Archive for the 'Holidays' Category

In beautiful New York, New York…

Happy New Pontiac!

Honestly, can you sponsor a year?

Do French people still tape paper fish to each other’s backs on April 1st, or was Madame Rublewitz lying to us all in 8th grade?

That’s neither here nor there — unless it happens to be there in France. Anyway, I’m sure everyone has already seen Google’s TiSP system by now, so I won’t go into that (although I’m pretty pissed off that you have to install the Google toolbar to use the system).

Instead, let’s have a look at what those crazy kidz at Technorati are up to today:

Kinda cute, huh? Some of them are of Fawlty Towers quality.

Tags:
Technorati,
Logo,
April Fool,
Google,
TiSP

Here’s a wee hunk of American history that you probably don’t know.

We’re all familiar with the story of the first Thanksgiving, the feast shared by the Pilgrims and their Wampanoag neighbors. No, turkey was apparently not served. Instead, the meats feasted upon that day were most likely venison and duck. But that’s not the piece of history I’m here to teach. I’m here today to talk about the corn that was served that fateful day.

Even without butter, corn on the cob is kind of sloppy food. And when you’re a Puritan, sloppy food is embarrassing food, and embarrassing food is sinful. One particular fellow by the name of Joseph Lymon expressed his disgust with the concept of grabbing the corn in one’s bare hands and gnawing on it, leaving little wet torn up bits all over it. He vowed that he would find a way to make corn eating sufficiently godly, or that he’d make sure no one ever ate it again.

At the second Thanksgiving feast a year later, after the prayer, Lymon stood up to announce that he had found a way to enjoy corn without insulting anyone’s (including god’s, of course) sense of propriety. He held up his invention: small, beautifully polished pieces of wood with one end sharpened. He proudly demonstrated how to insert them into either end of the corn cob and feast on the lord’s bounty without ever having to touch the food with one’s hands. “With my new Corntensils,” he declared, “we can give thanks and praise to the Lord without acting like lowly beasts.”

His announcement, much to his surprise, was met with laughter of derision, and he stormed away in a holier than thou huff.

A week later, Lymon and a few of his followers packed up their belongings (including the colony’s supply of Corntensils) and declared that they could no longer stand to live among the ungodly beasts of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They traveled inland to the west and the south for weeks, until they arrived at a wide river. It was there that they declared they had reached the land promised to them by god, where they would create their own colony, with their own laws, not the least of which would be the law of Corn Etiquette.

Tags: Thanksgiving, History, Etiquette

This is your idea of terror, Boston? It’s Err, for fuck’s sake!

I was supposed to go to the pharmacy today, and instead I sat here terrorized by all that terror in the streets. The bridges were closed! The River Chuck was closed! They even found one of these “packages” here in the ‘Ville!

So because of this panic over a cartoon character, I wasn’t able to pick up my drugs — the drugs that are supposed to keep me from panicking over stuff like cartoon characters!

If anyone on the news had bothered to mention that these tools of terror were LED Mooninites, I could have told them not to worry. Instead of that, this day, which was supposed to be a joyful celebration of gorilla suits, is now going to live in infamy as the day of the Boston Magnetic Light Scare. (I will admit, however, that for a day about gorillas to become famous for guerrilla marketing is kind of cute.)

Honestly. Get a grip, Mayor Mumbles.

Tags: Boston, Terror, Err, Mooninite

That’s right, folks. It’s National Gorilla Suit Day today! And as one of my cats is in fact named for someone in a gorilla suit (go ahead, guess), I’m celebrating.

This despite the fact that Boston has been quaking with fear all day and it’s the fault of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Oy. I’ll be waiting for a personal apology from Master Shake.

Tags: National Gorilla Suit Day, Boston, Bomb Scare, ATHF, Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Viva Santos Claus

I guess I’m not quite done with this. I assume you’ve all heard about this Great Sea-Tac Christmas Tree Fiasco. What a load of crap.

I get it that some Rabbi thought it would be a good idea to put up a menorah in addition to the Christmas trees. I get it that when the trees were taken down the Rabbi made it clear that he was sorry — that this wasn’t the outcome he was looking for.

And I get but disagree with this concept of the Supreme Court determining Christmas to be sufficiently secular that putting up a Santa or a tree doesn’t cross the ol’ establishment line.

