Yesterday I went to Cinematheque
December 01, 2004 // Link
Yesterday I went to Cinematheque to catch G. W. Pabst’s 1929 Pandora’s Box, famous for its inclusion of Louise Brooks, herself famous for her sexuality, temper, and excellent haircut.
I hadn’t seen the film since Junior High, about nineteen thousand years ago when television remote controls without wires were the most newly fangled thing around.
Back then I spent an inordinate number of my weekends doing one of two things: assembling and programming homebrew computers, or watching old films at the library. This sort of nerdly activity is why I’m so pale in all those photos of me as a kid. The fact that I’m just as pale now is, well, for much the same reason.
Both the North York and Toronto library systems had little cubicles I could use to watch films on tiny little black and white monitors. By tiny I mean really tiny, probably no more than 6 or 7 inches across. The films themselves came on both crinkly reels and huge video cassette.
I had no end of trouble keeping the reels threaded in the projector, which sat on the table and faced sideways into a box. I suppose there was a prism or a mirror inside which turned the image to face me. There were multiple reels for each film, usually mislabeled and almost always wrapped backwards because the last viewer didn’t spin them back the way we were instructed to.
The video cassette players were those huge old ones with pop-up tops for loading the cassette. There are some films that even today immediately make me think of shoving a cassette down and pressing a big manual play button with a thunk.
I’d sit there all day watching film after film that had been recommended by the librarian or that I’d selected simply because of its title. Between the ages of 12 and 15 I watched literally hundreds of films that way, leaning on my elbows to stare into tiny, too dim screens and wearing a pair of big headphones that usually smelled moldy. Such is the life of a young film fanatic. I had lots of my weekend time free because girls hadn’t been invented yet, and the few prototypes I met were icky.
Strangely enough for a kid into science fiction and horror flicks out in the real world, the films I’d watch at the library were generally not mainstream flicks. The library system didn’t have much of anything modern. Instead, I watched endless hours of Japanese and European films, plus a lot of silent American films, dating from the turn of the century to the mid-Sixties.
Half the time the foreign films had no English subtitles; I’d have to figure out the story as I went from the images alone along with little typewritten cards that would describe the film and how it was cataloged. All the films that came on reels had no audio tracks at all, even though most of them were not actually silent films. There was a long time when I thought a large number of films from the 40s and 50s were silent. I only realized my error when the books I’d read about the movies would quote lines from them and I finally figured out that meant somebody must have actually heard the lines. It still amazes me that it took me so long to figure that out.
The first time I saw most of Kurosawa’s films they were in Japanese with what looked to me to be Japanese subtitles. But films like The Seven Samurai and Stray Dog were so interesting and so different from anything else I’d seen that I watched them repeatedly without understanding a word. Funnily, I liked neither Ikuru nor High And Low the first time I saw them, but I suppose that’s because I couldn’t figure out what was going on—they’re now among my favorite films.
The first time I saw Metropolis I think I watched it five or six times that day. I’m sure I gave some thought to how I’d smuggle it out of the library—which wouldn’t lend the films—and I suspect the only thing that stopped me was I’d have no way to watch it at home.
Sitting in the shushed library watching films that were either silent or might as well have been for all I could understand is probably what led to my love of the films of Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and especially Harold Lloyd.
Talkies are a fad.
I went skating with my nephew last night. Great kid, great time. He’s still learning to skate backwards and to stop without making a wide circle, so we worked on those a little bit. But mostly it was just round and round the ice, with him smashing himself into the boards and executing a dramatic sound-effects laden dive whenever the opportunity presented itself. The opportunities were plentiful.
On the way to the rink, we were driving behind a bus with a little LCD display on the back.
[aside]
I say “we were driving,” but let’s face it: he really doesn’t hold up his end of the vehicular operation at all. And frankly, the whole “I’m only seven years old and my feet don’t reach the pedals” excuse is starting to wear a little thin.
[end of aside]
The display alternated between the number 20 and a symbol. I took a small movie of the bus as we (we? ha!) drove along, but it doesn’t seem worth it to post a 400K movie so here are two frames:
I suppose it was supposed to be a symbol of a bus, but I would have thought a clear enough symbol of the bus at hand would be, you know, the actual bus. The symbol did sort of look like a Space Invader character, so maybe the driver’s high score was 20. Which is pretty dismal, even for playing while operating a bus.
