24/7: Road to Christmas: Musing on Beloved Traditions Before the Sleigh Arrives

It’s that time of year once again. The time where I complain about B101’s taste in Christmas music, watch “Black Christmas” and “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” over and over and scream The Royal Guardsmen’s “Snoopy’s Christmas” at the top of my lungs when I’m in the car by myself.

As magical as those traditions are – very – they’re not even all that high on my list of favorite Christmas activities.

Of course, I don’t have an actual list per say. That’d take too much work. What I do have is a loose and random collection of things that I enjoy or enjoyed doing during the long, slow slog towards C-Day morning, when wrapping paper bombs go off in living rooms all across this great and god-fearing nation.

• The family party. Gatherings with the extended family used to be a pretty huge deal when I was younger, but none more than the Christmas party, which my family hosted. These parties got less and less important as I got older until it reached the point where I stopped going to any of them. Things have come full circle now and I enjoy going to them again, but still nowhere near as much as I did when I was a lad. I’ll always remember hanging out with the cousins and playing nonsense games with Nerf guns. The all-time highlight took place during the Christmas party when I was in 8^th grade. Both my younger cousin and I were completely obsessed with the WWF and we spent a huge chunk of the night reenacting matches and moves. It all culminated memorably with me locking him in the Mandible Claw complete with sweaty sock, which made both of us crack up. Well, he cracked up after I'd removed the sock from his mouth.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas ... Shoes: And why it's awesome he did

www.crazycheapcostumes.com

Until today, I’ve managed to avoid a scourge that usually plagues the Christmas music season: “Christmas Shoes” by NewSong  (actual band name by the way, I guess GenricName was taken).

                Now look, I’m hesitant to call “Christmas Shoes” the worst Christmas/holiday song of all time. Not as long as Dan Fogelberg’s “Another Auld Lang Syne” is still out roaming free, taking lives where it pleases.

                While it isn’t definitively the worst holiday song, “Christmas Shoes” is without a shadow of a doubt the cheesiest, sappiest thing in a season chock-full of cheesy, sappy things.

                When it came on the radio this morning, I did the only thing any sane and clear-headed person could do when faced with the prospect of listening to NewSong’s “Christmas Shoes”: I considered cutting the steering wheel hard to the left and plowing straight into a concrete barrier at a reasonable rate of speed.

                Eventually I decided against it. Even more incorrect, I decided to listen to the song. Call me a masochist, but I hadn’t heard it in a year and I wanted to see if it was as much a syrupy nightmare as I remembered it.

                Oh yeah. It’s worse.

                “Christmas Shoes” is the soap opera of Christmas music.

Shut Up, America: Capitalism's Fake War on Truth, Justice and Greed

knue.com

It’s the week of Thanksgiving and that means two things: Turkeys everywhere have abandoned the Earth’s surface for the foreseeable future and barricaded themselves into their subterranean bunkers to wait out their yearly species-wide end of days. We should see them back out on the streets come the new year.

                And two: Americans everywhere are pouring through news reports about Black Friday, working themselves into a sanctimonious lather, not about the deals or lack there off, but about the hours.

                Surpassing drunken arguments with the family, Lions football, and even mind-blowing amounts of gluttony, America’s new favorite Thanksgiving tradition is complaining about what time the stores open on Black Friday, or Terrible Thursday as it’s become.

                Black Friday used to be about waking up at 2 a.m. and journeying out into the darkness, belly full of stuffing and turkey meat, to wait in line at big box stores to fight tooth-and-nail to save a few sheckles on a big screen TV.

                Now, it’s about the same, only instead of waking up before your neighborhood rooster, people don’t go to sleep. Black Friday has encroached on Thanksgiving, to the point where K-Mart opening at 6 a.m. on Turkey Day and staying open for either 41 straight hours or until employees revolt and burn the place to the ground in a bleary-eyed rage.

                Whichever comes first.

                And so it goes. Capitalism. Uncle Sam’s wet dream. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.

                Except every year anymore people get all cheesed off about it. Petitions get signed, people go on TV and the internet, complaining to anyone or anything who’ll listen about closing retail stores down and protecting the virtues of pigging out together and then kicking some Native Americans in the shins like the Pilgrims did. AS A FAMILY!

                I don’t get that.

