Among my gifts this year, I received the H.L. Mencken collection Prejudices, so I’ve got lots to read over the next few days.
I also received the “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” DVD collections, although getting a chance to play them will probably not come up for a few days, given how many other DVDs were exchanged as gifts this year.
I hope your Christmas (if you celebrate it) was equally happy.
Now, turn off your browser and go enjoy yourself offline!
If you hurry, you can just get your Santa’s Visit Application in before the deadline tonight!
Ethan Greenhart wants to rename Christmas as “Turkey Genocide Day”:
Just as there’s nothing civilised about organising society around the wants of Gaia-mauling human beings, and nothing green about traipsing halfway across the planet to trek with donkeys in Peru (how do you know the donkeys want to trek?), so there can never be anything ethical about a holiday whose centrepiece is a dead bird sexually molested by sage; whose star turn is an obese man who drinks that imperialist tipple Coca-Cola and delivers yet more stuff to already stuffed brats; and where taking a tree from a forest, humiliating it with tinsel and sticking it in a living room is seen as a perfectly normal — nay, fun — thing to do.
This is no holiday; it’s a hell-iday for the defenceless creatures and plants of this ball of gas and air we have arrogantly labelled “Earth”. The signs were there 2000 years ago when a knocked-up teenager enslaved a donkey and forced it to carry her hundreds of miles to Bethlehem before ousting cows and sheep so she could give birth in their home.
If that weren’t bad enough, so-called “wise men” (another contradiction in terms) raided nature to find gifts for the resource-user that this young woman unthinkingly gave birth to, including myrrh, which is literally made from the blood that oozes from the wounds of the Commiphora species of trees, and frankincense, which is stolen from the Boswellia tree.
And so it was that this 2000-year-old orgy of animal enslavement, human breeding and gift-giving became an inspiration to the brainless inhabitants of Christendom, who every year ape the Holy Family by abusing animals and dishing out unnecessary gifts and calling the whole stupid shebang a celebration.
Overall, not a bad rant, although it only manages a close second to the Prince Regent’s complaint:
Edmund: So, shall I begin the Christmas story?
Prince: Absolutely! As long as it’s not that terribly depressing one about the chap who gets born on Christmas Day, shoots his mouth off about everything under the sun, and then comes a cropper with a couple of rum-coves on top of a hill in Johnny Arabland.
Edmund: You mean Jesus, sir?
Prince: Yes, that’s the fellow! Just leave him out of it — he always spoils the X-mas atmos.
H/T to Roger Henry for the link.
It’s Christmas time, and that means it’s time to enjoy A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’ melancholy tale of a productive businessman who gets worked over by three meddling supernatural social workers one Christmas Eve, transforming him into a simpering socialist.
It’s almost as sad as Star Wars, really.
Douglas Kern, “A TCS Christmas Carol”
Gregg Easterbrook receives the perfect, perfect holiday letter:
Don’t you hate boastful holidays letters about other people’s fascinating lives and perfect children? Below is one Nan and I received last week.
Dear Friends,
What a lucky break the CEO sent his personal jet to pick me up from Istanbul; there’s plenty of room, since I have the entire aircraft to myself, to take out the laptop and write our annual holiday letter. Just let me ask the attendant for a better vintage of champagne, and I’ll begin.
It’s been another utterly hectic year for Chad and I and our remarkable children, yet nurturing and horizon-expanding. It’s hard to know where the time goes. Well, a lot of it is spent in the car.
Rachel is in her senior year at Pinnacle-Upon-Hilltop Academy, and it seems just yesterday she was being pushed around in the stroller by our British nanny. Rachel placed first this fall in the state operatic arias competition. Chad was skeptical when I proposed hiring a live-in voice tutor on leave from the Lyric Opera, but it sure paid off! Rachel’s girls’ volleyball team lost in the semifinals owing to totally unfair officiating, but as I have told her, she must learn to overcome incredible hardship in life.
Now the Big Decision looms — whether to take the early admission offer from Harvard or spend a year at Julliard. Plus the whole back of her Mercedes is full of dance-company brochures as she tries to decide about the summer.
Nicholas is his same old self, juggling the karate lessons plus basketball, soccer, French horn, debate club, archeology field trips, poetry-writing classes and his volunteer work. He just got the Yondan belt, which usually requires nine years of training after the Shodan belt, but prodigies can do it faster, especially if (not that I really believe this!) they are reincarnated deities.
Modeling for Gap cuts into Nick’s schoolwork, but how could I deprive others of the chance to see him? His summer with Outward Bound in the Andes was a big thrill, especially when all the expert guides became disoriented and he had to lead the party out. But you probably read about that in the newspapers.
What can I say regarding our Emily? She’s just been reclassified as EVVSUG&T — “Extremely Very Very Super Ultra Gifted and Talented.” The preschool retained a full-time teacher solely for her, to keep her challenged. Educational institutions are not allowed to discriminate against the gifted anymore, not like when I was young.
Yesterday Rachel sold her first still-life. It was shown at one of the leading galleries without the age of the artist disclosed. The buyers were thrilled when they learned!
