Strange commerce

Apparently 2016 is the Year of No Copy Editors. Although I suppose AOL in all its permutations can’t be considered the kind of media that cares about communications. Their primary focus is on getting clicks.

At any rate, here’s something from the landing page that I found…well, bizarre:

Which is what their headline writer should have used, because—even though I don’t give a toss about who this Krauthammer guy is, or what advice he might be giving the Kleptocrat—the advice was not, in fact, related to commerce.

Just more right-wing crackpottery.

As for the copy editors—wherever you are, I hope you’re enjoying your leisure. Some of us miss you sorely. Others, obviously, never knew you were around.

Seasons greetings

I picked up a holiday card yesterday at work. It was signed personally by our CEO, which is fine.

But it also had my name in his handwriting, along with the message, “Happy to have you at [place of employment].”

I have to say that, in this age of surveillance by everyone from the NSA to Facebook, this is just the tiniest bit disconcerting.

I guess if he just made one pass writing the “Happy to have you” message and signing his name 500 times, and then another pass adding name after name from a list of all employees, that would be okay.

What does this say about me, though?

Love in the news

Yeah, let’s take a swipe at one of the much-reviled mainstream media, but this time for good, solid reason.

Christmas Eve dinner and complex card game with friends, then Boxing Day party with a complex game of Catchphrase plus a 45-minute drive home late last night left me crawling into work this morning feeling a bit like Bob Cratchit telling Scrooge, “I was making rather merry yesterday, sir.”

So I was trawling Washington Post this morning, trying to ease myself back into work, and lookee what I found: a frisnic (well, I don’t think it really qualifies as a “story”) in their Style section about (and by) someone who used Tinder to find what appears to be more than a one-off hookup. 

Well, yippee.

However, what piqued my real interest was the headline in the left-hand rail teaser:

Fiancé, as you well know, is the male half of the betrothed couple. I looked at the writer’s name and thought, “Well, isn’t that very post-Obergefell v. Hodges?”

Okay, no, that’s not what I thought. I thought, “Oh, WaPo, WaPo—do you have no editors of any stripe who understand the whole fiancé-fiancée thing? Is your copy-editing algorithm so pig-ignorant that it doesn’t even flag this for a human?”

So I clicked on the link, because I wanted to see how many corrections appeared in the comments. As it happened, there were no comments, but here’s how someone or something “fixed” the head:

Well, what do I know—maybe “wifé” is a whole thing, and I’m just behind the times.

Thank you, WaPo. For I can now continue to make rather merry.

UPDATE: as of 1400 today, this is what has been showing for at least three hours (they changed the head, but didn't reload the article, because "wife" still shows in the URL): 

I may be making rather merry, but inside I'm weeping for civilization.

Gratitude Monday: Fine dining

If you think your holiday dinner conversation with the ‘Rents and Rels was awkward, be grateful that it wasn’t like this, from one of my friends:

Although, these days I’m guessing that parents are live-streaming these important events. But I’m grateful that so far, I haven’t come across one of them in my social media.

How shall I receive you?

Today’s the big finish, isn’t it? So even though we’ve already had one piece from Bach, I’m closing out my 2016 Advent with his Christmas Oratorio.

Well, Part 1, the “Early Morning” Nativity cantata, since it premiered on this day in 1734.

As I write this, I’m in my living room, the sun is out, and sparrows are ecstatic about the scone I put out there about 15 minutes ago. (Alas—a failed first try at a theme gift for a friend. I realized after I’d got them into the oven that I’d forgotten to add the salt, and these just didn’t rise, so I had to make another tray of them. The sparrows don’t seem to mind. There are 14 or 16 of them—they are hard to count, seeing as to how they all look alike and they hop about continuously.)

May your Christmas Day, your Hanukkah and/or your Sunday be all you could wish.

Happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy...

In addition to Christmas Eve, today is Erev Hanukkah. So I believe something a little less…orthodox is in order. And what’s less Orthodox than Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song”?

(Whatever that is, I don’t want to know about it.)

Sandler has updated the lyrics several times in the decades since he sprang this song on the world. He now recounts (among other things) that “Joseph Gordon-Levitt enjoys eating kugel; So does Stan Lee, Jake Gyllenhaal, and the two guys who founded Google.”

I've built my dreams around you

When it comes to classic Christmas films, there are plenty: Miracle on 34^th Street, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Christmas Story, Die Hard, about 235 versions of A Christmas Carol… But last year I stumbled upon one that’s become one of my holiday favorites: A Very Murray Christmas.

Yeah, it’s not for everyone, but I’ll pretty much watch Bill Murray in anything. Plus: Christmas.

The schtick is that on Christmas Eve, Murray’s in his hotel in Manhattan, waiting to broadcast a live show (hello? Scrooged?), which he needs to do for the money. But a blizzard of Biblical proportions strikes, screwing everything up. He can’t cancel, but…well, a whole lot happens (including a power failure) and he, his crew, a wedding party, and miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam end up in the hotel bar, doing what you might expect in a Manhattan bar during a blizzard on Christmas Eve.

There’s drinking, crying, fighting and singing. All the usual elements of holiday festivities.

The piece I truly love is the ensemble’s cover of The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York”. There’s something about this collection odds and sods, primed by either tequila or slivovitz (or both), coming together to sing about broken dreams, lost opportunities and old drunks that just speaks to me.

Whaddaya think?

The first tree in the greenwood

The “Sans Day Carol” comes to us from 19^th Century Cornwall. It’s similar to “The Holly and the Ivy”, but I kind of like this variant better. Sometimes. Sometimes not. It depends.

Here’s the English early music group Carnival Band performing it. I like this version because it hasn’t been interfered with by John Rutter, and that’s hard to find these days.

Water like a stone

It’s the Winter Solstice today—the longest night and shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Humans have been marking the turning back of night around this time for millennia—celebrating the resurgence of light and hope over darkness and despair. Because no matter how black and cold it might seem at this moment, they know that the seasons will revolve; spring will follow winter; there is life beneath the frosted landscape.

The English poet Christina Rossetti wrote “In the Bleak Midwinter” in 1872, although it wasn’t published until 1904. A couple of years later it was set to music by Gustav Holst and became the carol we now know.

The imagery of the first stanza just makes you shiver—earth hard as iron; moaning, frosty wind; water like stone; snow piled deep on itself. It’s a frozen world, an absolutely perfect description of the Winter Solstice. As Rossetti goes on to describe the mother and child, the stable beasts and the angels, you can just about see their breaths billowing misty into the night air.

It seems appropriate for today, and here’s one of my favorite a capella groups, Chanticleer, singing it.

Hark now, hear the angels sing

Let’s return from the Old World to the New, and have something with a bit of a Caribbean flavor.

The first time I ever heard “Mary’s Boy Child” must have been Harry Belafonte’s version. But ever since my first watching of the Carnegie Hall Christmas broadcast some time in the 90s, my heart on this has belonged to Kathleen Battle, Frederica von Stade, Wynton Marsalis and the Boys Choir of Harlem.

Yeah, okay—bleat about cultural appropriation some other time. I just love this, so here it is.