But if it’s secular, why do so many religious people take it so damn seriously? Did you see Lou Dobbs discussing the case with Jeffrey Toobin a few days ago? Lou was absolutely apoplectic! I can’t find the show transcript, but at one point he said something like, “And that… that…. that… that… Rabbi…” I don’t think “Rabbi” was the first word that came to his mind. It’s as if somebody told Lou that Rabbi Bogomilsky ran a sanctuary for Mexican illegal aliens in the basement of the shul.

Here are a few more over-reactions to the case from that Seattle Times article I linked to above:

Robert Jacobs, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, said more than a dozen organizations or rabbis had reported receiving hate e-mail. His organization was advising local Jewish institutions that have received significant numbers of hate e-mails to consider having security during Hanukkah and other holiday-season events.

The furor has been building for years. Last month, the Alliance Defense Fund, a religion-based legal-aid group in Arizona, announced it had lined up an army of attorneys who were prepared to defend the tradition of Christmas in schools and on public property.

“Frankly, it’s ridiculous that Americans have to think twice about whether it’s OK to say ‘Merry Christmas,’” said Alan Sears, the group’s president.

Jesus Christ (so to speak)! Who’s being ridiculous now? And you get wankers like O’Reilly complaining that all the religion has been taken out of the holiday. If you want the religion bit, go ahead, but then you can’t turn around and say it’s secular enough that it belongs on public land.

If you want your trees and your Santa and your shiny gifties wrapped at the mall and your stockings filled with gift cards from the Home Depot and Pottery Barn and the Gap, I say fine. But the lot of you have to say that this has nothing to do with Jesus. Jesus is the messiah of the Christian faith. Christmas is about Santa.

One or the other. Not both. Nope. But think about this: if you take the religion out of Christmas, you’ll end up with something akin to what the card pictured above is about. Notice the text. Notice the flag being carried by the lil’ cosmonaut. That’s right. Christmas without religion is like something out of the Soviet Union. The communist, atheistic Soviet Union. Would that make you happy? I doubt it.

My advice is to take Christmas back. Take it away from those horrible commercial, secular, godless heathens and keep it close to your heart as the holy day you know it to be. Don’t share it with the rest of us. We don’t deserve it.

Update: I haven’t located the transcript of Dobbs’ rant on the Rebbe, but thanks to Wonkette, I do have access to a column Lou wrote on the subject.

This week we were treated to the spectacle of an easily offended and highly offensive rabbi who walked into an airport, gazed upon Christmas trees all around him and suddenly was overwhelmed with an immense, and apparently irresistible, urge to sue the management of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport because nowhere among all the Christmas trees was a single menorah. Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement of Seattle even delivered to the airport’s management a draft of a lawsuit he would file if they didn’t sprinkle menorahs around the Christmas trees.

Political correctness in this country reached an entirely new level of absurdity some years ago. But occasionally, and the situation at Sea-Tac is just such an occasion, we exceed ourselves. The militant fundamentalist rabbi so flummoxed Sea-Tac management with his threat and their perceived obligation to be “politically correct” that, rather than think rationally or simply tell him to stuff it, they started hacking away at all those artificial Christmas trees and quickly descended into a public relations nightmare in which they managed to offend reason, cultural values and the vast majority of Americans.

Wonkette mocks Lou for referring to him as a “militant fundamentalist rabbi,” but if you’ve ever met a Lubavitcher…

As we’re currently in the midst of the festival of Zappadan, I thought I’d slap together a few of my personal memories of Frank.

When I was in high school, I mostly just listened to electronic stuff like Kraftwerk, Walter/Wendy Carlos, Isao Tomita and Synergy, and pseudojazz, aka “fusion,” such as Weather Report, Return to Forever, Spyro-stinking-gyra and that wizard of the electric jazz violin, Jean-Luc Ponty. Kinda sad, I know, but at least it meant I didn’t have to go along when my friends would go on their annual pilgrimage to Nassau Coliseum to see (ulp) Styx.

However, there were a few exceptions to the no-rock rule for me: Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and yes, Frank Zappa

I had to be careful who I told about that, though. For the most part, if you told people in my high school that you liked Frank, you could expect them to start quoting some of Moon’s lines from Valley Girl — their favorite track from the only Zappa album they’d ever listened to, Sheik Yerbouti. Gag me with a spoon.

