Mainlining Christmas

So, I entered this holiday season with 1049 holiday songs, and I decided it only made sense to start out by listening to each and every one of them. That adds up to about 59 hours, in case you were curious. I decided to go in alphabetical order by song title (I actually put a lot of thought into this beforehand and came to the conclusion it would actually break up the slow parts more than going by artist or album name). I had so much "fun" doing this, I decided to share the experience with all of you. What follows is not meant to be comprehensive. It's just a series of notes I compiled highlighting, by letter, the songs that left an impression. Because I was listening while doing other things, I'm sure I glossed over some good and bad songs while I wasn't paying attention. Further, because I was busy, many of these notes were written at the end of the day (or even a few days later), when I got around to it, so I'm sure I'm forgetting things that see

I liked this more than Erin did, I think, but it eventually grated on me as well. This is also known as the Seattle Ballet Nutcracker, and that is a more appropriate name, as the largest problem with this was the tension between whether you were watching a dance piece or a movie. I found the beginning rather charming, but eventually it was just long and strange. The surreal narration doesn't add much. The dancing is decently done, most of the time, and I'm sure it was fun to see live. The energy of the dancers just doesn't translate to film. The camera is often filming the least interesting part of the dance, and occasionally it seemed to me that the visuals were out of sync with the music. Adding a few moments of awkward bluescreen does not change a piece intended for the stage to one suited for the screen. I had trouble staying interested through the Land of Sweets dances; some of the costumes and dancers were good, most just did not work on film. There were momen

Reading this book was an odd experience for me, kind of like overhearing a conversation where you're familiar with the subject matter, but are coming at it from a drastically different point of view. I started out really disliking the book for reasons I'll get to in a moment, but ended on a more positive note. Since it's the Christmas season, I'd like to start with the negative, which is easily done since it means starting at the beginning. The book is billed as a history of the holiday, and indeed it opens with pre-Christian festivals. However, right from the start, Forbes defines Christmas as a Christian holiday which was inspired by pre-existing celebrations. While he's open about the significance of Roman festivals like Saturnalia, he's fairly dismissive of them. The term he uses for pre-Christian celebrations is "party," and he never explores a spiritual side to these events. The reason, it seems, is that the book is written by a Chr

This year we went the day before Thanksgiving to see the Parade Balloons being inflated. It's free to go, but you have to enter at a particular place and deal with huge crowds. The first few balloons we saw: Kung Fu Panda's ass: I liked seeing how many sandbags it took to stabilize the balloons: Here's a look up the street: Here's the head of the Kung Fu Panda balloon, and a small vehicle for size comparison: A bunch of smaller round balloons: Here some workers are securing SpongeBob Squarepants. I did notice that his arm was oddly bent by the straps, and still kind of bent the next day: The sidewalks the crowd walked on surround the Natural History Museum. There were big floodlights set up so that the balloons could be easily seen. Kool-Aid Man was being moved to a new position as we walked by, at first we thought he was deflating. Erin took this picture of a balloon dog's butt. All the

X-Men: Evolution is a strange show. It started out with one of the worst premises imaginable: having the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants as students with secret powers enrolled in the same public high school. And, frankly, it didn't even do that premise justice for more than a year. However, over the seasons, the show evolved into something else. Somehow, the characters and the setting evolved until it actually made sense calling them the X-Men. In a sense, most of the series wound up functioning as an extended and in-depth origin story, which is sort of cool. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad episodes to sit through before the series picks up. This episode is after the worst of them, but it's still got a lot wrong with it. As the title implies, On Angel's Wings focuses on Angel, who inexplicably hides his powers in shame, despite the fact his mutation is more likely to get him laid then hunted (to be fair, this bizarre bit of illogic is lifted right f

Cross-Posted from The Blue Fairy's Workshop Hercule Poirot's Christmas Agatha Christie, 1939 I find Agatha Christie to be an acquired taste that I've never quite acquired. I enjoy her work, usually, but it takes me a long time to get into each book. This was no exception. Once the story got going I quite liked it, but there were a lot of character introductions to get through first. Once the extended family was all together at the manor house, they got right down to the business of Christmas: acrimonious backstabbing, awkward flirting, and murder. Poirot is brought along to assist the local police when patriarch Simeon Lee is found dead in a locked room. He'd assembled his clan of children together for the holidays to emotionally torment them, then threatened to make a new will. So everyone has a motive, but only Poirot can peel through the misdirections and lies to figure out what happened. I especially enjoyed Poirot's amusement at the very British natu

Let me start by saying I didn't know anything about this show going into this episode, other than that it's sort of The Last Scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Series. What I knew by the end is that it's really just that: a series of wacky adventures based loosely on a bunch of made-up magical artifacts based even more loosely on historical figures and events. (I have since watched another, more recent episode, which sucked much less than this one.) This Christmas episode features a cynical banker-type being tormented by a spectral Santa, who threatens to make him “disappear” unless he changes his ways. There's a sub plot about reuniting another character with his father. It's not boring, but all of the plot turns are horribly cliché and I just want to smack all of these characters for overacting and being morons. The dialogue is fairly clunky, although the cheesy B-grade CG special effects amuse me. There's some decent use of silly creepy Christmas mus