Jack’s hair was dyed green and red (temporarily—or at least that’s what he told his mom). He said it was for Christmas, but I suspect substance abuse or worse the influence of that crazy Rock and Roll music the cool kids are listening to.
I always hate it when other people post supposedly cute images of kids on their blogs. Boring with a capital BOR, and a slightly smaller but still capitalized ING. But this is different because...because...oh, shut up.
I have a new sofa and chair
December 05, 2004 // Link
Yes, yesterday I got furniture. It’s like I’m a real adult or something. Best of all, they’re these cool retro things straight out of a 1970s rec room. Photos will be forthcoming, because I know you care.
Photos are forthcoming instead of forthalreadyhere because the sofa and its satellite are currently sitting on the back of a pickup truck in my sister’s shop. I borrowed the truck to go get my new sit-on-able friends, and I haven’t had a chance to conscript my equally sit-on-able brother-in-law to help lug them up into my digs.
I know I said that their cool retro-ocity was the bit that was best of all, but another bit that is also best of all is the price. You have that much in your pocket right now, even if you aren’t wearing pants (which, given what I’ve heard about you, is highly likely). Why spend actual money on furniture when you can just stumble across an ad online for a sofa that needs a new home? No reason, that’s why!
After the epic adventure that poets shall later call The Getting Of The Sofa And The Chair came the slightly less epic adventure that the poets are still discussing a name for but are leaning toward something like The Shopping For Games With Erin. (The poets welcome your suggestions on postcards.)
During the adventure of The Shopping For Games With Erin, I bought nothing. I think I was still too high on my sofa-for-nada to spoil the day with the exchange of funds for goods. The main goal of the excursion was to check out games for future Nerd Nights, and she picked up a couple of card games: Mille Bourne and My Word. (Links are to descriptions on boardgamegeek.com.)
We later played the games over dinner at Boston Pizza, and had more fun than the rest of the people in the restaurant. (I know, because I had them fill out a survey.)
But all this talk of sofas and games has missed the mostest funnest thing of the night. The mostest funnest thing of the night was Erin’s other purchase: a duck puppet. I will call him Quackers for the sake of this story, but for all I know his name is Waddles, Roderick, or most likely something that has InterCapiTals and ends in ®.
Quackers is a puppet that talks. Or rather, he sings. Sure, the only word he knows is “quack” but he’s quite versatile with it. As you open and close Quackers’ bill, he quacks out a tune. Words cannnot do justice to the hilarious joy of seeing Quackers’ in action, but a movie can:
Sing, Quackers! Sing! [1.1MB MOV]
Quackers needs a record deal, and he needs it now.
I’ve been blog-slacking
December 08, 2004 // Link
Half-edited posts have been piling up here, so you can probably soon expect a bunch to come at once. In addition to sheer laziness, which accounts for most of the delay, I’ve been foot-dragging because I’m contemplating a switch from my hand-rolled blogging setup to Wordpress.
The primary reason I’m considering the switch is because I’m too lazy to implement a few basic features (e.g. trackbacks, pingbacks, rss). I’ve enjoyed tweaking my own PHP code, but I’d rather take all the basic functionality as a given and spend my efforts writing plug-ins for custom features. For instance, I’ve got a doozy of an idea for a change to the way recent posts are listed, and I’d rather implement that than fiddle with pingbacks.
I’ve looked at the various blogging apps out there, and Wordpress has the most appeal for me. I like that it uses PHP and MySQL, it strictly adheres to web standards, and it’s licensed under the GPL.
[aside]
I welcome your flames about how awful my choice of Wordpress is, and I’m willing to be persuaded I’m wrong by those in the know. My inbox awaits your wisdom.
[end of aside]
If all goes well, the switch shouldn’t cause any links to break or any functionality to be lost. I may archive the existing posts in an “old blog” section if it’s too bothersome to convert the database structure, but ideally you shouldn’t notice that anything has changed except the appearance of the long-promised rss feed.
Oh, and the color. No doubt you’ve noticed the new color already, because you are observant and smart and a good dresser. I’m not necessarily sold on this new color: I may try out a few different ones. If you have a hue suggestion, fire away.