Every year I’d see a few kids with t-shirts indicating that they’d been to Zappa’s annual Halloweenie concert at the Palladium in New York (die heißeste stadt), but I’d heard scary stories about that place (before it turned into a giant disco) and I never went, stupid kid that I was.

I did finally get to see Zappa live my freshman year of college, which would have been in 1981 or 1982, at the hockey arena on the campus of Boston University. It was a pretty damn cool show, but I have to admit that the most memorable part of the evening came at the end. After a few encores, the lights came up and for some reason everyone ran out of the arena as if someone had just thrown a grenade into the room. The exit my friend and I took wasn’t exactly an exit. Once we were outside, we found ourselves stuck behind a rather high chain link fence, and we and about twenty other fans had to climb over the damn thing. Chaos can be fun, kids.

Check out the videos below. It’s Zappa on the old Steve Allen show in 1963, demonstrating ways to create music with a bicycle. In between dumb jokes, Allen actually attempts to relate this to free jazz and other experimental forms.

Part 1
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGPPBwDBJDs]

Part 2

Why do I have a problem with Christmas? The obvious reason is that I’m not a Christian, and I have no desire to celebrate the supposed birthday of the supposed messiah.

When I mention that to people, I usually get the response that Christmas isn’t about religion. It’s completely secular, and it’s just about giving, sharing and fun. It’s just a celebration in the dead of Winter intended to perk us all up. Banks are closed, there’s no mail picked up or delivered, no government work is done. It’s a national holiday, not a religious holiday. Sure, it started as a religious holiday, but that’s pretty much been filtered out of it, so it’s not a valid point to refuse to celebrate it on the grounds that you’re not a Christian.

Even observant Jews celebrate it, putting up “Chanukah bushes” in their yards so they won’t miss out. Chanukah itself is a nothing holiday, but American Jews chose to give it more importance just so their kids wouldn’t feel left out of the celebration. Add in Kwanzaa and Diwali and just about everybody in the country has something to do around this time of year so that they can participate, and it all gets mushed together into this obviously-no-longer Christian national holiday.

Well, in my view, that fits in quite nicely with how the holiday came about in the first place. Early Christians, looking to increase their numbers, made little alterations in their religion’s story in order to get it to fit in with traditions that were already in place among other groups. Of course Jesus wasn’t born in December; we all know that. But the Winter Solstice was a big enough deal to enough people that the Christians knew they’d be better able to proselytize folks by pointing out their faith’s similarities with the beliefs and traditions people already had.

No matter how secular, how all-inclusive Christmas may become, no matter how many people say “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas,” it’s still a religious holiday in my book.

On top of that, the fact that it’s been as secularized as it has allows the Christians to have it both ways. They’ve got just about everybody celebrating the birth of Jesus, whether they’re Christian or not, and they always get to turn around and preach that this national holiday, this secular celebration has a “true meaning.” That gives them the opportunity to give us all their messianic miraculous claptrap about the birth of the one and only true savior.

Well, if that’s what they want, that’s what they should insist upon. If Christmas is about the birth of the son of god, the man who is the personification of the Christian faith, then it’s not for Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, or members of any other religions, and it’s certainly not for atheists. And if that’s the case, then it’s not a reason to shut down the whole country. And you absolutely should not expect anyone who isn’t a practicing member of your religion to participate in it, promote it, decorate for it, or wish you a happy it. It’s yours, not ours.

Hell, if I were a member of your little club and someone who I knew disagreed with our tenets wished me a merry Christmas, I’d probably thank them, but the question “what do you know about it?” would be echoing in my head. Christians cheapen their faith when they expect non-believers to play along.

So please, Christians, pick one or the other. If you want Christmas to be about Jesus, then dump Santa Claus, get serious about this messiah of yours, and leave the rest of us out of it. If you want the day to be a celebration for everyone, Christian and infidel alike, then shut up about its “true meaning” because we don’t want to hear it. You can celebrate Jesus’ birth on his real birthday, whenever that is.

Today, our beloved leader issued his annual pardon of a pair of turkeys (after having them fully interrogated in Syria, of course). The web site of the Imperial Palace offers up some fascinating information on the history of this heart warming tradition, along with a breakdown of this year’s vote, which I’ve reprinted below.

Slate is offering an in-depth analysis of the race and its history.

