Beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Let me start this out by promising you that I’m hard-put to find a Christmas song better geared to make me start banging my head against the wall than “Little Drummer Boy.”

I mean—that “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” jobber is pretty sick-making. But for shear wild-eyed get-me-outta-here, shoot-me-now mania, “Drummer Boy” is my primordial nightmare.

However, I’m almost rethinking my stance on this one, because:

If you can watch this video without projectile snorting whatever you might be in the process of drinking, you are one Scroogy dude.

This is so much better than the David Bowie/Bing Crosby version, which still takes high honors for WTF-iness and does make a great icebreaker if the punch at your Christmas party has gone a little flat.

But now, I’m never going to be able to hear any version of this lugubrious piece without picturing those patient dogs at the keyboards, bongos and cello, playing their, er, parts like they know there will be bowlfuls of treats once they get those silly outfits off.

Also—having the actual drummer boy wearing a Chanukah tee shirt and playing like Animal in the Muppets’ band just changes the whole sensibility of the thing.

Somebody needs to write a dissertation on this. 

For your holiday pleasure

It’s certainly not for me, but clearly there’s a market for this, uh, well…

I know what it references; I’m not culturally illiterate. But the color, texture and industrially-extruded petrochemical derivative composition just makes me think of shag carpeting from the 70s. Not an era that evokes warm and, er, fuzzy feelings in me.

On the other hand, I’m also not sure what relationship a pig or a dachshund bear to Christmas, but I see they’re being invoked as yard decorations. Lighted ones.

Maybe I need to get out more?

Ho-ho-uh-oh

Okay, in keeping with yesterday’s post, here’s another view of the holidays:

No telling who’s naughty and who’s nice in this. But it just goes to show that being Santa’s a tough gig.

Viral holiday

This struck me as kind of an odd juxtaposition of signage at the Cupertino Target:

Perhaps it’s just me, though…

A little buggy

Uh, oh—the low-rent apartment building 15 yards away from my condo complex is suiting up for fumigation.

Again. As in: for the second time in two years.

Um.

The apartment building owner had the place fumigated back when he was painting it to look like not quite the tenement it is, and charging more for all the one-bedroom flats with just one parking space (and no street parking).

Story I heard from my neighbor on the condo board is that the building owner had been trying to sell it for several years, but there were no buyers. Not surprising, because even if you scraped it (tore it down), there’s nothing you could put up that would be viable because of the lack of parking. Look—this is the Valley They Call Silicon; you need wheels. So he slapped on a few coats of paint, ripped out the minimal landscaping to add three parking places and doubled the rents.

Not sure whether the homeowner association of this place is aware of that, or what significance it might have for this building. But as far as I know, there’s been no extermination activity over here in the three years I’ve been in residence.

Well—perhaps it’ll take the infestation a while to get up to the third floor.

Gratitude Monday: Falling rain

Gratitude Monday, and I’m grateful for a day of rain yesterday here in the Valley They Call Silicon. It happens so seldom, and we need it so much.

I’m grateful that I was snug and cozy in my flat, listening to the raindrops hitting the skylight over the entry and the greenhouse window in the kitchen. And that I was watching the goldfinches come to the feeder, and doves coming for the seed on the balcony floor.

I’m grateful that water turned the autumn leaves diamond-decked and glistening against the grey sky.

And I’m grateful that I had bread in the house, for making cinnamon toast and tea in the afternoon.

Loveliest kind of day for ending November.