The most invasive and annoying internet ad
December 09, 2004 // Link
The most invasive and annoying internet ad I have ever seen came from Diesel Jeans. It was on the Hint Magazine site, which is full of bad code and reader-hating practices. Clearly Hint needs a clue, and Diesel needs a zipper accident. I hope both companies choke when they eat my words...
The Denim And Daniel Webster
December 09, 2004 // Link
The most invasive and annoying Internet ad I have ever seen came from Diesel Jeans. It was on the Hint Magazine site. I link to neither because I blame them both.
While I won’t link to them, I will add them to the list of companies that won’t get my money. Other nefarious list members include censorious bookmonger Chapters-Indigo, notorious spammonger Priceline, and vainglorious crapmonger Wal-Mart.
Oh, and Cher. She knows why.
The Diesel ad was an image of a dead bird oozing its own intestines. I guess it makes sense as a jeans ad because that sort of stuff makes some us want to change our pants.
The dead bird image I could live with. Frankly, some of Diesel’s former campaigns were more offensive than the new gutted bird ad. (e.g. the “Big Titted Party Girl Bottle-Blonds Will Fuck You If You Wear Diesel Jeans” campaign from 1999, and last year’s “It’s Cool To Look Uncool, Provided You’re Actually Cool And Just Wearing This Crap Ironically” campaign.)
But no, just like the label whores themselves who go truffling for currently hip brand names, it wasn’t the image of the ad but rather its nature that offended me.
What grabbed my goat by his good bits was the fact that it was a full-screen animation that floated over the whole window, stalling my browser until a close box slowly wafted its way on to the screen. Now, this was not a pop-up in the traditional sense. Spamvertisers are finding their pop-ups increasingly ignored due to the prevalence of pop-up blockers and better browsers like Firefox, so the new trend is toward floating content inside the main window itself.
Normally I’m immune to such nonsense because I rarely keep the Flash plug-in enabled. Flash is used only for three things: invasive advertisements, puerile animations, and invasively puerile animated advertisements. It’s worth the little bit of effort to move the plug-in for those rare times I do want to see a Flash gizmo, since it saves my eyes from dealing with the latest manifestation of some damn Click The Monkey To Win ad.
[aside]
Note to browser makers: there really should be a “right-click to enable plug-ins for this site” option, like the one for pop-ups, to permit chosen sites to show Flash animations but by default block invasive ads from sites like Hint that hate their own readers.
[end of aside]
Alas, today I had Flash enabled because of some “it’s worth the wait” link from lovely local linkmeister All Things Christie. I’d not gotten around to re-dis-enabling the Flash plug-in when I later clicked over to Hint Magazine (no link for you, boycotted bastards) from perennial time waster Boing Boing.
What ensued can only be described as a browser hijack. A big “bend my browser over the table and say hello prison style” from Warden Diesel and Screw-on-the-take Hint Magazine.
While I’m not going to link to Hint, because there’s no way I’m going to help their Google placement, I will encourage you all to go to hintmag.com and reload the site until you, too, see the incredible eye-burning Diesel ad. But you must first promise not to click on the Diesel ad—the point here is to cost Hint a nice little bandwidth expense without actually helping their damn client.
After disabling Flash I returned to the Hint site so I could look over the code for the Diesel ad, with thoughts of perhaps writing a Firefox extension that wipes both Diesel and Hint from the face of the net as far as my own browser is concerned. But without Flash the Hint site was if anything even more useless:
The Javascript code that opens the ad didn’t first check to see if Flash was available, it just grabbed the full screen and left it up to my browser to display a big blank “get the plug-in” link. The Hint site was hidden away underneath, only seen in fleeting glimpses as I scrolled up and down. Awesome.
Let’s look at the Hint site’s code and see what it reveals about the mag’s mentality, shall we? Visiting the site with both Flash and Javascript happily disabled, a quick click on the “view source” menu reveals a site filled with nonstandard HTML, riddled with Javascript nonsense, and lacking even so much as a doctype declaration.
Clearly, somebody needs a visit from the web standards project. Yes, a nice long visit. With clubs.
Here’s a list of the Javascript functions that appear at the top of the Hint Magazine home page, in order:
- popUpCentered
- popUpEmail
- popUpRegistration
- popUpProfile
- popUpSlideShowCollections
- popUpSlideShowSize
- popUpSlideShow
- popUpPoll
- poppedUpAd
- popUpFlash
- popUpFlashnew
See a pattern there at all? Take your time, it’s subtle. I’ll give you a hint: look for the word popUp.
