The Fourth Post of Christmas: The Things I Don't Want You Buy For Me From Sky Mall Magazine (Part 1?)

We all know that I've made bad choices in the past. I know that I've bought holiday sweaters for my dog and/or cat. I know that I still have that crystal unicorn collectible in a box in my basement and I hardly every talk to him anymore (I'm sorry Wonderdasher . . . I just need some time to move on . . . ). And please don't bring up my shape-of-a-British-phone-booth CD and tie organizer. No, I still haven't been able to sell it on e-Bay. But it will hold my unfolded clean laundry in my corner quite nicely for now, thank you.

But I'm trying to move on with my life. I need to get off of the SkyMall Magazine wagon. No more. No more. And there is so much you can do to help me. Well, just one thing. I don't need any more useless, gaudy and ridiculously overpriced . . . stuff. To be sure you get the picture, I've made a short list of things that you definitely, definitely, ABSOLUTELY cannot buy me. Well, if you want, you can. Ok, ok, just one! Maybe two.

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Warm Whiskers Neckwrap

Because why just keep your neck warm when you can keep your neck warm with a cute kitty cat! People won't even have to know that you are a week girly-girl who needs a neck warmer because they'll think you just wanted to wear such a cutsey, cute little, kitty-witty cat.

As an added bonus, it hearkens back to the good old days of women wearing dead fur around their necks! Win-win! No, better yet, win-win-win!!

Price: $39.95

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Hogan vs Andre the Giant Photo

Truly, thunder rumbled and the gods themselves did quake that memorable day when for some reason or another SkyMall bravely looked backward into the terrifying, apocalyptic past of professional wrestling and brought forth this mighty tribute to Herculean strength and stretchy, stretchy costumes. Overpriced you say? I say, Hogan vs. Andre: Priceless!!

Price: $190.00

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Skateboard Simulator

I wish I had time in my busy, 9 to 5, work-a-day humdrum existence to add a little spark, a little pop a little, oh I don't know, a rail-mung dropping into a 5-0 grind before ramping up to hit a sick Crookie Monster. You know, just to liven up my day a bit. But who has time for skateboarding and cool skateboarding lingo? I do! Gnar! Hammer! Ender ender! The easiest way to break into the "cool" world of "hip" young skaters who "probably won't amount to much"? The SkyMall Skateboard Simulator! Hop on ride those rails and if you put down enough pads, you probably won't break anything!

Bonus: Every time you look down, you'll be reminded that, thanks to SkyMall, you're "radical"! "Dude"!

Price: $59.95

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Phew! Not asking for stuff is hard work. But keep in mind there are so, so many other things that you should definitely NOT get me for Christmas from SkyMall catalogue. I'll keep you posted.

The Third Post of Christmas: "Little Dumber Boy"

(the following was an overheard conversation)

"Honey, I just don't see what the big deal is!"

"Again, it's just a really, terribly, bad idea!"

"I still don't see how that's a bad idea. It'll get them into the Christmas spirit!"

"Really, Steven? Really?! Can you think of one single time, one single person, who just having gone through such an long and ardous experience would think that that would put them into the Christmas spirit?"

"Well, they wrote the song about it didn't they?"

"That's my point!! Nobody ever really stopped to say 'You know what? If a boy came in and did that right after I had just had a baby, I would smile politely and thank him for his thoughtful gift.'"

"Sharon, he was a poor boy. A poor boy. It was all he had!"

"I worry, I really worry, about the boy who, walking into a filthy stable and seeing a mother in the state she must have been in, thinks to himself, 'Looking on in reverent silence at the newborn King would be good, but banging out a smokin' hot riff on my drum?!! That's exactly what this situation calls for!!' Honestly, Steven, you show me that boy and I'll show you someone our tax dollars should be providing programs for."

"Sharon it was all he had and it was just a gesture!"

"And I'm telling you that if it had be ME after Chelsea was born? . . . Well, I can think of several gestures I would have shot right back at him."

". . . " (mumbling)

"Of course I'm overreacting, Steven! It's my only sister's first child! It was a thirty-six, a THIRTY-SIX HOUR, delivery! AND I've been telling you no the entire drive over here, and if you don't stop playing "Wipe Out" on the nurse's counter right now, and take your snare drum back to the car, you will not live to see our child open her Christmas presents!"

