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.

Somebody’s going to emergency, somebody’s going to gaol

Well, if you’re looking for further signs that civilization is going to hell in a handbasket, I have a doozy for you.

Black Friday, it seems, is spreading beyond the borders of these United States.

And by Black Friday I’m referring not only to retailers advertising “deals” on their merchandise, but consumers acting like complete pillocks in the pursuit of these alleged bargains.

Viz.: Stories out of the UK are documenting the kinds of chaos and mayhem that we’ve experienced since the Cabbage Patch days. Yes, I’m talking grown humanoids engaging in knock-down-drag-outs over limited numbers of goods that are marked up only 135% instead of the normal 150% during “special” operating hours.

There was the whole build-up, with people mobbing outside various establishments in hopes of being the first through the door to get…whatever it is that’s worth waiting for half the night outside a store in late November. (In my mind, this would be…nothing; but I recognize that if the economy depended on my purchasing habits, we’d be in even deeper trouble than we are now.)

And local police and EMTs have been in overdrive, dealing with the mayhem and maiming. So I’m thinking that I’d add Black Friday to Remembrance Sunday on my list of Best Times to Knock Over a Liquor Store in Britain, since every cop in the country is engaged elsewhere and I’d be pretty well assured of a clean getaway.

But speaking of criminal stupidity, I got rather a kick out of this guy in The Guardian’s report from a North London Sainsbury’s: Andy Blackett, 30, had two carts full of merchandise. “I got two coffee makers, two tablets, two TVs and a stereo,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you the prices, but I know they’re bargains.”

Our financial master of the universe is—wait for it—a real estate agent.

His apparently small pal had the TV he’d bagged taken from him by someone bigger. Law of the retail jungle, baby.

(Well, it just occurred to me that Blackett may have plans of selling his swag on Craig’s List, or eBay. So maybe not as idiotic as I’d originally thought. His pal is still stuffed, though.)

At least he wasn’t arrested and didn’t require medical treatment, which was how the day started and ended for a number of people around the country.

And—okay—he also didn’t end up with an overpriced vacuum cleaner, like another shopper interviewed. She’d been unable to get the high-end electronics she’d come after, so she was standing there with a Dyson. There’s some kind of poetic something surrounding that, but I’ll be blowed if I know what it is.

Poor old Mother England—so eager to show moral and cultural superiority over our crass, money-grubbing American hegemony. And they end up importing something that only makes (limited) sense in the context of the day-after-Thanksgiving signaling the start of the Christmas shopping season. It seems bizarre that as we’re losing that context here, the Brits latch onto it and make it every bit as grubbily theirs as it used to be ours.

And, oh—you don’t believe me about the fights? Take a look, sunshine. Not so merry-old, eh?

Oh—but this is probably a windup:

Clouds on the horizon

On Friday of Thanksgiving week, I’m grateful that—occasionally, when the atmosphere has the temerity to formulate a few clouds in the early morning—you can actually see a gorgeous sunrise here in the Valley They Call Silicon.

Because you need clouds to refract the light to get really beautiful sunrises or sunsets. Without the clouds, darkness just morphs into light and vice versa.

And that’s as good a way as any to close out this week.

The Baroness of Holland Park

One of my early heroes of detective fiction has died. P.D. James was 94 and had amassed multiple honors for her highly successful novels, most featuring policeman-poet Adam Dalgliesh.

I didn’t find her stories entirely comfortable; they were heavily laced with psychopathology, and so many of the characters were so disagreeable that I really wanted to throttle most of them and toss them in roadside ditches. But I admired James’s ability to craft a story and provide a compelling atmosphere, whether it be in a hospital, a publishing house, a nuclear power plant or a monastery.

James did not start publishing until she was in her forties, after a career as a civil servant, and raising her family. I really like that notion, of the second act being writing.

I confess that I thought she jumped the shark a bit when she wrote Death Comes to Pemberley in 2011. It tosses characters from Pride and Prejudice into a murder mystery, which I didn’t find as carefully plotted or as cohesive as James’s other works. But I respect the hell out of her trying something so different at age 91.

Something to aspire to, perhaps.

Thanksgiving: Connections and recalibrations

For those who’ve been unaware of all the Black Friday advertisements, today is Thanksgiving. The actual day when we actually pause to give actual thought about things we might actually be grateful for.

Mostly people talk about the big things—health, security, shelter, family, jobs, etc. I’m concentrating on smaller things this week, things that might not be the most stand-in-your-face objects of gratitude.

Today I’m grateful for conversations that end up taking sharp turns because someone picks up on some element that never occurred to me might be capable of being viewed differently than from my perspective.

And of course, I’m grateful for the people who put up with those sometimes loopy conversations, who encourage them, and who take pleasure in them.

Viz.:

A few days ago I was talking with my BFF. She brought up a technical issue that occurred when she tried sharing my post about the D-Day then-and-now photos. You know—a combat photo from 6 June 1944 that morphed into a shot of the same spot taken this year.

I got a little excited, because after I’d written that post, I got some info about this particular picture of British Commandos landing at Juno Beach, from someone whose father was in No. 4 Commando, which landed on Sword Beach:

I’d asked him about the fact that several of the men in that picture do not appear to be wearing helmets. It was time-stamped 0900, and since the landings on Juno began at 0745, I was wondering if it was possible that the beach might have been cleared enough of the enemy within an hour or so that men disembarking might not have needed helmets.

He roughed out the background of the Commandos, and then mentioned that his father had been caught stealing chickens (not a petty crime when your nation is under wartime rationing) and given the choice between going to jail or “volunteering” for the Commandos. (His subsequent combat history suggests to me that he was a much better Commando than a chicken thief, which I found extremely interesting, and is probably a good outcome for everyone concerned.)

Well, so, back to my convo with my BFF. I got kind of lively when I reached the part about the type of man accepted into the Commandos, and even more lively when describing Lord Lovat, the man who put the units together and led them.

Bas Bleu: This Lovat guy was eccentric in the way that you only ever seem to find in the British army. He gave each commando the choice of whether he wanted to go ashore with or without helmet. And he had his personal piper march up and down the landing beach…

BFF: [long pause] Oh—PIPER. I was thinking ‘Piper Cub’…

BB: [pause] Oh. Yeah. Entirely different sort of eccentricity. [pause] No—guy with a set of bagpipes.

[Mutual snorts and giggles]

See, she’s into civil aviation, I’m into how people deal with combat. I was thinking, “What does it say about a commander and fighting unit that has a guy in kilts playing pibrochs and whatnots in the middle of a mechanized firefight?”; she’s thinking, “I wonder what they were doing there with a little aircraft?”

Then we both had to take a sideways glance at what we were assuming was the common ground, and recalibrate.

And, that, my children, is how we expand our knowledge base: by realizing that there are multiple perspectives on everything, and that vocabulary is contextual.

It also makes life so much richer. For which I am extremely grateful.

P.S. Lovat’s piper was a man named Bill Millan. This photo, shot on 6 June 1944, shows his back, with the tips of his pipes poking in front of his face—he’s in the foreground just to the right of the photographer. And you'll notice he's not wearing a dag-blamed helmet.

He survived 4 Commando’s campaigns and died in 2010, much loved and deeply mourned.

(The photographer focused on Lovat, who appears in the middle distance, to the right of the column of men. I can't tell whether he's wearing a helmet, but my money's on not.)

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all. Musicians, pilots, soldiers, change ringers, lawyers, statisticians, spooks, poultry-nappers, personal trainers, mothers, baristas, social workers, Movember fluffers, artists, and especially readers and friends. You enrich my life, and I'm grateful to and for every one of you.