The Best of Everything

Superheroes are part of the 1%. (Is This Art?)

2012-01-28T13:40:00.001-07:00

The other day, I took a walk to the Museum of Modern Art, where I was horribly disappointed to learn that I was two weeks too early for the Houdini show. I don't know what Houdini art is, but I want to see it.

Which brings me to the Human Slinky: Like Houdini Art, I don't know what it is, but I definitely want to see it:

THAT, as I said, is Human Slinky, otherwise known as a guy named "Veniamin."

I learned about Veniamin because I heard that there was a Human Slinky costume for sale, and like everybody, I have always dreamed of being a Slinky. Who didn't, as a troubled kid growing up in the seemingly idyllic town of Hartland, Wisconsin, occasionally sit on the green-carpeted front steps of their house mulling over how much better it would be if, instead of being an overweight shy kid with a lazy eye, one could be a Slinky? Are you with me on this?

Really? Just me?

What if I left out the part about the lazy eye?

Still nobody else. Hm.

Anyway, I heard there was a Human Slinky costume for sale, and that is exactly the kind of thing that I would want, because not only would I get to say "Hey, guess what, I own a Human Slinky costume," and don't underestimate the power of that at parties -- I'm always looking for something to make me the life of the party -- but also consider the other things that a Human Slinky costume would let you do, things like:

(A) Really freak out your neighbors when you take the garbage out as a Human Slinky.

(B) Allow you to park in the handicap spots at the mall, since I assume that nobody is going to challenge a Human Slinky about whether or not it is handicapped.

(C) Be a superhero:

Woman in distress: "Help! I'm in distress, probably from a mugging or perhaps an assault of some kind!"

All Other Superheroes: "That's kind of penny-ante, isn't it? I mean, it's like the time Superman helped break up organized crime in Metropolis. Even Batman aims for bigger things, now, like terrorists. Call 911."

Human Slinky: "I'm on my way! Let me just tilt this giant 2x4 down from my perch atop this tall building where I have built the Slinky Lair. There! Now, here. Whoops. Start over. Hey, it's tangled. How does this... what... it's like it's tied in a knot? What? No, I don't want to just roll it down sideways. Hey, quit pinching me. Mom!"

All Other Superheroes: "That's why we didn't let him join our group."

Awesome.

There is a Human Slinky costume actually for sale, on eBay. List price:

No, seriously:

You may think that's kind of a hefty price, because it is. But consider this: 10% of the proceeds from the Million Dollar Human Slinky costume are going to go to benefit the American Cancer Society, so you could really help out cancer research by buying the costume.

You could help out cancer research MORE, of course, by simply donating your $1,000,000 to cancer research, but then you wouldn't have a Human Slinky costume, would you?

Besides which, have you considered that, as superhero outfits go, Human Slinky is really kind of a bargain? How much do you suppose the Iron Man suit cost? Or Batman's junk? And even Spider-Man's webshooters, because everyone knows he has webshooters and not gunk from his wrists, must have cost something.

As it turns out, someone has figured out about how much an Iron Man suit would cost for real, and the fact that someone has already done that is either proof of why America is great, or proof of why America is now a third-world country. I'm not sure which. It's probably both.

But someone has figured it out, and the total cost for an Iron Man suit, at today's prices, is:

$100,420,000.

Which seems surprisingly low, given that the same article says simply developing a fighter jet is in the $95,000,000-$113,000,000 range.

Which brings me to another point:

Where did Superman get his money?

Ma and Pa Kent were dirt farmers, right? And Clark Kent worked as a newspaper reporter, and then briefly a TV anchor in the 70s in the comics, and none of those spell superrich, at least not back then. So if we assume that Clark Kent was doing okay (although he lived in Metropolis, where one can assume the prices were equivalent to New York City, if not more expensive), Clark Kent was not rich.

But Superman was. He had his Fortress of Solitude, remember, and according to this site, which has "Superman" in the URL and so must be authoritative:

Here in this secret sanctum, far from civilization, are the fabulous trophy room, housing the hard-won memorabilia of more than a thousand adventures; the workshop and super-laboratory, where Superman labors in search of an antidote to kryptonite and performs other experiments; the gymnasium and recreation facilities, where Superman exercises, relaxes, and indulges in a variety of super-hobbies; the interplanetary zoo, containing live species of wildlife from distant planets; special rooms and memorials in honor of Superman's parents, foster parents, and closest friends; the bottle city of Kandor, a city of the planet Krypton that was reduced to microscopic size and stolen by the space villain Brainiac sometime prior to the death of Krypton; special monitors for communicating with Kandor, the undersea realm of Atlantis, the Phantom Zone, distant planets, and alien dimensions; Superman's Superman-robots and other special equipment; and numerous other rooms, exhibits, weapons, machines, and scientific devices. Indeed, since the invasion of the Fortress by an outsider could result in the placing of these devices in the hands of evildoers - as well as endanger Superman's secret identity - the exact location of the Fortress remains one of the world's most closely guarded secrets.

How is he feeding those animals? And building Superman-robots? And a lab? Batman has a lot of junk, but Batman at least has an explanation for his money: He earned his $6,500,000,000 (according to Forbes) by stealing military technology and exploiting it for himself.

But Superman? He doesn't even appear, I bet, on a list of richest superheroes. I would tell you for sure but the only list I found I can't get to load on my laptop, so let's just assume I'm right that Superman is not known to be wealthy.

So what's he doing to keep his living standards up? Part of Superman's secret may be moving jobs offshore. While it was always believed that the Fortress of Solitude was in the frozen arctic, scientists recently actually found it in Mexico:

Artist's rendition of Superman's
Fortress:

Actual picture of scientist
standing in the Fortress... in Mexico:

So the Fortress was built using the same techniques Apple employs to let you have a voice recognition system that is slightly more sophisticated than Moviefone. (Apple's constantly releasing new phones, as everyone does all the time, isn't responsible for just wrecking the lives of millions of workers everywhere; it's also going to bring about the end of major cell phone companies, which lose money when they sell you fancy phones at a discount. As phones get newer and better, cellphone companies' operating margins disappear, which is probably why they're paring costs by eliminating unlimited data plans and the like.)

(Just to be clear: Apple, and other tech companies, are wrecking the lives of millions of third-world countries' workers because despite their giving them wages and a job, they're also not properly monitoring working conditions, allowing the contract partners to get rich off exploiting people while Apple and other tech companies look the other way, and while that's going on they're helping bankrupt vital communications companies in America.)

So back to superheroes. For $100,000,000, you could be Iron Man. For the cost of simply your soul and some presumably-stolen goods, you could be Superman. For just a million bucks you could be Human Slinky.

And for less, you could be Veniamin's kind of creepy Human Blowfish:

Or the Octopus:

Is it just me, or are these getting less fun and more nightmarish? Before you answer, this:

If you watched that all the way through, you saw there were hot chicks in those costumes. And hence...

The Verdict: ART. And Congress needs to hold hearings about Superman.

I wonder whatever happened to the actress who played the mom in ET?

2012-01-28T11:00:00.001-07:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Next Island for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

When I was a kid, I loved Dungeons & Dragons.

Okay, when I was a teenager… late teens, I loved Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games – all the way from grade school through early high school, I had D&D and others (a James Bond game, a Superheroes game, things like that) and I’d get together with friends to play them; it was almost exactly like that ET opening scene with the mom that was kind of hot only we never had pizza delivered and no aliens crash-landed near our house. But other than that, it was exactly like the movie, right down to that mysterious van that kept driving by.

I wonder whatever happened to that guy?

Anyway, I got away from roleplaying games because they took a lot of time to set up and it was hard to get friends together, and who had the time for that in college? There was drinking to be done. Oh, and studying.

But now, I might be able to get back into roleplaying – no, not that way, weirdo—with “Next Island,” and, as you’d guess with anything that gets my interest these days, I might also make some money at it.

Next Island is this new free-to-play online game , an MMO role-playing adventure game that just opened to the public. I only just heard about it and am really new to it so far but it sounds awesome.

The basic storyline is this: A bunch of scientists found an island dedicated to scientific progress, and have discovered a way to travel in time, including to ancient Greece. And now YOU join, taking part in what looks to be the kind of roleplaying game that goes beyond hack-em-ups and boring SIMS-suburbia to something that’s really fun and engaging.

On Next Island, you can set yourself up in an occupation, and explore the island and Ancient Greece, and interact with people to solve puzzles and have adventures, and of course have the social aspect of interactive games like this – it’s kind of like Facebook only with avatars and time travel, so it’s about a billion times more fun than Facebook – and all the while, you can earn real money for time spent playing the game. There’s a feature that turns what you do and time spent in the game into real money, so the longer you play, the more fun the game is AND you’re getting paid.

So you can tell your boss that you actually ARE being productive, and then go to Ancient Greece. Works for me.

The really great thing about these MMOs is that it allows the visuals to help out my imagination – so I can flesh out the pictures I create – and also someone else is doing all the work to create the adventure. I don’t have to get out my graph paper, twenty-sided dice, and books to find out how many ‘hit points’ I have. I just create a character and get going, working and exploring and adventuring.

I plan on checking it out more; you should go sign up and locate me – but by then I expect to be an expert in Time Travel, which I plan to first use and find out what that guy in the van was up to.

Do you want to woo hoo? (Thursday Scramble)

2012-01-26T19:15:00.000-07:00

On Thursday Scramble, I take an old post from one of my blogs -- my blogs currently make up 24.8% of the entire Internet -- and repost it to all my OTHER blogs. This post appeared in 2008 on my blog "Thinking The Lions." Thinking The Lions focuses on funny stories about me, and the things I do with my family, and the things I do when I'm supposed to be working, and the things I do when I'm supposed to be doing the things I do. Also, I post poems there on Fridays.

*******************************************************************************************

Always carry the pooping toddler behind you, not in front of you.

That way, when the pooping toddler poops, it will not fall directly into your path, causing you to step in it, which will cause you to think oh my god this is possibly the grossest but most hilarious emergency I've ever been a part of, and which will also cause you to stop, take that sock off, and then continue on your way to the potty chair, which you have left upstairs, and upstairs is an awful long ways away when you are carrying a naked, pooping, and now upset toddler at arm's length.

That's what I learned last night, as I was helping to clean up the kitchen after tacos and smoothies made in the new blender using the high-end "Whole Foods" fruit we had, both of which we had because Sweetie got them for St. Nick's Day.

I'm not sure why "St. Nick's Day" exists, or even if it does exist outside of my family. I always wondered if it existed outside of my family when I was a kid, too, when we would, in the beginning of December, get candy in our stockings. Never presents or anything, just candy, which always included one of those giant, straight-up-and-down candy canes, the kind that would splinter when you bit them, so that if you sat on the brown couch eating them and watching channel 18 -- channel 18 was the only channel worth watching most of the time back then, because it was the only non-network channel, so it showed reruns of shows and cartoons in the afternoon, as opposed to showing "Phil Donahue," a show that by my memories was on at least 17 hours a day on all three networks in the late 70s and early 80s-- if you sat on the brown couch eating your candy cane and watching Channel 18, you would have parts splinter off and fall on your chest and be covered with sweater-fuzz, making them inedible. You would also get little tiny peppermint shards sprinkled down your chest and stomach, giving you a minty smell and a crackly feel the rest of the day.

No other kids ever seemed to get stuff for St. Nick's Day, which was why I thought maybe it only existed in our family, but, then again, I was the kind of kid who never really knew what was going on, either, so maybe everyone was getting St. Nick's presents, and I just didn't know it because I spent most of my time in fourth grade reading the "Emil" books and playing one-on-one football on recesses with Kevin Donnerbauer, the kid with only one thumb, and what time I didn't spend doing that I spent drawing "vipers" from Battlestar Galactica and getting beat up by Dean Larsen. None of which really lead one to conversations about whether or not the other kid celebrates "St. Nick's Day."

When I married Sweetie, I learned that she, too, celebrated St. Nick's Day, and that she celebrated it through presents, which seems odd, since Sweetie is always telling me how poor she was growing up, stories about poverty that make me feel even more guilty than I do most of the time about my relatively-privileged background. I, as a kid, generally got presents like the Millenium Falcon with Actual Cargo Bays for hiding Han Solo, or my "official" Dallas Cowboys helmet, or the Lego set that let me build an actual Lunar Landing Module (which I still remember was called the "LEM," even though I don't remember why it was called the "LEM") or any of the the 1000 other toys and junk my parents got us for Christmas, and that still wasn't enough, as most years there were plenty of junky things we didn't get. Realizing that, that I was so spoiled and privileged and didn't appreciate it, serves the valuable purpose today of making me feel guilty, guilt that I channel into areas that society desperately needs, like "working hard" and "giving to charity" and "telling my own kids how lucky they are that they have so much stuff, compared to how little stuff I had," which is only true comparatively speaking, because I had a lot of stuff, but my kids have more stuff, and they, too, do not think they have enough. Yes, The Boy has a great big TV in his room and a DVD player and a Playstation 3, but he still pines away for an Internet connection that would let him play Playstation online against other players, even though the other player he would mostly play against is his friend, who lives next door, and who would probably come over to play anyway, bringing his own TV and Playstation 3, so that they could harness the awesome power of the Internet to play a game against each other sitting two feet apart.

So the guilt I carry around lets me lay some guilt on The Boy and his sisters for having so much stuff, something that I do to relieve my own guilt and also to make sure that they have guilt when they grow up, so that they will work hard and give to charity and be good people and guilt-trip their own kids, and the Circle of Guilt will continue.

I don't guilt-trip the Babies! yet, because they're too little to feel guilty about anything, and also because they don't really want anything. We have not yet bought them that many toys -- all of their toys except the slide and their car fit into a laundry basket -- but we have bought them toys, and they generally ignore those toys and play with anything else.

Mr Bunches, for example, carries around a small red practice golf ball that Middle gave him. It's made of foam rubber and he has it with him at all times. I've never known anyone to have a "Security Golf Ball" but he does, and he gets upset if he can't find it. He got so upset the last time it was lost (we found it behind the Only Surviving Plant in the house) that Sweetie took precautions and found a second one, a Spare Emergency Golf Ball that is kept carefully hidden in the Babies!'s room. We all also make sure, at all times, that we are aware of the Red Ball: "Where's his red ball?" we ask each other, when moving Mr Bunches from one room or level of the house to the next.

He can't be fooled, either -- give him a different color practice golf ball and he'll throw it aside. Give him a different kind of red ball and he'll squeeze it to test it out, and if it doesn't give a little like The Red Ball, he'll toss that aside, too.

Losing his Red Ball is one of the few things that upsets Mr Bunches. He's pretty easygoing. The only other things I've seen upset him are when someone leaves the room he's in, and being whisked away to poop on the potty chair rather than on the living room floor, where he thought it was okay to poop because, after all, he was naked.

Mr Bunches was only naked because I felt sorry for him and also because I needed both hands free to clean up the smoothie mess that I'd created making smoothies on the blender I'd given Sweetie for St. Nick's Day, a blender that was big and expensive and more big and expensive than a St. Nick's Day present should be, but I tend to give Sweetie big and expensive presents because, like I said, I feel guilty about my privileged background and Sweetie manages to dredge up more guilt by telling me stories about her own unprivileged background.

I might tell a story, for example, of how I had all these Star Wars action figures and I used to set them up in elaborate scenarios in my room in which the dresser with its four shelves was the Death Star, because the books on the bottom shelf could be the trash compactor, and then I might say that I wished I'd kept those Star Wars figures because maybe they'd be worth money, and then Sweetie will say something like this, a story she actually told us:

"I didn't have action figures or dolls when I was a little girl. We couldn't afford them. I had marbles, though, that my grandma gave me. I used to pretend the marbles were people and play with them and make them go shopping."

Imagine hearing that on the heels of your story about having an actual Boba Fett that shot missiles. Then imagine yourself standing in the department store thinking "Should I get her that blender she asked for even though it's very expensive?" and as you think that, you remember that Sweetie, as a kid, had to have her marbles have adventures, things she couldn't even dress up or fix the hair of or whatever it is that girls do with their dolls and toys.

And then imagine standing in that department store, pushing your Babies! in their stroller, and feeling terribly guilty about having been so privileged, and deciding that yes, you will buy her the blender, and you'll also get her some other stuff because she deserves it, but then you get distracted and think How would a marble be a person? And did they have names? Were they, like "Judy The Marble?" Did she make them walk, or just roll them to the Marble Shopping Mall? And then before you can get the blender or answer those questions, Mr F leans over and starts trying to knock over the pile of Christmas dinner plates you're stuck in front of.

Mr F got to try to knock over a lot of things last week, as we finished up the shopping for Sweetie's St. Nick's Day present. Her entire present was that blender that she asked for, and a bunch of high-quality fruit from Whole Foods, and a Whole Foods $10 gift card (which I threw in to top it off, but which is useless because $10 at Whole Foods will get you one grape) and a book of smoothie recipes that had lots of recipes for smoothies made without yogurt, because Sweetie likes smoothies but hates yogurt. Or I should say, Sweetie wants to like smoothies, something she tells us all the time:

"I want to like smoothies," she'll say, "But I just don't like that yogurt."

When I ask why it's so important that she like smoothies, she answers: "Because they're cool."

Finding the blender was the easy part -- the department store had blenders, lots of them, some of them as high-priced as $159. I did not get guilt-tripped into buying that. Marble People or not, I don't buy $159 kitchen appliances. I settled on a tough-looking red blender that had an "Ice Crusher" feature. That sounded good (if not very romantic or Christmas-y) to me. Getting the fruit was also easy. It was the book that was tough, because I had Mr Bunches and Mr F with me in their stroller, and I had to go to three different bookstores to find just the right book of smoothie recipes, which meant three different nights of pushing the Babies! through bookstores, bookstores with shelves that were very close together and packed with books that were ripe for the plucking, so that as we walked down the aisles Mr F and Mr Bunches would reach out and grab books and toss them on the floor, and I would quickly scoop the books up and put them back more or less in the region they came from, hopefully also getting all of the "Teddy Graham" crumbs and smudges off of them. So if you are shopping for a book at any of those stores, the odds are that the book you want is about five feet further down the aisle, and you'll want to wipe it off a little before buying it.

I also could not stop the stroller, because they'd get really antsy then, and start arching their backs or taking off their socks and shoes and throwing them, and if there's anything that gets you judged to be a bad parent, it's having barefoot kids out in a store in December in Wisconsin. Plus, people don't think it's so cute the third time a shoe gets flung at them.

Most of the shopping, then, was done with me handing them "Teddy Grahams" and trying to calm them down and distract them by talking to them and singing Mr F's favorite song ("All I Want Is You" from the "Juno" Soundtrack) quietly as we walked through the aisles, and when that didn't work, I'd try to quickly scan the books as we walked by. When I'd see a book I thought would be good, I'd scoop it up and keep pushing the stroller, checking out the book with one hand and pushing the stroller with the other hand, eventually looping back to drop the book off more or less where I'd gotten it (I could tell by the trail of "Teddy Grahams.")

I had to do that because in public, I'll do anything to keep the Babies! happy, and also because I'm a pushover. I think I'm a tough dad, but I'm not, and I just give in to the Babies! demands no matter what the cost to me personally is. I will let them, for example, out of the cart while we're at the drugstore picking up cold medicine, even though I know that it will be physically impossible for me to hold both of their hands and get out my wallet to pay. I let them out of the cart and hold their hands and then, when it comes time to pull out my wallet, I let go of Mr Bunches' hand for just one second I hope and pull out the $20 Sweetie gave me, but it's no use: Mr Bunches has taken off towards the back of the store, laughing, and I have to scoop up Mr F and tell the lady behind the counter "put the change in the bag" and then I carry Mr F with me while I chase Mr Bunches around the rack of cold medicines in the back of the store, twice, before grabbing him and going up front carrying both boys to grab the bag, which hopefully has my change in it, and head outside.

Even then, I'm such a pushover that I feel bad for Mr F, who didn't get to run around the pharmacy, and I wonder if I should give him a chance, too. But Mr F gets his own special treatment, like when I keep playing The Tackle Game with him even though I'm afraid that he's given me a concussion.

The Tackle Game is Mr F's favorite. He invented it, and as you'd expect of a game invented by a two-year-old, it's pretty simple and also violent. In The Tackle Game, I sit cross-legged on the floor, and Mr F goes into the other room and then comes running at me while I say "No no no no no" in a scared voice (note: I'm not acting) and he then plows into me and we fall over backwards and I tell him he's very strong and how'd he get so strong? Then we do it all again, for about an hour. And I keep playing The Tackle Game under the most adverse conditions, like when Mr F the other night caught me just behind the temple with his forehead, causing him to momentarily cry until I calmed him down by tossing him in the air a few times. He was fine. I, though, was seeing stars and had a splitting headache, one that instantly set in and spread down to my jaw and my neck, and one that I still kind of have, two days later. But I kept playing The Tackle Game, and didn't let on to Mr F that I thought maybe I had a concussion.

That pushoveriness is how Mr F and Mr Bunches ended up running around buck naked on St. Nick's Eve, or the night of St. Nick's Day, or whatever. We'd eaten dinner, which was tacos and chips and non-yogurt-containing smoothies that I'd made using Sweetie's new St. Nick's blender, and I was helping clean up before taking the Babies! upstairs for their bath, and Mr F started getting into the wedding cabinet, which is the only thing in our house anymore that both contains glass and is in arm's reach. It's a curio cabinet with glass doors that's filled with wedding mementos and champagne glasses and pictures from our wedding and things like that, and we'd move it, but it's really heavy and it wouldn't be right to put it in the garage, anyway, so we guard the wedding cabinet using the high-tech method of taking the piano bench and the round table and laying them down in front of it, a giant barricade that completely fails to slow down Mr F, who likes to open and close doors, hard, to hear the bang! they make. Mr F frequently gets into the wedding cabinet doors, which make a satisfying glassy sound. He hasn't yet noticed that every single thing inside that cabinet is breakable, but it's only a matter of time.

While I was cleaning up last night, Mr F got into the wedding cabinet, and I got him out and tried to distract him from that by dropping him on the couch. That's "The Treatment," a game he and Mr Bunches like. In "The Treatment," I hold them and swing them back and forth and say "1... 2... Treatment!" and then drop them on the couch.

And, yes, "The Treatment" is a lot like "Cloverfield," but there are subtle differences that experts will note. Differences like: In "Cloverfield," I'm a monster, who walks around roaring Cloverfield! and then picking them up and dropping them on the couch, while in The Treatment, I am just Daddy, or sometimes Dr Slider, and I do not roar, but I do count. Cloverfield The Monster would never count. He's a monster.

