Mainlining Christmas

When I’m bored of instrumentals, sometimes listening to “noise” helps me concentrate. Ambient-mixer.com has tools for building your own atmospheric mixes, and while I haven’t gotten into building my own, sometimes I like to see what other people have come up with. Of course I noticed that there was a section of holiday ambiances. Here are the three most popular of the featured mixes: Christmas Time Well… this is unique. The most popular comment reads: “You've successfully combined Christmas and Halloween,” and I think that person is on to something. There’s a creepy music box on the verge of running down, very loud footsteps and door sound periodically, and an oddly ominous Santa voice every so often. This has many more views than anything else on the Christmas page, but I wouldn’t listen to it for long. I guess you could turn off the Santa phrase and use it for the background of a Christmas horror story. Cosy Evening in the Winter Cottage This is okay, I guess. The c

It's time for the annual Mainlining Christmas Last-Minute Holiday Gift Guide! Okay, so technically we've never actually written one of these before, but tossing the term "annual" onto the front just gives it some much needed gravitas. Besides, if ever there was a year the public needed some help finding that perfect gift, this is it. I mean, what do you get the person who already has everything in their fallout shelter? It's a tough nut to crack, but we've been wracking our brains to come up with the best holiday solutions. The Fondoodler Ever want to write with melted cheese using what amounts to a caulk gun? If so, the Fondoodler is what you've been waiting for. The Fondoodler can turn almost any cheese into whiz. Perfect for the foodie on your list! A Digital Subscription to the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. Now that we're on the precipice of living in a nation where the free press is threatened at every turn, the news media needs

Silent Night (A Raine Stockton Dog Mystery) Donna Ball, 2011 Christmas crossposting! (Note: Many of the Christmas books I am reading this year have one notable thing in common -- they were all cheap or free on Kindle some time in the last few years. No other qualifications.) Premise: Raine Stockton runs an obedience school, or she would if the contractors would finish upgrading her facility. She trains dogs, keeps dogs, and sometimes that means she follows their noses right into trouble. This is another cozy mystery that’s more what I would call romantic slice-of-life with a pinch of mystery. Raine’s friends, job, and trouble with men are, if not interchangeable with others I’ve read, certainly of a type. The mystery isn’t much of the story - someone is stealing nativity Jesuses and some puppies are abandoned. Also a teenager’s abusive father turns up mysteriously dead, but Raine and company only briefly feel like they are in any danger, and she only gets involved because

Well. That was weird. I've seen ads for this show before, but I never actually watched an episode. Now that I have, I'm still a little unsure what to think of it. The Last Man on Earth is a series about a small group of survivors living in the empty, desolate remains of a planet where disease has killed off the human race. Also, it's a farcical comedy. I actually like that premise quite a bit. Protagonists in post-apocalyptic stories tend to be abnormally capable; the best of humanity. Conceptually, there's value in subverting this assumption. But maybe they pushed things a little too far with Will Forte's Tandy, who I found entirely unlikable. To be fair, I think that was the intention, but still, it might have been a bridge too far. These two episodes were part of a much longer plot arc. The first, Secret Santa, centered on the group celebrating Christmas together with a Secret Santa gift exchange. This made for some entertaining interactions due to diff

Roseanne's one of those shows I watched sporadically growing up. I remember finding it funny and knowing intellectually it was supposed to be significant for some reason, but I didn't fully appreciate it back when it was airing (hey, I was only a teenager). Looking back, it's incredibly impressive. Casting a pair of leads more closely resembling the average American than Hollywood stars was courageous. Also, ingenious: they clearly got their pick of undervalued comedians, since they wound up with two of the best. The episodes are formulaic, but not in a bad way. There's an impressive balance here between slapstick comedy and serialized storytelling. Even jumping from year-to-year, I found myself getting caught up in the character and plot developments. Santa Claus (1991) This episode from season four seems to kick off the annual Christmas episodes, assuming there aren't earlier holiday installments hiding under unassuming titles. The cold opening establis

First, I would like to state for the record that about fifteen minutes into this musical movie, I started thinking that it wasn’t that it wasn’t awful, but there was a disconnect between the style of the music and the style of filmmaking that made it unconvincing and boring. But if either the music/singing were more grounded or the acting/set/cinematography more surreal, it might work. And then later in the film I was proven right when it suddenly got good. The movie follows a young man named Langston (after the poet), when his mother sends him to her estranged parents’ home for Christmas. He’s never met his grandparents, but his mother’s jobs aren’t bringing in enough to make rent, so she ships him from Baltimore to New York. And up to this point it’s just slow and schmaltzy, and it has that music problem I alluded to at the start. The music is full of autotune and style that doesn’t match the very realistic filming of characters walking and riding buses. The result is thereby d

I think this movie was recommended on some list of little-known Christmas films, even though Christmas doesn’t fully show up until after the halfway point. We open on a tour bus traveling down Fifth Avenue, with an announcer pointing out the houses of New York’s wealthiest families. A man in a shabby outfit with a dog and a cane is walking down the street. Once the bus passes, he sneaks through a loose board into a backyard and down through a manhole, coming up (somehow) inside the boarded-up mansion. It turns out this is Aloysius McKeever, a homeless man with high class taste. He lives in this house secretly while the owner, real estate and business mogul Michael O’Connor, is in Virginia for the winter. Meanwhile, the last tenant is being thrown out of a building scheduled to be torn down for one of O’Connor’s projects. This is Jim Bullock, a young unemployed veteran with nowhere to go. McKeever runs across him in the park and takes him back to his secret mansion. Jim thinks M