Stale New Year’s Thoughts

Posted on January 6, 2017 by admin

Fact is, I’m not much for New Year’s anymore.

I don’t go out, I don’t stay up, and I don’t pay a lot of attention to those tedious “year in review” features that seem to be the principle media fare during Christmas Week. I may be slipping, but I haven’t slipped so far that I can’t remember paying $3.35 for gas without prompting, and being reminded about “Gangnam Style” is no way to kick off a new calendar in any case. But that isn’t to say I don’t practice certain beloved rites of the season. One of my favorites is not making any New Year’s resolutions.

Sure, I used to indulge in that sort of sketchy enterprise, but it wasn’t for me. For one thing, I typically set my bar so low I could never be completely sure whether I was staying the course or not. When your resolution is to “not put things off as much,” any chance act of celerity looks like success, never mind that 6-inch pile of unanswered correspondence. For another, vowing to buy a new laptop in the coming 12 months isn’t exactly a bid for self-improvement, especially when you’ve been pricing them online since October. These days I just don’t have the energy for the charade.

But that’s me.

Beth Foster, on the other hand, has pledged a healthier and more active 2013. “I re-upped my membership at 24-Hour Fitness and plan to stop in for a swim a few times each week after rehearsals and shows.”

Seems to me like a better resolution would have been to cut down on all those rehearsals and shows, but then I’m not a founding member of the small-but-feisty “One Night Stand Productions” theater company, and the only thing I hate worse than doing something once is doing it again. Still, swimming is purportedly aerobic, and since Beth tends towards cleanliness and a couple of laps count as a bath, she might actually realize a net time savings.

I deem Beth’s resolution worthy of support, if not emulation.

Mary Ann Tate forwarded an inspirational post suggesting a way her Facebook friends can spend 2013 creating a personal “Year in Review” featuring more “What I Did Last Summer” and less Taylor Swift. “This January,” urges the post’s author, “why not start the year with an empty jar and fill it with notes about good things that happen? Then, on New Year’s Eve, empty it and see what awesome stuff happened that year.” Mary Ann thinks that’s a great idea.

“What a great idea!!!”, she commented.

Assuming I could find a jar around here that isn’t already full of rubber bands, loose hardware, expired Arby’s coupons, bone-dry pens, or something that may be leftover gravy, I consider this resolution dangerously vague. If my new brake shoes fail catastrophically and the new ones come in under $300, is that a “good thing”? How about when I match three on Lotto? Do I need to write a note if I leave a half-cup of coffee in the pot and somebody else has to brew the next one? Or if a friend catches cold and I don’t get it from them? No, the remembrance jar is nice in principle, but carries a pronounced risk of over-commemoration.

I would urge caution.

“My new year’s resolution is to not let my daughter on my Facebook, and to find a proper journal for her..:P,” declared Peter Allen.

Notice that Peter’s sensible plan is safely personal. Though I still maintain that too many well-meaning resolutions – “be nicer to people” for example, or “give more to charity” – arrogantly force unconsulted others to be party to one’s private self-improvement scheme, Peter has cleverly charted a course of rehabilitation that reserves credit and distinction to himself while ensuring that any potential sacrifice or inconvenience will be suffered by somebody who lacks effective legal recourse. Perhaps most ingenious, by cleverly adding a playful emoticon at the end of his resolution, Peter can plausibly dismiss it as a harmless jest when grandma gets involved and the whole thing goes south on him.

It’s a thinking man’s resolution.

Happy New Year, Peter’s daughter.

Clash of the Brides

Posted on December 30, 2016 by admin

Deputies stopped by a McDonald’s on West Ken Caryl Avenue to hear from a woman who said she was assaulted. According to her statement, the woman had been at a holiday costume party at a swinging club on West Chatfield Avenue and, with a mania for appropriateness, had gone dressed as a bride. Alas, two other women had come to the soiree dressed as brides and one of them was unnaturally cross about it. When the complainant’s bridal train became entangled in a fan, she and the false bride exchanged words and the other woman began pulling on her veil, which was attached to a wig, the loss of which would have been “utterly embarrassing.” As it was, her attacker managed to remove the veil only, which she physically disrespected into rags and tatters. The complainant then threw water on her enemy, who promised her she’d “be dead in the parking lot.” The blushing bride wanted the incident documented in case her presumably chaste antagonist decided to make good on the threat.