"The Treatment" did not work on Mr F, who headed back to the wedding cabinet, so I took the next most logical step, which was to strip him down to his diaper. You would have to live in our house for a while to understand why that was the next most logical step, but it was. And it worked: soon, Mr F was down to his diaper and we were hollering, as he ran by, "Woo-hoo!" which is what we do when nearly-naked two-year-olds run around our house. (We even call it "Woo-hooing." "Do you want to woo-hoo?" we'll ask the Babies!, who will answer with "guck.")

Then, Mr Bunches wanted in on the Woo-Hooing, so he came over to me and I stripped him down to his diaper, too, but that wasn't enough: he wanted the diaper off.

So I put my foot down. As he pulled at his diaper and looked up at me and made pleading noises that were kind of like words but not really, I said: "No. You've got to leave the diaper on."

He pulled at it more and pulled at my leg.

"No," I said, firmly. "The diaper stays on."

He whined a little, looked sad, and pulled at his diaper, forlornly. So I caved in and said "Fine," and stripped the diaper off, which Sweetie might have objected to but it was my day to be in charge, so she didn't say anything other than that I sure am a pushover, and I then stripped off Mr F's diaper, too, letting them run around naked while we continued cleaning. I figured, they'll get some naked woo-hooing in before their bath, and I can get this cleaned up so that we can just relax," and I went back to cleaning the blender, but within about two minutes, I heard Sweetie yelling that Mr Bunches was pooping, and I rushed out there to see Mr Bunches by the Only Surviving Plant, with Sweetie holding a magazine under his butt.

I picked up Mr Bunches, who looked surprised, and held him at arm's length as we went through the kitchen, where he dropped part of the load and I stepped in it, forcing me to stop and hold Mr Bunches in one arm while I took off the now-needed-to-be-burned sock, at which point Mr Bunches got terribly upset and started crying, so I got the sock off, and got him upstairs into his room and sitting on the potty chair.

By then, Mr Bunches was thoroughly upset and was bawling, and I didn't want him to form some kind of permanent negative pooping attitude -- what if he ended up always being constipated because he was worried that if he pooped he'd get scooped up and whisked around? What if he went crazy because he was so scared of pooping? How would that affect my plans to have him and Mr F star in their own show on Disney so that I can retire? -- so to fix that, I told him it was okay, and then when that didn't work, I cheered.

"Yay!" I said, and started clapping. He looked surprised, but stopped crying and looked at me. "Yay!" I said again, and cheered some more. "What a good boy! Yay! Hooray! Good job!" and I kept clapping while he sniffled and then cheered up and then he gave me a hug.

We cleaned him up and then, still naked, I took him back downstairs to clean up the mess. I forewarned Sweetie and Middle to cheer for him, too, so Mr Bunches walked, naked, into the kitchen, to a standing ovation of Mommy and his sister clapping and cheering, while Mr F looked a little jealous, like he was wondering if he should poop, too.

With a lot of bleach, we got the floor clean, and we got the Babies! up to their bath and got them dressed, and spent the rest of St. Nick's Night playing The Tackle Game and watching their new movies they'd gotten for St. Nick's Day, and I had learned a valuable lesson, which was this:

Next time, put more ice cream into the smoothie.

The Pop Culture Graph: Vampire Movies.

2012-01-23T13:46:00.006-07:00

Driving today, I heard lots of reports about the latest Underworld movie and how much it made at the box office, and that got me to thinking about vampire movies and how they relate to each other and other movies.

And that got me to making graphs instead of working.

Here is a graph of the percentage of total box office revenues earned by vampire movies:

What's surprising about that is not just that Twilight movies account for 46.1% of all money spent on vampire movies ever, but that Van Helsing is number five.

This graph may be biased by the source I used to get the info, which listed no box office receipts for any vampire movie prior to 1979. I doubt that no vampire movies were ever made before that year, but who am I to question the Internet:

I suspect, since I was measuring them by top box office, none of the pre-1979 movies made the list because box offices were lower then; box office receipts are not an absolute measure, because there are more people now, more movie theaters now, and mostly because movie ticket prices are sky-high now. (In 2010, the average movie ticket price was $7.89. In 1978 it was $2.34, so a movie seen by the exact same number of people in 1978 as in 2010 would have less than 1/3 the box office.)

So are vampire movies popular, in general? This graph is a little hard to read, but purple is the top-grossing non-vampire movie that year. Green is the top grossing vampire movie:

Wherein I leave the world to defend itself against a newfound menace. (POP!Best!: Hot Extras)

2012-01-21T08:14:00.007-07:00

Today's Hot Extra comes from the video for Fun.'s song We Are Young, which is only an okay song:

As an anthem, it doesn't have the same power as, say, Wavin' Flag or anything, but it's still better than Pumped Up Kicks, in the ranking of anthems/hot songs. If it matters to you, apparently the video is supposed to be an allegory of losing one's virginity, if comments on Youtube are correctly interpreting it.

As for the girl, I'm not exactly sure who she is. The question Who is the girl in the We Are Young video was asked on Yahoo! Answers, and the answers:

She's the image of porn star Lindsey Strutt.

Look at the video info. I LOVe fun. Omg im seeing them in march

Show why we are ranked about 375th in the world in terms of intelligence and productivity. Seriously, why log in to provide an answer if you don't know it?

Also: who knows what porn stars look like by heart?

So instead, I did a Google Image search of that picture up there to see what happens with that, but it was taking forever to load the image, so I gave up and instead watched this video of what happens when you do a Google Image search of a transparency, and then search that, and so on, recursiving yourself back to the dawn of time, or something:

Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1 from kingcosmonaut3000 on Vimeo.

Pretty cool stuff.

By that time, my image search had loaded and given me these results:

And if you look closely you'll see that some of those results are robots of some sort, and clicking that image led me to a site written entirely in a foreign language that featured pictures of robot action figures and umbrellas:

But they're scary foreign umbrellas, not good God-fearing American umbrellas, so I got really worried about what my search results might lead me to. Could I, by trying to figure out who this girl was, accidentally uncover some sort of Chinese plot to invade us with nonwaterproofed robots that require umbrellas to protect them from the rain, umbrellas which would (naturally) be equipped with pull-out swords?

I mean, if that's the case, don't I have a duty to try to figure out what that site says so that I can spread the word about the Swordfighting Chinese Robot Invasion, since Ron Paul's campaign literature doesn't mention that enough already?

So I was fully prepared to learn Mandarin Chinese and translate that page, but two things happened:

(v) I thought "What if that girl's not even 18? That makes this the creepiest possible way to spend a Saturday morning." and

(brown) Mr Bunches announced that he wanted to go play skee-ball, which sounded pretty fun to me.

Thursday Scramble! Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World! (NSFW)

2012-01-19T08:51:00.001-07:00

This is actually chapter 23; to begin the story at the beginning, click here. Or, to download the entire story in book form for free, click here.

WARNING: This scene is graphic!

Rachel, after awakening from her zombie state, fell in love with Bridget, who through the magic of a time warp, gave birth to their daughter Harper. Now, having been disintegrated by Harper to save her from the Bubbles, Rachel has been captured by Bridget's dad. No, that doesn't explain anything, which is why you should read the story.

"Let go of me," I said.

He pushed me back on the bed, his leering face only inches from mine. "No," he breathed. "Do you know what I've been through? I've literally been to Hell, died, had my body reconstructed into this monstrosity," and he pointed down at himself, "All to search for what is rightfully mine."

He paused.

"You."

Another pause, as he loomed over me.

"You, you are mine."

"I got that," I told him, trying to sound braver than I was feeling. He was lying on top of me and was heavier than I felt I could move.

"I created you, Rachel. Not literally. I did not myself carve up the women who would become your parts. I did not myself go and kidnap you from that concert. I did not drag your unconscious body down into the cellar where that mad idiot works doing things only he can do. I did not remove your chip and I did not pick out the limbs that would become the new you and then sew them together into this remarkably sexy package, binding them seamlessly by calling on energy from in between the dimensions."

He looked down at the stump of my left arm.

"Except for that one. I picked out that one, and that one in particular was the one that belonged to me." He stared back into my eyes and then put one of his hands, the one with the delicate nails, onto my breast, began kneading it and pulling it, roughly.

"Do you want to know why?" he asked.

"Don't touch me, please," I managed to whisper.

He took his hand and pushed harder against my breast, and I felt a cold sweat break out. Shifting his weight, he pressed his knee into my stomach, just below my ribcage.

"Don't tell me what to do, you lesbian zombie whore," he said, and my blood stopped in my veins at the threat in his voice.

With a tiny twitch of his weight, he pumped his knee into me. My breath whooofed out of me and tears sprang to my eyes and I gasped. He pinched my breast and then punched me in the face.

"Stop it!" Bridget yelled. I couldn't see her. I closed my eyes and tried to catch my breath as my legs were roughly pushed apart.

"You don't know what resources went into creating you, all to have a body that could hold on to that hand and all because that hand was the final ingredient in controlling the thousands of slaves we created," Bridget's dad said.

"Don't do this, Daddy!" Bridget yelled again.

"SHUT HER UP!" Bridget's dad roared and punched me in the face again. Before I could even catch my breath he pushed his knee into my stomach again and I gasped again, feeling emptied of air entirely. His hands were pushing in between my thighs and I wanted to fight him, I did, but I couldn't even catch my breath and my lungs were so empty it caused me actual pain inside my chest.

I heard a crack of metal on a head and Bridget screamed and The Me's voice said "Don't do that!" and there was a scuffle sound as Bridget's dad's hand pushed into me and I tried to fight and he said:

"Don't fight me. You have lost the one thing you were created to keep and since this body belonged to others before it became your demon soulless shell, you shouldn't care what I do to it." He pushed his knee down again and my body felt like it was turned inside out as I struggled to breath. He punched the side of my head and I saw stars.

"I would kill you, but I need the body alive. I must make sure you understand never to oppose me again," he said, and viciously raked his nails over my inner thigh. I would have screamed but I couldn't even suck in air, as he was keeping his knee pushed into my stomach now.

I began to black out.

I felt his hands in me, inside my thighs and on my breasts and one pushing into my mouth and the room went all spinny and then a voice crackled through an intercom:

"It's not here!"

Bridget's dad stopped staring at my pussy and turned his terrible face back to look at mine. Through blurred tunnel vision, I saw him purse his lips.

"That is very bad for you," he said. "But worse for your lovers."

He punched me again in the face, and said: "Kill them."

The Terrorists Have Probably Already Won, But At Least Our Side Is HOT (Eye Candy)

2012-01-18T04:46:00.004-07:00

Two things inspired this post:

(c). I saw the movie Mission Impossible IV: Don't Call It IV, Call It "Ghost Protocol" Because Otherwise It'll Sound Like A Junky Sequel Instead Of All Classy Like All Those James Bond Movies And Even That Bourne Movie, They Didn't Use Numbers, Did They? What Are We, a Bunch of TV Producers?

(iii). I read, on The Editing Room, the fake abridged script for same,

and both me, after the movie, and The Editing Room, made the same point: aside from Ethan Tom Cruise Hunt, the IMF agents are amazingly bad at their job, which raises the question: how'd they get hired in the first place?

A bit of research (googling pictures of hot people while Sweetie's at yoga) answers that question, and so I give you The Impossibly Hot But Amazingly Incompetent Agents of the IMF:

Maggie Q

Why she was incompetent: Her character, Zhen, was given three jobs to do in the movie: apply her makeup, spill wine on the bad guy, and pretend to seduce Tom Cruise posing as the bad guy to get him out of there "inconspicuously," because nothing says inconspicuous like leaving the Vatican with a clumsy, provocatively dressed hot woman.

Thandie Newton

Why she was incompetent: Supposedly a great cat burglar, she was foiled by Ethan Cruise despite the fact that he had about 24 hours to learn of her existence, her plan, and her whereabouts, then nearly drove her car off a cliff trying to avoid a job offer, then got busted reading a secret envelope by a bad guy because she put the envelope back in the wrong pocket, got fooled by the same bad guy into revealing the IMF plan, finally finishing her role as an incubator for a virus and needing to be rescued again by Ethan.

Paula Patton:

Why She Was Incompetent: Did you see the movie? She couldn't fight, blew the masquerade switcheroo, killed a person IMF needed as a hostage, failed to seduce a desperate guy who was actively trying to pick her up and finally got shot. I would make a better agent.

Ingeborga Dapkunaite

Why she was incompetent: Her job, in the first movie, was to watch a guy while she wore sunglasses. Seriously. And when she was done with that, she climbed into a car bomb and blew up.

Emmanuelle Beart

Why she was incompetent: In the very first film mission for the IMF team that showed up on screen, her role was "temporarily dead fake hooker," which required her to be temporarily dead, and a fake hooker, revived by Tom Hunt. On the next mission, her order to abort the mission was ignored by Ethan Tom Cruise, leading to her being apparently blown up (but she wasn't) as a set-up to seducing Ethan Hunt to get $10,000,000 from him, only she blows that (while helping Ethan succeed in all his other missions, thereby proving incompetent as a bad guy, too, finally getting shot by the bad guys because she told them not to shoot the good guys.

Keri Russell:

Why she was incompetent: Whatever she was supposed to be doing on her mission, it ended up with her tied to a chair and an explosive in her head and requiring a whole 'nother IMF team to rescue her, after which she couldn't stay awake long enough to even tell Ethan Cruise Hunt what was going on and had to be carried around like a sack of potatoes. Compare that to Tom Ethan Cruise, who, when the exact same thing happened to him, managed to beat up Philip Seymour Hoffman, teach his wife how to use a gun, set up a makeshift defibrillator, and stop his heart all before the charge went off.

Josh Holloway:

Why he was incompetent: Whatever mission he was supposed to be on, it didn't, apparently, require that he bother to learn the identity of one of the world's most notorious assassins, the woman who guns him down in an alley being unrecognizable to him even though other IMF agents, when they see her picture, instantly recognize her. Maybe he needed those reading glasses he found on the island more than he wanted to admit.

Sell my mobile phones? Don't mind if I do.

2012-01-18T04:35:00.003-07:00

I am sitting at our little living room desk as I type this, and in that desk drawer are not one, not two, but FIVE old cell phones, going all the way back to my original cell phone that I got back in 2005, a phone that is almost comically devoid of features: it could only make phone calls, if you can imagine!

The thing is, I don't know what to do with them. Every so often, I've upgraded my phone -- whenever the company says I can do it for "free" I go ahead and do that because their free is my "I pay you billions of dollars per month for all these services, thanks very much, so I know it's not free at all"-- and when I've done that, I typically take the old phone and put it in a drawer because what am I going to do, throw away a perfectly good phone?

So I've got this collection of instant antiques and nothing to do with them... until I came across a website that lets me figure out the best way to sell mobile phones.

The site is called "SellMyMobile.com," and what it does is provide instant comparisons of the various people who will buy my phone. It's almost impossibly easy to use. I went there, put in my cell phone make and model, and I get all the sites that'll buy that phone from me and how much they'll pay. I then only have to mail my phone to them and get cash back a couple of days later.

I know: there have been phone-buying sites around for a long time, but I don't want to go searching around for them and trying to compare them and reading all the details. What am I, made of time? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. Time is a whole 'nother dimension. People can't be made of time, unless they're some sort of comic-book villain...

...I digress. The point is, I've been saving up for a Kindle Fire, and now I can unload this space-taking-up collection of old crummy phones and put that money towards my new tech stuff, killing two birds with one stone. Metaphorically. I've got nothing against birds.

Now, I want some of ALL of these candies. (Off The Top Of My Head)

2012-01-16T15:34:00.006-07:00

The other day, reader Anna Carrera and I mixed it up a bit on Twitter because she said that she loved Raisinets; as a firm backer of Boston Baked Beans, I took offense to the notion that something could best my beloved candy. Then, today, because I am theoretically working from home, I got to thinking, and what I thought, in order was:

I would like some Boston Baked Beans.

Come to think of it, I would like some French Burnt Peanuts.

Now that I ponder it, I'm kind of weird.

With that, I started trying to think of all the kind-of-obscure candies I'd ever liked and decided that I'd do a list of them, because you deserve to be constantly updated on whatever it is that crosses my mind. So here is the

Off The Top Of My Head List Of Kind Of Weird, Obscure Candies I Love:

Boston Baked Beans.
French Burnt Peanuts
Pop Rocks
Pixy Sticks
Chocolate Key Limes
Those little brown peanut-butter candies that come wrapped in wax paper at Halloween.
Charleston Chews
Bun
Chick-O-Sticks
Zero Bars
Hot Buttered Popcorn Jelly Belly Jellybeans
Nibs, but only the black licorice kind
Circus Peanuts
Bit O'Honey
Zotz

And there was a thing that was like caramel and nougat spiraled together on a stick and it was a square and I can't think of what it was called and it's killing me to not know, and I went so far as to ask Sweetie but she doesn't know and Google was no help, and yeah, I know I'm not supposed to Google things for these lists but what're you going to do, call the Internet cops?

Also, I just found them. They were Slap Stix. Turns out they have banana in them.

I asked Sweetie if she wanted to do a list, but she just got a weird look in her face, one that seemed to say something like "What in God's name am I married to?" only I'm sure that's not what it was really saying.

I'd have never cleaned my office if I'd known I could've won prizes for it!

2012-01-16T14:00:00.001-07:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Contest Factory for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Back in September, I organized my office. Seriously, I really did: I got files off the floor and banker boxes of documents put into storage and I got rid of things I never used and in general made my office about 64% more livable… but it’s still not great.

It would be great if, for example, my long credenza-like shelf/storage thing had drawers that were sized for real office purposes: the drawers on that thing come in two sizes, “too small for anything other than maybe one of those staple removers and who has to remove staples that often?” and “large enough for anything you might want to put in it but for some inexplicable reason it is only about three inches deep so whatever you put in it better be two-dimensional,” and I have almost no office supplies that are not the regular number of dimensions.

Oh, and that credenza thing doesn’t have a door on one of the cupboards, which makes it practically useless for hiding evidence, and what good is law office furniture that can’t hide evidence. (ATTENTION: ETHICAL REGULATORY AGENCY OF MY STATE BAR: IGNORE THAT LAST PART, THANKS !)

Anyway, I’m pretty happy with my office but I could be pretty happier, so the Pimp My Cube Contest couldn’t have come at a better time.

“Pimp My Cube” is a contest from Contest Factory that’s looking for the most pathetic, messiest, worst-est cubicle or office EVER. If you’ve got terrible furniture, outdated TRS-80 computers, messy desks, disorganized files, loose wiring, dim lighting, ground-in food stains on the carpet: they want you.

All you have to do is take a video of your terrible office/cubicle and upload it to the contest, explaining on the video what makes YOUR workspace the worse, and telling Contest Factory why you need to have your space pimped out.

Then, with your video up, you invite people you know to vote for you. The contest works (in part) on points: you get points for entering, commenting, voting, and having others sign up, and in the end, if you win you might win prize packages totaling $1,200, including

o New high end computer system
o New Desk, Chair and Decorations
o New Entertainment Package with high end stereo, espresso machine etc.

The contest is wide-open: get your video now and make it fun, interesting, compelling, and horrifying to have the best chance to win. (Even if your video doesn’t win, there’s a 2^nd chance random drawing for a $200 gift card.

The contest is open until noon on January 31, 2012, so go to the Pimp My Cube site, get registered and upload your to enter in the contest. Then work on getting out the vote by telling people to go vote for you!

Bacon double cheeseburgers also interfere with my ability to determine what is, or is not, a science. (Awesome Covers Of Already Awesome Songs)

2012-01-14T16:16:00.003-07:00

I didn't exactly fit the mold of a typical fan of The Cure back in the 1980s, although at one point I did have spiked hair on only one side of my head. It's hard to be goth and grim when you're fat, I suppose. Doesn't quite work.

Nonetheless, I loved The Cure, and still love The Cure, even though I'm no longer angst-ridden as I was back then (for no reason whatsoever, I should add. I was angst-ridden about being a superprivileged suburban kid), and that brings me to Tanya Donnelly & Dylan At The Movies' cover of The Lovecats,

which cranks the theatricality of that song up to 11 and makes it into almost a performance art piece, thereby making this song less accessible than ever and further marking just how far away from the mainstream I am.

Which would be enough to feel angsty about, if I were still the angsty type, but it's hard to be angsty when my life is going so well and I'm full of the bacon double cheeseburger I got from Sonic today.

Bacon double cheeseburger cancels out angst. It's science. Or math. Maybe geography. Is that a thing?

Bacon cupcakes are the only thing that'll cheer me up about this news.

2012-01-14T14:00:00.001-07:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Walgreens for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

I thought I’d take a moment and do one of those off-the-top-of-my-head lists of things. Today it’s

The List Of All The Things I Like About Our “Health Care” “System.”

So there’s…

Um…

Maybe…

Okay, I’ve got it: Bacon Cupcakes. Don’t tell me that’s not part of the health care system. It probably is, given how screwed up health care is in this country.

And the latest screwing-up of a necessary component of any advanced civilization (i.e., “health care”)? The insane demand for profits by a middleman company that is at the heart of the Walgreens and Express Script dispute.

Express Scripts is this company that does nothing and creates nothing and provides no meaningful services. It is a Profit Troll, a company that exists because it can, not because it should. What it does, to the extent it does anything but drain our society of resources, is act as the middleman between drugstores and health insurance companies.

And what Express Scripts, Profit Troll, does recently is demand ever greater concessions from companies like Walgreen’s; the latest round of contract negotiations between the two saw Express Scripts (Whose profits grow at 2x the rate of other industry companies) demanding that Walgreens take huge losses and give unilateral control over things like naming what’s a generic drug to Express Scripts.

And in the end, Walgreen’s couldn’t do that, so Express Scripts (as so many “health care” companies/Profit Trolls do) put profits ahead of health and has no deal with Walgreen’s.

The upshot is Walgreen’s customers who are Express Scripts members may now have to go farther away to get prescriptions at other drug stores: all Walgreen’s and some Duane Reeds are affected. And they’ll probably pay higher prices.

One particular group will almost certainly pay higher prices: Military families. Express Scripts contracts with Tricare, which provides insurance to military families. Walgreen’s offered to guarantee the lowest prices in the country to Tricare, and Express Scripts said no, because Express Scripts likes profits more than it likes than our military.