Shame on you, Diesel, for running such an ad. Shame on you, Hint Magazine, for enabling it. You’ve both made The List. I wish your companies bankruptcy, your customers an increased awareness of your manipulative shallowness, and your board members syphilis. In whatever order is most uncomfortable.
Fantastic evening, frustrating night
December 10, 2004 // Link
I drove up to my sister’s place in Uxbridge to watch my nephew’s holiday pageant. I’ll spare you the endless photos I took, because I am kind to you, but I will tell you that there was much cuteness and mixed-up singing.
Thus, a fantastic evening.
But it was a frustrating night. The rest of this blog post will just be a rant about an offensive asshat I had to listen to while troubleshooting a computer problem. I suggest you save yourself the bother, and go read something else fun instead.
When I got home this evening there was a message from a friend requesting technical support. She and her roommate had been off the internet for a few days. They had already attempted to get support from their service provider directly (good on them: most people don’t even try).
That failing they turned to the Nerd Of Last Resort, and I got the call.
The initial difficulty had probably been something trivial, but the call center dweeb had instructed her to press the reset button on her wireless router. Yes, as in the factory reset button. So poof went the passwords and protocols.
You’d think the ISP’s own tech monkeys would know that they’re using PPP and not DHCP, so one can’t just go around resetting routers and expecting things to keep working. Then again, maybe they wouldn’t: not only was the router reset, but also the account had been temporarily suspended by the ISP at the same time. Ask me how long it took me to figure that one out.
The second call center person they spoke to had instructed them to fiddle with the cabling, if only to test how observant I’d be when I showed up.
I’m venting of course, but that’s because my mood is sour. I don’t mind doing tech support—well, not on Macs anyway—but I haven’t yet told you about the really annoying bit yet. The really annoying bit was having to do all this troubleshooting while listening to the gals in the other room talking to Mr. Full Of Shit Guy.
I don’t know if Mr. Full Of Shit Guy is their friend or just somebody they were forced to listen to because of some community service sentence, but I have never had to listen so long to such a fatuous poseur.
Mr. Full Of Shit Guy went on and on (and on, and on...) with tales of his reluctant conquests of women, his power struggles at work (struggles with women, of course), and how hard it is for him to find Ms. Right when he’s such an obviously swell catch who keeps dating clinging, fault-ridden gals that he has to toss away.
And then there were the constant generalizations, mostly also about women. According to Mr. Full Of Shit Guy, all women are really girls. But luckily, he said, men want to be with girls and every year there is a new crop of 25 year olds. He may have said 26 year olds or 12 year olds, but by then I was already trying not to listen. He went on to explain that this works out better for guys than gals because all men are really boys who want to be with girls, while all women are really girls who want to be with men. So us guys can get what we want (girls, that is, not women), while gals are out of luck in their quest for men.
This was the only point I participated in the discussion. I was asked from the other room whether I thought all men were really boys. I responded by asking “all men in the world, or just all men in that room?” I didn’t get asked any more questions after that.
But back to Mr. Full Of Shit Guy’s theories. Another one was that women make bad bosses because women won’t take responsibility for their actions the way a man will.
Yes, he was saying all this to a pair of females. No, they didn’t light him on fire because of it.
Of course, Mr. Full Of Shit Guy said everything with just enough of a half-joking lilt in his voice to give him wiggle room in case he was directly confronted about how offensive he was. He adopted the “I’m not a racist, but...” tone that racists use at parties where the Nazi flag isn’t evident, just in case. Nonetheless, it would have been easy to substitute “the blacks” or “the Jews” or “those damned foreigners who take our jobs” for the subject of almost every sentence that oozed out of him.
The only time he was pressed about making generalizations, he claimed it was just human nature and everyone does it. I was pleased to hear the response that he was now making generalizations about making generalizations.
I was less pleased not to hear the sound of them defenestrating him. Or something that rhymes with defenestrate.
After about an hour of mixed troubleshooting and ear-plugging I got the network up again, and I quickly excused myself. If I’d stayed around any longer I would have felt obligated to pummel that asshat. Instead I just came home to blog angrily about it. Clearly, I’m learning restraint.
