*PREVIEW* The Christmas Bullet *LIVE IN LONDON*

Planes were going to be developed into a weapon of war, soon more than just the rights would be trying to sell their shit to the government.

And that brings us to our main character of the story: Dr.

William Whitney Christmas.

Oh, fuck off.

Fuck off.

Sorry, getting scammed by Dr.

Christmas is just like.

Yeah, the lesser-known Mega Man villain.

Getting scammed.

Once again, he's throwing presents at you.

Oh, yeah, exactly.

Get equipped with a plane that kills you.

No, don't Nate to hold that thought.

Dr.

Christmas is the most Protestant version of Santa.

He doesn't give you gifts.

He just flies out and tells you how mid of a person you've been.

Christmas was born in 1865 in North Carolina.

That's sin number one.

And by all accounts, at this part of his life, it was normal.

He attended and eventually graduated George Washington University Medical School by 1905.

And this is the last for sure thing we know about his life because if there's one thing Dr.

Christmas loved more than his name and money, it is lying about his life and everything he ever did.

So he's just a charlatan through and through, that the old-timey guy that, like, his practice gets shut down in North Carolina, and it just pops back up in South Carolina, and nobody knows why.

Yeah, this is the era where you could just abscond with your ill-gotten gains in like a Zeppelin in a huge bag of money and be like, catch me if you can.

Like, that probably happened multiple times in this guy's career.

He had to move, you know, the bottom had fallen out of the snake oil market, you know?

I mean, the idea of him jumping in a zeppelin, twirling his large mustache, which he did have,

and flying away is really Mega Man villain maxing.

It doesn't get more villain than that.

Maybe having a plane in North Carolina is more of a Shelbyville thing.

He had to leave.

No, I think the only more villainous thing is if he flew away in a hot air balloon.

It's not a very good getaway vehicle, you know, because it's like, oh, look, it's going exactly where we expected it to go, straight up.

Now, by 1908, he reappears and he's telling people, y'all hear the Wright brothers, right?

First to fly, but you know who is second?

Me!

There's no fucking evidence of this.

The man had never flown a plane before.

He had never even been in a plane before.

And he's like, nah, fuck those guys.

I'm number two, and my plane is better than theirs.

Then people would, of course, ask, well, where's the plane?

Well, you don't understand, you see.

I built this plane, but thanks to the gangsters and the patent mafia from the U.S.

government, I had to burn it.

Yes,

I love old-timey liars.

Like, is it so much more fun before proof existed?

Yeah,

my plane was made out of ivermectin, and I had to burn it because I didn't want you to know how good it was.

No, if you fly it, it'll have no worms.

And people believed him.

People straight up believed him.

It's like, well, he's a doctor.

He seems trustworthy.

Why would he lie?

Would a man named Dr.

Christmas lie?

Both those words are good things in my book.

Put them together, you get an even better thing.

People back then were so fucking trustworthy.

It's like, oh, the man says he built this revolutionary aircraft, but he can't show it to me because it goes to a high school in Canada.

I mean, the game was so much different back then because the concept of like aeronautical engineer hardly existed yet.

So like, well, this man has an education.

He's a doctor.

Of course he could build a good airplane.

I mean, at this point, I think it was maybe 60 odd years beforehand to Beaufort scale to measure the speed of wind had just been invented.

No need.

Don't need it.

This plane can go faster than that.

Wind is fake.

Wind is fake.

People don't notice wind is fake.

Everybody knows that the large wind lobby is involved in this.

But Jay, like you were saying, I mean, there wasn't anywhere near the kind of standard of measurement things back then.

It's like you could be told by actual, not Dr.

Christmas, but real medical doctor, like, no, this patent medicine that's just simple syrup and cocaine will cure all your ills.

Now you're sick, take this heroin syrup.

You'll feel better and then die.

I mean, this is an era where people were designing things on effectively napkins, slapping them together because there's no concept of testing because

they were fucking made out of napkins as well.

