Viva La Dirt League
Published 14 Dec 2020Rowan thinks its a good idea to play X-mas music in the store for the entire Christmas period … and the staff aren’t happy
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December 21, 2020
Horrible Christmas music in retail stores – X-mas Music
December 28, 2019
Star Wars and the First Xmas Film – December 27th – TimeGhost of Christmas DAY 4
TimeGhost History
Published 27 Dec 2019Did you go to the cinema this holiday? Or binge a bit of streaming? D’you feel modern about it? You’d be wrong… Holiday movies is a tradition that goes back almost 125 years!
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek KamińskiSources:
Mark Doliner https://flic.kr/p/oV46FY
Portrait of the Actress Carrie Fisher member of the jury in the 70 Edition of Venice International Film Festival 2013 by Riccardo GhilardiSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “A Sleigh Ride Into Town”
Howard Harper-Barnes – “My Only Wish Is Love”
Mike Franklyn – “Christmas Bliss”
The Snowy Hill Singers – “It Was On A Christmas Night” (Instrumental Version)A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
December 27, 2019
Imagine John Lennon as a huge hypocrite
As Mark Steyn pointed out, it isn’t hard to do:
In his Christmas sermon five years ago, the Bishop of Shrewsbury described John Lennon’s ghastly dirge “Imagine” as “heart-chilling”. Here’s what I had to say about it, and about secularism and a common culture, in the Christmas issue of The Spectator a decade earlier:
At my daughter’s school this year, the holiday concert concluded with John Lennon’s “Imagine”. The school had thoughtfully printed the lyric on the program, and the teacher, inviting the parents to sing along, declared the number summed up what we were all “praying” for. Indeed. The droning vamp began, and John’s anthem for cotton-candy nihilists rent the air:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today …Ah, that’s the message of the season, isn’t it? Back in the Sixties, John opined that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus Christ, which was a wee bit controversial in those unenlightened times but which appears to be no more than a prosaic statement of fact as far as the music department’s priorities are concerned. These days, “Imagine” has achieved the status of secular hymn, no doubt because of its inclusive message:
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too …Hey, happy holidays!
You may say he’s a dreamer, but he’s not. A couple of years ago, it emerged that Lennon was a very generous contributor not just to organizations that support and fund the IRA, but to the IRA itself. He could certainly imagine there’s no countries, nothing to kill or die for and no religion, too, but until that blessed day he was quite happy to support a religiously discriminatory organization that blows up grannies at shopping centres in order to get out of one country and join another. How heartening to know that, though he grew rich peddling illusory pap to the masses, he didn’t fall for it himself.
“Imagine” didn’t go over wild with the parents, who mumbled along unenthusiastically. To be honest, I’d prefer John and Yoko’s peacenik dirge, “(Happy Xmas) War Is Over”, though that might be a little premature and anyway that song suffers from the disadvantage of mentioning Xmas. On the radio you can hear “Frosty” and “Rudolph” and James Taylor’s new post-9/11 version of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”, but anyone with young children finds themselves exposed to a strange alternative repertoire of unseasonal favourites. My friend Tammy emerged from her daughter’s kindergarten concert in a rage: not just no Christmas carols, but no “Jingle Bells”. The only song she recognized was Lionel Bart’s spectacular melisma pile-up from Oliver!, “Whe-e-e-e-ere Is Love?”, which is not designed to be sung en masse. “They sounded like they were dying,” she fumed, before going off to beard the school board, who explained that “Jingle Bells” had been given the heave-ho on the grounds that it might be insensitive to those of a non-jingly persuasion.
December 26, 2019
Top 12 Fictional Pseudo-Christmases
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 24 Dec 2019Happy holidays, one and all – even those of us from fictional universes where Christmas isn’t celebrated! Let’s celebrate by comparing twelve fictional Definitely Not Christmases and ranking them from lamest to best!
