Seasonal excess

While we’re still within the confines of the Twelve Days of Christmas, I’m going to pass on a couple of bits of seasonal weirdness.

First up is a toting up of really, seriously tacky Nativity representations. It’s truly hard to choose the worst among them, at least for me. I’m thinking the meat, butter and Spam ones are certainly way up there on the crap-o-meter.

Although the one made up of junk food is also in contention.

A spin-off from this list is the depiction of the life of Christ in…Christmas lights. Up to and including the scourging on the way to Calvary.

Never underestimate the capacity and willingness of people to go to extremes of dreck during the holidays.

He was not a bullfrog

But he was totally a straight-shootin’ son-of-a-gun.

News tonight of the death at age 78 of General Norman Schwarzkopf. I’ll just leave you with one of his comments:

"Leadership is the potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy."

Running on empty

I spent a good chunk of yesterday getting home to the Silicon Valley from Sedona—from about 1030 to 1700, door to door. And of course I have a couple of observations on this process.

USAir has to be one of the saddest carriers still limping along, flying the most dilapidated aircraft that actually make it into the air. Their flight attendants do not inspire confidence when they can’t even read that flight safety announcement. (The one from Flagstaff to Phoenix seriously had the card in front of her face, and she still couldn’t get it right.)

The thing about spending the entire day on airplanes where they give you nothing to eat but a packet of pretzels is that, with only a couple of toaster waffles in you, you arrive home absolutely empty, but too tired to cook anything.

Thank God for TJ’s holiday-only “handmade” tamales that you can nuke for a couple of minutes.

Supper club in Sedona

I had an unusual Christmas Eve this year. My sister, whom I’m visiting in Sedona for the first time, arranged for us to go out to a “supper club” holiday dinner.

It’s sort of a mix between dinner theatre, a night club and the early-bird special. There was a four-course dinner and then a small, uh, entertainment group (singers, instrumentals and really, really bad patter). Evidently it was the first time this particular establishment has done this, and they hadn’t quite worked out the pre-show organizational bugs, but the food was actually quite good and the musicians were accomplished.

What they didn’t explain was that, in order to get more people into the venue, which isn’t that big, if you were a party of two, they sat you with another party of two. When we arrived at our table, we found that a (retired) couple from Seattle were already ensconced there and had eaten all the choice bits from the cheese platter.

This pot luck seating is one of the reasons I’ve never fancied taking a cruise. (The other one is that I am not what they call a good sailor and I’ve never seen the point in paying money to spend all my time hanging over the rail, if you catch my drift.) To be seated for five hours (less the 90 minutes of the two musical sets) with a prime example of the self-absorbed, self-satisfied inhabitants of the Emerald City was just plain mean.

In all the time I was there, the husband (John) asked me exactly one question about myself—where in the Bay Area I come from. That was just a foil for him to go off at great length about how he and the wife always go to San Francisco, “which is really comparable to Seattle, although it’s not as big”.

Oh, in his bleeding dreams.

The entertainers are obviously well-known to the audience—I expect that in a town the size of Sedona, people get to know the local performers. (The Seattleites assured me that there’s a massive music scene here.) Plus—the fans were clearly well-oiled.

It was actually an enjoyable experience once I got over the whole bad-PNW-fairy thing. Definitely an experience I would ordinarily not have touched with a barge pole. So, hurrah for the Christmas spirit.

Today I’m on my way back to the Bay Area, glad for the break, for seeing my sister and for trying something different.

Holiday flash, Part 6

For Christmas, I’m giving you one more “Hallelujah” flash mob. It’s the first one I ever heard of, put on by the Philadelphia Opera Company on behalf of Random Acts of Culture at the old Philadelphia Wanamaker’s (now Macy’s) store.

If I thought I could be engulfed by one of these flash mobs, I might be enticed into a Macy’s.

At any rate—I hope your Christmas is as surprisingly wonderful as any of the holiday flash mobs I’ve shared with you over the past week or so.

Tech connections

I’m visiting my sister in Sedona for Christmas. Flew out Saturday from Oakland, through Phoenix and then on to Flagstaff, which from the air appears to have expanded since the last time I was through there 30 years ago and rolled my car.

(Yes, that’s right. I did not spin out; I did a 360-degree roll. But that’s another story.)

I brought with me: my laptop, my Kindle Fire HD tablet (an early Christmas gift, with which I’m completely besotted), my smartphone, my Zune MP3 player, a Nikon 35mm DSLR and a Nikon POS camera.

Here’s the thing: because every blinking one of these things has a different connector at the device end for either power or to transfer files, I’ve had to bring with me six bleeding cables. My roll-on was a veritable snakepit of cords.

At least I can use the same cable for my pedometer and the DSLR.