Then there was the arrival of our purebred owczarek nizinny puppy. He’s the little furry guy in the enclosed family holiday portrait by Annie Leibovitz. Because our family mission statement lists cultural diversity as a core value, we named him Mandela.
Chad continues to prosper and blossom. He works a few hours a day and spends the rest of the time supervising restoration of the house — National Trust for Historic Preservation rules are quite strict. Corporate denial consulting is a perfect career niche for Chad. Fortune 500 companies call him all the time. There’s a lot to deny, and Chad is good at it.
Me? Oh, I do this and that. I feel myself growing and flowering as a change agent. I yearn to empower the stakeholders. This year I was promoted to COO and invited to the White House twice, but honestly, beading in the evening means just as much to me. I was sorry I had to let Carmen go on the same day I brought home my $14.6 million bonus, but she had broken a Flora Danica platter and I caught her making a personal call.
Chad and I got away for a week for a celebration of my promotion. We rented this quaint five-star villa on the Corsican coast. Just to ourselves — we bought out all 40 rooms so it would be quiet and contemplative and we could ponder rising above materialism.
Our family looks to the New Year for rejuvenation and enrichment. Chad and I will be taking the children to Steamboat Springs over spring break, then in June I take the girls to Paris, Rome and Seville while Chad and Nicholas accompany Richard Gere to Tibet.
Then the kids are off to camps in Maine, and before we know it, we will be packing two cars to drive Rachel’s things to college. And of course I don’t count Davos or Sundance or all the routine excursions.
I hope your year has been as interesting as ours.
Love,
Jennifer, Chad, Rachel, Nicholas & Emily(The above is inspired by a satirical Christmas letter I did for The New Republic a decade ago. I figure it’s OK to recycle a joke once every 10 years.)
PC World says:
Turner calls the game “Snowball Blaster.” If you help Santa dodge all the snowballs, you get a special lights display. Passers-by can hop into the “blaster” unit and use a controller to play via a PC that operates 128-channels of lights to form the display.
When the National Post carries a story about someone purloining one of the wise men figures from a church in Brooklin:
Durham Region police reported that the 6′ x 3′ plywood cutout of one of the Three Wise Men was stolen in the early morning hours Dec. 12, and the church had said they would like it returned.
“It’s a bit of an insult,” said Brooklin United Church council chair Rick Barnes.
Mr. Barnes said the thieves were caught on camera, and said they appeared to be “a bunch of kids goofing around and having fun.” The wooden cut-out, which was fastened to a metal post and then attached to the larger constructed scene, would be hard to remove quickly, he said.
“It didn’t take all night but it took them a considerable effort to get it removed,” he said.
Mr. Barnes said that although Brooklin United doesn’t plan to make a big deal out of the incident, it is unfortunate for the church, who have limited resources to begin with.
Brooklin is kind of a quiet place . . . but even here, this isn’t really a big story. Why the National Post bothered to report on it, I can’t begin to imagine.
I don’t cook, except for very basic things, so this isn’t the sort of list I’d be able to compile for myself. Megan has been doing it for several years:
Yes, it’s that time of year again. Back by popular demand, expanded with the accumulated bounty of one moderately large wedding, it’s the kitchen gift guide. As usual, I am organizing by price, since everything on this list is something that I specially like having. [. . .]
Butter boat This uses evaporative cooling to keep butter at room temperature without spoiling. There’s a well for water, and then a butter dish that rests on top of it, and slowly wicks water through the ceramic. The upshot is that as long as you change the water every few days, you can keep butter in the dish for weeks — longer than a stick of butter usually lasts in our house, anyway. I have two, a white one for unsalted, and a green one for salted. It’s really a nice little present — who doesn’t like nice, soft, fresh-tasting butter?
We’ve got a couple of these, and they’re very useful . . . when we remember to refill them after using up the last of the current stick of butter.
Rabbit Corkscrew I’m a big fan of this — it makes opening a wine bottle basically foolproof. I feel it’s especially good for people who are losing hand strength, although you might also want to consider an electric corkscrew, which gets decent reviews. We’re also extremely pleased with the wine aerator that a friend got me for a bridal shower gift; it allows you to rapidly aerate red wine that you don’t have time to decant, improving the flavor. It would be a lovely gift paired with a corkscrew.
I’ve heard mixed reviews about the Rabbit — some people really love them, while others think they’re vastly overrated. I’m still happy with a simple lever-style corkscrew I picked up at the Williamsburg Winery on a trip to Virginia several years ago. The aerator is a good idea for those of us who don’t remember to decant the red wine far enough in advance. It won’t miraculously change the quality of the wine, but it will make up for a bit of the time you forgot to allow it to have for breathing.
Russell D. Longcore looks at the economics underlying Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol:
Next we are introduced to Scrooge’s philosophy on celebrating Christmas. His nephew greets him warmly with a “Merry Christmas!” Scrooge responds:
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; a time for balancing your books and having every item in them through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.