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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December 25, 2019
The Wildest Christmas Party Ever? – December 24th – TimeGhost of Christmas Past – DAY 1
TimeGhost History
Published 24 Dec 2019The first day of TimeGhost of Christmas is about a legendary Christmas Party bearing the equally legendary name of “the Eggnog Riots”, which took place on Christmas Eve in 1826 at the Military Academy at West Point, New York.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Joram Appel and Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations by:
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/Sources:
NYPL Digital Collections
From the Noun Project:
Wine by Ayub Irawan
Drunk by Ates Evren Aydinel
Whisky by Made by Made
Rum by Andreja Kirma
clock by Maurício BritoSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “A Sleigh Ride Into Town”
Etienne Roussell – “A Winter’s Night”
Mike Franklyn – “Christmas Bliss”A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
Repost – The market failure of Christmas
Not to encourage miserliness and general miserability at Christmastime, but here’s a realistic take on the deadweight loss of Christmas gift-giving:
In strict economic terms, the most efficient gift is cold, hard cash, but exchanging equivalent sums of money lacks festive spirit and so people take their chance on the high street. This is where the market fails. Buyers have sub-optimal information about your wants and less incentive than you to maximise utility. They cannot always be sure that you do not already have the gift they have in mind, nor do they know if someone else is planning to give you the same thing. And since the joy is in the giving, they might be more interested in eliciting a fleeting sense of amusement when the present is opened than in providing lasting satisfaction. This is where Billy Bass comes in.
But note the reason for this inefficient spending. Resources are misallocated because one person has to decide what someone else wants without having the knowledge or incentive to spend as carefully as they would if buying for themselves. The market failure of Christmas is therefore an example of what happens when other people spend money on our behalf. The best person to buy things for you is you. Your friends and family might make a decent stab at it. Distant bureaucrats who have never met us — and who are spending other people’s money — perhaps can’t.
So when you open your presents next week and find yourself with another garish tie or an awful bottle of perfume, consider this: If your loved ones don’t know you well enough to make spending choices for you, what chance does the government have?
Repost – “Fairytale of New York”
Time:
“Fairytale of New York,” The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl
This song came into being after Elvis Costello bet The Pogues’ lead singer Shane MacGowan that he couldn’t write a decent Christmas duet. The outcome: a call-and-response between a bickering couple that’s just as sweet as it is salty.
QotD repost: Sir Humphrey’s bureaucratic holiday wishes
Sir Humphrey: I wonder if I might crave your momentary indulgence in order to discharge a by no means disagreeable obligation which has, over the years, become more or less established practice in government service as we approach the terminal period of the year — calendar, of course, not financial — in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, Week Fifty-One — and submit to you, with all appropriate deference, for your consideration at a convenient juncture, a sincere and sanguine expectation — indeed confidence — indeed one might go so far as to say hope — that the aforementioned period may be, at the end of the day, when all relevant factors have been taken into consideration, susceptible to being deemed to be such as to merit a final verdict of having been by no means unsatisfactory in its overall outcome and, in the final analysis, to give grounds for being judged, on mature reflection, to have been conducive to generating a degree of gratification which will be seen in retrospect to have been significantly higher than the general average.
Jim Hacker: Are you trying to say “Happy Christmas,” Humphrey?
Sir Humphrey: Yes, Minister.
December 24, 2019
It’s 2019 and Drew Magary still hates Williams-Sonoma
He’s been hating on the company for a while, but it’s still doing the things that got him riled up in the first place:
Oh, hello there! Welcome! Come on in! Come on in! Dust your boots off in the breezeway. I have a special mat you can use for it that’s woven from human hair sourced from the tribes of the South Pacific. Best snow-wiping hair ever designed, by God. Once you’ve cleaned up, I have a splendid repast of beggar’s purses and dolloped lobster turnovers awaiting you in the dining room. You may begin eating these haute goodies at 7:45 pm and no sooner. Please do not touch ANY of the decorations in the hallway as you proceed toward the food. My decorations are for admiring only. If you mar them in any way, I will grate off your genitals using a microplane. I am the Joneses. You cannot ever keep up with me.