So with all that going on, two questions remain:

Can you prove that bacon cupcakes aren’t part of the health care system?

And what can you do?

The answer to the second question is: join Walgreens Prescription Savings Club

http://www.walgreens.com/pharmacy/psc/psc_overview_page.jsp

For January, you can do that at a discount: $10 per family in ($5 for one person), and you get discounts on 8,000 different brand-name medications, low prices on generics, Walgreen’s discounts on flu shots, pet scripts, nebulizers and other things. Members also get bonuses for using other Walgreen’s services, like photofinishing, so you can continue to save on medications and still do one-stop shopping at your local pharmacy.

And you can show your support for the companies that are trying to do the right thing: Pick sides, like me: Stick up for Walgreen’s: Like Walgreens on Facebook and follow Walgreens on Twitter (@Walgreens), and help make things better.

A Random Number Of Words About "Fright Night" (Movies)(Random Number Of Words)

2012-01-14T08:34:00.007-07:00

(What's this about? Click here.)

720 Words About “Fright Night.”

We watched the remake of Fright Night on Christmas Eve, as is our habit: every year since the first year we did this, we have watched a horror movie of sorts on Christmas Eve as our family movie, with the sole exception being 2010, when we watched The Other Guys, which was not in any sense a horror movie unless you count the fact that it begins with two men jumping to their death horribly, which is kind of funny to think about in the sense that it’s not funny at all that two men jumped to their death in a comedy and we called that a comedy while in Fright Night, which is a horror movie, we don’t actually see anyone die except [SPOILER ALERT!] McLovin’, who is turned into a vampire early on and who I’m pretty sure dies of being decapitated later on even though he didn’t have to because the end result of the movie is that everyone is cured of being a vampire.

Here’s your very-spoilery plot of the movie: A single mom is raising a kid who has inexplicably become popular and gotten a superhot girlfriend:

over the summer, and like everyone who suddenly becomes popular, the newly-popular kid has problems that geeks like me can barely understand, in that he doesn’t want to have sex with his superhot (and, they kind of hint, slutty) girlfriend

and also the guy who just moved in next door is not just Colin Farrell, whose name, it turns out, isn’t even kind of spelled like ferret, although it seems it should be, but also a vampire.

What really jumped out about this movie to both Sweetie and I, as we watched it on Christmas Eve (remember?) while the Babies! Slept in their room: Man, Colin Ferrell doesn’t even try to hide that he’s a vampire, does he? The movie jumps right in with a bunch of vampire-y stuff and about halfway through it Colin The Vampire is not just slinking around trying to be creepy, he’s ripping up gas lines in the backyard to blow up the house (because he can’t come in as he hasn’t been invited, see, so if he blows up the house, then he can just eat them all, a plan Edward Cullen would have never moped his way into thinking up.)

I do not remember the original Fright Night very well, although I’m sure I saw it. Why I’m so sure I saw it, I don’t know, as I haven’t seen practically any of the iconic 80s movies that everyone my age talks about loving. I spent the 80s reading sci-fi books and comics and being unpopular, and not the kind of unpopular that leads one to get a superhot and kind of slutty girlfriend. The kind of unpopular that leads one to, 25 years later, watch Fright Night and think, of the scant few high-school scenes, “High school was not like that” but secretly worry that, yes, it was, for everyone else.

Beyond Colin Ferrell imprisoning strippers (the movie’s set near Vegas, which kind of confirms what I secretly think about people who live around Vegas) and trying to molest teen boys, Fright Night doesn’t offer much: There’s a half-hearted attempt to throw some mythology into it (Vampires are dirt-dwellers, or something dumb) and the de rigeur self-referential thing horror movies have to do because Scream existed once (a vampire killer stages a Vegas show about killing vampires but he doesn’t really, unless he does really, kill vampires.) There is a car chase, a cameo appearance by Vampire From 80s Fright Night, a not-so-great fight in the Hall of the Vegas Vampire Killer, but the end result is entertaining enough to pass.

And, in the end, the teenage boy has his slutty girlfriend turned into a vampire and has an excuse to actually not sleep with her:

but he comes up with a plan to save everyone by lighting himself on fire and hugging Colin The Vampire to death, which really happens in the movie and which causes all the people Colin made vampires to become not vampires anymore, and so everyone is as happy as can be expected.

Except for McLovin’, who they decapitated and who is still dead at the end of the movie.

A Random Number Of Words About... the Introduction And List Of All Reviews!

2012-01-14T08:10:00.005-07:00

720 Words About "Fright Night."

Those of you who follow my 38,000,000,000 ...howmanyzeroesinazillion...000 blogs know that I used to do something I called the "Rum Punch Review," which were extended book reviews that explored not just the books but anything that came to mind while reading or writing about them.

Then I got bored with that.

And then I tried to write a 500-word short story that ballooned into 58 pages and while that story is probably the greatest story ever written and will make you laugh and make you cry and make you do long division in your head which will make you doubt your answer, it's also not really a short story.

And I've tried from time to time to write other reviews -- like Indie Book Reviews and Random Blog Reviews -- but I've never really gotten into the "movie" or "book" or "thing" reviewing world as a regular thing.

Until now: I've read so much phenomenal stuff lately, and seen so many movies that deserved comments, and found so many podcast... and ... you get the picture... that I'm going to start reviewing them, and the twist, to make it interesting, is that each of my reviews will be a random number between 1 and 1,000 -- I'll go to Random.org, get a random number assigned, and write exactly that many words about the subject.

For no particular reason. Just to see if I can do it. (In case you didn't know, this is my new experiment this year: hitting an exact target of words. Like Ezra Pound, who [possibly mythically] wrote a sonnet a year before he decided to write free verse, I am going to do this as an exercise to keep writing fun and interesting for me.]

This'll be fun. Until I get bored.

what is 'the After'?

2012-01-12T08:04:00.001-07:00

the After on Prezi

the After is...

... everything you want it to be.

...a trap

...where all your friends and family wait for you

...frighteningly perfect

the After is my latest book: four years in the making, the After tells what happens to Saoirse following a plane crash that leaves her standing in her perfect kitchen with her perfect family in a perfect world that she cannot stand. Told by William Howard Taft -- yes, that William Howard Taft, who appears on her doorstep -- that she can leave, Saoirse sets off on her own travels through a world almost entirely of her making, trying to find out how to leave and to decide if she wants to.

If you ever wondered what comes next, the After is a must-read. Buy it on your Kindle for $0.99 or in paperback on Amazon.

Click here for a sneak preview of a portion of the book.

The Best Worst Story: An Ongoing TBOE Investigation (Books, and Other Smarty-Pants Things)

2012-01-11T06:00:00.003-07:00

Part 3 of my Pulitzer-prize mentioning investigation into what makes a good, or bad, book. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here.

Today: Do you have to call a novel "a novel?"

Author/Secret Agent Patrick Dilloway, who prompted this investigation by posting what he said might be the worst story ever, has written thirty-one different books, by my count. His latest (or latest that I know of) is called Back To Life, and I am in the (very slow) process of reading and reviewing it, but I keep getting sidetracked from that process by (D) Other stuff and (2.7) the fact that every time I start to read it get caught up in the question of what makes a book truly good or truly bad and so I start to deconstruct books and this time the question on my mind is what I started the post with: why call a novel "a novel?"

I started thinking this because I am putting the finishing touches on my own next book -- details soon -- and when I started writing that one, four years ago (!), I put the words "a novel" after the title.

I didn't at the time know why I did that, but I do now, after thinking about it and investigating what it means.

I didn't know what I meant by that at first because as I look back now, the words "a novel" didn't need to be there. I mean, the book is a work of fiction. When published, it will sit on the (virtual) fiction shelf, it will be tagged as fiction, and, when read, as I've no doubt it will be by millions of people, it will be seen as fiction, clearly, or I expect it will because in it William Howard Taft tries to convince a housewife to help expel everyone from Heaven, which is not something I've heard happened in real life.

So because I didn't know why it was there, before setting this book up to publish I deleted that little phrase, "a novel," and went on with my life, but it got me wondering: why bother saying on the cover what it is?

Only books seem to do that, when I started to think about it. You never see "Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace, A Film" or the like. U2 never released "The Joshua Tree: A Sound Recording." Picasso, so far as I know, never made "Blue Dog: A Painting."

True, movies sometimes say "A True Story" or "Based on a true story," a tagline that automatically irritates me ever since I saw The Strangers, which was a great movie about a brutal home invasion said to be "Inspired by true events," only the true events that inspired this movie were simply "a guy knocked on the director's door once and then left."

The director rejected "Girl Scout Cookies: The Movie"

Seriously: That's what happened, and he used that guy as the inspiration for what was ... was... one of the more chilling movies I'd ever seen, a movie that got that extra fillip of scary because of the thought that some of it had happened, only none of it had happened and if people got a refund for having bought that James Frey book because it was supposed to be true but wasn't, then I'm owed $2 for The Strangers.

So: Calling a book "a novel" seems to have no real point, given that while when you look at a book in isolation, it's not immediately apparent whether you're looking at a novel or a memoir or a cookbook, books aren't in isolation, they're in sections, and also, when you look at a book, while you almost certainly make a great many judgments about that book based exclusively on the cover thereby belying that old saying about books and their covers, I don't know anyone who only reads the title and then buys the book.

Everyone I know who shops for books does this, either in real life or the virtual equivalent:

(17.) They see a cover of a book they like.

(17.) They pick it up and look at the back cover (or page down and read the description, online).

(C.) They shrug and go looking for something that promises to have more sex scenes in it.

(That is why Dilloway's Back To Life, despite not having "a novel" in the title, still has marketing genius behind it; to get to the book online, you have to agree that you're over 18 because the book apparently has so many NSFW scenes in it.)

(The necessity of an early sex scene in a book is one that should be obvious: A great many terrible books-- there was a book I read once about a Tom Cruise-like star in a haunted mansion or something in Hollywood that met this criteria-- have been read all the way through because despite the fact that they were not very good books, they had a sex scene early enough that readers [not just me, necessarily but probably other people] slogged through them in hopes that at least there would be another sex scene to break up the tedium. That's why the Internet will kill reading; people used to go on reading terrible books in hopes of getting to another sex scene. When you're reading online or on a tablet, you're never more than two clicks away from porn and can give up on a terrible book faster.)

In other words, nobody says "I'm going to only read the words on the cover, and I am only interested in books that are clearly novels," so from a marketing standpoint, the words "a novel" appearing on a cover of a book appear to be completely unnecessary.

Or are they?

Does the word novel mean anything anymore? Or is it a code that is meant to appeal to a certain kind of book buyer... let's call them snobs, the kind of people who say things like "Oh, I don't really watch TV" and who eat things that originated (they think) in Eastern Europe but which are actually from a factory in North Carolina.

Here's an interesting fact, if by "interesting" you understand I mean "probably not very interesting to anyone but me": the word "novel" wasn't used to describe a book at all until the 18th century, which is clearly an error on the part of this website that I used as my source for any actual information in this post, because everything was invented in the 16th century, but let's go with it.

The idea of a novel, that site says, came from the Italian word novella, and was used to distinguish a new sort of story from the old sort of stories that humans had been telling until that point. Novels back then were primarily character-driven, 50,000+ word stories. Or, as that site puts it more academically:

The novel places more emphasis on character, especially one well-rounded character, than on plot.

Another initial major characteristic of the novel is realism--a full and authentic report of human life.

The traditional novel has:

-- a unified and plausible plot structure
-- sharply individualized and believable characters
-- a pervasive illusion of reality

Here is another "interesting" fact: Some people are paid to research things like this and do that for a living which is kind of proof, I think, too, that we have more than enough money to do things like "provide free health care to anyone and everyone" because when you live in a society where you can pay people to research novels and other people will pay to learn about that research because those other people want to go on to make their living thinking about novels you are talking about a society that has a serious amount of leisure time and leisure money, so let's get with it people, and start having the kind of country where poor people don't die in the street while we squabble about whether Mitt Romney likes to fire people. (He does.)

I don't just point out that studying novels makes our society "capable of providing health care and education" and "stopping being selfish and stupid" because I'm a jerk. (I am.) I also bring it up because novels are a sign that society is progressing: in the 18th century when novels were not actually invented because everything was invented in the 16th century, the growing middle class was (again according to that site) demanding more literature, which is funny because now we have a shrinking middle class which is demanding more Jersey Shore, although as I look at that sentence nothing is funny about it at all, so I'll move on.

They did some pretty
weird stuff in the 16th Century.

While people back then had "literature" such as autobiographies and memoirs (which for some reason people think are two different things) and biographies and romances -- romances being not Fabio-covered women swooning books but grand adventures -- and allegories, people wanted something more real, more lifelike, and so the novel was invented; according to most sources,the "first" novel ever written in English was "Le Morte d'Arthur" in 1470, which is clearly wrong on so many levels that we can go back to ignoring most sources: "Le Morte d'Arthur' is, for one thing, a collection of short stories, so it's not a novel at all and people are ninnies.

Answerbag ("Where the answers are submitted by the same people who didn't know stuff in the first place!") says Cervantes Don Quixote de La Mancha was the first "novel" as we think of it, and actually cites to something that's not Wikipedia, but that site I've been relying on says it's actually Samuel Richardson who "created the novel of character" by writing "Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded" which is a novel told through letters, sometimes called an "epistolary novel" but more often called "an annoying literary device" which didn't get any better when Nicholson Baker transformed it into the all-conversation erotic story Vox in the 20th century, although you can clearly see the trend of novels from that transformation: virtue rewarded to phone sex describes the path of all civilization (hence: Jersey Shore)

Not that the 21st Century is much better,
weird-stuff-doing-wise.

But then, too, that site I've been relying on goes on immediately to say that Henry Fielding wrote the first novel, so let's just say "Benjamin Franklin wrote the first novel" because in the United States, that's how we solve everything: attribute it to Benjamin Franklin, a fictional character if ever there was one because by now, to achieve everything Ben Franklin was to have achieved he'd have had to live 300 years and be four people, which he could clearly only do if he'd discovered the Fountain of Youth and used his vast lifespan to acquire huge amounts of wealth and build a mountaintop laboratory in the Appalachians where he discovered cloning and sent out an army of Ben Franklins to alter history from time to time, and I've just plotted out, I realize, the sequel to my previous historical novel ("John Tyler: Space President"). I'll call it "Ben Franklin: Science Warrior". Look out, George R.R. Martin, here I come with the next phase of gritty, realistic, Lord Of The Rings ripoffs.

Add a dwarf, and HBO will
be calling me in 15 minutes.

I'm getting bored with the history, as I always do. Let's fast-forward:

After novels were invented by Ben Franklin, Science Warrior, they went through a couple of phases that can be described as "18th Century: Bronte-izing the Novel and Making It Boring", with a side trip into "Charles Dickens Writes The Only Christmas Story Anyone Will Ever Hear Again" to the 20th Century Novel, which that site that I've been relying on describes as "we can't really say anything about it" (seriously) (so now people are getting paid to not be able to talk about the thing they get paid to study, so, honestly, I should be able to get a free kidney transplant) to "The Postmodern Novel", 'postmodern' being a term only academics use because "modern" means "relating to recent times" and you can't postmodern is therefore a moving target, but that site that I'm no longer relying on says that the characteristics of the postmodern novel include:

playfulness with language

experimentation in the form of the novel

less reliance on traditional narrative form

less reliance on traditional character development

experimentation with point of view

experimentation with the way time is conveyed in the novel

mixture of "high art" and popular culture

interest in metafiction, that is, fiction about the nature of fiction

Which, if you look at it closely, means that the characteristics of a postmodern novel are that it is not at all a novel.

If, that is, novels mean "character studies that are fictional but which are meant to seem very realistic" which is what I gathered a novel was (because that was what people said it was.)

So, we're back to this:

A novel is a lengthy character study meant to be highly realistic and depend more on development of character than action-driven plots, unless a novel isn't any of those things at all.

Awesome.

So why do people still put a novel on their cover? I think it has nothing to do with making sure you, the reader/buyer (as I've pointed out, book publishers are far more interested in buyers than they are readers) know that a particular book is a character-driven realistic story (unless it isn't), and more in appealing to a certain class of reader: snobs.

I say that because the other history of the novel begins with one of the single-most overrated figures of the 20th century, ranking right up there in overratedness with Kurt Cobain: Andy Warhol.

Pictured: The Death of Culture.

Andy Warhol wrote a book. He called it "a, A Novel." It was not a novel. It was, according to Wikipedia which is fine for dreck like this, a word-for-word transcription of tapes Warhol made with Ondine, and I'm so uninterested in Warholesque Boomer Art that I'm not going to look her/him/it up.

Warhol talked with Ondine for two years (presumably, not straight through, but you never know) and then transcribed it as "a, A Novel" and it got published because publishers even then were trying to kill off reading.

"a, A Novel" is not at all pretentious *where is that sarcasm emoticon when I need it?* in that ... and I'm going to quote Wikipedia directly for the full impact... it is:

Warhol's knowing response to James Joyce's Ulysses [and] was intended as an uninterrupted twenty-four hours in the life of Ondine, an actor who was famous mostly as a Factory fixture, Warhol film Superstar and devoted amphetamine user

That is to say: She was famous for being around Warhol, who was famous for being around people like her. Also: "knowing response to James Joyce's Ulysses"? I've never read Ulysses and don't intend to because I was already burned when people said to read David Foster Wallace's unreadable garbage, but I do know that it's not worthy of a response.

Wikipedia goes on:

A taped conversation between Warhol and Ondine, the book was actually recorded over a few separate days, during a two-year period. The book is a verbatim printing of the typed manuscripts and contains every typo, abbreviation and inconsistency that the typists produced. Ondine's monologues and disjointed conversations are further fragmented by Warhol's insistence on maintaining a purity of the transcriptions.

a, A Novel was the second of several publishing projects Andy Warhol produced in his lifetime. ...Warhol wanted to write a "bad" novel, "because doing something the wrong way always opens doors."

Yes, that is the excuse I use when what I turn out is terrible: "I did it on purpose because doing things badly opens doors," something that's apparently only true for Tim Tebow. Who knew that "hiring bad stenographers and then hanging around drug addicts" would get a publishing deal?

Wikipedia has more:

Four typists were employed to transcribe the Warhol/Ondine tapes. Maureen Tucker, the drummer for the Velvet Underground was an expert typist.

Emphatically, she was not, unless the previous paragraph about errors was completely wrong, which, maybe it was, if it was entered into Wikipedia by Maureen Tucker.

However, she refused to transcribe the swear words and left them out. Two high school girls were hired to work on some of the tapes. When one girl's mother heard what they were listening to she threw out the tape, losing several hours of conversation. All four hired typists transcribed the dialogue differently, some identifying the speakers, others not. The editor for a, A Novel, Billy Name, preserved the transcripts as is, with every typo and inconsistent character identification, and even moving from two column pages to single-column based on each typist's style. The final printed version was identical to the typed manuscripts

Sounds hellish, doesn't it? It gets worse:

In his glossary for the 1998 edition of a, A Novel, Victor Bockris cites Billy Name as the source for the title; "a" refers to both amphetamine use and as an homage to e.e. cummings.The title in both editions published by Grove Press in 1969 and 1998 use the a, A Novel format.

Excuse me? "An homage to e e cummings"? Which, I'll note, Wikipedia misspelled as cummings did not use punctuation in his name. (Unless he did?)

Enough. Warhol was beloved by Baby Boomers, which was enough to make him famous and to permanently warp history, the Boomers warping culture the way gravity warps space-time, and by calling "a" "a novel," Warhol, my thesis is, stamped with cultural approval the words "a novel", marking that phrase with a certain kind of cache that is meant to convey, to the buyer -- people who are swayed by the words a novel on a book cover are far more likely to be book buyers than book readers -- that the book on which the words a novel appears is in the same category of things like "documentaries mostly containing subtitles," "Saabs", "things that make me think of lower Manhattan," and "wine country", the message being: "This book will convey to your friends and associates that you are cultured and intellectual."

Lest you think I am too hard on authors who use "a novel" (because I was going to), consider this: I was going to because that particular a novel I thought had a higher literary significance than the other stuff I've written, which is not a hard mark to achieve to do when you consider that "some of the other stuff I've written" includes "a story premised on a joke about Godzilla and Jesus," but the point is that I was trying to be pretentious when I typed that (and trying not to be when I deleted it), and lest you think I am overstating the impact of putting the words a novel on the cover, consider "the Prius Effect."

The "Prius Effect" is an actual thing: It refers to the oddly-shaped Prius car, and the fact that the Prius was oddly-shaped to emphasize that it was a hybrid, which, in turn, made people who wanted to buy hybrids more likely to buy a Prius, not because they were better cars but because they were immediately recognized as green: by buying a hybrid car, you are helping the environment, but by buying a Prius, you are helping the environment and telling everyone that you are helping the environment, the latter being very important to almost everyone who wants to buy a Prius.

The "Prius Effect" means that some people put solar panels in less-than-optimal spots because it's more important to them that everyone knows they have them than that they work, and in terms of a novel means that by slapping a novel onto the cover of your book, you will ensure that potential buyers, and even some readers, of your a novel will be able to advertise to people that they are buying (and maybe even reading) a novel.

That is, when they sit in Starbucks "reading" their new book, people who look at the book will know instantly that the buyer did not buy some trashy romance or boring nonfiction book: the buyer is a serious person who is reading something that hearkens back to literary answers to James Joyce and etc. etc. something art.

In that sense, the words "a novel" are simply, now, a marketing tool, similar to putting "from Steven Spielberg" on a movie poster or "Whole grain" on a box of food: it's a meaningless code phrase meant to convey a certain association to people who don't really care about the contents but who do care about what other people think about the contents.

I want this, and hate myself for wanting this. (Star Wars References.)

2012-01-05T10:57:00.004-07:00

The Phantom Menace is no longer just an unfairly-maligned Star Wars prequel; it's also the raison d'etre (that's French for raisin of death) for a new line of sandwiches available to Belgians which, really? There are like four Belgians in the world, total, and Belgium is always just moments away from being downgraded from "country" to "division of Epcot Center," the way scientists downgraded Pluto because they had nothing better to do that week.

What am I getting at? A story broken by HuffPo today that Quick, which is a Belgian restaurant chain, will be offering Phantom-Menace themed burgers, including, most notably, the Dark Vador:

HuffPo wondered why the burger is called the Dark Vador, and I wondered, too.