Dear memories of a doomed juggernaut: Stuff that I recall from my days as a video jockey

Now that Blockbuster has decided to abandon its place in the physical world and exist solely in some sort of Internet-based, digital ether-land or whatever it is that company thinks it’s doing, (you’re dead guys, get used to it) it’s time for some reminiscing.

                I’ve already mentioned that I worked for Blockbuster for about a year back during mycollege days. Hell, those sweaters that college kids always wear tied around their necks in movies don’t pay for themselves after all

                During my time there, I experienced many things, some good, some bad and some that I just can’t chase out of my brain for whatever reason.

                Here are some of my most memorable memories from my days wearing the Blockbuster navy blue and yellow.

• First time I ever had the police called on me. I could spend paragraphs detailing why Blockbuster’s no-late fees policy was a giant scam that did the unthinkable and managed to piss off customers even more than their original, yes-late fees policy. The long and short of it is that the company didn’t do a very good job of explaining to customers that if movies were late, they would be charged on their credit card for the full market price of the disc, usually $30 for movie and $100 for a TV show. One lady did not take kindly to Blockbuster’s attempt to destroy her credit score and after yelling at me for 20 minutes or so, she walked out of the store and called the cops. I could see the pain in the poor suburban cop’s eyes as she explained the situation to him in the parking lot. He was living the boring nightmare that his city cops friends always made fun of him for. He came back inside and I explained the policy to him, he nodded solemnly and walked back outside, to presumably tell the lady to f off and rethink his life choices.

Make it a Blockbuster life: Final thoughts on the death of a douchey icon

dinnerwithmaxjenke.blogspot.com

On Wednesday, Blockbuster announced it would begin the process of shutting down all of its remaining stores, officially bringing about the end of an era.

                This move kicked off a firestorm of Google searches as people around the country looked to see where the closest Blockbuster was to them, having assumed all the stores had already closed like three years ago.

                But no, a few resilient locations of the former juggernaut remained, limping along, refusing to die until this week.

                I worked for Blockbuster for right around a year back during my college days. During my time with the company, I met a lot of amazing people. In addition, I also learned how not to run a company, should I ever decide to start one.

                Netflix gets most of the credit for ending Blockbuster’s reign, but really, Blockbuster did that it itself. It treated its customers like garbage, because, well, where else were they going to go? It had a near-monopoly of the at-home entertainment industry for a long time and so it could basically do whatever the hell it wanted.

                You guys don’t like late fees? We hear you. Let’s get rid of them for good … and replace them with restocking fees! Oh, you don’t like that? Well, I guess you can go to Hollywood Video … oh that’s right, we killed that company. Sorry!

Review: 1 a.m. going on 1 a.m.: Thoughts on 'Blackfish' (Part 2)

There’s one scene in particular that’s just absolutely terrifying. Spoiler alert, by the way. It’s home video of a trainer during a whale performance at Sea World. At one point the whale, not Tilikum, decides to grab the trainer’s foot in its mouth and drag him down to the bottom of the pool. It holds him there for what must have felt like an eternity before surfacing again, never letting go of the man’s foot.

The whole time you can clearly see this guy’s face and look in his eyes as he faces almost certain death. But he never panics. You see him breathing deeply while stroking the whale and whispering to it and then it goes down again, holds him at the bottom and surfaces again.

Same thing. He doesn’t panic. He keeps breathing slowly and stroking the whale, hoping to convince it to let him go and it does. But then it grabs his other foot and pulls him down again.

As this is going on, other trainers have divided the pool in half with a huge net, the idea being that if he could get away long enough to swim over the net, the whale wouldn’t be able to follow, but that was it. That was the best they could do for this guy.

Review: 1 a.m. going on 1 a.m.: Thoughts on 'Blackfish' (Part 1)

www.hipandtrippy.com

Over the weekend we did that whole Daylight savings time thing and “fell back” as the kids say.

Some people, smart ones, used the extra hour to catch up on sleep.

Not being one of those smart ones, I used my extra hour to get one step ahead of my Netflix queue and watch a documentary about killer whales in captivity called “Blackfish.”

The doc had previously occupied the number one spot on my Netflix DVD queue, but then it turned up on CNN late last Saturday night/early Sunday morning at midnight, so my choice was made for me.

And after watching the movie, I have to say, there’s something deeply unsettling about clicking on the guide button to check what time something ends and seeing 1 a.m. followed by another 1 a.m.

It’s the type of thing that could send you into a psychotic episode in the middle of the night when you’re fending off sleep tooth and nail.

 What about “Blackfish?”