I got that microplane from the Williams-Sonoma catalog, by the way. True, I COULD have bought a microplane at your local Pathmark. They have a rack of them hanging above the Pop-Tart shelf for some reason. But why buy one there when I can support my local (international) mom-and-pop (publicly traded) store (merchandising oligarchy) instead? I’m no fool. I know what’s best for America, and what’s best for America is ignoring every horrible thing going on and, instead, assigning two entire months on the calendar to spoiling myself, cutting down precious wildlife, and indulging in retail spending practices so irresponsible that every accountant on the planet cries their eyes out at night just thinking about it all.
I am hardly alone in such rituals. Try as you might, Christmas fiends, you cannot kill Williams-Sonoma. I know because I’ve been shitting on this company’s catalog every Christmas for YEARS, as a matter of both tradition and moral principle. But all of my efforts to drown this yuppie trinket hive in the toilet have seemingly been in vain. In fact, last year, I myself nearly died before this company did. And I’m a sturdy fellow. I work out an elliptical trainer five times a week and occasionally eat fruit. I am strong. I am invincible. I AM MAN. Alas, I am no match for a company wily enough to sell Star Wars Le Creuset roasting pans for $450 (HOLY LIVING FUCK) and somehow make it work. How does W-S do it year after year?
Well, according to an article I just Googled, the company is strong in something called “omnichannel retailing,” a term I will look no further into because I don’t hate myself. Also, millennials apparently LOVE West Elm, which W-S also owns. West Elm is IKEA for people who don’t want to say they bought their furniture at an IKEA, so that all tracks. I have West Elm furniture in my house. It’s alarmingly small furniture. Really, only my dog can fit on the chair we got. He weighs 15 pounds.
Also, the company has shuttered a lot of brick-and-mortar Williams-Sonoma locations in favor of selling designer chicken coops directly to hotels, banks, and other industrial concerns. OH WOW DID I JUST SEE THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT METER ON SANTA’S SLEIGH SPIKE INTO THE RED? You know I did. According to every Christmas movie I’ve ever watched, Christmas spirit is in great peril every year. That’s why we need overpriced fondue pots more than ever.
Remy: “The First Noel” (Ballot Access Parody)
ReasonTV
Published 23 Dec 2019Remy is creeped out by restrictive ballot access measures. Also by Prince Andrew.
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Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason
Subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts: https://goo.gl/az3a7aReason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
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Written and performed by Remy.
Produced and edited by Austin Bragg.
Music tracks and mastering by Ben Karlstrom.LYRICS:
The first Noel I heard early one day
As I tried to run as a new candidate
My cheeks were wetter than Prince Andrew’s shirt
When the man spoke to me and he told me these words:No “L,” no “L”
No “L,” no “L”
No room for me on the ballot, oh wellI looked up a party wherein
I could join but was told “There’s no room at the inn”
No bed to lay and I heard “take a hike”
Like the time I bought my wife an exercise bikeNo “L,” no “L”
No “L,” no “L”
No room for me in the parties, oh wellMy wish this year is to feel content
At the ballot and not—to be frank—incensed
Must it be so hard to boot folks we don’t like
But they claim it is lawful and I think that’s right, but …No “L,” no “L”
No “L,” no “L”
Seriously, how creepy is Prince Andrew?
Repost – Hey Kids! Did you get your paperwork in on time?
If you hurry, you can just get your Santa’s Visit Application in before the deadline tonight!
Holiday Tales: Christmas
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 25 Dec 2017Merry Christmas, all! In honor of this complex and multifaceted holiday, today let’s talk about some of the many and varied influences and major historical turning points that sculpted this holiday into what we know and love (or lose our minds at Starbucks over.)
