Merry Christmas from William Li

Because nothing says "Christmas" more than a white tiger, at an aquarium/downtown restaurant, demolishing raw hamburger inside a cardboard box in front of an ersatz maharaja adorned with an evergreen tree that had been earlier torn down from the rafters and "marked" by said tiger, please consider this my personal Christmas card made especially for you.

The Least Original Idea Ever

I know this is supposed to be the epi(lady)logue portion of this blog, but for the sake of my childhood next door neighboor, I want to make fun of a movie that I haven't and won't go see. It's called "Brothers" and its the Least Original Idea Ever.

The movie is about a Captain who goes to fight in a war, leaving his wife at home. Thinking he is dead, the wife is accidently unfaithful to the Captain. The Captain discovers this and a lot of bad stuff befalls both the Captain and a family member named Tommy. I think there is also a drunk old man in the movie who does bad stuff. Wow.

The canonical rant about X-mass music

This is inspired by walking into the cafeteria at noon today and yesterday and hearing the exact same point (almost to the note) of "sleighride". Yes, its odd and scary that I had lunch at the same time two days in a row. Does that make me Kant?
Anyhow, I am not referring to Christmas or "Winter Holidays" but Xmas, the absurd post post post modern (modern modern.... Echo echo echo) holiday that Charles Schulz and even Dakota ("People think the X sounds like Christ? Who came up with that?") think are fake.
I got so sick of Xmas music that over the years I have purchased "a muppet christmas", "a twisted christmas" (d synder), "christmas is 4 ever" (boots e collins), and "aquatic vampyres battle dolphin paladins: a christmas opera" (not really, but wouldn't that be awesome?), just to cut the sickly sweet frappe of cheese (tasty) with something else; anything.
The epitome of this cheez is the movie "love actually" which involves a really "inspirational" cover of "(all eye) want 4 x-mas (is) U" originally ghostwritten for Mariah Carey. Its super easy to take pot shots at ol' Maraiah, and very clever, so let's focus on the cheez.
What's so great about that song? The lyrics? Sing it. Don't look it up. Now look it up. Did you get them right? If you did, you are excused to resume reading your dog-eared copy of "Us" magazine. But before you go... Your schmaltzy rendition of that yoddle without a< melody is what passes for a "hit"
In that spirit, I invite everyone to sing along schmaltzily to my Xmass hit:

Xmas comes at Xmas time
Xmas cheer with Xmas love
All around the Xmas tree
Merry Xmas--- you and me
(Refrain)
Xmas Xmas Xmas Xmas!
Xmas! Xmas-Xmas, Xmas.
Xmas! Xmas! Xmas!
Xma-aaaaasss!

;
How does the melody go? Do you pronounce the X in Xmas as X like X-ray or like the Charlie Crist? Do you want to sing other lyrics? Go for it.
IT'S UP TO YOU!!!! Just be schmaltzy

Saucey Policy

Policy is a funny word. Say it five times in a row. Did you make up a little song ?

I am harnessing the full potential of the internet!!!!

The power to add more banality to the collective consciousness.



Step 1: Capture banality on my cell phone.
Step 2: Upload banality to YouTube.
Step 3: Share banality on my blog.
Step 4: Add irrelevant tags.

The past is overrated

I'm going to do a subset of the Canonical Rant called a Cranky Diatribe. I won't explain why it's more specific than the general class of C-R. So, T.S.

Ben posted Quindlen: Hillary Is Wrong About Youth - Newsweek Columnists - MSNBC.com on his blog, words because he was responding to the "the rat race is not all it's cracked up to be." I'll leave it to Trav to discuss whether the real reason there is so much middle-class discontentment is (a) the revolution of rising expectations and (b) crazy people stretching for a house jacks up prices on everyone. I want to go to one of my canonical rants:

The past is overrated. Quindlen tears into the notion (from our ancestors) that our ancestors were nobler then than we are now and that the good old days are gone. But I think Quindlen's focus on codgerims (her term) is wrong. It's not finding fault with the present that's wrong (that's a good thing to do); it's comparing the present with the past, which is overrated.

There is no such thing as the good old days, and our ancestors were not better than us. The past was bad, and we improved it. Some of these improvements helped the situation; some just caused new problems. Nevertheless, in the past, the (then) present-day people were a whole lot more honest about the fact that the (then) present needed a whole lot of fixing up, and the (then) modern-day contemporaries spent a whole lot of time and effort developing {technology X} and {medicine y} and fighting {evil historical figure Z} and on beyond Zebra.

Do you know that in the past, people had to get out of their chairs to change the channel on the TV, and in any case, it hardly mattered because there were basically only three channels, and all of them had virtually identical programming? And before that, people just listened to the radio? And before that, the one person who could read would merely read the latest installment of a serialized drama out loud to his illiterate family. Today, I don't even need to watch the show. TiVo will suggest something for me and record it for me; I can read the summary and flip through the good parts, and be done with it. I watched the movie "Emma" this way. I can tell you for certain that I would have hated the movie, hated the radio play, and hated having to listen to it being read by my dad in my drafty Victorian hovel. However, I liked the movie at 2x speed for the parts featuring Alan Cumming and 8x speed for everything else. I finished the movie in 3 minutes.

"But you don't know what it was about?"

I wouldn't have known what the heck they were going on about any better if I had been forced to suffer through one of those other delivery methods, but at least this way, I can tell you who was in the film and that it depicts the past, and as best I can tell: the past is overrated.

For the sake of completeness, I have referenced this blog on friendster. I was pretty much using the "about me" space for the same purpose as this blog anyway. Here is what had been in that space:

My wife pointed out that Dora the Explorer and her "so-called friend" the Map seem to have a strained relationship. When Dora is lost, she says, "Who do we ask, when we don't know which way to go?" But then, her Monkey Pal, Boots, not Dora, is the one who answers this rhetorical question (it's the map).

The most telling remark indicative of a strained relationship comes from the Map himself: "Where is Dora trying to go?" he asks. He acts as if he wasn't right there on Dora's back, listening to every word she says.

"Well I know how to get there... Tell Dora to get there she needs to go here then here then finally to here." Actually, that might be the problem... he's always on her back, telling her where to go, but he himself would have no purpose without her. That sort of co-dependence is unhealthy.

Anyhow... Map, you gotta listen to me, Dude. You need to tell Dora yourself, don't take it out on the kids because you are mad at your spouse.

ALSO:

I had a rave about Thomas Dolby there that I've since lost.