THE BEST CHRISTMAS MUSIC EVER (Says I.) Part Four

Here we are in Dave Letterman territory, beginning our top ten Christmas songs of all time, according to me and my personal preference. It should be said, of course, that you will probably disagree with me.  If you do, please let me know what an ass I am in the comments.  But you never know, your favorite still might be somewhere on this list.

Today we have booze, sugar, and Dean Martin, not necessarily in that order.  See more after the jump:

THE BEST CHISTMAS SONGS EVER! (Says I.) Part 3

The Choir of Corona del Sol High School in Tempe, AZ.

We're in the middle of the pack for our list of the 25 best Christmas songs, which means there's only 3 shopping days left until Christmas.  Get on it procrastinators!  If you need help, there are some handy tips for last-minute shoppers here.

This edition of the list is heavy on angels and bells, for some reason, and features the second appearance of Bing Crosby.  Let's get straight to it.  To see the first two installments in this list, click here and here.

THE BEST CHRISTMAS SONGS EVER! (Says I). Part Two

The 1000 Voices Choir of Parkville, Missouri, via the Parkville High School View.

And we're back with day two of my list of the Best Christmas Songs ever as chosen by me using whatever methods I just made up! (Actually, I did use a rubric for the ranking process that was fairly time consuming and very boring, but I'll spare you those details.)  Click through to see the next five songs in our countdown, and if you missed the first day and want to start at the beginning, click here.

THE BEST CHRISTMAS SONGS EVER! (So says I.) Part One.

That's the Berthoud High School Show Choir from Berthoud, CO.  Ain't they cute?
The picture, BTW, belongs to the Berthoud Recorder.  I own nothing.

In the spirit of the season, and as a counter-balance to recent awfulness (which I'm not even going to link to because who needs to subject themselves to that anymore?).  I have instead to offer my 25 favorite Christmas songs, in order of my personal preference.  First five will be today, with follow up posts every day until the big reveal on Christmas Eve.

So come along and we'll sing a chorus or two (ouch, sorry).  You might learn a thing or two.  Or not.  Either way, it'll be more fun than eleven ladies dancin'... or lads a-leapin', if that's your bag.

By the way, The Twelve Days do not appear anywhere on this list.  If you think you can still handle that, click on...





I’ve been feeling in a rut lately. Work is less interesting to me than it once was, and I find myself drifting off for long periods. Did you know that some psychologists consider daydreaming a mild and relatively harmless form of dissociation? Kind of cool, no? Anyway, I’ve been dissociating more frequently than is really productive, and I’m afraid it’s starting to be noticeable. It might be encroaching depression, but then it doesn’t really feel like I expect depression to feel (Nobody expects the encroaching depression!).

Worst of all is that I haven’t been writing. Except this blog, occasionally, which doesn’t really count. Other stuff, which I will now attempt to explicate and justify, in the hope that it will provide some kind of jolt of inspiration. Bear with me. Hidden in here is a badly framed (even Byzantine) request for the advice of my trusted friends.

The Web Across the Void

This Essay had been floating around my hard drive for a while, looking for an appropriate home.  Short of starting a third blog (thanks, no) I've decided to put it here.  Any concept or unifying theme for this blog is now officially dead.

Warning: kinda heavy in places.  By which I mean, like, really heavy.

The worst insult known to man (real men, anyway)

Last week I was listening to Science Friday on NPR, where they were interviewing the totally amazing Maria Popova.  I had no idea who Maria Popova was at the time, nor why she is so amazing, but was quickly convinced.  (The interview is available here, Ms Popova's site is brainpickings.org, and if you never return to this blog after clicking that second link, I will understand.)  For the uninitiated, Maria Popova could be described as a super-blogger, though she calls herself an "arbiter of interestingness", and the important takeaway from the interview, for me, was that she posts on her blog three times per day, not pictures of kittens, either, as you'll see if you click through.  It's insane.

