managed to flatten everything inside the bags to a single dense layer, and squeeze all of the air out of the bags until they were perfectly flat, like the top of a picnic table, if it had been made out of fabric. So for a mere ten pounds' worth of cat, you can achieve the same effect, and I pass this along as a household tip for anybody, and not just the VP of Finance, who may be looking to save a buck or two.

In other animal news, we have this entry from Monday's newspaper in the Best Bets section of the TV listings:

=========================
"Rules of Engagement"
Audrey has a mentee who wants
to learn about publishing.
=========================

I have to say that I reject out of hand the idea that someone with a mentor is a "mentee," and that's all there is to it. Personally, I think it's a stupid word that sounds like some sort of ridiculous mythological creature from medieval days, when strolling troubadours carried the epic tales of giants, spirits and sea monsters like the fearsome Mentee, rising up out of the deep with eyes of fire and razor-sharp talons. ("Thar she blows, my lads," the captain did cry; "Steer clear of her tail or we'll all surely die.") Incredibly, it was the very next day that we watched an episode of 30 Rock where Jack was trying to find a worthy candidate to bestow his abundant mentoring skills upon, and used the term "mentee" repeatedly to describe this hypothetical individual. Inasmuch as I had never heard the term before, I thought it was more than a strange coincidence that it turned up twice in two days. And people can call me a hidebound traditionalist (they'd better not!) but I really don't have problems with similar words of this ilk, such as payee or attendee or designee - but when it comes to mentee, I just can't countenance this wholesale invention of frivolous sounds masquerading as real words, and that's not just the Mentos talking, believe me.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of the season, I was tossing together a holiday-themed newsletter last week, and was inspired to include the story behind the hymn "Silent Night," which I'm sure is well known to all, and beloved by everyone alike from the youngest school children to venerable oldsters, and anyone in between. It all began at a little church in Germany, just before their jubilant Christmas Eve service, when they discover to their horror that the organ bellows have been chewed through by mice, so the organ doesn't work, and they suddenly have to find some seasonal music that can be played in church without an organ, which at that time was such a radical concept as to be unthinkable. Luckily, local schoolteacher Franz Gruber springs to the rescue with his guitar, and at the eleventh hour, writes "Silent Night" on the back of a shovel with a piece of charcoal (here, the dinosaurs are trying to convince me that was Abraham Lincoln, but this is my story, and I'll tell it my way, thanks so very much not) and the rest, as they say, is history. Not so fast! As much as I hate to spoil a classic holiday legend for everyone, apparently the reality in the mice-chewing-the-bellows story is, well, not so much. Which is to say, the entire story is a complete and utter fabrication from whole cloth, with not a stitch of truth in it, from one end to the other, through and through, and no matter how you slice it. I have it on good authority from the official Silent Night web site (and you're welcome to go right ahead and visit http://www.silentnight/web.za and see for yourself) where they celebrate the simple yet touching story of Pastor Joseph Mohr, who took his poem "Stille Nacht" to his colleague Franz Gruber, who set it to music, whereupon it was sung at the Christmas Eve service in the Austrian village of Obendorf in 1818, and quickly became a runaway sensation, spreading like wildfire through the royal courts of Europe and far-flung churches the world over. That's the whole sum total of the tale, with nary a mouse to be seen, and I can't say that it's much of an improvement in any way, over the more colorful version that everyone knows and loves, and that's not just a load of charcoal, believe me. Obviously our official friends at the official site know nothing about marketing, and even more so, have learned nothing from the John Ford cinema classic "Liberty Valance," where the canny newspaperman, after being apprised of the actual story behind the famous event, rightly yields to the inevitable conclusion: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." They may say that truth is stranger than fiction, but it's usually a whole lot less interesting, and what I say is, give me mice chewing bellows any day. So here's a big fat holiday raspberry to the evil minions at the official Silent Night web site, for destroying centuries' worth of a perfectly fine holiday fable, and leaving us instead with a non-story that may as well be the history of an Austrian folk song about three goats and a milkmaid, for heaven's sake. No one's ever going to get rich with this measly and boring non-fiction, which I think is a crime, and after all, everyone knows that crime doesn't pay.

Elle

Spell Check

Hello World,

Happy Hanukkah! Or should I say, Chappy Chanukah, Xappy Xanuka, or Qappy Chanuqa? It seems that our friends at www.joemaller.com did an Internet search and turned up 16 different spellings for The Festival of Lights, which you couldn't help but think would be some sort of record. I realize that it's one of those movable feasts based on some arcane formula so that the date changes every year, but I wasn't aware that it's also such a slippery character in the name department that it's almost impossible to pin down, or even narrow down to under a dozen. This is what I would call the poster child of holidays with an identity crisis, if ever there was one, and somehow it seems to be getting worse rather than better, even after 5,771 years and counting. This fact was brought home in powerful fashion last week in the Life & Style section of our local newspaper -