(quietly to self) "Pah-rum-pum-pum-pum, Rum-pum-pum-pum, Rum-pum-pum-p-aaACKHH."

"Nurse, one to visit room 3405. When he gets up, please take his sticks out of his mouth and tell him that he can wait in car."

Twelve Posts of Christmas #2: Orange You Glad I Didn't Say Chinchilla?

For today's Christmas post, I wanted to share with you a very special story, one that has been told in my family for years and means more and more (or less and less) as time goes by. This story of course, is the story of the "Christmas Orange." I found at least three versions of the story, each with large, but essentially unimportant detail changes: in one the orphan tracks mud in the house, in one he starts a fight, in one the orphan is a girl etc. The story is almost always the same and if you are like me, you've heard it ad nauseum (as in "it makes you literally nauseous"). So I made a few minor adjustments, as you will hopefully notice below.

When I have replaced words (with a very simple Find/Replace function), they appear in bold. When I have added or embellished (for the sake of ludicracy and commentary), I put those in italics. (Note: For a more direct comparison, read along to this version. I think you'll enjoy). If you are strapped for time, just read the first, second and last paragraphs. Feliz Navidade.

Gil was nine years old with tousled brown hair with watery blue eyes as bright as a drowning angel. For as long as Gil could remember he had lived within the walls of a poor orphanage. He was just one of ten children supported by what meager contributions the orphan home could obtain by defrauding off-shore holding companies. There was very little to eat, but at Christmas time there always seemed to be a little more than usual, and the orphanage seemed a little warmer. But more than this, there was the Christmas chinchilla!

Christmas was the only time of year that such a rare treat was provided and it was treasured by each child like no other food: admiring it, feeling it, prizing it and slowly enjoying each juicy section. Truly, it was the light of each orphan's Christmas and their best gift of the season. There was an orange tree in the back yard of the orphanage, but all of the orphans were sick and tired of them, and mostly threw them at passing cars. How joyful would be the moment when Gil received his chinchilla!

Unknown to him, Gil had somehow managed to track a small amount of mud through the front door, muddying the new carpet, the new carpet that the orphanage decided to buy before shelling out money for decent Christmas gifts. The punishment was swift and unrelenting, not to mention a complete overkill, though it sets a nice tone for this story: Gil would not be allowed his Christmas chinchilla! It was the only gift he would receive from the harsh world he lived in, (besides a crushing sense of worthlessness and a proclivity toward alcoholism), yet after a year of waiting for his Christmas chinchilla, is was to be denied him.

Tearfully, Gil pleaded that he be forgiven and promised never to track mud into the orphanage again, but to no avail as that surely would ruin the touching ending of the story. Gil cried into his pillow all that night and spent Christmas Day feeling empty and alone. He felt that the other children didn't want to be with a boy who had been punished with such a cruel punishment. Maybe, he reasoned, the gulf between him and his friends existed because they feared he would ask for a little of their chinchillas. Gil leapt to several other overblown conclusions that were no doubt included in this story to make absolutely sure that we were empathizing with the poor orphan bereft of his chinchilla. Gil spent the day upstairs, alone, in the unheated dormitory. Huddled under his only blanket, he wondered why the author kept including details about how miserable Gil's life was: unheated dormitory, little to eat, only one blanket. He wondered if readers would sympathize with an orphan who wasn't suffering as much as an orphan could possibly suffer. Probably they could not.

Bedtime came, and worst of all (if you didn’t count the food poisoning in their dinner the orphans would violently learn about early the next morning), Gil couldn't sleep. As he climbed into bed from the cold, hard floor, a soft hand touched Gil shoulder, startling him momentarily and an object was silently placed in his hands. The giver disappeared into the darkness, leaving Gil with what, he did not immediately know! Looking closely at it in the dim light, he saw that it looked like a chinchilla! Not a regular chinchilla, smooth and shiny, but a special chinchilla, very special. Inside a patched together skin were the segments of nine other chinchillas, making one whole chinchilla for Gil! The nine other children in the orphanage had each donated one segment of their own precious chinchillas to make a whole chinchilla as a gift for Gil.