Initially I thought it might have to do with copyright, because Lucas copyrights everything, but I was thrown off by the fact that the green burger with what appears to be Play-Doh french fries on it is a "Jedi" burger, so I figured If they can use "Jedi" they must be able to use "Darth Vader", right?

Wrong: While Lucas sued a company for using the phrase "Jedi Mind" a while back, he doesn't have a copyright on the word Jedi. From that article:

The other interesting point: Lucas doesn't actually hold a trademark on "Jedi" or "Jedi Mind." It does hold trademarks on Jedi Knight, Jedi Power Battles and Jedi Training Academy but that's not quite the same thing...

That didn't stop "Jedi Mind" the company from caving in, despite the fact that the suit seemed to have no more merit than Hayden Christensen's claim that he actually came up with the idea for USA's Royal Pains show.

But "Darth Vader" IS trademarked for everything from toy figures to children's underwear. Which doesn't clear up anything, because Quick presumably can't use an image of Darth Vader unless they had permission, so why would they get permission for that but not the name?

I assumed then that Dark Vador is what he's called in Belgium, which I figured to prove quickly by googling What do they call Darth Vader in Belgium? but that just led me to this post about someone who met Darth Vader, only it was a giant balloon Vader, which actually exists:

The Vader Balloon has its own website and is available to be booked, which means that with Quick's Dark Vador burger, we are rapidly approaching the Vadersingularity, that time when you can have an entirely-Vader themed existence.

Also: are you disappointed that Hayden Christensen turns out to be kind of a whiner in real life, too? "Padme, I want credit for inventing Rooooooyaaallll Paaaaainnnns."

Holy cow! Now I want to follow up on the last answer. What a cliffhanger! (Indie Book Review)

2012-01-02T09:11:00.006-07:00

Today, I take a break from posting the Best of 2011 and give you 10 1/2 Questions with authors Erin O'Riordan and Tit Elingtin:

A few years back, Sweetie and I subscribed to our local paper because, as I put it "I'm afraid if I don't they'll put a mall in across the street from us and I'll be the last to know."

Turns out that fear is very real - -and in Eminent Domain, potentially fatal. After Jeff and Kendra get a potential dream house at a bargain basement price, their plans to fix it up and live the good life get hijacked by local government. At first only an annoyance, the local pols harass Jeff and make his life more difficult as he restores his house, builds his business, and deals with in-law troubles. But when the city unveils plans to turn Jeff and Kendra's home into part of an ongoing riverwalk project, Jeff's anger boils over.

Eminent Domain begins with one of the more chilling action/revenge sequences I've ever read before backtracking to show just how things got this bad... and it's based on a true story, as authors O'Riordan and Elingtin detail in discussing in some notes in the book a U.S. Supreme Court precedent that lets private developers use the government's power of condemnation for profit. I loved this book -- although it's outside of my usual genre, I found it compelling and well-written -- and recommend it to people who like their legal and revenge dramas populated by believable characters.

I sent my usual 10 1/2 questions to Erin and Tit, who are a husband-and-wife team of amazingly prolific writers-- and it turns out the story is more than just fiction.

Here's their responses:

About The Book:

1. In Eminent Domain, the chief conflict is between a man and his local government over property rights, but the main character, Jeff, seems to have conflicts with lots of other people who fall short of his ideals. Did you make a conscious effort to shape Jeff as a sort of roughneck idealist (my words?) Or did it just work out that way?

It’s the natural of my co-author, Mr. Tit Elingtin. “Roughneck idealist” is a good way to describe him. It just bled into the character.

2. The details of this story amazed me, from the discussion of the plans the town has that require (?) condemnation to the attention you pay to the backstories of the other characters. These really flesh out the story and add to the realism. How much of those details do you plan in advance, and how much is more spur-of-the-moment window dressing?

Many of the details come from life experience. We took personal experience and crafted the story from real situations. In reality, the city we live in wants to take our home. The writing of this book was a cathartic way to deal with the emotions and anxiety we have been put through by our local government. The backstory with “Lex,” in reality, was done to us by a family member.

3. One concern I had -- I'll word this carefully because I don't want to spoil the book-- was that Jeff's decision concerning the legal route he could take to challenge the city. While his decision was in keeping with his character, I felt Jeff should have made a different decision to justify his later actions. Did you have a reason for Jeff making the choice he did?

In real life, the legal route would be our choice. Within the fictional world, we wanted to go to the extreme to show the consequences of what government meddling could do in someone’s personal life. We wanted the character to just be “fed up,” with no hope. In real life, we have a tremendous amount of hope, and we will prevail if we ever go to court.

About You:

4. You wrote this book with your husband, Tit Elingtin. How do the two of you divide up the writing duties?

I get the foundation down. The book started out at 80,000 words, all of which I banged out myself, and then we edited it together to refine it. Together, we edited it 8 times, and we’re currently going through a ninth (and hopefully final) edit to be re-released February 2012.

Tit’s contribution was the whole first chapter, and he’s the killer of adverbs. He takes a paragraph and turns it into just a few words to keep the reader moving. I compare him to Ernest Hemingway.

5. Most of your writing falls in the "erotic fiction" genre, making this somewhat of a departure for you. What made you decide to write about the issue of public taking of private property?

Our personal experience with our local government – Tit is so passionate about our home, he was obsessed with what to do, and this was the best way for him to work through his emotional struggles.

6. You told the "Whipped Cream" interviewer back in 2010 that your most embarrassing moment was accidentally giving a character two different names in a book, and having that error survive all the way through publication. Is that still your most embarrassing moment?

Heavens above, I hope so.

Things I Just Feel Like Asking

7. If you could have a movie made about your life, what song would play over the opening credits?

“Survivor” by Destiny’s Child

8. 3D movies seem to mostly show they're 3D by having objects thrown directly at the camera. How would you improve 3D movies?

Tit’s answer is, “Instead of 3D glasses, 3D contact lenses.”

I’m thinking Smellovision.

9. Regardless of what flavor they might actually be in real life, what flavor do you feel white jellybeans SHOULD be. (For purposes of this question, "Pina Colada" and "Coconut" are not allowed as answers.)

Peppermint

The Impossible Question:

10. The ‘Taos Hum’ is a low-pitched sound heard in numerous places worldwide, especially in the USA, UK, and northern Europe. It is usually heard only in quiet environments, and is often described as sounding like a distant diesel engine. Since it has proven indetectable by microphones or VLF antennae, its source and nature is still a mystery.

In 1997 Congress directed scientists and observers from some of the most prestigious research institutes in the nation to look into a strange low frequency noise heard by residents in and around the small town of Taos, New Mexico. For years those who had heard the noise, often described by them as a “hum”, had been looking for answers. To this day no one knows the cause of the hum.

What do you think is causing the "Taos Hum"?

Tit says, “I suspect it may be the sound of a long-distant train, somehow amplified by the atmosphere. Their geographic location may be the spot off which the sound waves reflect. I would use the example of architecture that allows someone to be on one side of a room, 100 feet away from someone on the other side of the room whispering, and still be able to hear him or her."

And the half-question: finish, then answer, this question:

11. Neil Armstrong famously said "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," but what most people...

…claim were humankind’s first steps on the moon were not. As Solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun. Has the human race been to the moon before? We say yes.

Eminent Domain is available on Amazon for $13.97;

it's also available as an e-reader download. Click here for more works by Erin O'Riordan.

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Interested in government? Not really, you say? That's probably because you never read Publicus Proventus, the best politics blog around. Check it out today!

The Best Of 2011, and My Predictions For 2012 (Today: Sports!)

2012-01-01T07:19:00.008-07:00

Today, the first of two things from 2011 that I didn't want to like or even think existed, but which ended up being The Best of those things around, this one from the category of:

SPORTS:

I don't like Bill Simmons, okay? More often than not, when I mention him on my sports blog it's to make fun of him and/or accuse him of stealing my ideas, which, to be honest, he does a lot because my ideas are awesome.

So when I first heard back in May that Bill Simmons was going to have his own website called "Grantland", news I got via a blog post on Slate which I didn't really understand, I said:

I only understand about half of that, but from what I gather, it's making fun of Bill Simmons, who deserves that because when he's funny at all it's because he copied me, and he's rarely funny. So I wholeheartedly support Tom Scocca in whatever it was he was writing about there -- and hereby forgive Tom Scocca for having himself kind of stolen my idea a while back, too.

And with that, I decided that I'd never have to read Bill Simmons again, since I never went to ESPN anymore because I'm sick of ESPN, and "NFL Today" and other sports websites; I don't really get my sports news from them at all. When I want sports news -- which is about twice a week -- I get it from a few sources, those sources having been:

1. The Dan Patrick Radio Show

2. The Sports Economist website.

3. NPR's Frank DeFord

4. Deadspin

5. Sometimes that one TV show with Colin Cowherd and Michelle Beadle, about whom I can't decide if she's hot or just sports hot, because sitting next to Colin Cowherd has to make one look better, doesn't it?

Or does it? People think that if you sit next to someone ugly you'll look better, or if you sit next to someone fat, you'll look skinnier, but as I think about it, I question that logic the same way I question the logic of going to an amusement park on a Tuesday or Wednesday because you think the lines will be shorter: if everything thought that way, Tuesday and Wednesday would be the worst days to be at the amusement park, wouldn't it? Which means you should go on Saturday, when nobody's there, except that's what we all think, so we all go on Saturday, which means...

... you can see why I never go anywhere, and instead just sit around pensively listening to Butterfly Nets by Bishop Allen.

That kind of logic isn't the same flawed logic as "let's sit by someone fat and ugly so we look skinny and pretty", which is also flawed logic, because isn't there just as much of a chance that people will look in your direction and say "Man, look at that whole group of fat, ugly people"?

I think that system only works if you are already hot/skinny, or if you want to make yourself look bad. For example, if you take a Ferrari (or, fill in the name of the car you like, or, if you don't like a car, then fill in the name of something you, personally, find beautiful/hot, like, say, Vanessa Williams or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in which the jelly is spread evenly among every bite.)

(Or, Vanessa Williams making you that PB&J. Man, that's HOT!)

Note: There is no sandwich in that picture. Also note: I am attempting to include more pictures in these posts because Michael Offutt, Author/Mincemeatarian (you're not the only one who can bestow titles, Mr Offutt) thinks I need more pictures, which I'm trying not to take as a criticism of my writing style, but how can I not? Do people go around telling [fill in name of author later, because right now all I can think about is Vanessa Williams, and that's going to seem a little obsessive if I say her again] that she needs more pictures in her work? They do not! Probably! I'm going to listen to Bishop Allen again.

Okay, I'm back. Where was I? Oh, yeah, hotness and how to improve oneself, which isn't at all what this post is about but I've vowed, in 2012, to do two things:

1. Not make any vows, and

2. Finish at least one thought this year, and

iii. Not be tied down by conventional ways of numbering things and let my imagination flow.

[stemella coeruleoalba]. Never admit up front how many items ought to be on a list.

So if you took your hot thing -- Vanessa Williams Making A Perfect PB&J being about the hottest thing anyone can imagine, so we'll go with that -- and put it among ugly things, it wouldn't look any hotter, would it? Sure, it would emphasize the hotness, as in this fictional conversation in which I, and Grumpy Bulldog, and Andrew Leon because I already mentioned Michael Offutt, Author/Higgs Boson, are sitting around having lunch:

Me: This is really weird, isn't it?

Grumpy: I hate everything, especially that girl because she looks like she might not like Kurt Vonnegut.

Andrew: I don't really have a catchy nickname for myself. Should I get one?

Michael Offutt Author/Palindrome, from off to the side: I recommend it! Also, you should have invited me! If I just mention people, they get, like 43,000 hits!

Grumpy: I hate him, now, too.

Me: Hey, is that Vanessa Williams making a PB&J sandwich over there?

Andrew Leon: I don't know, I can't see past all the fat, ugly people in the way.

Grumpy: I hate how much hotter she looks than everyone else.

Rusty Webb, in a surprise guest appearance: Vanessa, let me help you get away from those people at that table.

Michael Offutt Author/Pope Of The Church Of Ridley Scott: I would never have done that to anyone, unless by doing so I could get a sneak peek of Prometheus.

And... I officially have no readers anymore, correct?

On with thinking stuff about other stuff!

The other thing standing near a group of people can do is make you look bad. If I, in that hypothetical lunch scene above, had done to stand near Vanessa Williams, I (a) would have been violating both restraining orders, and (ochre) would have been exposed for being completely not hot -- my lack of hotness becoming extremely apparent in comparison to extreme hotness, the way you don't really notice how white that one shirt is in the detergent commercial until they put it next to the dingy shirt washed with that offbrand soap that your mom uses because she hates you.

Which brings me back to Michelle Beadle:

Hot? Or Sports Hot?

Which in turn brings me back to Bill Simmons and Grantland, which is what this post is about, remember.

I only read Grantland, originally, out of spite, to see just how bad it was and laugh at it and feel superior to Bill Simmons in the way that a guy who has his own sports blog with 0.03 readers can feel superior to a guy who makes his living watching sports and saying stuff about it.

And then I liked it. From the Bad Quarterbacks league to the shout-outs to pop culture to the for some reason Chuck Klosterman writing on it to the fact that they put a 2011 Song Round Up on the site that made no references to sports whatsoever to the fact that they had a great article about how basketball owners have their priorities all wrong... Grantland really stepped up sports writing and managed to do it with a mix that somehow manages to be sports-geeky with references to stats and fourth-string-wideouts and stuff nobody but nerds cares about but also in a way that manages to be fun.

Reading Grantland is, to me, what would happen if the smartest kid in high school got injected with Captain America serum, only the Captain America serum made him funny and interested in sports, a little, too, and so he began writing about it and posted it on a website with a super-pretentious name only somehow it all worked out and made it interesting, and also, let's pretend this metaphor never happened, it was just my way of working in a reference to Captain America, which I watched last night and which was pretty good, except that if Captain America's metabolism really worked at 4 times the rate of ordinary humans', he would need to eat at least 8,000 calories a day, and likely more considering how hard he's working at all other times, so his food bills would be enormous.

And, on Captain America, too, after it was over, Sweetie asked me "How could he be alive after all these years?"

And I said: "Well, you have to assume that he crashed into the ocean and froze pretty quickly, and since it was explained that his body could heal itself, he was in suspended animation with his body healing itself, too," and then I added "Or, more appropriately: something-something-something-science, he's healed!" which is what all science is about in comic books, anyway.

And that is why I like Grantland: because this post, which is about Grantland, also manages to be about how hot things are and PB&Js and Captain America and science. I'm not a sports junkie; I don't care much about the Xs and Os and stats unless you manage to make it interesting to me. Grantland manages to do that: be interesting, plus plus be smart about sports so that I can learn things and make sense of it.

So, in conclusion:

*. The numbering system you use is heterofascist; free your mind and the body will follow.
17. Grantland is The Best Sports Whatever Of 2011.
3. Michelle Beadle is not as hot as Vanessa Williams.

PRIOR BESTS of 2011:

Music.

Celebrities

Books (And Other Smarty-Pants Things)

Santa, Godzilla and Jesus Walk Into A Bar...

Nick, a nearly-failed UFO maker, finds a tiny brass trumpet lying in a gutter – moments before a dead body drops from the sky and he’s chased down the street and into a major adventure by Sexy Cop. Before he knows it, Nick is doing battle with Wenceslas’ Xmas Machine, helped by Angels, the Secret Army Under The Bed, and a man in a robe, as attempts at world domination mix in with Nick’s attempts to convince Sexy Cop that they are soulmates.

Santa, etc… is a hilariously offbeat, thrill-a-minute otherworldly adventure that attempts to answer the question “What is the most ridiculous possible explanation for Christmas as we know it.” Said one person: “If Douglas Adams had teamed up with Robert Heinlein to come up with a story to make everyone forget A Christmas Carol, they’d have simply ended up copying this story.” (That person was the author of this story, but still… he said it.)

Go buy the book on your Kindle.

Available on Amazon as a paperback; click here for that version.

The Best of 2011, and my Predictions for 2012 (Today: MUSIC!)

2011-12-31T06:41:00.003-07:00

Ever stop and think why you like a particular song?

I do, and when I stop and think about it, oftentimes the reason why I like a song has less to do with the song itself and more to do with what's going on with me at the time I hear the song. Other times, there's one particular moment or piece of the song I like so much that it makes me like the whole entire song. (Something I've commented on before, here and here.)

So here's my list of The Best Songs I Heard For The First Time In 2011 -- which, note, some of them may not have first been made in 2011, but who cares about that? They were new to me this year and why I liked them. Feel free to add your own nominees in the comments.

The countdown is to the Best Song of 2011:

12. The Presidents, Jonathan Coulton:

Why I Liked It: I first heard about Coulton on a podcast in which it was revealed that he made thousands (hundreds?) publishing his music through his own website, making him something of a hero to me because that's what I'd like to do with my writing. (So far, I'm not making thousands unless I count the money in decimals, the way England used to with the ha'penny, and I really think that we lost something in society when we stopped having money you could break into usable bits.)

I like this song of his the best because (a) it's catchy, (b) it mentions William Howard Taft, who is a lead character in a book of mine that I'll probably finish this year (you can read most of it for free here) (c) It's catchy. That's worth mentioning twice, because you try writing a catchy song about the presidents.

What I predict for Jonathan Coulton in 2012:

He just got his breakthrough song, Code Monkey, turned into some sort of musical by some sort of group, so by the end of the year, and zombies are big, so we can expect a guest shot from him on the final season (this year) of The Walking Dead, where he'll play an office worker turned into a zombie in homage to his song RE: Your Brains.

Here's that musical:

PS: We can hope that The Walking Dead ends this year, can't we?

11. Friday, Rebecca Black.

Why I Liked It: Mostly because people hated it, which is how I get to like a lot of stuff, because screw you, world, don't tell me what to like. When I heard how much everyone hated the song, I went and listened to it, and it wasn't that bad. I explained it more at length (of course!) here.

What I Predict For Rebecca Black In 2012: Did you know that Rebecca Black's video spawned its own pop culture spinoff already? The Girl In Pink who rode in the car apparently was elevated from "person" to "person some people know about," thanks to riding in the car with Rebecca. She's even released her own single:

Which leads me to my prediction: A reality show for Rebecca Black and The Girl In Pink, a sort of "Teen Moms" meets "American Idol."

10. Butterfly Nets, Bishop Allen

Why I Like It: Sometimes -- most of the time -- I am in a quiet, pensive mood . The raucous jabbering persona I play on the Internet isn't really me; that's just a character I put on for your entertainment. Soft, quiet songs that make me remember my life only in my memories it's tinted like a yellowing newspaper are one of my favorite things.

Also: that sax solo midway through puts a lump in my throat.

What I Predict For Bishop Allen in 2012: I don't know anything about this group. I don't even know how I came to have their CD or where I heard about them or whether they're even a group anymore. So I'll say... they will do the score for that Prometheus movie. That seems timely.

9. Friday (literal version.)

Why I Like It: Just because something's played out doesn't mean I can't like it. In fact, I'm planking right now.

8. Music For A Found Harmonium, Ferny Grove Percussion Ensemble:

Why I Like It: I love Awesome Covers of Already Awesome songs, and these kids are good. Plus, they look like they're having fun.

What I Predict For Them In 2012: They've probably graduated and gone on to boring jobs by now -- but maybe the fame engendered by making this list will get them into a reunion tour and they'll cover other songs? They're really good:

7. Their Duet, Wim Mertens:

Why I Like It: Someone put a video on Youtube of the "Baby Einsteins" only instead of the "Baby Einsteins" soundtrack, it had this song as the backing. I don't know why people do the things they do, but Mr F and Mr Bunches liked the video and I liked the song so I put it on my playlist.

What I Predict For Wim Mertens in 2012: More people pirating his work in obscure and nonsensical ways, until SOPA goes into effect and we all get sued into oblivion by Viacom and J.K. Rowling.

6. Golden Phone, Micachu & The Shapes:

Why I Like It: When Sweetie and I went on a date night this year to State Street, she was shopping at Urban Outfitters and this song was playing. I found it catchy and it reminds me of that night, which was marked by pleasant weather, an excellent sandwich that probably killed two chambers of my heart, and a mysterious animal that made me realize Sweetie and I were soulmates.

My Prediction For Micachu et al in 2012: I will hear their new song while picking up take-out at Chili's and mention it on December 31, 2012, but by then the world will have ended 10 days earlier, making it somewhat of a moot point.

5. Almost Every Single Song By Slow Club, Ever, But I'll Just Pick Out "Me And You"

Why I Liked It: Slow Club was my 2012 version of Noah & The Whale, a band I became enamored of, but they've outlasted my Noah obsession and earned spots on four different playlists on my iPod (Running, Upbeat, Indie, and the After, which is the music I listen when writing that aforementioned book starring Taft.) Rhythmic music, obscure lyrics, and a sort of Zooey Deschanel-esque vibe without actually being Zooey Deschanel, which is important because I really kind of feel like Zooey overdid it this year.

What I Predict For Them In 2012: They've been featured in a commercial, and their sound was ripped off for some car commercials, but the life cycle of quirky almost-folksy duos is a short one; Quirky, almost-folksy duos are the fruit flies of the music world. We'll probably never hear from them again, just like Noah & The Whale, which, I know, not a duo, or maybe they are. I really know very little about the bands I like, as I don't particularly care about them, I like the music. I don't need to know anything about the band to enjoy the music, anymore than I need to know about Patricia Cornwell's private life to have enjoyed the Kay Scarpetta books before she got all whacky about them.

4. Will You Be There, Ida Jo (and the Show?)

Why I Like It: I've always liked this song, and Ida Jo's mournful, folksy take on it elevates the song to a spiritual level. Plus it lets me like the song without the moral quandary of liking something Michael Jackson did. Moral quandaries ruin music for me.

What I Predict For Ida Jo in 2012: God, I don't know. I'm just going to stop predicting stuff. It's getting old.

3. Graphology, Olivia Mancini & The Mates:

Why I Liked It: First, it's the kind of song you can see yourself driving to, say, through the plains of Kansas on an early, slightly chilly June morning when the corn isn't that high and the sun has only just come up and everything is flat and shaded bluish-gray except the horizon itself, and you're on your way to an adventure you can't really imagine yet but which will clearly be a lot of fun.

Second: Try writing a catchy song about studying graphology, which is the study of handwriting.