Nobody tell Blue that this video is mostly historical.
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December 23, 2019
The lousy economics of gift-giving – “non-cash is a poor receipt of value”
Tim Worstall explains why gift-giving at Christmas is so economically inefficient:
The point being made is dual, that individuals have agency and that utility is entirely personal.
To unravel that jargon.
Individuals, peeps, are able to make choices. We delight in making choices in fact, “agency” is the opposite of “anomie”, that feeling that society determines what we may or can do that so depresses the human spirits. We get to choose to get up at 6 am or 8. Have coffee or tea when we do. Go buy the latest platters from the newly popular beat combo, pay the ‘leccie bill or have the coffee out at an emporium.
Having choices, making them, makes people happier.
Secondly, utility. The result of those choices, which of them will maximise happiness, is different for each and every individual. Sure, we can aggregate some of them – food is usually pretty high up everyones’ list, that first litre of water a day tops most. But the higher up Maslow’s Pyramid we go the more tastes – and thus happiness devoured – differ.
So, we make humans happier by their having the choice to do what they want, not what others think they should want or have.
Thus, give people cash at Christmas not socks.
Balancing that is the obvious point that the care and attention with which a present is considered is part of that consumption of happiness. The boyfriend who actually listens to the type of clothing desired and goes gets it provides that joy that a bloke has, for once, been listening. Or the book that would never have been individually considered but was chosen because it might – and does.
Sure.
But the point isn’t about Christmas at all. That’s a way of wrapping the point so it can be left underneath the tree of knowledge.
Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”
L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:
Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.
Feh.
As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.
Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.
But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.
Double feh.
Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…
Repost – Kate Bush – Christmas Special 1979 (Private Remaster)
Published on 5 Oct 2013
I know there’s a good few copies of this out on YouTube, but here it is, again! The other copies were either split up into individual tracks, the best complete one (from BBC Four’s rebroadcast in 2009) had the wrong aspect ratio, which annoyed the hell out of me! So, here this is…
Video and audio have been tidied up very slightly, not much was needed!
Kate Bush – Christmas Special
Tracklist:
(Intro) 00:00
Violin 00:29
(Gymnopédie No.1 – composed by Erik Satie) 03:44
Symphony In Blue 04:44
Them Heavy People 08:20
(Intro for Peter Gabriel) 12:52
Here Comes The Flood (Peter Gabriel) 13:22
Ran Tan Waltz 17:02
December Will Be Magic Again 19:43
The Wedding List 23:35
Another Day (with Peter Gabriel) 28:05
Egypt 31:41
The Man With The Child In His Eyes 36:21
Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbreak 39:24“I was recently asked about this BBC TV special and I thought I’d share my comments here. Kate: Kate Bush Christmas Special is a stage performance by Kate Bush with her special guest Peter Gabriel. Though most of the songs are not holiday ones, they come from Bush’s first three albums (Never for Ever her third album would be released in 1980 after this 1979 TV special was taped). The performances include costumes, choreographed dances and a wind machine, creating an eclectic music TV special to say the least.
This is one of the programs that makes my research quite difficult — because it calls itself a Christmas Special yet it contains only one performance of a Christmas song “December Will Be Magic Again” (a song that wouldn’t be released as a single by Bush until the following year, in 1980). TV programming that calls itself a Christmas Special and yet contains little to no Christmas entertainment is actually quite common — especially on the BBC.
Between the end of November and the end of December each year, there is quite a bit of special programming on television. Remember Elvis’ 1968 Comeback Special — it aired in December that year and includes only one holiday song, a performance of “Blue Christmas.” Is it considered a Christmas special? No, not really. And so, despite its title, the lack of holiday programming in Kate Bush’s 1979 TV special means it shouldn’t be considered a Christmas special either. But the Kate Bush Christmas Special is certainly worth watching!”
H/T to Ghost of a Flea for the link.