The End

Twelve Posts of Christmas #1: Goodnight, my Deer

My Christmas gift to all of you this year is a dosage of satirical wit and an heaping spoonful of undeserved pride in myself. Everyday up till Christmas, you will be treated with a new installment of a short, Christmas-themed piece of writing. I guarantee they'll usher in the spirit of the season (or at least some kind of spirit. Hopefully the kind that is easy to exorcise). If you feel a measure of the Christmas spirit yourself, please leave a comment so that I know you dropped by. It's the least you could do for me isn't it?



The First Day of Christmas: "Goodnight, my Deer"

"So you see," Professor Ericson said to his daughter, as he turned off his PowerPoint projector and sat down at the foot of her bed, "It's unreasonable to think that his nose was glowing at all. The text clearly indicates that the nose was "shiny" and that we (the objective observers) "would even SAY it glowed." The physical state of the red nose probably indicated some type of dermal infection, resulting in overactive sebaceous glands excreting oil on to the epidermal surface. Or maybe swelling, perhaps to due to some kind of tumor or cyst within the nose caused the skin to be stretched tight and swollen with blood, causing both a shiny appearance and red discoloration. In any case, these maladies would not cause the nose to glow or emit any kind of phosphorescent light of its own. In foggy atmospheric conditions, ambient light would be reduced to almost nothing and certainly no more illumination would have been produced from the animal's nose. Putting him, a probably diseased creature at the head of the team pulling the sleigh was a foolhardy error that showed a serious lack of judgement. In actuality, the other reindeer were probably right to shun him."





The Professor placed his dry, chapped lips briefly on Kimberly's forehead and walked out of the room, trailing a long, glistening trail of imaginary reindeer blood. The snap of the light switch was the pull-chord of the guillotine that slid down to behead the last last vestiges of childhood fantasy. And his whispered, "Merry Christmas, sweetheart," rustled through the room like needles skittering over concrete.

Peace on Earth: "You can't spell 'intolerance' without 'tolerance'!"

Note: An entry on religious tolerance the same week as Gov. Mitt Romney's speech on religious tolerance and no reference to that speech? It's true! I don't really have anything to add to his speech except to say that I agree with it. You can watch it here. I am a fan of Mr. Romney. I don't agree with all of his ideas, but I agree with most of them.

As soon as Thanksgiving has come and gone, the holiday season is come upon us. Christmas and his younger holiday brothers, who have been demanding more and more attention lately have come around and it's it's only natural for people to show an increase in love and understanding. Barring that, of course, it's time to show a new, more special intolerance of other people's beliefs.
Of course, I started out mentioned the holiday fervor people get into. Can we look forward to another year of "Happy Holiday's" vs. "Merry Christmas"? Only time will tell. That is, time will tell or I will tell you. Yes. I'm telling you that, yes, we will have more of that this year. Sheesh.

But that's really not the main gist of what I wanted to mention. Two things came to my attention this week, both kind of in random ways that made me think about the existence (and in some cases prevalence) of religious intolerance. They involve the Church of Scientology and the Jehovah's Witnesses.

A BBC report this week discussed a move on the federal and state levels in Germany to declare the Church of Scientology from the country. Currently, Scientology is not recognized as a religion in Germany. Their accusations, that Scientology has "cult-like practices" and are "a threat to the rule of law and 'democratic order'" seem more than a little ridiculous. I openly admit that I know nothing of Scientology besides what I have seen on the first 3 pages of theirs official website and on the long, long Wikipedia entry discussing the religion. And, I will admit, what I saw on the South Park episode about Tom Cruise being stuck in the closet (which was hilarious). In my opinion, Scientology seems more than a little strange, in its claims, in the story of its origins, and in how much latitude they give Tom Cruise to go around being a weirdo and say dumb things.

All that being said, I am a Mormon, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a church that has been openly, at times violently, attacked for its entire 177 year-old life. So I am more than a little hesitant to throw another religion (if they call themselves a church, then they are a church) under the bus and condemn them without 1) knowing anyone who practices of Scientology and 2) without knowing why they do what they do.

