goodness gracious

And leave Tiger alone, eh? There's no way this is anyone's business but his. Don't give me that TMZ bullshit.

What happened to people being discreet?

my eardrums for a moment of peace

The question, fellow Romans, is how we could possibly endure approximately three weeks of commercial radio Christmas tunes at the workplace, supposedly a sacred place? And how can a radio station possibly sell this tired trick of attempting to go all-Christmas 24 hours a day for nearly a month straight? It is a fool's-errand. Nobody, but nobody, needs 24-hour a day Christmas songs.

And the repeats. O, the awful repeats. Mariah Carey's frighteningly exuberant All I Want for Christmas is You, in which she sounds positively tickled to be desperately pining for her significant other at Christmas time. Paul McCartney doing an interminable, and very, very dated 80's-style (it came out in 1979) holiday song, of which every other line appears to be the dread refrain "Siii-imply haaa-aaving a wonderful Christmas time."

Elvis Presley with Blue Christmas, which is fine, but no one needs to hear it more than once a day (we had it twice in four hours already yesterday), even at Christmas time. And the real problem at the root of all this holiday-themed sonic evil: today was only Monday, November 30th. What will we do for 23 more days when today was already jam-packed with repeats, played within lit'rally 4 hours of each other as if there weren't offices which through no fault of their own had been listening all the live-long day.

And besides all this, have you ever actually listened to the words of these Christmas songs? They are intolerably bad. The only thing they do is rhyme, the only thing. They are nearly devoid of meaning. We desperately need new Christmas songs (By the way, I actually enjoy the more religious Christmas songs that deal with the nativity and all, but you don't really get those on commercial stations like WODS Boston, usually a much-loved oldies station for me, transformed into a hideous holiday monster of trite, oft-repeated, cookie-cutter (how appropriate!) Christmas sentiments).

Let's run down what the Christmas songs say. All of them seem to come back to these several themes:

-Christmas is the BEST time of year. No serious person may question this.

-Snow is fun, even though it may at times be 'frightful'. Those are the times when it's a good excuse to spend more time with your beloved.

-You are always surrounded by many loved ones at Christmas. Relations with these people are blissful, always.

-It's no fun to be away from your beloved at Christmas time. You should aspire to be with them, and write a song about it if you can't.

-Sleighs

If you have any other themes, let me know, but I think those are the major ones.

Christmas seems to be so much a sham right now. A sale masquerading as a cultural institution. People whip themselves into a frenzy with Christmas music and tear themselves up over what to get for their loved ones. Just enjoy the time off, don't get stressed out about stupid stuff, and spend time with your family. Because a man that doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man. Just take it easy. And lay off the 24-hour Christmas songs, they will drive you nuts.

A postscript: And today, Amanda's computer at work contracted a virus from a Christmas music website and had to be sent away to the help desk. It goes to show that the age-old maxim is true: If you play fast and loose with Christmas music, you're bound to get burned.

It Just Is

I like seeing things for what they are, but also not trying to see in them what's not there. I read David Foster Wallace and find that there is rich humor throughout. Do I ask why? I do not. I would like to advance the notion, perhaps forgotten, that enlightened people can enjoy art, music, literature, food, or anything else, without knowing the minutiae of its underpinnings.

The chicken is free range from southern Alberta, raised on handpicked rye and winter wheat as well as organic tulip bulbs. It's marinated in a Sonoma Valley white made with 100% sustainable Chardonnay grapes pollinated by ladybugs, along with some basil I raised from seed and ginger from Sichuan province in China. Of course, I don't need to mention that, really, a civilized person wouldn't use anything but Sichuan ginger. Would anyone like some more pesticide-free fetal asparagus?

Thank you, I really didn't need to know that. If something tastes good, maybe that's all there is to it. That's why we say it tastes good, rather than saying, oh, it's made out of fresh local ingredients derived from sustainable farming techniques and I know every stinking detail down to the chicken was born on a freaking Wednesday. If you saw an attractive person, you wouldn't start guessing about which side of her family the Roman nose came from, or whether the steely gray eyes are a recessive trait. No, you would say, that is a suitably attractive person for me to mate with, or something less creepy-sounding along those lines. We seem to have an unhealthy obsession with analyzing things, so that we can't see the forest for the trees.

Just let it be.

T-No (I'm angry)

I'm watching "The T.O. Show" on VH1.

It's awful.

It seems to be set up a lot like "The Hills", including all the shots looking down streets in LA with indistinguishable music playing between scenes. Aaargh, the music. The people who put this show together really seem to be trying to copy all of the worst parts of the Hills and none of the best. There are more little cut up bits of songs in this show than Sullivans in a Boston phone book. They add little or nothing to the show. There are plenty of pretty obviously scripted lines read by TO and his friends, and let me tell you, they aren't very good actors. I think the reason people like the Hills is that they've seen it before. They have some sense of who the characters are, and they enjoy ridiculing the people on the show for their bad decisions and ludicrous behavior. The T.O. Show has none of this familarity. It's just another badly produced reality show in a long, long, long line of badly produced reality shows that I couldn't care less about, but networks still feel obligated to produce because they cater to the basest and most moronic, and therefore the broadest swathes of our society. This show brings absolutely nothing to the table. They'll get a spike of curious viewers the first two weeks maybe and then nobody will watch because there is nothing remotely interesting about this show. I don't care about TO, he's not a compelling figure, the popular fascination with him makes no sense. And while I'm here, has anyone noticed that MTV doesn't show music videos anymore? Does that make any sense? All they have now is freaking marathons of "16 and Pregnant", one of the most despicable TV shows of all time, and a subject to be delved into at another time. The direction our culture is headed makes me steaming mad. We're getting stupider! The media we use to distract ourselves is getting dumbed down. I am not pleased, and I am not amused.