Star-crossed

Posted on December 23, 2016 by admin

A beacon from the firmament

A globe of fire in star-lit sky

An omen surely heaven-sent

To guide the wise to wonders nigh

“Our road leads west,” the kings agreed

“Our fortunes bound to yonder star.

With sturdy hearts and all due speed

We must away to lands afar.”

Assembling modest retinue

The learned three betook their quest,

Celestial pharos e’er in view

A burning purpose in each chest.

Across the plains of Samarkand,

And choking desert wilderness.

O’er gasping mountains toiled the band

Through regions strange and comfortless.

At last, upon a night divine,

Arrived they unto Bethlehem,

To there behold no stately shrine,

But rough-hewn stable waiting them.

“Praise to the Lord!” the wise men cried

“That in this humble place doth bide

Philosopher, exalted guide,

The child in whom all fates reside!”

At calm repose a newborn lay

Serene upon a bed of straw

Its mother rested steps away

The visitors approached with awe.

“Accept these gifts, Madonna Fair

For this, your Son of blessed birth,

We offer gold in princely share

To He who will bestride the Earth.”

“Rich frankincense, a treasure rare

Befitting Heaven’s champion,

And myrrh to sanctify the air

Surrounding this, our Holy One.”

The mother, clearly unimpressed,

Just took another bite of hay.

The child no gratitude expressed,

But bleated in an anxious way.

The Magi were confounded sore

Had they displeased the newborn king?

A shepherd boy rose from the floor

And said “You see guys, here’s the thing…”

“That gold and stuff is great,” he winked.

“For such as them what wears a crown,

But these are sheep. I kind of think,

You want the kid two mangers down.”

Merry Mal-wear

Posted on December 16, 2016 by admin

“There is a remarkable breakdown of taste and intelligence at Christmastime. Mature, responsible grown men wear neckties made out of holly leaves and drink alcoholic beverages with egg yolks and cottage cheese in them.” P.J. O’Rourke

A weird thing about people is that they’re always looking for an excuse to be weirder.

Take Christmas. You’d think that love, joy and Peace on Earth would be enough to sustain any holiday. But it’s not. It never was. People moved quickly from Wise Men and angels-we-have-heard-on-high to fruitcake, over-sized stockings and a chimney-spelunking philanthropist towed around by a flying caribou with a thousand-watt honker.

Weird.

From there it was a distressingly short trip to Santa Shrek lawn ornaments, musical footwear, “Home Alone 3”, gelatin salad with crushed candy canes in it, White Elephant parties and Black Friday.

Weirder.

Fortunately, most of those strange symptoms of the season can be avoided by the prudent, or at least dismissed by the patient. Not so the Ugly Christmas Sweater. A relative newcomer to modern merrymaking, the retina-searing regalia of the hyper-festive simply won’t be denied. At work, at the grocery store, on a public sidewalk, an Ugly Christmas Sweater will march right up and explode in your face without warning. Whether you love it, or hate it, or love it and hate it, that ubiquitous Yuletide uniform is now as much a part of the holidays as the Grinch and green bean casserole.

So how exactly did we get from Bethlehem to Tacky Town? Happily, it’s not a long narrative journey, although it may be hard for some to hear. Folks who profess to know describe the Ugly Christmas Sweater as an inharmonic convergence of two roughly parallel trends that came of age in the fashion- free 1980s, the same decade that brought you leg warmers, sweatbands and acid-washed jeans.

‘Twas the advent of the Christmas Variety Special that set the stage, with white-bread crooners like Andy Williams gathered around a TV hearth purring semi-swinging carols and sporting what were then known as a “Jingle Bell Sweaters”, relatively tame garments of generally Scandinavian artistic derivation. Enter actor and comedian Bill Cosby who, as Cliff Huxtable on the hit sitcom “The Cosby Show”, popularized the wearing of hideous sweaters. The combination of nostalgic themes and stylistic carte blanche proved irresistible, and the Ugly Christmas Sweater quickly rose to dominate year-end ensembles all across a nog-addled nation.