Unfortunately.
See? I told you to go read something fun instead.
Dan Beeston saved my sanity
December 10, 2004 // Link
Dan Beeston saved my sanity, or what’s left of it, by a suggestion he made in the comments for the latest Eat My Words article (the one in which I whine about an eye-poppingly annoying Diesel Jeans ad).
Dan’s sanity saving suggestion was a Firefox extension called Flashblock. Its single yet wonderful function is to replace all Flash animations with a button you can click to play them. Or, and this is the Really Good Bit, you can not click it to not play them.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Dan, you rock. (And I know this firsthand because I met him once when he was on my side of the planet.)
But Diesel Jeans can still eat my shorts.
My trip to New York
December 11, 2004 // Link
My trip to New York, which you didn’t know about, has been delayed. Oui, there will be no fun dans la Grosse Pomme avec Julia this weekend. That means Carrington is a sad Carrington. Carrington is so sad, he’s writing about himself in the third person. And that’s pretty damn sad.
Bright side lookin’, I was bought pizza this evening by Linda and Audra as thanks for lending them a hand this week. I will work for food. This is not news.
Afterwards Linda took me to see Ocean’s Twelve because she is nice and I am fun to be with. Or so I tell myself. (I tell myself this in the third person, too, so it’s easy for me to believe me. I find me very persuasive.)
We had to remember which straw was hers in the Too Large For Any Pair Of Sane People, Or Us, To Drink In One Sitting drink. She has some sort of Twelve Monkeys cold coming on, and I didn’t want to be the first victim of Typhoid Linda.
After I praised Flashblock
December 12, 2004 // Link
After I praised Flashblock, a few people wrote in to suggest other handy Firefox extensions. Here’s the list of what I’ve installed now to increase my browser joy:
Flashblock: Replaces Flash objects with a button you can click to view them (or NOT click to NOT view them, which is my favorite bit).
Dict: Right-click any word to query its definition. Best of all, this uses the DICT protocol, so it’s fast and text-only (unlike rival options which open graphics laden dictionary web pages).
Go Up: Press alt + up arrow to remove the last segment from an URL. (example.com/one/two.html changes to example.com/one/)
ImgTag: Right-click an image to generate an xhtml
tag for it, including path, height, width, border, and a blank alt tag ready to be filled in. Big time-saver for web development.
Disable Targets For Downloads: Zaps those annoying target=”_blank” links for file downloads from sites that obviously hate their visitors. I’ve added PDF to the list of extensions it guards. I’ll probably add HTML next.
BugMeNot: Bypass web registration, and rejoice. Download Statusbar: Downloads are displayed in an auto-hide status bar, which I find more convenient than a separate downloads window.
FLST: Focus on the last selected tab when a tab closes.
Nuke Anything: Allow hiding of almost anything with a click, for those times when a “block images from this server” just isn’t enough...
There’s a good list of Firefox extensions on Texturizer.net, with all of the above plus dozens more.
Overheard on a subway platform
December 15, 2004 // Link
Overheard on a subway platform last weekend as a lad of no more than 14 or so talked into his cell phone:
“She just stares all the time. She has less expressions than Rocket Robin Hood.”
Funny, sure, but what kind of prototeen makes a reference to that band of brothers marching together heads held high in all kinds of weather?
It confounds me, astounds me, and spellbounds me that you can watch a Rocket Robin Hood episode online, complete with those oft repeated in-show commercials for the cast.
WordPress is excellent
December 16, 2004 // Link
It installed in a handful of minutes, and it even generated the htaccess rewrite rules I’ll need to maintain the “cruft-free” URLs on my blog. All is well in Carringtonland.
Except, of course, that you can’t see any of it yet. ;-)
I’m not going to switch over to the WordPress version until January, because migrating the database content would be a pain in my spank-tender bottom. I’ll leave all the existing pages up, of course, and all previous “permalinks” will still work. Wouldn’t be very perma otherwise, huh?
Last night I dove in and wrote my first pair of WordPress filters. The first enables in-line titles for blog posts, so I can keep the same style I’m using now. The second adds a new
[aside]
Like this one, for instance.
[end of aside]
Creating filters for WordPress is very easy: they’re just normal PHP functions that you link to the rest of the package with one command. I’m liking it very much.