Third: The song seems to be about never stopping learning, and that is something I aspire to. The amount of knowledge I add to my life each day only makes me realize how many more things there are out there that I don't know yet, which makes me sad sometimes but then makes me excited other times, because in both cases, there's still lots for me to learn.

2. Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk, The New Pornographers (Acoustic Version)

Why I Like It: Not only is it a catchy, uplifting song by a group I love, but also: Mr Bunches loves this song, and we watch the video together and name the instruments they play. Then he sings along with it, which is really amazing considering that not many 5-year-olds know the word byzantine, let alone how to use it in a song.

And The Number one Best Song of 2011:

1: Friday, by Stephen Colbert:

Why I Liked It: It's clearly the Best Song of the Year: It combines Friday, which really was an earth-shattering song when you think about it, with Stephen Colbert, who is himself a pop culture force like no other, and they raised money for charity by doing this, which I found admirable especially in that by doing so, Colbert helped offset the incredible harm he's doing by siphoning money off from Democrats to fund his "Colbert SuperPAC" joke which is intended to make a point but which point it makes is likely to be "helping elect a Republican by getting liberals to give money to a joke cause rather than real causes."

Also: Ladies and gentleman, Taylor Hicks! ought to be said more often.

Previous Bests Of 2011:

Celebrities

Books (And Other Smarty-Pants Things)

The Best Of 2011, and My Predictions For 2012 (Today: Celebrities!)

2011-12-29T05:33:00.005-07:00

Back when I was a kid, I regularly read Doonesbury comic strips. I still do, in fact, but now I read them on the Internet whereas back then I would check compilations of Doonesbury strips out of the Hartland Public Library, an institution I used so often that I still remember my library card number (it was "4002.")

Back then, you checked books out by having the librarian write your library card number on the little card and take it, and then stamp the book with a due date and send you on your way. I bring that up in order to compare it to how I checked out a book the other day from the Madison Public Library: I logged on to the website, found the book I wanted, entered my 13-digit library card number (actually Sweetie's; I use her card because of my ongoing feud with the Middleton Public Library, a feud that I'm fighting in part by not paying a late fee on my own card, so I can't use it), clicked a few buttons, and then went upstairs and began reading the book on my Kindle.

My, how things have changed!

Except that they haven't, not really, because this little jaunt down memory lane has a point, and that point is that way back then, Doonesbury did a series of strips where Rick Redfern went to work for People magazine and had to go to a gossip symposium where he learned how to be a celebrity journalist. One of the strips commented that the then-modern-day "celebrity" had not really done anything worth celebrating, and proposed rebooting the whole system (presumably, not a gritty reboot) to refocus on those people truly worth celebrating.

That debate has gone on, obviously, for at least 30 years, and maybe longer; I'd be willing to bet that if you go back and look at a 1920s newspaper (or, as they were called back then, event-o-printoriums)(but they still had horoscopes, which said things like "Today, you will do the jitterbug in a speakeasy with a tall, dark stranger.)(Yes, my knowledge of the 1920s is based exclusively on once watching the film version of Chicago.)

if you went back to the 1920s, you'd find that back then, people were griping about other people being famous simply for fame's sake.

So maybe it's about time we stopped debating whether people are famous for the "right" or "wrong" reasons, and just accept that people become famous for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes once they become famous we want them to keep being famous, for whatever reasons. After all, is it any better to become famous playing an ultraviolent delinquent who rapes people than it is to become famous for nothing at all?

Which brings me to the Best Celebrity of 2011:

Oh, come on. Who else could it be?

Once you stop obsessing over whether celebrities need be required to do something worth celebrating before we obsess over them, the choice of Kim Kardashian as 2011's Best Celebrity is a no-brainer, much like the people who obsess over Kim Kardashian's fitness for the public eye.

The answer to whether celebrities have to do something worth celebrating lies, like a zen koan, not in the external world, but in the meaning to the question itself. When people say things like "Kim Kardashian is famous for nothing! She has no talent!", they are exposing their own ignorance and biases.

I note that I do not pay attention to those who say she's famous because of her sex tape. Kim's sex tape, like Harrison Ford's gig painting a doorway, allowed her the entryway into show biz, but, like Harrison Ford, Kim has stayed around longer than her dearth of any displays of talent would allow her to do so. If you say that Kim Kardashian is famous, now, because of her sex tape, then, you are saying that Americans will pay attention to someone for four solid years because of one sex tape, and while Americans will pay attention to a great many things in hopes that there's some sex in it somewhere (see also: all those Dragon Tattoo books), four years is a lot longer than one sex tape can hold even our addlepated attentions.

Plus, think of all the other people who have released sex tapes and who have not maintained the level of fame that Kim Kardashian has.

No, the sex tape was what opened the door, but Kim Kardashian has kept her foot firmly wedged in that door since then, which brings us back to that zen riddle posed by people who say she's famous for doing nothing and has no talent.

Who do you suppose, in saying that, that those people are thinking about as the 'rightfully' famous?

Scientists?

Doctors?

Judges?

Social workers?

Soldiers?

I could go on.

People who say Kim Kardashian has no talent and doesn't deserve to be famous classify the world into "those deserving fame based on their talent" and "those not deserving of fame because they have no talent."

And then, under the deserving fame column, they put people like actors, and singers, and dancers, maybe, and directors, and possibly comedians.

All talented people, of course. Or many of them, anyway.

But the fact that those people are not arguing that doctors/judges/social workers/activists, etc. should be more famous shows that they classify talent very narrowly: the talent that deserves fame, they say, is the ability to make me laugh or cry or hum the tune to a musical about the 1920s.

I've been humming that song all week, since I jogged to it on Monday.

That-- that -- is the talent that most people say is deserving of fame.

That's why it's so ridiculous that people argue that Kim Kardashian should not be famous: because if there is someone deserving of fame, shouldn't it be the people that accomplish something that matters?

I love movies, books, (some) TV shows, music, art, sports, all that stuff. But do those things matter enough that we should be going nuts over them, and not over other things?

Here's a thought to mull on while you work through this. This past year, a boy named Luke learned to walk again after suffering a rare case of encephalitis that hospitalized him for lengthy periods of time and left him unable to walk for four months. With the help of 8 therapists, this little boy eventually walked on a treadmill, and 4-day-a-week therapy sessions built around a show Luke loved ("Wipeout") helped him build up strength and stamina.

Luke still used a wheelchair for many things when the summer came and he got to visit the Jacksonville Jaguars training camp, and, inspired by being there, Luke walked unassisted across the field.

That is a remarkable story, isn't it? Very touching and heartwarming and it was headlined:

Jaguars center Brad Meester inspires boy, 6, to learn to walk again

Now, I don't mean to diminish Brad Meester's role in Luke's recovery: Meester visited him and urged him on and invited him to training camp and was in general a wonderful guy.

But Luke was already learning to walk, and had his life saved by a team of doctors and therapists and surgeons none of whom saw their name in a headline as inspiring a boy to walk again.

So let's get a sense of perspective, okay? It was nice for Brad Meester to help a little sick boy recover.

It was heroic and talented and news- and fame-worthy of that team of doctors to use their skills, skills that did not involve "pretending people are shooting at us" or "standing resolutely in front of another large man for a few seconds at a time."

Whenever I hear people say "Kim Kardashian has no talent, she's famous for nothing," I think to myself "Yeah, but most people are famous for being marginally, if that, more talented." And the people who should be famous, the people who really are talented, rarely are.

With that out of the way, let's tackle the other big complaint about Kim Kardashian. No, it's not that she is serious about never being photographed from behind,

...it's that her wedding was fake.

That outraged people this year -- the fact that Kim Kardashian got fake married and then real divorced made people madder than any three things Netflix could have done; if I didn't know better, I'd have suspected that Netflix put Kim up to it simply so that they could get off the hotseat of "Americans being upset at stupid stuff".

But why?

Why, exactly, were people upset about Kim Kardashian's wedding-and-divorce news cycle? (The timing of it more or less exactly coincided with the premiere of various iterations of her shows, right?)

The general reason I hear is that she made lots of money off of it, and so people were really, really mad that she made them believe she was marrying for love and then she wasn't, really, and so she shouldn't have gotten paid for something that wasn't real and didn't matter.

Excuse me?

That is the standard we are now setting for our celebrities? You only get paid if we believe that what you're doing is real? I guess I ought to cancel my plans to go see Ghost Protocol tonight.

I can't believe that two decades into reality tv, this needs to be said, and I can't believe, further, that I'm going to mention Kim Kardashian and Erwin Schrodinger in the same sentence, but I just did.

Schrodinger, remember, famously said that it is the act of observing something that collapses the wave form and inevitably alters the possibilities of what can happen.

Schrodinger's cat is meant as a criticism of quantum mechanics; he used it to point out that the idea that all possibilities exist equally until we observe the outcome of an experiment; the act of observation reduces the waveform of probabilities to a single outcome.

Which is to say: observing changes the event.

Which is what happens when we create "reality" TV shows that follow people around and make them do things. No "reality" TV show is real because once you put a camera on someone, they stop scratching their butt and start doing things, and in the process of doing those things, they inevitably change their behavior, for better or worse.

The most obvious example of this was Horrible Kate Gosselin, who used her status as a "mom" to forget all about being a "mom" and try to become a reality star.

I do not object to people becoming famous; I do not object to people becoming famous by using their kids, either [provided the kids aren't ill-treated]. What I do object to is people like Horrible Kate Gosselin pretending to be a mom in order to get on TV; that's misusing kids and once people realized that Horrible Kate Gosselin felt about those kids the way you or I might feel about something nasty we stepped in, they stopped watching.

But that's not the point. The point is that when Horrible Kate Gosselin first got on the air, she was a struggling "mom" of 8 kids with an idiot husband and a fetish for natural peanut butter, trying to buy groceries at a savings club to make ends meet.

Within a season, though, the money Horrible Kate Gosselin was getting paid to pretend to care about her kids on TV had changed things: they took those kids to Disneyland and ate breakfast with Mickey, and vacationed in Hawaii and shopped for houses that included a horse farm.

Simply paying Horrible Kate Gosselin to watch her changed what people were watching.

That is what happened, I figure, with Kim Kardashian's wedding. TV shows have long featured big emotional hooks and suspenseful cliffhangers, which is why it's so hard to make a life into a TV show. Rarely does your life have a big emotional hook or suspenseful cliffhanger at the precise time you'd like it. Kim Kardashian may or may not have liked Kris Humphries for real -- seems pretty clear she didn't, though -- and may or may not have ever married someone if it weren't for the TV show. But we all are -- well, you all are, because I don't watch -- watching her, and so she had to do something important.

Her sisters had gotten married and had babies with a guy who is actively trying to look like a fictional serial killer, which, what?! How does that not worry the bejeesus out of you?! Is there a context in which someone can try to emulate a serial killer in a non-sociopathic way?!

But Kim Kardashian hadn't done much of anything for a while, had she? I'm pretty sure she hadn't, and so she got married because what else could she do? Try out to be an astronaut? Learn to kayak? Switch to Hinduism?

Kim Kardashian is in the entertainment business, and wants to remain there. So she got married, and if you watched the wedding, and then watched the divorce, you were entertained.

And yet, people got mad, because Kim Kardashian's wedding, they figured, was not "real."

You know: real like all the other stuff you see on television. Real like, say, Miley Cyrus' career.

You remember Miley Cyrus, right? She was someone, once. Miley -- not her original name, by the way, she was legally Destiny Hope Cyrus before she changed it in 2008 to Miley Ray Cyrus -- got famous playing a teenager who pretends not to be a rock star, and now Miley Cyrus is a rock star who pretends not to be a teenager, and nobody hates her even though nothing in her life is any more "real" than Kim Kardashian's wedding was.

Like talent, we apply the word real in an odd way: Kim Kardashian did, after all, get married for real, even if she didn't really intend to be married for long. But people felt it wasn't real because they wanted it to be real real, not just reality show real.

And THAT is why Kim Kardashian is the Best Celebrity of 2011. Not because she's so famous that merely looking kind of like her can lead to sort of offshoot fame itself -- as with Not Kim Kardashian in the Old Navy Commercial:

And not just because she's somehow managed to make everyone pay attention for four years of not doing much of anything while getting people to watch, and not just because she and her family make in excess of $65,000,000 per year just for hanging around their house and talking about themselves, which is a good reason why we should give up on our current civilization and start a new one: in a post-apocalyptic world, we might have to fight ravaging mutants for a can of avocadoes, but we probably would have our priorities rejiggered to avoid voluntarily donating $65,000,000 per year to people who don't need it simply because we want to see what they do next (answer: not much of anything, which is all they ever do! From what I have seen of the Kardashians, they don't do very much of anything).

No, all of those things are just offshoots of celebrity the way it has existed prior to 2011, and those alone wouldn't get Kim Kardashian to be the Best Celebrity of 2011.

Instead, I'm naming her because she completed the transformation of celebrities this year, and, in doing so, proved me right, in part, and then went beyond that.

Last year, I said that 2010 was the year celebrity died:

Celebrity, as a concept: the idea that there are those out there who are famous, celebrated, for doing something the rest of us have not. Those people no longer exist, at least not in the form that celebrity has taken since the 16th century, when the concept of celebrity was invented.
...

The door is wider open than ever...and as more and more people get let into the celebrity compound, the people already there have to try harder to get noticed: everyone's doing something else and frantically trying so hard to become, or stay, famous, that they will do anything to stay in the spotlight.

...It's the corollary to Warhol's famous comment: When everyone is famous, nobody is famous.

That's what I said then, and I concluded that in 2011,

The only way celebs get noticed now is to not exist... Hunger Games like, our celebrities in the future will increasingly be pitted against each other in a deathmatch for the fragmented public attention.

And I pronounced celebrity dead.

And it was, for a while -- but Kim Kardashian resurrected it, a mad scientist working in a mountaintop lair (or, in this case, a blue lagoon somewhere in the tropics), and like Frankenstein (read here why I call it that and not Frankenstein's monster), what now exists is not recognizable as a living form of celebrity, but celebrity is no longer dead.

Instead, we have a hybrid form of celebrity that has talent, of sorts - -it takes something to keep people watching for four years, and lots of people have tried to do that and failed -- and is famous enough for us to care about but not famous enough for us to not care about -- nobody cares that Tom Cruise's marriage is a sham, after all, and nobody is mad at Britney Spears for her string of failed marriages including one that lasted what, a day? -- and in doing so, created a new reality. After Kim Kardashian's marriage, there is real like what I do every day, and there is real like reality TV and then there is a different real altogether -- a new sort of reality springing up the way DC Comics used to create new universes. Call it Earth-K, and on Earth-K, real isn't real yet but it can be, if we wish real hard.

Kim Kardashian's marriage was Tinkerbell's fading glow, with one exception: whether you clapped your hands or not as Tink lay dying, Tink revived because that story had already been written. On Earth-K, the stories are written by what you demand, and that is why people are mad: They watched Kim Kardashian and willed her into a marriage, observing her until she collapsed the waveform into the reality they wanted. They clapped as hard as they could, and it didn't work.

Maybe that's Kim Kardashian's fault, but it's also her greatest accomplishment yet. Kim Kardashian, I salute you.

RUNNER UP: Rebecca Black. Because I really do like that song, and you people are all mean.

Predictions For 2012: Kim Kardashian will host Saturday Night Live, which has somehow become a thing to do again, will appear as a guest judge on either X-Factor or American Idol (if Idol is still on. Is it still on?) and at some point will be photographed with a foreign dignitary, before she goes on to become a spokesperson for Netflix, creating a singularity of hate that grows and swallows all the enmity in the world and starts a new era of peace and love.

Prior Bests Of 2011:

Books (And Other Smarty-Pants Things)

I'm not actually sure you peel avocados.

2011-12-29T05:24:00.002-07:00

There's more than one way to peel an avocado, and more than one way to make money off the 'net.

Actually, I'm not so sure about the first part of that sentence, but a new site recruiting Webcam models makes the latter very clear; the site -- WebCameraModels.com -- is up and recruiting people who want to earn up to $5,000 per week working from home.

The site, which promises Webcam jobs to both men and women, does a good job of pointing out how easy it is to make money as a webcam model and offers helpful tips on doing more than just sitting in front of a camera making a fool of yourself. It also features a "Camscore," a tool to measure how popular a given webcam model is, to improve on your performance and your pay.

It may not be for everyone, but if this is something you're looking into, this site seems ready to help you do it in an upbeat, sex-positive way, and the tips and set-up seem legit.

The Best Of 2011... And My Predictions For 2012 (Part One: Books, and Other Smarty Pants Things!)

2011-12-27T07:37:00.014-07:00

There are, as I type this, 111 hours and 14 minutes left in 2011, which makes naming the my Best Of 2011 somewhat less dicey than people who began naming their Bests days, or even weeks ago.

I always used to wonder about that: Naming the Best of this or that in early December leaves out the possibility that anything good will happen in December, doesn't it?

Then I wondered if anything really good ever happened in the arts or science or culture or style in the last two weeks of December, because if nothing like that ever did, then what's the big deal about naming Bests on, say, December 5?

So I investigated, the way everybody investigates everything, by googling it, and so I asked Google the question:

Did anything really important ever happen in the last two weeks of December?

And learned that somehow Britney Spears is involved:

Naturally, I didn't click that link, because even though Britney doesn't appear on the top 10 list of celebrity links most likely to infect your computer with a virus, it's abundantly clear to me by now that clicking any links on the Internet, ever will result in your computer starting to foam at the mouth and Nigerian princes being legally allowed to sublet your kitchen.

Also, yes, my computer has a mouth.

Anyway, Wikipedia, which is becoming surprisingly reliable (I'm using "reliable" in the sens of "easy to get to, and I'm lazy") has a series of pages by day and a list of things that happened on that day, so I picked out December 29 at random (I'm using "random" in the sense of "not random at all"), and found these amazing things that happened on December 29ths of yore:

In 1813, the British soldiers burnt Buffalo as part of the War of 1812.

In 1914, James Joyce began serializing his first novel, A Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Boy, in a magazine, (so if you, like me, like to serialize your stories, you're in good company as far as literary critics are concerned, but not as far as I'm concerned because I've never read Joyce and never intend to.)

In 1937, Ireland became a country.

In 1983, Alison Brie was born.

Sheer, random chance how that
came up.

So if you were, in any of those years -- or any of the other years in which there was a December 29th, for that matter-- putting up your "Best Of" list before December 29, you would perhaps miss out on some important events like "The Best Burning of An American City by a Foreign Power" or "The Best New Country" or "The Best Potential Source For Downloading Malware Onto Your Work Laptop 28 Years From Now."

Nevertheless, I'm going to go ahead and start posting my Best Ofs, because that's how I roll. I got 99 problems but a calendar ain't one, as I like to say.*

*That song played over the credits of the new version of Fright Night, which was the movie Sweetie and I watched on Christmas Eve, and I've decided to make that my catch phrase this year. Let's see if it sticks!

So for the rest of this week, I will be posting my Bests Of 2011, and, just for the heck of it, predicting what is going to be the big thing in those categories in 2012, and next year, I'll maybe remember to look back to this year and see if I was right, something I will have to do before December 12 next year, as that's when the world is ending. Live it up!

The Best In Books, 2011:

Best Of The Year: INDIE BOOKS and INDIE Writers.

2011 was the year of the Indie Book! Rather than focusing on any one particular book for this category, I decided to broaden the scope and point out that for people like me, and the Indie Authors I've begun reviewing, and people who like to write, 2011 was the year people began to realize you can do that.

A recent look at top sellers in books found encouraging and amazing results for people who just like reading or just like writing: Indie books are a majority of top-20 best sellers in every single genre.

That's right: no matter what genre of book you like reading, the top 20 is dominated by self-published writers realizing their dreams. Romance, sci-fi, and fantasy each had 16 or 17 or the top 20 slots taken by indie books, and thrillers, where large publishers have been making a stand of sorts, has become a Helm's Deep: 12 of the top 20 are indie books.

Why is that so good? Not just because I indie publish all my books and serialize them on my blogs and make them available on Scribd for free and otherwise do my best to just enjoy writing without ever bothering to write another query letter again, although that is good for me, but it's also good for reading.

Study after study shows that people who buy e-books buy more books than they would with hard copies, and e-books are the reason that more people can indie publish their books; books are easier to create, easier to sell, and easier to buy and read than ever before in our history.

At the beginning of 2011, e-books outsold paperbacks for the first time in history (on Amazon, at least.) With that, the floodgates were opened. Ebooks were the only area of publishing that saw a growth in income in the first 8 months of the year, and the numbers on top 20 sellers suggest that indie books are driving that growth.

"Traditional" publishing won't die out soon -- not any more than the ability to make a movie with an iPhone keeps Steven Spielberg from blowing $70,000,000 to make a movie about a fictional horse fighting a real war. (The pitch: "It's Saving Private Ryan meets Mr. Ed!") Or no more than the prevalence of mp3s and iTunes led to the demise of Lady Gaga and the Black-Eyed Peas.

What it does mean is that authors can now follow in the footsteps of Jonathan Coulton and Louis C.K. and take control of their creations themselves.

Special note to those who, like Garrison Keillor, would bar themselves in Helm's Deep and keep others out while they die inside: Will indie book sales maybe result in more authors sharing fewer dollars, as Keillor said? Perhaps... but the average wage in 2010 for people working as authors of one sort or another was $65,000. In 2008, half of all full-time writers earned between $38,000 and $75,000. And that's with the full benefit of the publishing industries -- all the publishing push the majors can put into it resulted in half of all writers earning less than $75,000 a year.

Consider this, then. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated 40,000 or so people worked full-time as writers in 2010. 24,000 of them earned less than $75,000 per year. (because half earned between $38,000-$75,000 and 10% earned less than that.)

Meanwhile, the top-10 highest paid writers in 2010 earned $269,000,000 between them. That list includes people like Janet Evanovich (who I've never read) John Grisham (who became a parody of himself long ago) Stephen King (whose hit-to-miss ratio is about 1-to-10, now) and Nicholas Sparks (who... enough said.)

There's a lot of money to go around. The Indie Book Revolution could be rephrased as #Occupy Random House: the top 1% of all authors have been sucking the air out of the room for a long time, and Indie Books just cracked a window.

The best books I read this year began as indie books or stayed indie books: Rusty Webb's novella A Dead God's Wrath was amazing and heralds more to come. John Dies At The End began its life as a blog before being picked up by a small publisher. Blood Calling and Lyon's Legacy brought new life to tired genres (vampires, and sci-fi otherworld travel, respectively). I've just finished Eminent Domain by Erin Riordan and Tit Elingtin, and that was good, too (review coming.) If, in 2011, you didn't read an indie book, you missed out.