Now, spite and envy have always had a place in my toolbox of motivations, so I was inspired to start posting to my blog again, in hopes of emulating Maria's success.  I may, however already be behind, given that it's taken me five days to write this one post.

Whatever, click through to find out what the worst insult known to man is.

Are you a good princess, or a bad princess?

Anybody who's read more that two of my posts knows by know that I have a young daughter at home, and she absolutely loves the Disney princesses, and Disney movies in general.  Like a lot of blue-state, liberal-arts, post-feminist people, I have mixed feelings about this.  I worry about the influence these types of cultural cues have on children, especially girls, and the movies are a mixed bag of good and bad lessons. I want to take a minute and evaluate a few of them.

Sigh.  I was going to write another long essay-form rant on the subject, a la my earlier entry on The Little Mermaid, but couldn't decide how to frame it coherently, so instead, I'm making my second list in the (admittedly very short) history of Caught Without a Parachute (the first, somewhat lackluster list is here).

The Nostalgia Machine

From the brilliant xkcd.com  His cartoons all carry an Easter egg, visible when you mouse over them; the one on this chart says: "An American tradition is anything that happened to a Baby-Boomer twice."

Regardless of what I may have said in recent posts, I really do enjoy the holiday season.  I even enjoy some of the more commercial aspects of it, especially the yearly ritual of bemoaning the commercialism of the season while simultaneously wallowing in it.  In large part, though, my enjoyment is based in nostalgia of the purest kind, and my nostalgia is triggered by cynical advertising ploys, bent on producing exactly the kind of reaction xkcd's referring to with the above chart.  Why is our Christmas celebration rooted so very firmly in the past?  If I remove the baby-boom signifiers from the season - the Red-Rider Air Rifle kind of stuff - I'm left with yet another layer of images from a vanished past, namely the Victorian era, when people actually rode around in sleighs, and Dickens was the hot new thing.

Is Robin Hood a Socialist?





There's was a piece the other day on the New York Times' website about the growing movement - particularly in Europe - in favor of a so-called "Robin Hood tax".  These are tiny taxes on certain financial transactions, particularly the risky ones that generate large sums of money, seemingly out of thin air.  The proceeds of the taxes, as the name suggests, are then used to support social programs.  The idea has some high-profile supporters, such as Bill Gates and Angela Merkel, and not surprisingly, some powerful opponents in the US and UK.

I made the decision not to talk too much about current events on this blog, because every post would quickly become an incoherent rant, but this presents an opportunity to talk about a Disney movie, which is one of the things I said I was going to do (check out my read on The Little Mermaid here).  It raised the question in my mind: is the Robin Hood we were presented as children, the fox in the green hat, a Socialist?

My First List - Things were better when...

Is there anything more susceptible to parody than the image of the old man lecturing a kid about how different things were "when I was your age" (I mean besides the Kardashian sisters)?  And is there anything more cliched in internet-land than lists (I mean besides bad grammar and pictures of kittens)?

When the idea for this post occurred to me, at first I rejected it.  It seemed like painting a picture of a canned ham in a cornfield, on black velvet.  But I needed something to post, and sometimes you just can't avoid the black velvet painting moments in life, so here it goes...

Stuff that was better when we were kids

Growing up

I think I've finally figured out what this blog is about.  It's about growing up.

More specifically, its about the experience of growing up, of looking around and realizing that adulthood's maybe not as cool as you thought it was going to be, and all that stuff you were quick to lay behind as a teenager is actually awesome.

To that end, I will be taking a gander at children's things through jaded adult eyes.  Sometimes it will be pure nostalgia (and will probably relate to something my kids have been up to lately), and sometimes it will be a deeper look at something we took for granted as children, as I did with my Mermaids post.  (They won't all be that long, I promise.)

Now for a quick plug: a couple of things I never grew out of were gummi bears and those frosted animal crackers.  Laurel Bushman is a California based artist who makes awesome charms and pendants based on them and other nostalgia foods.  Check them out here.  Full disclosure: she's my sister.

Forget Christmas, Save Thanksgiving!