Three count ‘em three
December 16, 2004 // Link
Three count ‘em three letters I received yesterday from three count ‘em three different people used “should of” instead of “should’ve.”
You do this on purpose just to push my buttons, don’t you?
I drank tea and ate walnuts
December 17, 2004 // Link
I drank tea and ate walnuts with Sandy this evening, followed by composing some more music for Duck Duck Goose. The tea was good. The walnuts were good. But the music was very ungood.
You see, by “composing” I don’t mean “assembling music” so much as “assembling sounds that ought to be musical but which instead are dissonant and make my ears resent my hands.” Drat.
I’ve been playing around with one of the background themes, but everything I’ve tried so far is either too slight or too sonorous. I hate the feeling I’m left with after many hours of trying something creative that just doesn’t come together at all. Very frustrating.
I should’ve (pronounced “should of”) written instead.
On the plus side, that’s two days in a row I’ve received a surprise Christmas present: yesterday Tanya gave me a keen scarf (knitting a scarf was on her own Things To Do Before I Die list), and this evening Sandy gave me a hunk of movie goodness. There’s joy in Carringtonland.
So my neck will be warm and my eyes will be happy, though my ears and I might need some time apart.
Christmas Tree Decorating Day
December 18, 2004 // Link
Christmas Tree Decorating Day is one of my favorite family traditions. When I was a kid it couldn’t hold a candle to Rip Open The Presents day, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to appreciate the rest of the seasonal festivities for the passive-aggressive funfests they are.
One of the traditions I really like is the choice of food. The edibles on hand are not the typical Christmastime nosh. Nothing’s ever that straightforward in our family, so on Christmas Tree Decorating Day you won’t find us gobbling up turkey or feasting on figgy pudding. Instead our family tradition is to eat only hors d’oeuvres throughout the day. Platter after platter of spring rolls, meatballs, sun dried tomato thingies, and other single serving selections are brought out as the tree gets tarted up.
As you can see, there’s even a tiny Dickens Village that’s part of the decorating tradition. In the tiny Dickens Village, there are tiny ice skaters, tiny children playing in the snow, and tiny people singing tiny carols.
[aside]
Historical accuracy falls apart upon closer inspection: the tiny skates aren’t made out of the tiny bones of tiny dead horses, the tiny children don’t receive only a tiny orange in their tiny Christmas stockings to stave off tiny scurvy, there is neither a tiny fog of coal dust nor a tiny outbreak of cholera, and the tiny women don’t usually die in tiny painful childbirth. But the tiny Punch and Judy show is pretty funny.
[end of aside]
As for the Christmas tree itself, my family hangs up a lot of strange ornaments. Oh sure, there are also lots of plain red balls and mundane icicles adorning our tree each year, but the ornaments I like best are the cheesy ones: the homemade stuff my sister and I put together as kids, the bizarre ones bought on family trips, and the inexplainable blobs of plastic that get carefully boxed away after Christmas for their inevitable return.
I thought I’d share a few of my favorites ornaments with you, eager reader, so grab a mug of nog and read on if you dare.
Here are a pair of lovebirds. They look home made, but they’re not. It takes factory precision to make fluffy, blind birds that rest below a warped coat hanger. I like to think of them as a monument to the old saying “In the land of the blind birds, the one-eyed bird is king even if he’s made out of yarn.” Words to live by, my friends.
Ah, the famous Danglin’ Pom Poms. These were fashioned by the hands of Young Carrington, Age 5-ish. They’ve adorned every Vanston family Christmas tree since then, but it’s only now as I see them on my blog that it occurs to me there’s a pretty obvious testicle reference that I’d never spotted before. I may have just ruined Christmas for myself.
There’s a tradition in my family that when the Tiny Sweater ornament is hung on the tree somebody makes the joke that this is the sweater in which my baby sister was brought home from the hospital. Every. Single. Year. Because that joke never gets old. I made an attempt, circa 1985, to change it to a joke about this being the sweater in which baby Freddy Kruger was brought home from the hospital, but it never stood a chance against the inertia of the Tale of the Tiny Sweater.
A point of contention in the Vanston household at decorating time is the name of this ornament. My family refers to it as the Little Running Santa. But I think it’s clear, and I believe you’ll agree if you look without bias, that this is Little Purse-Snatching Santa.