RUNNER UP: POETRY.

This category on my blog is technically called "Books, and Other Smarty-Pants Things," and the while Indie Books were clearly The Best in that category in 2011, I'm going to pick poetry as the second best in that category for the year.

Everyone knows I post a poem nearly every Friday on my blog "Thinking The Lions". (You all know that, right?)

I don't want to brag it up too much, but I think poetry's starting to catch on. An author bragged about how he reads a poem a day. NPR's late-October-2010 contest seeking LeBron James poems led to students writing poems about the Packers reaching the Super Bowl which led to a free-verse compilation poem about Albert Haynesworth, as sports sought out the beauty of lyric poetry, and Google started creating poems, or something, and in Madison, Wisconsin, the city stamped some poems right into the earth.

So my favorite poem of the year was: "The Crowds Cheered As Gloom Galloped Away." Go read it. It's incredible. And it's not all poem-y, so don't worry about that.

PREDICTIONS FOR 2012: You know it's going to be something about Indie Publishing, right? Well, here's what I predict for 2012: J.K. Rowling is going to leave her publisher and begin to publish Harry Potter sequels and spin-offs on her own, marketing them through her own website.

Crazy? Or not so much? Radiohead gave up on record labels in early 2011. Louis C.K. began releasing his own comedy specials this year through his website, earning over a million bucks in just over a week. Rowling this year said she might write more Potter books, and Rowling has been hard at work trying to get the Pottermore website up and running, with 1,000,000 members having already signed up for the beta version. It might not be long before we're treated to Ron Weasly and The Winding-Up Wizard, which, having printed that, will probably now get me sued for copyright infringement.

28 Days Of Christmas, 28.. Make That 23... of the Best Christmas Songs, 9, 10 and 11... plus The 10 Best Santas and Some Stuff... (MiniBest!)

2011-12-22T08:13:00.009-07:00

I never quite hit the mark on these, do I? Here's the 2012 Christmas posts, 23 of the Best Xmas songs with some thoughts on Santas, Santa-Like People, and other stuff:

23. Go Tell It On The Mountain, Jim Nabors, Bo The White House Dog.

22. Kung Fu Christmas/ John McClain.

19-21: Another Rock & Roll Christmas, You Are My Joy, Santa Stole My Girlfriend, plus The Santa Clause Claus, Cousin Eddie who I kept calling Cousin Randy, and Yukon Cornelius.

17, 18: Nella Fantasia, Angels We Have Heard On High, and Larry Stewart.

16. You'll Never Find My Christmas, Bishop Allen, and Gizmo the Mogwai

15. The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Bob & Doug McKenzie, plus Bad Santa.

14. When the River Meets The Sea, by John Denver, plus "Doc Bullfrog."

13. All I Want For Christmas, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Santa who helped Superman fight Toyman.

12. We Need A Little Christmas, Glee version, and The Holiday Armadillo.

11, 10, 9: The Little Drummer Boy, Johnny Cash; What Christmas Means To Me, Stevie Wonder; What's This, by Julia Nunes and Ian Axel, and "The Santa From A Nightmare Before Christmas".

8. Taste The Coast, by Admiral Fallow

7. Dringo Bell, Mediaeval Babes

6. Born Is The King (It's Christmas) by Hillside

5: Tijuana Christmas by The Border Brass

4. Christmas Griping, REM

3. A Christmas Waltz, She & Him

2. Don't Shoot Me, Santa, The Killers

1. Snoopy's Christmas, The Royal Guardsmen

28 Days Of Christmas, 28 of the Best Christmas Songs, 9, 10 and 11... plus The 10 Best Santas and Some Stuff To Fill Out The List!: Song 23, etc.

2011-12-21T07:38:00.004-07:00

This morning, when I posted a catch-up on SUPERXmas!, I mentioned that as a kid, I used to listen to Johnny Cash singing "Go Tell It On The Mountain," which I distinctly recall my dad playing on the big white hi-fi in the living room.

That's a cherished Christmas memory: The tree up, by the piano, the fancy dining room table with its Christmas centerpiece, the hi-fi, which was 7' long and had a sliding top that hid the turntable, booming out Johnny Cash's deep, low voice singing about shouting from the mountain side how Jesus was born.

There's just two problems with that cherished Christmas memory:

1. Johnny Cash never sang that song.

2. That song may not even be a Christmas song.

Let's take number two: According to legend, "legend" meaning "a retired professor from Northern Illinois University who is considered the leading expert on Christmas carols," which I kind of take as an affront because up until I read that, I considered myself the world's leading expert on Christmas carols, which means that this professor and I are going to have to have a duel of some kind, perhaps a carol-off in which we march 10 paces and sing Christmas carols at each other?

I'll work on that.

Anyway, Professor Christmas (sounds like a TV movie to me!) William Studwell says:

It is an energetic, inspired carol...It is the greatest of all American folk carols... Most carols of the 20th century are not so enthusiastic. This is more like some of the older carols, like Joy to the World or Come All Ye Faithful in that regard...It shows some real enthusiasm for the Christmas holiday.

That article notes that Studwell (is that really your name?) says that:

Like many carols, the precise history of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is a bit fuzzy. Although generally considered an anonymous work, Studwell believes the piece was written by Frederick Jerome Work (1880-1942), a black composer, teacher and scholar. Work was deeply involved in the collection, arrangement and dissemination of black spirituals, so it is possible...that Work only discovered and preserved the song.

So it may or may not be a carol, given that it was recorded by Simon & Garfunkel, among others, not on a Christmas album but on their "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." work.

But it became a Christmas song, in part because guys like Professor Christmas, there, named it the Carol of the Year 2004, and in part because while Johnny Cash didn't sing it, Jim Nabors did, and here's his version:

Which is the version I thought was by Johnny Cash.

And today's Santa/Santa's Helper, Etc.? Let's get political with

Bo the White House Dog.

Bo's kind of a last minute pick for this list, but he's getting the recognition because like everything else Democrats do, Bo is destroying religion/faith/family/Santa/something else you care about. Unlike most Democrats, Bo's not destroying society/God/your sex life by trying to have government maintain a basic social safety net to avoid people from starving to death in the streets or dying of treatable diseases -- you bastards, you Democrats!-- but instead, Bo has taken the more direct route to wrecking everything you hold dear:

Lying in front of a fire peacefully.

Oh, the humanity! That's the FOX News story about the White House Christmas card; the headline is theirs, not mine.

Sure, that may look like a peaceful domestic scene, a silent night at the White House, if you will, but some people aren't fooled by it -- including Sarah Palin, who said:

"It's odd," that the card doesn't celebrate what she said are the traditional Christmas values of "family, faith and freedom."

Palin added:

It's just a different way of thinking coming out of the White House.

Notwithstanding that this:

actually exists, we've sort of reached saturation point with both Christmas means... and patriotism, haven't we? I mean, after this, won't Christmas and patriotism just sort of crystallize into the kind of giant structure formed by supersaturation, until we have lawn ornaments consisting of baby Jesus riding a Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer just ahead of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (all shaped like Obama?) (Also: Dibs on that idea.)

Since when is Christmas about freedom? The Fourth Of July is about freedom. Unless Christmas has already absorbed that holiday, too.

Cynics will note that Palin recently floated the idea that she might actually make a run for president, and that back in 2009 she gave a speech entitled "Faith, Family, Freedom: Remembering What Really Matters."

We've all been waiting for a candidate whose platform consists entirely of shopping at Neiman Marcus, getting rich off her daughter's pregnancy, and attacking Christmas cards, haven't we?

Prior Songs/Santas:

Prior songs/Santas:

22. Kung Fu Christmas/ John McClain.

19-21: Another Rock & Roll Christmas, You Are My Joy, Santa Stole My Girlfriend, plus The Santa Clause Claus, Cousin Eddie who I kept calling Cousin Randy, and Yukon Cornelius.

17, 18: Nella Fantasia, Angels We Have Heard On High, and Larry Stewart.

16. You'll Never Find My Christmas, Bishop Allen, and Gizmo the Mogwai

15. The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Bob & Doug McKenzie, plus Bad Santa.

14. When the River Meets The Sea, by John Denver, plus "Doc Bullfrog."

13. All I Want For Christmas, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Santa who helped Superman fight Toyman.

12. We Need A Little Christmas, Glee version, and The Holiday Armadillo.

11, 10, 9: The Little Drummer Boy, Johnny Cash; What Christmas Means To Me, Stevie Wonder; What's This, by Julia Nunes and Ian Axel, and "The Santa From A Nightmare Before Christmas".

8. Taste The Coast, by Admiral Fallow

7. Dringo Bell, Mediaeval Babes

6. Born Is The King (It's Christmas) by Hillside

5: Tijuana Christmas by The Border Brass

4. Christmas Griping, REM

3. A Christmas Waltz, She & Him

2. Don't Shoot Me, Santa, The Killers

1. Snoopy's Christmas, The Royal Guardsmen

28 Days Of Christmas, 28 of the Best Christmas Songs, 9, 10 and 11... plus The 10 Best Santas and Some Stuff To Fill Out The List!: Song 22, etc.

2011-12-20T07:35:00.002-07:00

For some reason this morning, on my way in to work, I thought of the old arcade game Yie Ar Kung Fu, which I used to ride my bike to play at the strip mall in Delafield, Wisconsin -- about five miles from my house, the strip mall had a book store and an arcade and a Marty's Pizza, and was the most exciting place around once the A&W closed and Rudy The Llama was sent somewhere else.

Which then led me to look up Kung Fu Christmas, by National Lampoon? Or by Saturday Night Live? Or by someone.

I don't know. I think this was on an early SNL skit back when Baby Boomers say SNL was funny. That's how you can tell what generation you're in: by what years you think SNL was funny. If you think the pre-Eddie Murphy ones were uniformly funny, you're a baby boomer and nobody really cares for you anymore because we're sick of your crap. If you liked Eddie Murphy-to-Billy Crystal, you're Gen X. Will Ferrell's years? Gen Y. And if you like today's version, then you're either only watching the Andy Samberg parts or you have no sense of humor.

And today's Best Santa Or Santa's Helper Or Whatever I'm Calling It This Time?

John McClain.

In the line of "Christmas movies that kind of aren't," Die Hard holds a special place as what is supposed to be the manliest of all movies -- manly like "Soda with 10 calories" or "man caves" or whatever is supposed to be manly today. If you don't like Die Hard, you're not much of a man, the thinking seems to be, as this scene from Friends (which I can link to but not embed because that makes sense; your copyright is not in danger if you only post a video in one spot on the web, right?)(Der.) as that scene from Friends accurately suggests is how people view this issue.

I thought Die Hard was okay, so you won't see me ripping telephone books in half or doing whatever it is people who drink beer with a twist of lime in it presume is manly nowadays.

But John McClain, let's not forget (for the purposes of Christmas) saved Christmas even better than the Grinch did, because John McClain did not steal Christmas, first.

Did you ever think about that? The Grinch follows the same pattern as all Christmas movies that aren't A Christmas-Carol-based: Man has life. Man's life gets worse. Man restores life to what it was, and is grateful for it. Merry Christmas!

In the Grinch, the Grinch's life is miserable. So he sneaks into town and steals Christmas, only to realize that he hasn't stopped the Whos from being happy -- so he's worse off than ever. He therefore puts Christmas back and is invited to dinner, and everything's okay.

Die Hard, in that sense, is a typical Christmas movie: John McClain is divorced, or something, and then he's kidnapped by terrorists, or something, and then he walks over broken glass, and at the end, the billionaires who owned that gold (or something) still own the gold, John McClain is back together with that woman who never had much of a career before or after that, and ... Merry Christmas!

(It's been a long time since I watched that movie, as I haven't had time to be a man while I was working and raising kids and stuff.)

Anyway: Here's your 30-Second-Bunny version of Die Hard:

And here is a link to play Yie Ar Kung Fu, free, online, a game which is way better than the last video game I linked you to.

Prior songs/Santas:

19-21: Another Rock & Roll Christmas, You Are My Joy, Santa Stole My Girlfriend, plus The Santa Clause Claus, Cousin Eddie who I kept calling Cousin Randy, and Yukon Cornelius.

17, 18: Nella Fantasia, Angels We Have Heard On High, and Larry Stewart.

16. You'll Never Find My Christmas, Bishop Allen, and Gizmo the Mogwai

15. The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Bob & Doug McKenzie, plus Bad Santa.

14. When the River Meets The Sea, by John Denver, plus "Doc Bullfrog."

13. All I Want For Christmas, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Santa who helped Superman fight Toyman.

12. We Need A Little Christmas, Glee version, and The Holiday Armadillo.

11, 10, 9: The Little Drummer Boy, Johnny Cash; What Christmas Means To Me, Stevie Wonder; What's This, by Julia Nunes and Ian Axel, and "The Santa From A Nightmare Before Christmas".

8. Taste The Coast, by Admiral Fallow

7. Dringo Bell, Mediaeval Babes

6. Born Is The King (It's Christmas) by Hillside

5: Tijuana Christmas by The Border Brass

4. Christmas Griping, REM

3. A Christmas Waltz, She & Him

2. Don't Shoot Me, Santa, The Killers

1. Snoopy's Christmas, The Royal Guardsmen

28 Days Of Christmas, 28 of the Best Christmas Songs, 9, 10 and 11... plus The 10 Best Santas and Some Stuff To Fill Out The List!: Songs 19-21, etc.

2011-12-19T08:06:00.006-07:00

I'm really busy, for no apparent reason whatsoever. Lots of work just piled up on my desk over the weekend, and so I'm going to make this fast today. Besides, if you want some EXTRA XMAS, why not check out

"Santa, Godzilla and Jesus Walk Into A Bar", a/k/a The Greatest Xmas Story Ever Told over on Thinking The Lions? It's not being overbilled at all: Follow Nick as he picks up a trumpet from the gutter, only to have a dead man drop down from the sky, forcing Nick into the lair of Wenceslas, who has invented XMAS!... part one of the ongoing serialized story is here.

Song 19: Another Rock & Roll Christmas, Gary Glitter:

Are we supposed to like Gary Glitter, or not? I'm so morally confused by celebrities and sports stars and charities and politicians who do bad stuff. Recently, I cancelled my bell-ringing shift at the Salvation Army because they don't support gay rights, only to find out that they do support gay rights. More on that later. Who'd have thought moral questions wouldn't be easy? Anyway, if you like the song, just pretend it's by Billy Vera & The Beaters.

The Santa, etc., to go along with Song 19: Cousin Eddie,* National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation: Who could forget Cousin Eddie when it comes to Santa's helpers? Destitute, unstylish, metal plate in his head replaced with a plastic one, Cousin Randy still comes through in a crisis by kidnapping Clark's boss and thereby granting Clark's only remaining Christmas wish.

Song 20: You Are My Joy, The Reindeer Section.

You'd expect them to have a Christmas song, wouldn't you? And the Santa to go with that? Santa "Clause" Claus, Tim Allen's version of Santa:

We watched that last night as we decorated our Christmas tree -- this year's theme, I am finally free to reveal, was Candy Bars! Sweetie tied Christmas ribbons to full-sized and mini candy bars and hung them on the tree and it looks really great, plus it's delicious -- and, I don't know. I kind of like Tim Allen's Santa. Partly because of the part where as he heads out to find a Mrs. Claus, he says something like "I've got a needlepoint sweater, and a minivan. I'll be back in 8 minutes." I found that amusing.

On the moral relativity ground, though, in this movie he falls in love with Juliet from Lost and I was never sold on her being a good guy; I didn't trust her even in the end. So now she's Mrs. Claus in some alternate universe and that's not necessarily good.

And Song 21: Santa Stole My Girlfriend, The Maine:

Which I really just chose for the title. But it's an okay song, right? I mean, you throw an acoustic guitar, some love, and a couple of references together and you're gonna get a pretty good Christmas song. Plus, this song is kind of what happens after Mommy kissed Santa Claus.

And the Santa/helper/etc for this song? Yukon Cornelius, the guy who helped Rudolph do something or other -- I don't even really remember the plot of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, the TV special, at all, as I sit here.

Do you suppose all those people who griped about all the 'back story' being put into Ron Howard's How The Grinch Stole Christmas also would have griped about all the 'back story' being put into Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer? The plot from the song, after all, was pretty thin soup.

Anyway, Yukon Cornelius, you might want to know, wasn't looking for gold or silver or anything like that. He was looking for peppermint. The scene where Yukon finds a peppermint mine was cut from the original film and not put back until 1998, so a generation of kids was left wondering what silver tasted like.

Prior songs/Santas:

17, 18: Nella Fantasia, Angels We Have Heard On High, and Larry Stewart.

16. You'll Never Find My Christmas, Bishop Allen, and Gizmo the Mogwai

15. The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Bob & Doug McKenzie, plus Bad Santa.

14. When the River Meets The Sea, by John Denver, plus "Doc Bullfrog."

13. All I Want For Christmas, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Santa who helped Superman fight Toyman.

12. We Need A Little Christmas, Glee version, and The Holiday Armadillo.

11, 10, 9: The Little Drummer Boy, Johnny Cash; What Christmas Means To Me, Stevie Wonder; What's This, by Julia Nunes and Ian Axel, and "The Santa From A Nightmare Before Christmas".

8. Taste The Coast, by Admiral Fallow

7. Dringo Bell, Mediaeval Babes

6. Born Is The King (It's Christmas) by Hillside

5: Tijuana Christmas by The Border Brass

4. Christmas Griping, REM

3. A Christmas Waltz, She & Him

2. Don't Shoot Me, Santa, The Killers

1. Snoopy's Christmas, The Royal Guardsmen

*Originally, I put Cousin Randy, but Grumpy Bulldog pointed out in the comments that that was wrong. So I corrected it, and did this footnote, which is the kind of stylish thing Slate does.

It's not too late to order some Indie Stuff For Christmas, but you better do it fast! (Indie Gift Guide!)

2011-12-19T07:44:00.005-07:00

UPDATED WITH THREE NEW THINGS! Look below:

This is a new, temporary feature on The Best Of Everything.

I do my best to support indie-everything -- all the bloggers, writers, craftspeople, singers, and other artists who are going it on their own and trying to sell their stuff. So from now until Christmas, I will be posting things to buy from the people I follow and who follow me. Each day I'll put up four new items; newest additions on top.

Want to be on the list? Email me a link to the thing you want and I'll throw it up here.

Let's get started!

THE STUFF!

Zombies, crazy cars, and more: Mount Horeb artist Matt Laznicka out Crumb's R. Crumb and out-classics... um... some classic artist. Laznicka's creations range from postmodern zombie iPhone cases to 70s inspired alligators-driving-cars coasters to... well, see it to believe it. Check out Laznicka's Zazzle store: for art lovers, hipsters, and people who are neither but know one of those two, or who just like cool stuff. ZOMBIE IPhone case (not shown) $39.95 on Zazzle.

Fireseed One is a YA futuristic thriller with crossover appeal written and illustrated by Catherine Stine.

The year is 2089. Temperate climate has replaced Arctic ice, and much of what is now the United States is a lethal Hotzone, cut off by an insurmountable border from its northern, luckier neighbors, Ocean and Land Dominion. It is rumored that roving Hotzone nomads will kill for a water pellet or a slice of insect loaf, and that the ZWC, a dangerous Hotzone activist group, has infiltrated the border to the northern Dominions. Follow

18-year-old Varik Teitur as he abandons his plans of partying party on SnowAngel Island and instead is forced to journey to Hotzone to find a plant that can save the world. Buy it on Amazon, $11.10 paperback.

GET PUNCTUATED! You know what's missing from our world? Overt punctuation. You can change all that with one of these classic "You've Been Punctuated" t-shirts. Comma, colon, semicolon, parentheses, ampersand, ellipses-- this Christmas, get punctuated. (Worst tagline ever, by the way.) Beginning at $18.95, Zazzle.

Get your groove thang on... wow. That doesn't work when I say it, does it? Maybe it would be better coming from Nick Nice, who mixes up live DJ stuff from "Milk Lab" studio. Nick's podcast, which is available free from Podomatic, is downloaded by people in 65 countries, not counting Canada, which isn't really a country. (We won't hold that against you, Canada.) You can donate to help keep Podomatic free, but you don't have to if you're a Scrooge. Also available on iTunes. Here's what you do: Sneak over to your friend's house, figure out their password for their laptop (it's probably Password), and then subscribe to Nick's podcast for them. And then do it for you. [Note: breaking and entering may be illegal in your jurisdiction.

Everyone talks about the politics, but nobody ever does anything about them. Nobody except Jenni Dye, that is. Jenni is running for Dane County Board, and for the low low cost of as little as $5, you can contribute to her campaign online. It's an electronic contribution. Or etribution. No. It's not that. But it's easy and fun and you can do it in someone else's name and make that your gift! Or do it in your own name and make it your gift to future generations. Click here to go to Jenni Dye For Dane County Board and contribute.

"Chapel's not having a good decade. Released from prison for a crime she doesn't particularly want to talk about, she's looking to lead a more normal, legal life - but life, that bastard, has a few curve balls aimed at her head." That's the promo for The Fix Up, the first novel from Emily Mills, who's just your average indie blogger/writer/poet/drag & burlesque organizer. Buy it on Createspace for just $15. And find out how to get Emily to help you set up your burlesque show here.

It's a John Irving-esque life-long tale of a man and his two loves:

Patrick Dilloway's "Where You Belong" has been called "the kind of story you're washed along with." Buy it on Amazon, $17 99.

A quick but incredible read: Rusty Webb's novella A Dead God's Wrath sets up a world very like our own, only this one has magic and mystery and a dead god and more. Buy it on Amazon, just $0.99.

You read it every Saturday for free, and it's the best webcomic around, isn't it? Then show Wonderella some love and get Everybody Ever Forever, the bound volume of the first 99 Wonderella strips ever. It's the gift that keeps on being sarcastic. $17 at Elegant Folderol.

28 Days Of Christmas, 28 of the Best Christmas Songs, 9, 10 and 11... plus The 10 Best Santas and Some Stuff To Fill Out The List!: Songs 17 & 18...