Is it just me, or did the major retailers kind of skip over Thanksgiving this year?  It seems that at Target, Walmart, Starbucks, and so on, the Christmas decorations went up the day before Halloween, and that the Turkey day paraphernalia was relegated to a discount table in the corner, if it was displayed at all.  Interest in the holiday seems lower than any time in my memory - it seems like Thanksgiving should simply be re-named "The Thursday Before Black Friday".

It's a shame, because it's always been a favorite holiday of mine, since I was a kid.  Sure, it's not Christmas, with all the toys toys toys and greed greed greed; or Halloween, with all the candy candy candy and greed greed greed.  But Thanksgiving serves as a nice buffer between those two carnivals of self-indulgence.  Everyone sits together at the table with their families (however they choose to define them) and share in the fundamental act of community, sharing a meal.

New Additions

Eamon Thomas, Born October 25, 2011.

On Mermaids

When you have a three year old girl, you find yourself re-watching a lot of movies you haven’t seen in a while, especially Disney. I saw The Little Mermaid when it first came out, in 1989 (I was seven) and liked it, though even then I was aware that it was intended more for girls than boys. Watching it again now, with an adult perspective, I’ve figured out why – and it’s more than just Disney’s incessant and slightly irritating marketing of the “Princess” concept.

The release of The Little Mermaid marked the beginning of what’s been called the Disney Renaissance, a series of films in which the study broke out of the slump it had been in since the seventies. The renaissance continued with Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. How long the streak continued depends on your opinion of movies like Mulan, Pocahontas, Tarzan and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but the core of the period is those first four films. The torch was largely passed to Pixar after Tarzan, and Disney started making stuff like Dinosaur and The Emperor's New Groove, meh.



Anybody else think she looks like
Kristen Stewart?

  Of the four, the best is arguably either Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King, but an informal poll of women in my life indicates that The Little Mermaid had the most long-term influence. It’s that influence that I want to explore here.  There is a considerable amount of analytical writing on the Disney oeuvre available online, and much of it takes a negative view of the films' influence, a prime example is this piece by Chey on Helium.com.  While I agree that early exposure to these cultural artifacts has an effect, I disagree with the view that these effects must be negative, and in se reinforce the "patriarchal myth".  The Little Mermaid’s power rests in buried psychosexual messages that ultimately provide a positive guide for adolescent girls’ development. To start with, the central event of the movie – Ariel’s transformation from mermaid to human – is a clear metaphor for sexual awakening. The important conflict is how that awakening is handled by Ariel and by those around her. It’s become a common game to spot supposed subliminal sexual messages buried in the frames of Disney movies – like the famous tower on Triton’s palace, or the dust that swirls around Simba in The Lion King. I’m not interested in such facile pastimes. Instead, I want to go deeper, and discuss symbolic and even archetypal characters and objects that give The Little Mermaid its intense hold on the imagination.



Generations

A piece on pbs.org (here) asks whether the economic destruction wrought by the profligacy of the last decade has created a new lost generation.  Unemployment among twenty-somethings is up, marriages are being delayed, and a huge number of young people are opting to live with their parents after leaving school.  Aside from the rather dubious designation of the "lost generation" (wasn't Hemingway a member of the last Lost Generation?), the piece hits a nerve with me.  Our twenties are when we define ourselves; we're away from the influence of our parents, and its time to decide what we're going to be and whether we're going to be great at it.

Places, and why we miss them

Anyone who's actually reading this may already know that we're expecting our second child. A boy. He's due at the end of October, but if he's anything like his sister, he'll come at the beginning of October. He'll be born here, in Phoenix.

The Curse of Coolness

It's been nearly a year since my last post. Thank god no one's actually reading this, or there'd be some disappointment going around. I promised stories from suicide row in my last post, and I'll get to that later on, along with the various comings and goings of life in general, and what's been happening these last eleven months. Big news: kid number two on the way! But that's also for another post.