Also, yes and then it would crash like okay well we'll work out so it doesn't crash so hard next time that's pretty much how developing a plane worked back then so the fact that this guy was saying this he was he sounded no less insane than the people who were actually doing it

so the idea that he could have built a plane not that far-fetched and the idea that he was a practicing doctor though he admittedly had not been practicing for several years for reasons that nobody can entirely nail down

of course he would have a better idea of these things so when Crispus told the story about being forced to burn his plane, he would then jot down a quick sketch on what he claimed that his plane looked like.

And what he would draw was the design of someone else.

It was called the AEA Redbird, built by a guy named Thomas Selfridge, who was famous for.

Does anybody know who Thomas Selfridge is?

All right, he's famous for being the first human being to die in a plane crash.

So he did not even die in a plane crash.

Sorry, he did not even die in a plane that he designed.

Rather, he died while being a passenger of Orville Wright

in Orville Wright's plane.

So off topic here, I'm originally from Michigan, and there's a National Guard airbase in Michigan called Selfridge Air Base for some reason because Selfridge is not from Michigan.

He's never been to Michigan and he did nothing in Michigan.

So we just kind of stole him.

Selfridge Air Base has the same kind of energy as Mahatma Airlines.

Like, famously, you don't need to know how to land.

Either did Selfridge.

The airbase doesn't have a landing strip.

It just has like a cavernous hole that you have to try and land in.

You're trying to land over there with the rest of the wreckage.

But North Carolina does have license plates with like commemorating the Wright brothers' first flight on it.

So I'm just imagining you get like a different plate from North Carolina's like DMV of just remember Thomas Selfridge.

It has like the right plane, but it's smoking on the ground.

Christmas had nothing to do with Selfridge, his company, AEA, or anyone else.

From what anyone can tell, the two had never met.

But he had seen his plane in the newspaper and just kind of stole it.

So

he claimed to have built the first man who died in a plane crash,

his idea for a plane before the man had gotten 9-11 by Orville Wright.

That's put a whole spin on the Wright brothers' kind of hagiography now, doesn't it?

Well, it's more of a John Denver situation, I suppose.

The joke is appealing to you two.

I've heard of a second band.

Then Christmas formed the Christmas Aeroplane Company in 1909, managing to secure the princely sum of $2,500, which is a fuckload of money back then, from three backers to build what he called the Red Bird 2.

So not only did he steal Selfridge's design, he then stole his design and continued numbering it after the man had died.

I mean, Leonard Skidder does keep touring, so this is an American phenomenon.

And much like Leonard Skidder, he should have seen the writing on the wall and stayed away from airplanes.

Christmas insists the Red Bird 2 was built and even flew multiple times, though these flights never have a date,

a pilot's name is never given, and there's no photographic evidence this plane even fucking existed.

But he did steal about $10,000 worth of money from people that he was said to say, I'm absolutely going to build this plane with this, and then just vanish like a fart in the wind.

He's doing

like Irish local politics procurement fraud.

How like the Healy Rays own pretty much every contracting business in Kerry and also all of the contracts are given to them by by their cousins who are on the local council.

So, like, they're making the potholes, they're filling the potholes, they're paying for the potholes to be filled.

The only reason we know that Christmas is not Irish American is because he's not a cop in Boston.

Though he was super racist.

So, what happened to all of this money?

We don't know, but we do know that Dr.

Christmas suddenly bought a very large mansion in North Carolina and several servants.

I'm just imagining Dr.

Christmas as like the homeless guy that like is a millionaire in The Simpsons.

I just,

the fact that you have to address Dr.

Christmas as a serious character in this story, like it just keeps coming across.

Unfortunately, he actually was a doctor, so calling him Mr.

Christmas is just not nice.

He didn't spend four years in Christmas medical school to be called Mr.

He was doing surgery on little presents to open them up and not tear the paper so he could reuse it.

Shout out to him for giving the elves universal basic health care.

No, you know, those elves were dying in horrible, horrible ways.

Yeah, they have the NHS.

Yeah, those elves are experiencing like industrial revolution level accents being mangled in like wrapping machines.

We've brought the black lung to the Antarctic.