2011-12-16T08:36:00.003-07:00

Over on "Thinking The Lions," I've started up today what will ultimately be recognized as The Greatest Xmas Story Ever Told -- because I subtitled it that way, so you're bound by it. I know my rights! -- and with that story unfolding, I have decided to spread my wings here a bit and include a song that may or may not be Christmas-y depending on how you look at it:

Song 17 is Nella Fantasia, by Ennio Morricone and Chiara Ferrau:

And in that version it's performed by the Gimnazija Kranj Girls Choir at their Christmas concert.

There's a bit of legend behind that song: Morricone wrote the song Gabriel's Oboe in 1986 for the film The Mission, and from there Sarah Brightman says that she wrote Morricone every other month until he consented to let her add lyrics to it -- but most people credit the lyrics to Ferrau, instead.

The singers are singing in Italian, which I'm told is a real language. I learn something new every day! In English, according to Wikipedia, the lyrics translate to:

In my imagination I see a fair world,
Everyone lives in peace and in honesty there.
I dream of souls that are always free, Like the clouds that fly,
Full of humanity in the depths of the soul.

In my imagination I see a bright world,
Even the night is less dark there.
I dream of souls that are always free, Like clouds that fly.

In my imagination there exists a warm wind,
That breathes on the cities, like a friend.
I dream of souls that are always free, Like clouds that fly,
Full of humanity in the depths of the soul.

Which seems to me to be as Christmas-y as lots of other songs, if not moreso, and so I'm including it.

Then song 18 is Angels We Have Heard On High, by

I'm picking that song because it was my mom's favorite song. My mom's birthday is December 15, and she would have been 66 yesterday, had she not passed away two years ago just after Christmas. It's not my favorite version of that song, but it's a version I think she would approve of, and so I'm posting it here. I make a lot of jokes about my mom's Christmas rules and the effort she put into them, but the truth is that she loved Christmas a lot and wanted it to be special every year, and despite all the hassles, it was. Part of why I run my own Christmases the way I do is that I know that no matter how hard I try, I'll never recapture the feeling of those early childhood Christmases, when my mom would make her fudge and lemon squares and press cookies, and they were laid out on the silver, double-tiered cookie tray on our kitchen table with it's used-at-Christmas-only green tablecloth, and the entire family would come over and spend the night laughing and joking and singing Christmas carols and playing ping-pong and once, even, Santa came to our party and we all thought at first he was just Uncle Doug in a costume, but Uncle Doug was there, too.

Trying to recreate that would cheapen the memory and never be possible; those memories are shiny because they are memories. Now, I try to create my own special memories for my own family so that someday, they can sit and remember, amongst all the snarky comments, that there were some great times, too.

*sniff.*

Must be some dust in the air.

On to the snark: The Best Santas, Etc., which, remember, I'm listing here each day, too, and today's Best Santa Or Whatever is...

...Larry Stewart.

You don't know Larry Stewart, probably, but you should.

Every year, there is a Secret Santa in a city who goes around handing out $100 bills to people at random on the street.

This year, in Reading, PA, a man walked around handing out $100 bills to people, and sometimes praying with them; he got on a bus and passed out hundred-dollar bills like they were candy canes.

Last year, a man handed out $10,000 to people in Kansas City. In 2008, a woman handed out money to shoppers in Sedalia, Kansas. A man in a Santa suit gave out $10,000 at a Goodwill store in Maine in 2009. In 2007, a Secret Santa handed out $20,000 in Phoenix, including giving a man enough money to get a place to live that year.

Maybe not all those people were inspired by Larry Stewart, but he's the name I associate with this phenomenon. For 26 years, Larry Stewart every year handed out hundred dollar bills in Kansas City at Christmas time; he estimated before his death that he'd given away $1,300,000 that way.

In that article I linked to, Stewart says he remembered a time he hadn't eaten for two days and went into a diner and pretended he'd lost his wallet; the owner came out and pretended he'd found a $20 bill and bought him the meal.

Years later, Stewart says, he went back and gave that diner owner $10,000. And so on. No tax breaks are gained by handing out money to random strangers. Stewart just did it for the sake of helping others.

I'm not rich. But if I ever am, I'll do stuff like that. This year, we used a chunk of our money we had and not only gave all the people involved with our twins $20 each -- right down to the bus drivers-- but we got one of those "Giving Tree" cards and bought the kid "Xbox 360 Batman: Arkham Asylum" and I'm going to give some presents to the Shaw twins I keep haranguing everyone about. I have a lot of good stuff in my life; other people need some good stuff in theirs.

Prior songs/Santas:

16. You'll Never Find My Christmas, Bishop Allen, and Gizmo the Mogwai

15. The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Bob & Doug McKenzie, plus Bad Santa.

14. When the River Meets The Sea, by John Denver, plus "Doc Bullfrog."

13. All I Want For Christmas, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Santa who helped Superman fight Toyman.

12. We Need A Little Christmas, Glee version, and The Holiday Armadillo.

11, 10, 9: The Little Drummer Boy, Johnny Cash; What Christmas Means To Me, Stevie Wonder; What's This, by Julia Nunes and Ian Axel, and "The Santa From A Nightmare Before Christmas".

8. Taste The Coast, by Admiral Fallow

7. Dringo Bell, Mediaeval Babes

6. Born Is The King (It's Christmas) by Hillside

5: Tijuana Christmas by The Border Brass

4. Christmas Griping, REM

3. A Christmas Waltz, She & Him

2. Don't Shoot Me, Santa, The Killers

1. Snoopy's Christmas, The Royal Guardsmen

The 12 Worst Things About Xmas, and the 12 Best Ways To Fix Them. (The Best Of Things That Don't Really Fit...)

2011-12-15T08:18:00.001-07:00

This is part of Grumpy Bulldog's Bah, Humbug Blahgfest.

For over two weeks now, I have been making a SUPERbig deal over Xmas! And I've done that for years now -- at the end of this post is a collection of all the "Best" things I've ever posted about Christmas here on this blog; looking it over, you can tell I've got a problem.

I make such a big deal about Xmas because I love Christmas. I love the food and the songs and the decorations and the movies and I'm even so nuts that I like Christmas shopping.

On Black Friday.

At the malls.

I make a special trip out of going Black Friday shopping. I've referred to that day as my second-favorite holiday. (The first being National Peanut Butter & Jelly Day, which is always on April 2 and which by God ought to be a day off.)

I am Crazy for Christmas. Xrazy for Xmas, you might say, if you were lame like I am.

So when challenged by Grumpy Bulldog's Bah, Humbug Blahgfest to come up with not one, not two, not i number of things, but twelve whole things that I hate about Christmas -- or, as I've been calling it this year, Xmas-- you'd think that'd be hard for me, since I'm practically a Xmas Superhero by now.*

*(Xmasman! With the powers of... tinsel?)

**(Well, that was a letdown. When I started typing that sentence I had high hopes my brain would finish strong. But tinsel? Really, brain? That's all you've got? Thanks for nothing.)

But it's not hard at all, because for all its good points... Xmas has lots of good points, remember, including but not limited to:

1. Egg nog.

2. Presents

3. More and more Xmas-shaped Snickers' bars.

And probably other good things, too, but those will have to suffice, since my brain has not yet punched in for work today.

For all its good points, Xmas has lots of bad points, too. Bad points which I will in this post list for you, in handy list form, which I've found to be the best form for listing things. (I used to use more exotic forms for listing things, like this form:

That's the ryu zin origami, and it's said to be the hardest form of origami, a form so hard that it posed a challenge when I just wanted to make, say, a grocery list, so I eventually stopped using origami forms to list things and started just using list forms, which is actually kind of unlucky for you because imagine if I had done this post in brilliant origami shapes and mailed them out to people who would then get a little Christmas-y themed essay shaped in some fancy origami-esque way. That would be phenomenal! What a great heartwarming story! In fact, it could be a Xmas story: something about people getting origami shapes, throw in a subplot where the guy has a troubled marriage and the woman's dad's business is failing, and then the shape they get is made of hundred dollar bills so they have a kid and save the business and fall in love and decorate a tree.

A Folding Paper Xmas, next year on Hallmark. It'll write itself.*3

*3 It better, because again, brain, What the H? "Something about people getting origami shapes?" Really? Are you even awake in there?

On with the list! Which you'll note, from the title, is not just complaining about stuff, but is also presenting fixes for that stuff. There's a reason for that, and the reason is:

I think I'm better than everyone else and know how to fix things way better than you, plus I make fun of you behind your back.

No, wait, I wasn't supposed to admit that. Lemme try again. There's a reason for that, and the reason is:

Why don't you just be honest with them?

I am going to have to take a lot less Nyquil before writing stuff like this. Or a lot more.

One more time: There's a reason for that, and the reason is:

I'm not a complainer?

Sure, let's go with that, my own personal Jiminy $#(#%&$ Cricket. I'll pretend I'm not a complainer, and will then complain about stuff while suggesting ways to fix it, because as everyone knows, the best way complain about things is to pretend you're not complaining about something but that you're actually okay with it but, you know, it could be better, so, just saying.... Try that on your own, with your boss' ideas, or your friend's apartment decorating, or your wife's personal grooming habits.*4

*4 It's okay, I've checked: That latter one is not actually grounds for divorce, so flame on!

So in the spirit of the season, I'm not going to just complain, I'm going to also propose a fix, or "solution", in science-y talk, for each of the Twelve Worst Things About Xmas!

Hey, how about that list, finally?

I'll get you later, brain.

The List!

1. The spirit of the season and other crap like that.

Problem Number One, or numero uno, in science-y talk, with Christmas is just what I started with here (that's why lists are so great!): The spirit of the season, which is a fancy way of saying "I'm just going to justify this by saying "It's Xmas, so here goes with whatever I want to do."

This has been an growing problem for a long time -- part of the reason for it being that Christmas, as a holiday, tends to swell larger each year like a hideous boil that's just waiting to be lanced but nobody has the guts.*5

*5 We'll see who gets who. Enjoy your imagery. Signed, your brain (a/k/a "Jiminy $#(#%&$ Cricket")

That constant growth of Xmas allows people to just cram any old thing they want into the season, as I pointed out the other day when I mentioned that Love, Actually announced that "Christmas is when you tell the truth."

"Love, Actually" seemed to actually (ha!) be making fun of that trend with the story line about the singer and his song "Christmas Is All Around Us" but the joke was on them, because that song actually (ha!) became a Christmas staple; it got played, apparently unironically, on my Pandora station the other day, just sitting there amongst all the Run Run Rudolphs I have to keep thumbsdowning (which is a verb now, because everything is a verb now.)

(Verbs are the Xmas of words.)

(Adverbs are the Arbor Day of words, which is weird because Arbor Day is actually the gerund of holidays.)

(There's no justice in the world.)

Christmas has become the ultimate enabler. Want another snack? It's Xmas, I might as well have a cookie. Need to spend more than you make? I have to buy Xmas gifts! Thinking it might not be a bad idea to do that fifth shot in front of your boss? It is. It's a terrible idea. But it's the Xmas party! Wearing a Santa hat while you drive to work? It's Xmas! Have a sense of humor!

Whatever it is, we can justify it with Xmas! Heck, Christine O'Donnell just endorsed Mitt Romney -- and that, I'm almost certain, was brought on by Christmas. Or a need to stay in the public eye. Which is pretty much the same thing.

Who should we blame for this? No good fix-it-up plan would be a good fix-it-up plan without first doing the most important part of fixing something: blaming someone else. That's our God-given right as Americans. USA! USA! USA!

This exists.

And nothing is more American, and nothing is more in the keeping of the Xmas spirit, than blaming Hollywood, which has repeatedly, over the years, shown us that Xmas is about everything in the entire world. Xmas is about not just such traditional stuff as family or God or peace, which things, let's face it, are a little outdated. (Have you noticed how old-fashioned God is? I mean, the guy's been around for longer than time has been around.)

Hollywood, not content to let the world live in peace with its families and make fun of God, Hollywood has crammed everything possible into Christmas, which by now includes, as its meaning, not just telling Keira Knightley the truth about your inexplicable crush on her since she's not that hot, but also includes curing alcoholism and chronic criminality with the help of a practically-orphaned kid, making sure your kids' adventures in New York City don't result in their deaths, keeping Santa from taking the year off because he's got a cold, and even just plain cash, as shown by the beloved holiday special "A Charlie Brown Christmas With An Overtly Religious Theme That Would Never, Ever, Be Able To Be Broadcast These Days Because We've All Completely Lost Our Ability To Place Things In Perspective":

Sally: [dictating her letter to Santa Claus as Charlie Brown writes it for her] Dear Santa Claus, How have you been? Did you have a nice summer?

[Charlie Brown looks at her]

Sally: How is your wife? I have been extra good this year, so I have a long list of presents that I want.

Charlie Brown: Oh brother.

Sally: Please note the size and color of each item, and send as many as possible. If it seems too complicated, make it easy on yourself: just send money. How about tens and twenties?

Charlie Brown: TENS AND TWENTIES? Oh, even my baby sister!

Sally: All I want is what I... I have coming to me. All I want is my fair share.

The Fix: You know how people who want to lose weight trick themselves into thinking that they can lose weight by doing something really easy and fun, like eating lots of bacon and calling that a diet, or ordering the Abdomenizer and swearing they'll use it because you can look like a Navy Seal in just three minutes per week? Aren't those people funny?

NO! Because they're you! In the immortal words of Pogo, we have seen the enemy and he is us! (I think Pogo said that. But it should be the Republican Party motto.)

There's no easy cure for this one; it is the top thing on the list, after all. So I'm afraid the cure is going to be drastic -- more drastic, even, than admitting that a diet that is premised primarily on "shakes" is not actually a diet.

(I see what you're doing here, brain. I'm on to you.)

The cure is to take Modern Xmas back to its roots and start all over again. We've got to cut off all the dreck and re-grow Modern Xmas from scratch, or something science-y like that. Which means getting back to basics, basics being What Xmas was before we got all manic about it.

As every good scientist knows, our Modern Xmas is based completely on "A Christmas Carol," which, just as Star Wars does for Western Culture, serves as the foundation for every single thing we think, do, say, feel, or wear. From A Christmas Carol, we get our "traditions" of "loving people" and "shopping" (Scrooge literally threw money out the window!) and "not letting children die," which, as I think of it, is a tradition we probably want to keep. But the rest? Begone! Out with ye! Avast!

Why am I talking like a pirate? I don't know. Here is how Charles Dickens described the pre-Scroogeified Xmas spirit:

Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer...? If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' upon his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!" -- Ebeneezer Scrooge

So it's time you were part of the solution, rather than the problem. This year, make sure that on Christmas Eve, you pay some bills and reflect that you are a year older, but not an hour richer. Do not, though, attempt to stake someone through the heart with holly, because that's murder. Unless the person is a Christmas Vampire, which, don't laugh, because that already exists.

Next year: Patriotic Christmas Vampires In Love
With Keira Knightley.

2. Candy canes. Every holiday's got to have it's own candy, right? Halloween has candy corns, Easter has chocolate rabbits (which, okay, just chocolate in a different shape, but bear with me here) Arbor Day has bark, which is what the pilgrims ate instead of candy because back then people figured the quickest route to Heaven was never having fun ever, which makes you wonder how religion stuck around as long as it did.

And Christmas has "candy canes."

We use mint primarily as a flavor in two things: 1. Toothpaste, and 2. Foods that are 'mint-flavored' and therefore inedible because they taste like toothpaste. Candy canes are the latter category with the added bonus of sticking to your teeth like Jolly Ranchers used to.

Why do we eat candy canes at Christmas? Sounds like a google question! To the internets!

Legend -- okay, Yahoo! Answers-- has it that in 1670 a choirmaster bent the "sugar sticks" into a cane shape to represent the shepherd's staff. But before you go off filling the kids' heads full of nonsense about "sugar sticks," consider that Yahoo! answers also picked as a potential answer to this question:

cause they are yummy and good for your tummy, MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Which is, I think, a direct quote of what the Angel said to those shepherds watching their flocks at night.

This site, on the other hand, says that the red in the candy cane represents the blood of Jesus, which is improbable given that Xmas Inc.'s religious subsidiary ("A Verrye Merrye Christmase, LLC") celebrates the birth of Jesus (four to six months too late, but still). Still, if there is a way to make a candy cane less appetizing, it's to make it into a fishookesque crucifix reminder, so let's go with that.

(The white in the candy cane, that site says, represents your purity after Jesus died on the cross for you, so eating the candy cane is, I suppose, a form of penance.) (And with that explanation, we're back to how did religion ever catch on? If I were going to start a religion, it wouldn't begin with "Everything you like to do is evil," it would begin with "Joining this religion will help you lose weight without exercising" and end on "Plus, we'll never raise your prices on your DVD by mail rental.")(I would still have a Pope, but he'd be a cool Pope, and he'd have a Segway, and he would fight crime, primarily focusing on Nigerian mail order scams, because no superheroes are taking those on.)

Who should we blame for this? The natural target would be Jesus, but He's got a lot of people after Him already, and while Jesus can probably handle his enemies just fine, I'd rather not add to His troubles, especially when we all need Him to make sure Tebow makes the Super Bowl, because that would be awesome.

So let's blame, instead, that person who said they were good for your tummy and claim without any basis whatsoever that candy canes never get digested and instead line the walls of your liver until you die. We could start an Internet rumor that one kid who ate too many candy canes was found dead by New Year's and when they autopsied him his liver was red-and-white striped.

Whoa. I went to kind of a dark place there. Looks like things just got real, brain.

The fix: I probably need antidepressants. Also: why not steal a candy from Halloween? They've got lots. Plus, Peeps! I just remembered that! Easter has Peeps! So all holidays do have their own candy and I'm not crazy.

Me and you, brain, we're gonna make it.

3. Decorating the Xmas Tree:

God, how I hate this. Oh, man, do I hate decorating the Xmas tree.

When we were kids, decorating the tree was possibly the least fun aspect of Christmas -- or, if anything was worse than that, it was having to play piano for my relatives on Christmas Eve, but that's something I only share with the team of specialists who are helping me unpack my psyche.

My parents had rules for decorating the tree, and subrules, and subsubrules, rules like "ornaments can't touch the branches" and "two similar ornaments can't be in the same area of the tree" and some ornaments had to go inside and others outside and ornaments couldn't be blue and lights had to be colored and if your Christmas tree lights blinked you were extremely low class and all of it was nightmarish in the end.

As an adult, I have at times tried to decorate my tree in the way an adult is supposed to -- i.e., good-- and those times, too, have been miserable. Once, Sweetie and I strung popcorn. Have you ever strung popcorn? Don't. Popped popcorn kernels are, if you are lucky, about a half-inch in diameter, which means you need about 24 of them to make a foot.

To cover your tree in a popcorn strand, you will need about 20 feet of popcorn.

You do the math. I only just reconciled with my brain and I'm not going to mess that up.

Putting on ornaments takes forever, even if you chuck all those rules and let the kids put them whereever the heck they want, as we did one year. Putting on lights is worse -- especially if you do it the way my dad taught me to do it, the so-called "right way" which I now refer to as "not just more or less draping the lights on the branches because this is stupid and taking forever" the latter method being what I do now, but it still doesn't save much time and you scratch up your arms and get fake-tree-pine-sap in them, which I swear is a real thing that happens to me.

That's right: I believe that my artificial tree has real sap and you won't convince me otherwise.

And for what do I do all that? I put my tree up about a week before Xmas. I take it down the 26th because nothing is more sad than a Christmas tree after Christmas, it's like looking at an orphan starving in the street while you eat a sumptuous meal of whatever it is people who are vague stand-ins for Scrooge metaphors eat when they are embodying those metaphors.

If you google "man eating while
starving orphan looks on" this is
the first image that comes up.
That kind of makes me paranoid, for
some reason.

Scratched arms, shocks from poorly-insulated lights, the tree always leans one way or the other no matter how many "Cosmopolitan" magazines I stack under one side of the stand, all so that I can sit and look at that little dinosaur ornament I bought one year because I was at Target (TM) and saw a dinosaur Christmas ornament and had this conversation with my brain:

Me: Who would want a dinosaur ornament?

Brain: As of this moment, you do.

Me: That's true. I do.

And so we hang a triceratops on the tree when we decorate it with our box of ornaments, which we don't do anymore because we have Mr F and Mr Bunches and so we don't want to hang a bunch of actual, expensive ornaments on the tree in case they break them, so each year we come up with a new, unbreakable, easy-to-do theme for our tree. Last year was "candy canes," and we hung nothing but a variety of candy canes (and lights) on the tree -- hence their inclusion on this list this year -- and the year before was "pictures of the family" and this year it will be something completely different but I'm not going to reveal it yet.

Who should we blame: My parents. They told me that you have to have a Christmas tree, but they also told me you have to do it right if you're going to have one, and so each year I try to have one but each year I fail at the latter part (doing it right, according to their rules) and each year I think next year, I am not doing this, but I do.

The fix: Holographic trees. Wouldn't that be incredible? Just set up your projector and you get a 3-dimensional tree fully decorated in one of 12 different holiday themes, like "Traditional Christmas," "Charlie Brown Christmas" "The Stars & Stripes Forever" or "Women of NASCAR."

4. A Christmas Carol, in whatever #$(#($%&$# form you're stuffing it down my throat.

I mentioned the other day that there's a Batman version of A Christmas Carol and that... is... enough already.

It's a nice little story. Got it. Man is mean, man learns a lesson, Tiny Tim blesses us, shut up.

There are other Christmas stories that you can retell. There are, in fact, people (like me, or almost anyone who reads this blog because if you read blogs you're probably a writer of some sort) who would happily whip you up a new Christmas story, and do it for cheap and it would be pretty good. You can make something Christmas-y just by putting the word Christmas in it, as in:

The Dukes Of Hazzard.

The Dukes Of Christmas.

See what I did there? (I was still sort of thinking of NASCAR. Hey, um, brain? I hate to rock the boat...)

There's simply no need for another version of A Christmas Carol. We have the original. We have the Bill Murray version. All other versions of this story need to be packed into the same vaults where they're keeping all those unwanted Sacajawea coins. Or perhaps the vaults in the caves where they store the government cheese.

Why does our government have so many vaults and caves?

Who should we blame? Not Charles Dickens. All he did was rattle off a crowd-pleasing story to make a little extra money, something he frequently did because Dickens was as fame-and-money-craving as anybody on Jersey Shore, so keep that in mind when you rip on Stephanie Meyers and claim she's just in it to make a buck.

Instead, let's blame every hack writer ever who couldn't come up with an original premise, and let's in particular blame Diablo Cody because I don't like her but I'm going to have to see that Young Adult movie because it looks good, damn her eyes.