It occurs to me that most of the ornaments have some sort of size-based preface, as in the Little Running Santa or the Tiny Sweater. But it’s not as if anybody can hang Actual Anesthetized Mall Santas or Life-Sized Reindeer Heads on the tree. Not in my family, anyway. The spoilsports.
Whether it was my sister or myself who fashioned Stringy Santa Hoop Head is now lost to the annals of time, and yet it’s a detail that is bitterly fought over every year. Better scholars than I have thrown up their hands and gone for a pint, so who can ever truly say who made this ornament? I’ll tell you who: me! I’m the one who made Stringy Santa Hoop Head and don’t let my sister tell you otherwise! Me me me, 100% all me all the time, not her, just me, stamped it locked it swallowed the golden key. So there.
One ornament I can’t take credit for, thankfully, is this jester head. It’s over 8 inches high, and that’s a whole heck of a lot of ornament. I think of it as Big Ugly Jester Head, but it is technically unnamed because it is rarely spoken of aloud. It’s the Lord Voldemort of ornaments. It is a reminder of why the most common rhymes for jester are fester, pester, sequester and polyester.
This would normally be an ornament I’d make fun of—because nothing says Christmas like an otter in a clamshell—but the fact that the otter is holding a bowling ball takes the whole thing to such a new level of absurdity that I’m actually impressed.
Santa in an outhouse. I have no response to that.
Ah, the infamous Shiny Pickle ornament. This is one of the Vanston household favorites, an ornament that gets commented upon and admired every single year when it is discovered among the other, lesser ornaments. It is written that the person who extracts the Shiny Pickle from the box of ornaments and holds it aloft will be crowned The Once and Future King of Tree Decorating and will be given sway over the land and all who live on it. It never works out that way, because the area immediately surrounding the Christmas tree was declared an anarcho-syndicalist commune in the mid 90s, but it’s a nice idea.
Besides, supreme executive power cannot be derived from some fermented cucumber ceremony, especially not when a far more beautiful and treasured ornament is at hand: the One-Winged Halo-Stump Clothes Peg Angel.
The One-Winged Halo-Stump Clothes Peg Angel is my favorite ornament of them all. It’s my desert island ornament, the one I’d pick if I had to decorate a whole (hopefully small) tree with only a single bauble.
It once had two golden heart shaped wings, but now it can only fly in circles. It once had a pipe cleaner halo, but now it has a stump-like antenna. Its expression has even begun to resemble a grimace over the years.
I made the One-Winged Halo-Stump Clothes Peg Angel myself when I was but a wee lad. In fact, making this ornament is one of my earliest memories. Of course it’s probable that I am only remembering the story of making the ornament rather than the actual act, but I’ll take what I can get.
And now that you have shared in the festive joy and hideous wonder of the Vanston family Christmas tree, you can feel a little better about your own family’s strange branch-hangers. If anyone needs me, I’ll be over by the pickle.
I went to a cheese party tonight
December 21, 2004 // Link
Not a wine and cheese party, just a cheese party (although there was wine present). More specifically, it was Cheesefest 2004. Gouda, cheddar, brie, and their ilk were all present. There was even cheesecake. And fondu. I may never have another bowel movement again.
Check out this guest list: Alanna, Bev, Erin, Gail, Laurie, Linda, and me. Six lovely ladies and yours truly.
Local boy makes good.
At one point the gals even steered the conversation around to the subject of computers. This party is where good nerds go when they die.
You’d better not shout
December 30, 2004 // Link
You’d better not shout. You’d better not cry. You’d better not pout. I’m telling you lies.
If you think the Santa conspiracy is just some harmless fun, then I suggest you put away that plate of cookies and milk and instead eat my words...
This is the first of a two-parter. Next up: Santa is a gateway lie.
You’d Better Not Pout, I’m Telling You Lies
December 30, 2004 // Link
Some people believe that aliens travel hundreds of billions of miles to gang-probe rural bumpkins. Some people believe there is a secret society pulling the government’s strings. Some people believe that oil companies are sitting on the blueprints for cars that run on banana peels and used coffee filters.
The people who believe these things call them hidden truths. The rest of us call them conspiracy theories. (Or “the latest one from that nutbar in accounting,” depending on whether they’re in the room with us when we’re talking about them.)