The dark little secret of the show is that there's nothing particularly interesting about the life of Terrell Owens. He's actually quite tame from the looks of things. The producers of the show try to create tension by having him act the party animal while his female friends try desperately to keep him from having fun, but there's absolutely nothing compelling about what ensues. The problem is, I don't know anything about Owens as a person and I couldn't care less about him or what he does. He's not strange, he has few distinguishing characteristics, he almost never says anything revelatory or surprising. After watching the show, I know maybe one thing about him that I didn't know before, that he likes to shop. Oh, wait, don't let me forget, he also appears to have no discernable personality traits!

Do yourself a favor and don't watch the show.

the seedy underbelly of the pizza business in Ipswich

This is too funny. I was looking for the phone number of a local pizza place, Theo's, tonight, and I stumbled upon what appears to be their website. The front page looks like it's about the place in Ipswich, has a little information specific to Theo's, a correct address, you know, the usual. But click on over to the reviews page, or 'About Us', and it's a whole different story. There you'll find that this site isn't about Theo's at all, but rather about Vinnie's Pizza, in good old Anytown, USA.

That's right. Someone out there thought it would be a good idea to create a form template on which to make a website for a local pizza place. Any local pizza place. Furthermore, someone at Theo's who was responsible for their web site forgot to finish filling out the template! This gives us gems like "Soon after graduating high school, Vincent began making pizzas at The Corner Pizza Place, in Northern Anytown." The story doesn't end there, though. "Although he had an affinity for The Corner Pizza Place, Vincent knew that greater challenges and opportunities awaited him in the heart of Anytown." Look you can take the fictional pizza maker out of Anytown, but you can't take Anytown out of the fictional pizza maker.

Sure the front page is up to date and includes some Theo's-specific information. But how am I supposed to believe anything Theo's says about their pizza when elsewhere on their site Gomer Pyle of the Anytown Gazette raves that they have "Simply the best pizza in Anystate. If you are looking for a delicious pizza, quickly make a trip to Vinnie's Pizza."?

Would it be too simplistic to say that this encapsulates everything that's wrong with American culture today? Instead of taking the time to jot down a few sentences for a web site, people expect that someone will have already created a template for them where they can just fill in the blanks, and presto, there's your web site. Basically it's Mad Libs for small businesses. No thanks.

the lie becomes the truth

Here's my idea for a much better way to cover the sad death today of Michael Jackson.


Silence.

Let's declare a moratorium on covering this story for three days. We can all have some quiet time to think about what Michael Jackson meant as a public figure, and as a person. Then we can come back in a few days and talk about it intelligently and coherently. Wouldn't that be much better than just tearing the story to shreds right now and speculating for hours on end about how and why he died? There's just so little to report here. The cable news channels will do what they always seem to do, which is have the hosts interview guests who really don't know anything that the hosts don't, so they pretty much just make stuff up. Meanwhile, an endless loop of file footage is playing, basically reducing the television medium to a dressed-up version of radio. Thanks, but no thanks.

I can commemorate Jackson myself by reflective meditation on his life and music. I don't need to be told how I should think by television hosts and commentators who are underqualified to think for themselves.

i make dough, but don't call me doughboy

WEEI's Jon Meterparel, commenting without irony on the oh-so-lovely way the Lakers' Pau Gasol can take it to the cup with either hand:

He might have one of the best left hands in the league. He's amphibious!

Way to keep those standards high, guys. Incidentally, I don't find Meterparel's Boston College football play-by-play work to be repulsive-it's actually quite decent. This, however, is something which I will not tolerate from someone who is handsomely compensated to speak on the radio. The word for which you went fruitlessly searching is ambidextrous, and you're making America stupider.

I'll miss the alimony too

I used to own 32 shares of GM stock that I purchased for 5.50 per share. Now I own it all over again as a US taxpayer.


I'm raising my can of Schlitz to new beginnings.

my mama never warned me about my own destructive appetite

Hard to say it much better than this:

"I think Dan Brown is a terribly bad writer, but he has cliffhangers after every chapter which makes you continue reading," Skarsgard told Swedish broadcaster SVT.

"It's like eating peanuts at a bar. You don't like them, but you keep on eating them anyway," he said.

Who said this, you ask? One of the actors in the movie. A Swede no less.

frisbee a la nude?

These Oregonians are crazy!


So, pants aren't really a big part of playing frisbee? This is absurd. This is exactly what's wrong with our culture and the youth of today. They think they can get away with playing frisbee pantless? They can't. This is inexcusable conduct. There has to be a line drawn somewhere. This is where we are drawing the line. You must wear pants to play frisbee. I will not negotiate on this point.