========================
Pop-up shop offers
all things Hanukkah

Chanukah Wonderland, an all-things-
Hanukkah pop-up shop, is open now
through December 8.
=========================

Say what?! By golly, the dinosaurs and I can remember a time when there were literary standards in the press, and editors would tear off their right arm before they would let anyone spell the same word two different ways in the same paragraph, much less the same sentence, for heaven's sake. Times have certainly changed, and not for the better, I can tell you that. They didn't fare any better in the Best Bets from last Monday, with this capsule review of Hawaii Five-O:

========================
When a member of the security detail for an
upcoming Aid Summit is murdered before he
can reveal the details of an assassination plot
of a ruthless dictator.
========================

Well, that certainly leaves you hanging on the edge of your seat and waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it were, and then just falls off the table and keeps everyone dangling. This is what I consider a textbook example of people not bothering to go back and read what they've written, because all they needed to do in this case is remove the first word "when" and the description would have been perfectly fine. As it is, it leaves you perched on the edge of a narrative abyss, and no subordinate clause in sight to leap to the rescue. It got even worse on Saturday, with this synopsis, and I assure you that I use that word in the loosest possible interpretation of the term:

=========================
"A Star is Born" (1954, Drama)
A movie star with a stalled career meets and falls
in love with a simple showgirl after accidentally
ruining her act, but their relationship takes a halt.
=========================

Now, it must be said that "A Star is Born" is an iconic story, for many generations, which has been presented countless times in numerous formats, from print to stage to radio to cinema to television and back again, and beloved anew at every turn. Probably everyone has seen at least one version of it at some point along the line, and I would hazard a guess that even people who have never actually seen it, still understand what the story is all about. Which is more than I can say about that supposed "review" of it in the TV listings, which not only makes no sense grammatically, but halfway through, takes such a bizarre detour that it becomes completely incomprehensible, as well as being unrecognizable as the movie that they're trying to describe. I'm not sure that all the editors in the world would have been able to salvage that fiasco, except by sending the whole thing back to the drawing board and starting all over again.

Also not saying what they mean (one hopes) this next story turned into one of my favorites in a long time, beginning with a screaming headline on Thursday -

SEWAGE RELEASE UNREPORTED

Here again, the dinosaurs and I can remember a time when something that was unreported would not have made the front page of the newspaper, by the very fact that it was, as they said, unreported. Apparently the unreported release must have been reported (de-unreported?) at some later point in time, because the reporter goes on to report -

=========================
Westchester County dumped 4.4
million gallons of treated sewage
into the Hudson River, the largest
release in recent memory - and
didn't bother to tell the public.
=========================

There's the usual parade of environmental groups, community leaders, scientists and outraged citizens all bemoaning what they consider the county's egregious and underhanded tactics, while the county's response was to pooh-pooh the over-reaction of excitable and suggestible rubes. After all, they rationalized, it was winter after the beaches were closed, recreational boating had ended, and the discharge was chlorinated. This is my favorite part:

===========================
County Health Department spokeswoman
Caren Halbfinger said, "We've taken steps
to ensure that similar notifications will
occur throughout the year."
==========================

By that, we can assume that she means NO notifications, just like this time? That's the only thing I can think of that would be similar to this, which was that there was no notification, which I guess is what we can expect to continue throughout the year, and we'll be sure to recognize it, because there won't be any. That should be easy to spot, it would be the deafening stillness where the official notification should have been, but wasn't, because of a total disregard for the public welfare. Not resting on their laurels, the following Wednesday brought another screaming headline to our doorsteps -

2ND SEWAGE SPILL UNREPORTED

For anyone who missed the first story, this headline would seem to be an incongruous curiosity, along the lines of MONA LISA UNSTOLEN or BROOKLYN BRIDGE STILL STANDING, that would be considered a non-story which begs more questions than it answers. For something that didn't happen, this story has certainly been getting a lot of attention, whereas if they had gone ahead and reported it in the first place, no doubt if would have been relegated to the bowels of the newspaper's dark and cavernous labyrinths, and nobody would have even noticed it to begin with. Say, is that the Mona Lisa blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge? Remember you saw it here first, folks.

Meanwhile at work, I picked up a phone call from a peppy young man who greeted me breezily and then charged right ahead and asked me what video conferencing equipment we use here. Anyone can tell you that I'm not normally at a loss for words, but I had to tell him that I had no idea, which made him pause, and then he asked me suspiciously, "What department have I reached?" When I told him that this was the Purchasing department, he muttered that he had asked to be connected to the Sales department, and was obviously displeased at what he considered the inept handling of his call. Now it was my turn to talk to him like the village idiot, so I said very slowly and distinctly: "This is a hospital. We don't have a Sales department." He might still be laughing for all I know, but I can't tell you, because he hung up at that point. I know at least one of us was still laughing anyway. And it wasn't the Mona Lisa with the Brooklyn Bridge, because I just found out that their relationship has taken a halt

Elle