Is he wrong, or is he a prophet? Today, a large percentage of Americans pay for Christmas with their credit cards, borrowing money from the future to pay for today’s luxuries. They work for wages, but American savings rates are near zero, so they are no richer than last year. They trade their irreplaceable time for wages as the years tick off. Where is Scrooge wrong in his assessment of Christmas celebrants?
Next we see an exchange between Scrooge and two do-gooders who come to the office looking for charitable donations.
[. . .]
Let’s pause to learn from this attempt at a shakedown.
The very existence of Christmas… both in the Dickensian era and today… promotes a desire for the giving and receiving of gifts. And that has nothing to do with Jesus. Merchandising is King of Kings in December. With that desire comes the feeling of “Want” described by Gentleman #2., particularly among those who have not. Everyone knows and feels the ubiquitous pressure on everyone to give gifts, even if you cannot afford to do so. Those who do not wish to participate in the expression of so-called “Christian cheer” may not be moved to part with their Abundance to provide the Poor with food, drink and warmth in this particular method of coercion.
As Scrooge reveals, he already supports the institutions that care for the needy. He either gives his own money voluntarily to the debtor’s prisons, the Union workhouses, the Treadmill… or money is exacted from him by taxation for the operations of these institutions. But Gentleman #2 argues that “many can’t go there… some would rather die (than go there). That is a choice made by an individual based upon haughty pride, not true need. Scrooge states that he does not accept the premise offered by #2 that anyone would rather die than go to the poor house, and that he is busy enough minding his own business. And thus ends this part of the story.
Joe Fay reports on an unpleasant meeting between rambler and reindeer:
Children are advised to hide under the duvet if they hear sleighbells this Christmas Eve, after it emerged that reindeers appear to have developed a taste for human flesh.
The reindeer’s ability to transform from Santa’s little helper to ravening maneater was illustrated by the tale of a 57-year-old woman who was subjected to a terrifying two-hour assault from a juvenile male last month.
Pat Cook was walking in the Cromdale Hills near Grantown-on-Spey when the juvenile bull separated himself from the rest of the UK’s only reindeer herd and began stalking her.
As she reached the summit of the hill, he pounced, knocking her to the ground.
Cook told The Scotsman: “One of my walking poles was thrown into the air. The reindeer kept trying to stick its antlers into me, but I managed to brace my feet on them.”
You’d really better watch out!
H/T to Economicrot. Many many more at the link.
A brief filler piece on the Canadian Press newswire explains only part of the reason so many Canadian shoppers are headed south to do their Christmas shopping this year:
This is Black Friday in the U.S., but many Canadian retailers are a furious red at the thought of consumers heading south for bargains.
The Retail Council of Canada says there is a long list of reasons to shop north of the border.
It says retailers are a vital part of any community’s economy and it employs 10 per cent of the workforce.
It also reminds consumers that Canadian taxes — which cause much of the traffic south — help pay for health care and education.
The higher taxes are certainly a big part of the explanation, but even if you control for tax, Canadian prices are generally higher than their US counterparts. For example, a paperback I picked up at random from our coffee table (published quite recently) has a price of $7.99 on it. If you’re an American, that is. Canadians pay $10.99. The Canadian dollar is around US$0.98.
Nice little markup, eh? Add the 13% Hack-and-Slash Tax on top of that, and you know exactly why thousands of Canadians are willing to put up with long lines at the border to do their shopping in the States.
Normal-ish blogging will resume in a day or two . . . in the meantime, what are you doing reading blogs? Go enjoy yourself!
David Harsanyi looks at the plight of the non-believer during the Christmas season:
Unlike many of my fellow atheists, however, I’m not a fundamentalist on the issue of nonbelief. Though my rock-ribbed skepticism is, I hope, driven by reason, my unwavering desire to avoid saying “amen” in a group setting is a real driver, as well.
“Aren’t we forgetting the true meaning of Christmas?” Homer Simpson once asked. “You know, the birth of Santa.”
Like Homer, I enjoy the birthday of Jesus — or Santa. So it pains me to witness fellow atheists acting like a bunch of irritating ’80s televangelists and defeating the entire purpose of unbelief by organizing, grousing, wagging their fingers and, worst of all, proselytizing.
Take the billboards popping up in Las Vegas this year that read “Reason’s Greetings” and “Heathen’s Greetings.”
The man behind the billboards claims to only want to make people think — because only atheists can really think, after all. “People that drive by who have an open mind may think to themselves, ‘Maybe I should question some of my dogmatic beliefs,’ ” Richard Hermsen, a local atheist activist, explained.
Granted, atheists have some reason to be annoyed by the general public. A USA Today/Gallup Poll in 2007, for instance, found that more than half of Americans would, under no circumstances whatsoever, vote for an atheist.
No group fared lower than heathens. Not Mormons. Or even the Jews — and we probably killed Christ.
An amusing little time-waster.
H/T to Jason Ciastko for the link.
Update: I didn’t do as well as Liam did (in the comments), but he’s right that the upper left seems to provide much more opportunity for scoring:
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