There are actually people who believe such theories. We encounter them all the time: some of them post grainy photos of UFOs on their all-lowercase blogs, some of them write books called things like Licorice: The Hidden Confectionary Power Behind 9/11 and/or JFK, and some of them stand in front of you at the grocery store buying a remarkable quantity of tinfoil. Or sprouts. I’m always suspicious of the ones with the sprouts.
But when does it all start? Do these people ease into these things, first believing they share a special bond with their cat and then slowly over the years coming around to the opinion that Mr. Buttons is telling them to climb up a bell tower and start thinning out the neighborhood? Or maybe it’s a sudden thing, like going to bed one evening thinking about tomorrow’s bank loan application and waking up the next morning as the Venusian Ambassador to Planet 3.
I have a theory. I call it the It’s All Santa’s Fault, The Fat Fucker theory. I’m still working on the title.
My theory goes something like this: it’s all Santa’s fault, the fat fucker. There’s a little more to it than that, but I wanted to get the basics out of the way quickly in case my computer is being tapped and this transmission gets cut short by Them.
Before I get to the details of the IASFTFF theory, let’s discuss the lie of Santa. We know that Santa does not exist. His supposed feats are provably impossible according to the laws of physics, just as they are provably false by objective observation.
So the facts are these: Santa does not exist, we know this, and yet we tell our children that he does exist. We lie to our kids, just as our parents lied to us. It’s a seasonal, festive falsehood.
Some things are so pervasive that they become invisible. Calling Santa a lie might sound harsh, but that’s only because in our society Santa is a shared concept that runs so deep most of us never bother to think about its effects.
Take the movie Miracle on 34th Street for instance. Reducing it to its essentials, this is a film about a lady who tells her child an unpopular truth and then is vilified for doing so. All the people around her share a secret lie and they persecute her into becoming One Of Us. In the end her resistance is broken and she embraces the lie, seeking comfortable social acceptance at the expense of deceiving her own daughter.
It’s a message movie. Nice family stuff.
This definition of the film might seem extreme, but that’s only because the lie of Santa is part of our culture. It would be different if the movie was not about the Santa but instead about some other lie. What if it was about a small town in which everyone “sees” a dragon that doesn’t actually exist? In this version, the mother might tell her daughter that the dragon isn’t real, much to the chagrin of the town elders who see the dragon as an important tradition and cultural bond. Imagine the final scene in which the wearied mom finally gives in after weeks of aggressive social pressure, and she tells her own daughter that she sees the dragon. What would we be expected to feel when her little girl points at thin air and says, “yes, mommy, I can see it, too. I can see the dragon.” Fade out, scroll credits, dry your eyes and think about how lucky we are that we don’t live in a town like that.
Oh, except that we do. But since it’s just Santa, we say it’s all harmless fun.
But how harmless is it, really? I think perhaps the lie of Santa is what causes a certain percentage of western society to believe in vast governmental coverups and X-Files plotlines.
You see, it’s no use arguing with these people about the unlikelihood of government conspiracies that require hundreds or even thousands of people to be in on them. It’s no use pointing out the odds against any conspiracy succeeding when it requires complicity by a huge number of people. And the reason it’s no use is because back when they were kids there really was a time when everyone was in on it.
To these people Santa wasn’t just a lie, it was a conspiracy. Their mother and father were in on it. Their teacher was in on it. The guy on the evening news was in on it, even going so far as to fabricate radar reports of a flying sleigh. The TV and the radio and the newspapers were all in on it. The people who make movies were in on it. The people who make toys were in on it, deeply. Hell, somebody even arranged for actors to dress up like Santa and then hired them to wait in conspicuous places to reinforce the lie.
Everybody was in on it. Absolutely everybody. Every trusted authority figure, every person lining the street, all the media...everybody. It was a real live worldwide conspiracy that cost billions of marketing dollars, the coordinated efforts of tens of thousands of people, and the complicity of every single person in a position of authority.
So it’s no use telling conspiracy theorists that their ideas about government coverups and alien invasions are ridiculous due to the number of people who’d have to be involved to make them work. The kids might be alright, but they won’t get fooled again.
You say it’s all harmless fun? You say there’s no danger in having a shared conspiracy to lie to our own children? You say nothing bad can come from yanking the rug out from under our wide-eyed, foolishly trusting kids?
Don’t make me ho ho ho.