What I want to talk about today is the problem of being cool. I was never cool in the sense that I was popular, or sought after, or a trend-setter. But I have, for a long time, tried to cultivate coolness. Ironic detachment. The ability to remain unruffled, and unmoved. And I'm realizing how much I missed in the process. How much we all miss, because our culture pushes cool to the point that I believe its hobbling the whole society.

I'll tell you what brings this up. In the last couple of months I've become a fan of Roger Ebert's website, especially his Great Movie essays, which are a biweekly feature. You can get the complete list here . Anyway, tonight I read his essay on Franco Zeferelli's Romeo & Juliet and thought "I bet Netflix has that available for streaming". Sure enough, they do.

My parachute's attached to a crazy person!

So, its been two months since my last post. Like I said, not good at this blogging thing yet. But since then, I've gotten a job!

A job! A job! O yes a job has he!

Does it pay what my old job did? No, it pays half.

Does it have perks? No.

Does it have a sweet commute? No the commute sucks hairy retarded monkey ass.

Am I happier with it than I ever was with my old job? Yes, and I'll tell you why.

My job title is Research Assistant. The study I'm working on aims to find out how to better treat people who are suicidal in an emergency room. (Or, as the docs perfer to call it, Emergency Department, it has more than one room.) So my job is to scan the charts as they come in to determine if any of the patients may be suicidal. Sometimes easy, the chart says "Suicidal". Sometimes hard, the chart says "extremity laceration", and then buried deep within, "patient slashed wrists with rusty box cutter and is now squeezing his wounds" - might want to have put that up front.

If I find out that you are suicidal, I'm going to try to find out if you're homeless, really drunk, or in jail. If you are none of those things, I'm gonna come talk to you and try to get you to enroll in my study.

Note please that I did not list crazy, slightly drunk, slightly high, a total prick, or stupid as reasons for which I will not talk to you. As a result, some of these conversations are quite interesting. My favorite so far is the guy who very loudly answered all of my questions...except i wasn't talking to him. I was talking to the guy in the next bed over. Schizophrenics are fun.

I imagine that this will be ripe for blog posts in future. (Being careful to avoid specifics, of course, in order to try and dodge HIPPAA procecution). Check back soon for more "Tales from Suicide Row".

ps. There actually is a row of beds called suicide row in the hospital, when all of them have suicidal patients in them, its called a straight flush.

Once more into the breach

So, it's been one year, one month, and one week since I stopped being employed. Here's how it went down:

I had been working as writer for a security company in New York, with offices all around the Northeast. I was writing training materials, proposals, correspondance, stuff like that, and was moving into some independent business analysis and process improvement stuff too. Sweetums (the wife) matched her residency in Phoenix, AZ. (More about the totally messed up residency matching system in later posts.) So we're gonna have to move.

Long story short, I was told that I could continue to telecommute, since I didn't really have to physically be in the office to do what I did. I even took a voluntary pay cut to make the arrangement more palatable to the higher-ups. Two weeks later I get a call from my boss. On my 5th wedding anniversary. And the day we're closing on our first house.

"We're going to have to find another way to pay you."

Fine, contract work. I'll put together bids on specific projects. I'll work with my boss to find the right rates. No problem. I'll still make what I need, right? Not so much.

Didn't get a response to a single bid. Not one. It was like I just dropped them into a hole.

So I don't know what to call that. Did I get fired? Not really, certainly not for cause. I guess it was kind of like getting laid off...right? Ultimately, what really ground my gears was the cowardice of it all. I worked with you people for five years! I spoke with you every day on the phone! And you (and I'm thinking of one Senior VP in particular here, the guy who I'm pretty sure made the decision to pull the plug) didn't have the courtesy to just say "no", you're done?

WTF?

Since then, I've been in contact with the old folks at my home office, and I've got no beef with them. I decided a long time ago that there was no point in finding out the full nitty gritty of what happened in corporate, or who decided that my ass was expendable. It'll only make me mad. Er. And I'm tired of being mad.

Anyway. That's how that happened.

Peace.