Every Thanksgiving, the president actually pardons two turkeys – the official Thanksgiving Turkey, who poses for the cameras in the Rose Garden, as well as an alternate, who remains in an undisclosed secure location, ready to take over if the Thanksgiving Turkey is eaten by terrorists. The two turkeys then retire to the Elysian Fields of Disneyland, where they will serve as Grand Marshals for Disney’s Thanksgiving Day parade, and be free to volunteer as mascots for California congressman Duncan Hunter’s 2008 presidential campaign.

A few years ago, Bush aides launched an online contest to name the turkeys. That was back in the days when the Bush White House enjoyed elections.

The turkey naming contest has been more successful than other administration experiments in democracy, like Iraq. But like the administration itself, the contest may be fading away for lack of interest.

In 2004, nearly 20,000 people voted, lifting the names Biscuits and Gravy to a 27%-22% win over Patience and Fortitude. Last year, turnout dropped by a third, to a mere 12,726 voters, as Marshmallow and Yam beat Wattle and Snood by only 27%-26%. The Wattle and Snood campaign is still whining that with a shift of just 65 votes, Marshmallow would have been stuffed and the press would be writing about a Wattle comeback.

This is an election year, so turnout ought to be higher. But the choices in this year’s “Gobble the Vote” contest won’t help. Each year, the race attracts four types of candidates: Famous Founders (Lewis and Clark in ‘03, Adams and Jefferson in ‘04), enduring values (Stars and Stripes and Hope and Glory in ‘03, Patience and Fortitude in ‘04, Democracy and Freedom in ‘05), turkey parts (Gobble and Peck in ‘04, Wattle and Snood in ‘05), and Thanksgiving favorites (Pumpkin and Cranberry in ‘03, Biscuits and Gravy in ‘04, Marshmallow and Yam in ‘05).

The race usually comes down to a choice between food and values, and food almost always wins out. Stars and Stripes won on a values mantle in 2003, when the nation was still in shock from 9/11. But Pumpkin and Cranberry finished second that year, while Biscuits and Gravy and Marshmallow and Yam won the last two contests. Turkey parts nearly pulled an upset last year with Wattle and Snood – but without exit polls, we’ll never know how many voters thought those were Republican values, nor how many regions consider those parts prized holiday fare.

This year, the White House faces the same challenge in naming turkeys that it had defending them in the midterms: No values are on the ballot. The Founders have three candidates: Washington and Lincoln, Ben and Franklin, and Plymouth and Rock. The other two entries are Fusion candidates: the Food/Founder hybrid Corn and Copia and the Turkey-Parts/Food combo Flyer and Fryer.

Even lifelong political birdwatchers don’t know how to handicap this race. Washington and Lincoln, who dominate the nation’s currency, will have a tougher time with turkey voters, who have never given a Founder more than 10%. The same bias against historical figures will hurt Ben and Franklin, despite their namesake’s impeccable credentials as the father of Thanksgiving and champion of the turkey as the national bird.

For once, the Founders may have a contender in Plymouth and Rock. Unlike Lewis and Clark and all those ex-presidents, it actually reminds people of Thanksgiving. Of course, if Plymouth could carry the top of the ticket, Lee Iacocca would have won the presidency in 1988, and we could have avoided a pair named George and George W. Bush.

While nobody ever lost money betting against the Food candidates, this year’s entries are more kitschy than appetizing. Like Wattle and Snood, Corn and Copia will leave many voters scratching their heads – although a holiday built around birds stuffed with bread and drenched in cranberries is enduring proof that Americans will eat anything.

Flyer and Fryer is another candidacy built on confusion – two appealing ornithological concepts ill-suited to this particular species. If Corn and Copia sounds like a Bushism, Flyer and Fryer sounds like the Bush Doctrine. Maureen Dowd is drooling at the chance to write up the father-son symbolism of a Flyer and Fryer win, as World War II flying ace Bush 41 sups with third-degree-electoral-burn-victim Bush 43.

As you can see, Slate was way off in theorizing that Plymouth and Rock would win this year. As it turned out, the victory went to Flyer and Fryer. Personally, I think the fix was in. Somebody in the administration is looking to stick it to the boss and set things up to make sure those two would be the winners — not because of the MoDo concept mentioned in the article, but because of what happened today when Bush made the announcement. With his comical, artificial Texas accent, he was unable to properly say the names of the birds, and it came out “Flahr and Frahr”.