The fix: Diablo Cody should use a pen name. And people should continue writing and producing their own books and movies because the publishing machine is crumbling and someday we'll all be our own publishers and we can republish A Christmas Carol verbatim as part of our "Indie Classics" line because it's in the public domain, so it's there for the taking.

Also, this came up when I googled A Sexy Christmas Carol:

5. People who get bugged by saying "Xmas".

As you've seen in this post, I am interchanging Christmas, and Xmas, more or less on a whim. That is because I'm lazy and realized too late that I was doing that, and so now I'm going to claim it's symbolic, that I was trying to make a point...

...Ex post facto claims of symbolism being the only claims of symbolism that are true, in that writers never intend to create symbols. That's not me talking. That's Ray Bradbury, who said that all good symbolism is purely unintentional and when writers try to make something symbolic they screw it up, which proves one thing:

Ray Bradbury reads my blog!

because I said that same thing a while back.

What does this have to do with people who hate the use of Xmas? Nothing. It's just filler. Unless it's symbolic. Which it definitely is. Let's see: Ray Bradbury is the European Central Bank, and symbolism itself is symbolic of man's desire to...

I'll get back to you on that.

Who should we blame? People who hate the use of the word Xmas.

The fix: We should start saying it the way it is written. Today, I want you to go wish someone a Merry Ecksmas.

And then reflect on how similar that is to my son Mr F's use of guck in my post Merry Guckmas! and wonder if I meant to do that all along. Symbolism?

6. Movies/TV shows that try to explain the magic of Santa.

I watched National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation last night, as I traditionally do this time of year, and noticed that in the cartoon beginning, Rudolph's nose is a radio/beacon of sorts. I watched Disney's Prep & Landing a few years back and saw that they used elves to prep the landing strip for Santa on each rooftop. I watched The Family Guy Xmas Special or whatever it's called and was horrified, but whatever.

Elf showed the elves learning to do computer chips and had Santa's jet-sleigh, with its explanation of Xmas cheer coming from singing or something. Other shows presumably did other things, too, but I can't remember them off the top of my head.

Here's the thing: The less explanation, the better when it comes to things magical. Did J.R.R. Tolkien explain how Gandalf did his "magic," which I put in quotes because Gandalf really did so little magic, didn't he?

J.R.R. Tolkien did not, though, explain how the not-very-magical Gandalf's so-called "magic" (fireworks!) worked.

And did J.K. Rowling explain how Harry Potter did his "magic," which, again, not really doing much of anything. Harry knew, like, three spells, and wasn't very good at those, so The Boy Who Lived was also The Boy Who Was Really Overrated, since in the end Harry's chief power was not dying, which actually makes him a Jesus metaphor, as Harry's death and resurrection made the world safe, so what are those Christians all upset about? In my new religion, you will be free to tell whatever stories you want.

Also: Now, when you eat candy canes, remember that the red is for Harry Potter's blood.

When Tolkien and Rowling did explain magic, it always sucked, didn't it? Why would Sauron put all his power into a ring? What did that gain? And then lose it? He couldn't see that happening? Has anyone ever owned a ring and not immediately lost it, as I said to my wife each time I lost my wedding ring? (It was just the one time, and we were inner-tubing on a river, and there was this scary part where we had to float on inner tubes past an actual biker rally... but I digress.)

'Twas The Night Before Christmas is not a Tom Clancy novel. We don't need technical explanations of how the bag works and whether reindeer's horns follow the Bernoulli principal.

Who To Blame: I'd say Tom Clancy, because if I blame J.K. Rowling she'll sue. She sues everybody. She's sued more people this morning than I will in my lifetime, and I'm the most litigious guy I know.

6. Stupid lists that play on "The 12 Days of Christmas".

Which is why I'm ending here. You don't own me.

PRIOR CHRISTMAS POSTS, AS PROMISED!

The Best Christmas Song.

The Best Christmas Movie.

The Best Holiday That Eventually We Won't Celebrate At All.

The Best Jazzy, Swingin' Hepcat Christmas Song...

The Best Indie Rocker Christmas Song...

The Best Character Who Is Somehow Associated With Christmas But Who Ultimately Has Nothing To Do With Christmas At All.

The Best Christmas Song That Has Nothing To Do With Christmas...

The Best Christmas Song That Is The Product of 10,000 Hours Of Practice...

The Best Gift In The Twelve Days Of Christmas.

The Best Christmas Song That Has Not Yet Been Made Into A Movie But Should...

The Best Christmas Album (Reader Submission!)

The Best Christmas Song That Is Not Even A Christmas Song But Which I Am Just Going To Declare, Unilaterally, IS In Fact A Christmas Song (2008)

The Best Christmas Songs (With No Longwinded Explanations), One.

The Best Christmas Songs (With No Longwinded Explanations), Two.

The Best Absolutely True (Well, Almost) Celebrity Stories That Should Be Made Into Christmas Movies.

The Best Christmas Songs (With No Longwinded Explanations), Three.

Song One Of The 8 Best Traditional Christmas Songs That Have Nothing To Do With Christmas.

Song Two Of The 8 Best Traditional Christmas Songs That Have Nothing To Do With Christmas

Song Three Of The 8 Best Traditional Christmas Songs That Have Nothing To Do With Christmas

Song Four Of The 8 Best Traditional Christmas Songs That Have Nothing To Do With Christmas

Song Five Of The 8 Best Traditional Christmas Songs That Have Nothing To Do With Christmas

Song Six Of The 8 Best Traditional Christmas Songs That Have Nothing To Do With Christmas

Song Seven Of The 8 Best Traditional Christmas Songs That Have Nothing To Do With Christmas

28 Days Of Christmas, 28 of the Best Christmas Songs, 9, 10 and 11... plus The 10 Best Santas and Some Stuff To Fill Out The List!: Song 16, etc...

2011-12-14T07:56:00.008-07:00

Not much time today! So much to do! Hustle! Bustle! I wonder why we say bustle when we say hustle! Is it because it rhymes! That last one was a question but I didn't want to stop using! exclamation! points!

Whew. Now I'm exhausted.

Actually, did you know that hustle & bustle is a peculiarly Christmas expression? I didn't even make that up, although someone else might have made it up. According to a blogger at the Philadelphia Biblical University, and what better source is there than that?,

The phrase “hustle and bustle” has been cliche especially during the Christmas season. Not only has it come to characterize the month of December, but it has also become a good descriptor of our lives as Americans and as college students.

That blogger didn't provide any attribution for his assertion that hustle & bustle is a Christmas Cliche (Xmas Xliche? Sure, why not?) But he did provide a link to another Bible Blogger, Michael, who suggests that we "just be."

Just be. It’s a simple concept. Take time to be alone. Enjoy some quality time with God. Go play outside with some friends. Read a book while reveling in a well-brewed cup of coffee. No plans, no intentions, simply living. With that thought I am off to enjoy some Tolstoy before bed.

The concept of just being actually makes me feel itchy. As much as I long to sit back and relax, whenever I'm actually given a chance to do that I tend to run out and spend an afternoon getting free pizza and looking at stuff, hustling and bustling and remembering that was what I was supposed to be talking about.

Hustle & Bustle is what linguists call an "irreversible binomial," a phrase which proves that linguists aren't too up on their linguistics. By irreversible they mean that the phrase isn't usually reversed, but irreversible means can't be reversed. What linguists really mean is that (a) the phrase hustle & bustle is a not-commonly-reversed binomial and (b) they don't really have any qualifications for real jobs but law school was too hard.

According to Wikipedia, a source only slightly less reliable than Bible Bloggers, "hustle and bustle" is an American expression not commonly used in England. Also not commonly used in the UK but claimed to be a common expression in the U.S.? "Bott's Dot," a phrase for a raised, round, nonreflective pavement marker:

In England, they call those Chaucer Saucers.

Well, they should.

Also: Hustle and Bustle should really be two Christmas imps who wreak mischief on shoppers at a swanky New York store, until they are discovered by the department store Santa, who at first is powerless to stop them until he summons up the real powers of Santa Claus and restores order to Christmas.

So, in conclusion, you can see that the hustle and bustle of the holidays is something or other, etc. etc., ad infinitum. Thank you all for coming today.

Here's the Song: You'll Never Find My Christmas, by Bishop Allen.

And the Santa Or Whatever Of The Day Is...

Gizmo, the Mogwai: So many people forget that Gremlins was a Christmas movie, probably because when you think about Gremlins being a Christmas movie, it turns out that Gremlins is a horrifying Christmas movie in which one character (Phoebe Cates, played by Phoebe Cates) hates Christmas because (as I recall) her dad died by suffocating in a chimney pretending to be Santa Claus.

Gremlins is the only Christmas movie marked by the extinction-by-sunlight of a whole horde of bad guys, or at least the only one my memory hasn't blocked out. But it also featured this scene of gremlins breakdancing and almost shooting Phoebe Cates:

And, in the end [SPOILER ALERT!] Gizmo saves Christmas by opening up the blinds at a local mall, because malls have blinds, and burning all the evil Gremlins in the fountain, thereby making sure that all the mall retailers who were counting on a big after-Christmas sale to make ends meet went out of business and declared bankruptcy.

Ah, the 80s!

Prior songs:

15. The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Bob & Doug McKenzie, plus Bad Santa.

14. When the River Meets The Sea, by John Denver, plus "Doc Bullfrog."

13. All I Want For Christmas, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Santa who helped Superman fight Toyman.

12. We Need A Little Christmas, Glee version, and The Holiday Armadillo.

11, 10, 9: The Little Drummer Boy, Johnny Cash; What Christmas Means To Me, Stevie Wonder; What's This, by Julia Nunes and Ian Axel, and "The Santa From A Nightmare Before Christmas".

8. Taste The Coast, by Admiral Fallow

7. Dringo Bell, Mediaeval Babes

6. Born Is The King (It's Christmas) by Hillside

5: Tijuana Christmas by The Border Brass

4. Christmas Griping, REM

3. A Christmas Waltz, She & Him

2. Don't Shoot Me, Santa, The Killers

1. Snoopy's Christmas, The Royal Guardsmen

Be the future, Danny. See the future, feel the future, BE THE FUTURE.

2011-12-13T16:00:00.001-07:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Sprint for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

For about 24 more hours, you can become the future, for free.

Let me explain.

The other day, there was a comic strip I read that showed two people talking; one was talking about how we’re all always carrying around little internet-connected computers that are packed full of power to do just about anything we want.

The joke of the cartoon was that the character was going to cryogenically freeze herself to jump ahead to the future to see how much better things could get, given how advanced we were already, but that wasn’t what made me think.

What made me think was the point that the comic was right: We ARE carrying around tiny computers in our pockets, all the time. Whenever you want to look something up, you’ve got an entire library in your pocket—better than the Hitchhiker’s Guide, in fact. Need to find a place? Push a few buttons and you’re guided to your destination. Film what’s going on around you and post it on the Internet, with just a few taps.

Oh, and call someone. You can still do that on a phone.

This kind of thing was unimaginable when I was a kid: Computers back then were slow and big and text-based ad we thought THAT was amazing, without ever imagining that one day I’d carry one around in my shirt pocket.

So if you DON’T have the latest smartphone, you’re living in 1987, when the clothes and music were better but the information tech was way worse, and you can rectify that.

Here’s where that “becoming the future” thing kicks in. For about 24 more hours, Sprint is offering you Android™ powered EVO 4G devices for free.

That’s FREE, as in F-R-E-E as in you pay nothing to become part of the future. You can carry around htat computer in your pocket for nothing. No activation charges, free shipping, FREE PHONE and you’ll be websurfing and texting and video-ing and navigating and, well, yeah, Angry Birds-ing, too, but that’s okay, everyone needs some down time.

This is such a good offer – a 4G phone! – that I might upgrade mine, because it’s FREE and so there’s no upgrade fee and I can be even BETTER connected.

So what are you waiting for? There’s no need to wait for the future anymore. It’s here, and you can have it in the palm of your hand. Free. (Did I mention it’s free? I feel like that’s important.)

The First-Ever TBOE Indie Gift Guide! UPDATED, 12/13

2011-12-12T15:49:00.009-07:00

THE STUFF!

New, skinny me will probably look down on old, fat me. Serves old fat me right.

2011-12-12T15:00:00.001-07:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Slim-Fast for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

I was skinny for a while there… and as GOD IS MY WITNESS, I WILL BE SKINNY AGAIN.

A little overdramatic? Probably. But I’m serious. For a long time, I was in really good shape – I weighed anywhere from 175 to 190, and I ran and exercised all the time and I had a 36 inch waist and I was the bomb, as the kids used to say. (I hated it when the kids said it, but now that I said it, it’s kind of cool.)

Then I got old. And I hurt my back. And I got distracted by the Babies! And I got made a partner at work. And one thing led to another and now there’s… a lot more of me than I want.

For a while, I thought maybe I could stick to my old ways: eat what I want, work out a bit, and be fine. But that’s not a good idea for a 42-year-old guy, especially because I don’t work out every day like I used to. I’m lucky to get 3 times a week.

So I decided to start walking after lunch at work, and this week, I also added new Slim-Fast shakes.

I heard about these Slim-Fast shakes

and at first, I simply thought “Oh, yeah, sure: diet food. Gross.”

But I gave them a shot, because let’s face it, nothing else was working. And it was at least something new that I could try.

So I picked up a four-pack of the “Strawberries N’ Cream” shake, in these bottles you can take with you in a briefcase or pocket, even, and they seemed healthy: 10 grams of protein, five grams of fiber and 24 essential vitamins and minerals. Slim-Fast says they’ll provide you 4 hours of hunger control, which would be great because I eat lunch about 11 or 11:30 and then get hungry before dinner at 6.

And about that: Slim-Fast is promoting these things as part of their “Slim-Fast 3•2•1 Plan” where you eat 3 Slim-Fast 100-calorie snack-packs a day, 2 of these shakes, and a 500-calorie meal, and they say you’ll lose weight, whether you’re just trying to do it, like me, or you’re shooting for something specific, like a wedding or vacation.

With five different flavors -- Creamy Milk Chocolate, French Vanilla, Rich Chocolate Royale, Cappuccino Delight, and Strawberries N’ Cream, it wouldn’t be a boring diet, at least, and the snack bars have different flavors, too.

Plus, they're easy to get: they've got them everywhere, now -- in the pharmacy sections at just about every store, including Target, and Safeway, and Wal-Mart and Kroger. You can even order them online at Amazon.com or the Slim-Fast 3-2-1 Store on Facebook. (And you can "Like" them on Facebook to show your support, like I did, at http://www.facebook.com/slimfast.)

So anyway, I got one, and I tried the first one tonight, after I got home from working out, instead of my usual snack. And I’ve got to say: it was delicious. It was actually a lot like drinking a shake for dessert, only healthier.

So there was that, and it made me feel good to be shopping in the health-food aisle instead of the snack-food aisle, and using this I might be able to avoid putting on weight this Christmas, and hopefully will end up losing weight and getting back to when I was… say it with me… the bomb.

It can’t hurt, anyway. You’ll know if it works because I’ll post one of those pictures of me in my “fat” pants, with a bunch of extra room.

It's the First EVER TBOE Indie Gift Guide!

2011-12-12T11:19:00.009-07:00

This is a new, temporary feature on The Best Of Everything.

I do my best to support indie-everything -- all the bloggers, writers, craftspeople, singers, and other artists who are going it on their own and trying to sell their stuff. So from now until Christmas, I will be posting things to buy from the people I follow and who follow me. Each day I'll put up four new items; newest additions on top.

Want to be on the list? Email me a link to the thing you want and I'll throw it up here.

Let's get started!

THE STUFF!

It's a John Irving-esque life-long tale of a man and his two loves:

Patrick Dilloway's "Where You Belong" has been called "the kind of story you're washed along with." Buy it on Amazon, $17 99.

A quick but incredible read: Rusty Webb's novella A Dead God's Wrath sets up a world very like our own, only this one has magic and mystery and a dead god and more. Buy it on Amazon, just $0.99.

You read it every Saturday for free, and it's the best webcomic around, isn't it? Then show Wonderella some love and get Everybody Ever Forever, the bound volume of the first 99 Wonderella strips ever. It's the gift that keeps on being sarcastic. $17 at Elegant Folderol.

28 Days Of Christmas, 28 of the Best Christmas Songs, 9, 10 and 11... plus The 10 Best Santas and Some Stuff To Fill Out The List!: Song 15, etc...

2011-12-12T09:03:00.005-07:00

I think it's safe to say yesterday's Emmet Otter song was the least popular song on this list, which is really saying something considering that one of the songs is a plea to not get shot by Santa Claus.

But I can read the mood of my audience, and so it's time to lighten things up again and cut back on the schmaltz with a song that Grumpy Bulldog Patrick Dilloway reminded me existed, and which is one of my favorite Christmas songs of all time: The Bob & Doug McKenzie Twelve Days Of Christmas:

The best part? When they add "... in a tree" to "And a beer" so that it fits.

I've never been sure what they were singing on some of those -- what with that "Canadian" accent and all-- so I looked up the lyrics, and here is what they get:

A beer.

Two turtle-necks

Three French toast

Four pounds of back-bacon

Five golden tooks,

Six packs of two-four

Seven pack of smokes,

and

Eight comic books

Which still doesn't answer all my questions, such as "what's a golden took," and I tried googling that but got nowhere, so help me out here.

Is it a drug thing? It's a drug thing, isn't it? God, I'm unhip.

In keeping with that theme, though, here's today's Best Santa Or Whatnot, and the one I'm presenting you with today is sure to be controversial: Bad Santa, which I've remarked a few times is one of my favorite Christmas movies of all time.

Bad Santa doesn't have a lot going for him, as a drunk, a loser, a criminal, a reprobate, and a guy who doesn't even know what a Fraggle Stick Car is. But, like all of us at this time of year, Bad Santa learns the real meaning of... well, Christmas, I suppose, but stop and think about that for a second:

What, exactly, is the meaning of Christmas these days? Doesn't it mean whatever good thing you want it to mean? Christmas is now a stand-in for all the emotions we'd like to have all the time: more than just goodwill to men and peace on Earth, (about that latter: see the Christmas Chopper Attack kids' ornament here), Christmas by now stands for pretty much any good thing.

I started thinking that when I re-watched Love, Actually and got to the sign scene where the Lovelorn Guy Who For Some Reason Thinks Keira Knightley is hot tells Keira that he loves her, and notes that he's doing it because

And I thought "Really? At Christmas you tell the truth?"

I hadn't heard that before, and so I started paying attention to what people say Christmas is all about, and it's really about anything.

Christmas is, as I predicted long ago, swallowing up not just every other holiday, but every other good thing in the world. It won't be long before you can just say "Well, it's Christmas, and Christmas is when we balance the checkbook" or "At Christmas, it's tradition to make sure you have an extra piece of pie" or whatever it is you want to justify.

So in Bad Santa, then, Bad Santa learns an Important Christmas Lesson, and heralds the world we are headed to, one in which All Lessons Are Important Christmas Lessons. The Important Christmas Lesson Bad Santa learns is "something about caring about others", as exemplified by his insistence on delivering a stolen stuffed animal to Thurman Merman, and also as exemplified by one of the funniest scenes in Christmas movie history:

Prior songs:

14. When the River Meets The Sea, by John Denver, plus "Doc Bullfrog."

13. All I Want For Christmas, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Santa who helped Superman fight Toyman.

12. We Need A Little Christmas, Glee version, and The Holiday Armadillo.

11, 10, 9: The Little Drummer Boy, Johnny Cash; What Christmas Means To Me, Stevie Wonder; What's This, by Julia Nunes and Ian Axel, and "The Santa From A Nightmare Before Christmas".

8. Taste The Coast, by Admiral Fallow

7. Dringo Bell, Mediaeval Babes

6. Born Is The King (It's Christmas) by Hillside

5: Tijuana Christmas by The Border Brass

4. Christmas Griping, REM

3. A Christmas Waltz, She & Him

2. Don't Shoot Me, Santa, The Killers

1. Snoopy's Christmas, The Royal Guardsmen

28 Days Of Christmas, 28 of the Best Christmas Songs, 9, 10 and 11... plus The 10 Best Santas and Some Stuff To Fill Out The List!: Song 14, etc...

2011-12-11T09:51:00.003-07:00

Just two weeks 'til Christmas, now, depending, of course, on when you read this. I'm writing it on the morning of Sunday, December 11, which means that two weeks from this moment my Christmas will be all done: we'll have opened the presents and drunk all the egg nog and watched all the Christmas specials and I'll be settling in for a lazy afternoon of chasing Mr Bunches and swinging with Mr F while Sweetie and the older kids go take in a Christmas Day movie.

Sounds nice, doesn't it? In other nice things, last night Mr F and I watched one of my favorite Christmas specials, ever: Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas.

This song isn't particularly Christmas-y, but it was in a Christmas special, and I really like it: When The River Meets The Sea, this version by John Denver:

And today's Best Santa or Santa's Helper? Doc Bullfrog, from that same special. There's SPOILERS ahead, so [SPOILER ALERT!]: After Emmet punches a hole in Ma's washtub, and Ma hocks Emmet's tool box, both done to enter the talent show on Christmas Eve to try to get the $40 prize, some thugs from River Bottom enter their rock band and get first prize, leaving Emmet and Ma and the gang to walk home on the frozen river.

When they stop to sing a song:

(That version being from the stage production of this show), Doc Bullfrog overhears them and offers the band a chance to perform at his restaurant regularly -- saving their Christmas and, probably, their lives, because Ma's washtub and Emmet's toolbox were their only means of support.

It's okay if you're crying a little. Just pretend it's the dust.

Prior songs:

13. All I Want For Christmas, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Santa who helped Superman fight Toyman.

12. We Need A Little Christmas, Glee version, and The Holiday Armadillo.

11, 10, 9: The Little Drummer Boy, Johnny Cash; What Christmas Means To Me, Stevie Wonder; What's This, by Julia Nunes and Ian Axel, and "The Santa From A Nightmare Before Christmas".

8. Taste The Coast, by Admiral Fallow

7. Dringo Bell, Mediaeval Babes

6. Born Is The King (It's Christmas) by Hillside

5: Tijuana Christmas by The Border Brass

4. Christmas Griping, REM

3. A Christmas Waltz, She & Him

2. Don't Shoot Me, Santa, The Killers

1. Snoopy's Christmas, The Royal Guardsmen