Alas, what goes up must come down, and by the early 1990s the Ugly Christmas Sweater found itself relegated to the retail rag-bin of “gag gifts”, rejected by most in favor of more tasteful holiday attire. There it would languish until well into the New Millenium when it was re-discovered by satire-starved hipsters who found in its trite themes and deliberate démodé to be an oh-so-ironic alternative to flattering apparel. The Ugly Christmas Sweater has been on a sarcastic sleigh ride to the stars ever since, with retail sales of the item increasing as much as 500 percent every year since 2010.

Ugly Christmas Sweater Parties are all the rage, these days. Although a precise genesis may never be known, “The Ugly Christmas Sweater Party Book: The Definitive Guide to Getting Your Ugly On” suggests that the first such unsightly soiree might have been thrown in 2002 by Canadian mock-hounds Chris Boyd and Jordan Birch in Vancouver’s classy Commodore Ballroom. Badly dressed Canooks still rock the Commodore each Christmas, with up to 1,000 paying guests competing to out-kitsch the disco balls.

Should you have occasion to attend an Ugly Christmas Sweater Party but can find nothing suitably unappealing in your wardrobe, commerce is way ahead of you. Although their rich lodes of cast-away Christmas cardigans have been worked for years, thrift shops and resale outlets are still good source of nerdy knitwear. Websites like ButtUglySweaters.com, TipsyElves.com and MyUglyChristmasSweater.com offer a plethora of preposterous pullovers to choose from, and well-heeled hipsters can satisfy their sardonic impulses via high-end haberdashers like Burberry, which will gladly accept up to $600 for a sweater no self-respecting Millennial would be seen wearing on Jan. 2 for any money. Then again, there’s just no substitute for the handmade holiday habit, and the Internet is tailor-made for the bad dresser on a budget. UglyChristmasSweaters.com, for example, is a handy source of information for those wishing to craft their own brand of unbecoming.

So what makes an Ugly Christmas Sweater ugly? More is more. More cheesy imagery, more contrasting colors, more ribbons and bows, more bangles and baubles, gimcracks and gingerbread. You can’t really put too many bells and whistles on an Ugly Christmas Sweater, both bells and whistles being perfectly acceptable embellishments. There’s even a website that details how to create a sweater displaying a full-color, live-action cheery Christmas fire like the one Jimmy Fallon wore on TV using only scraps of fabric, an iPad and entirely too much free time.

Yes, Americans do a lot of bizarre things in the name of Christmas, but it’s not like we have a monopoly on that market. Venezuelans travel to Christmas Mass on roller skates. Ukrainians decorate their Christmas trees with spider webs. Many in South African celebrate with a feast of deep-fried caterpillars, and Japanese spend Christmas Day working through a big tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Still, when you think of millions of otherwise rational Americans honoring one of the most important days of the Christian calendar, not to mention the Western World’s most beloved holiday, by expending countless hours, gobs of money and enormous effort on garments quite consciously intended to offend the sensibilities, well…

That’s just weird.

“Christmas sweaters are only acceptable as a cry for help.” Andy Borowitz

APB on Rudolph nets sleigh full of trouble

Posted on December 9, 2016 by admin

‘Twas about 2 a.m. when deputies received word that a person or persons in a black Jeep Cherokee with one working headlight had just stolen a wicker reindeer from the King Soopers on Conifer Road. About 5 minutes later, they stopped just such a cyclopean vehicle at Barkley Road and Wolff Avenue. The 19-year-old driver explained that the wicker reindeer in the rear cargo area belonged to her mother, although she didn’t say why she was chauffeuring it around Conifer, or why her breath smelled like the barroom floor. Of the four young reindeer-nappers in the car, one went down for DUI, two were cited for underage drinking, and one got nabbed on an outstanding warrant. It may be hoped that the persecuted caribou was restored to its natural environment, whatever that may be.