OK, item number two. This came in the form of a comic strip titled "The Crisis" that was written (poorly) and drawn (poorlier) by a fundamentalist Christian named Jack T. Chick. This particular comic details the crisis of a young girl being taken to the hospital and needing a blood transfusion. However, her parents are devout Jehovah's Witnesses and their religion forbids accepting blood from others because they feel that the Bible forbids it.

I suggest that you read "The Crisis." Marvel at the rising intensity of the action as The Christian hospital staff (the right kind of Christian mind you. Jehovah's Witnesses consider themselves Christians) bewail the foolish beliefs of the parents. Sit up at the edge of your seat as, in a last ditch effort to save the girl, they send the hospital chaplain in to talk to the panicking parents. Raise your eye-brows as the chaplain mentions to the parents (while their daughter lies bleeding and dying in the other room),"There are several things I disagree with in your beliefs." Feel a chill runs up your spine as two dark-suited Jehovah's Witnesses (are these some kind of enforcers? We can only assume that they are!! Wow!!) are dispatched from Watchtower headquarters after receiving "a print-out on Doug and Donna. . . [Donna] is the weaker of the two . . ." Their mission? To remove the child before she can be saved so that she can be saved (see how I used the same word for two different meanings there?).



The foregone dramatic conclusion is of course that the chaplain, in less than a half-hour, succeeds in not only getting permission for a blood transfusion before its too late but also in convincing Doug and Donna to reject the primary tenants of their religion, accept Jesus as their Savior and become saved (Doug's poorly drawn expression is priceless)! The dark suited Witnesses arrive just too late ("Foiled again! If it wasn't for you cursed Christians!!")(that's not a real quote from the comic, but it practically could be). The icing on the cake in my mind is the 'Saved Certificate' at the bottom of the comic that you can print out, read, check a box and thereby receive salvation in the kingdom of God. Good stuff.

Here's my final soap-box: I strongly believe in the value of religion to produce good people. I also believe in sharing what I personally know to be true with other people because of the good that it has done in my life. But I think that that invitation needs to be offered in simple and humble terms and not in aggressive or mean-spirited ones. And being intolerant of others? Even if others are intolerant of you? In the end, all of us are trying to do the best that we can. And if we can't work together in trying to keep this world a good place to be, then we have completely missed the point of any and every religion out there.

Happy Holiday's everyone.

Funny things that that I wanted to pass along

Unintentionally funny:

This is someone's description about themselves from Facebook. The good stuff is at the end, but don't skip down first. You'll be glad you didn't.

i hate when people say they are from Boston and they're like from a suburb
thats near boston and(lol) is nothing like boston.....you have to have lived in
the dirty bean to know how it is( if you dont know what the "dirty bean" is then
you definateley shouldnt say you're from their) HAHAHAHAHAH j/k actually im
not

(To alleviate concern that I'm that creepy guy who goes trolling around Facebook, I happened to be looking for a Nelson Mandela quote and this girl happened to have it. I read what she had written about herself and wanted to share it with others. I was also curing cancer at the
same time. At a soup kitchen. I'm a good person.)


Intentionally funny:

"You know what I love about the O. C.? The diversity. Between upper-middle class and upper. My people. Is there anything more annoying than the poor? Always complaining? 'Oh, I can't afford a two-bedroom town house for $600,000!' Good! Move east! That's what the Midwest if for. For people who gave up on their dreams."

"A leopard can carry two times it's body weight into a tree. I don't have a joke for that yet, but it is accurate. And just in case you hate my stand up, you can leave saying, 'You know, at least I learned something.'"

- Daniel Tosh

(Kitten asleep in bowl of food: Unintentionally funny. Posting it here: intentionally funny)

A picture is worth a thousand boastful words.

I realized something extremely harrowing and important just now: the picture I posted of the BYU vs. Utah game in the weekly photo was much, much too small. So to make up for my gross misjudgement, here are some photos that I took, ones that you can enlarge, save as your desktop background, or have imprinted on your tombstone. They show the one, two and seven minute progression of the fans rushing the field after the game.

Honestly, though, the game ended 17-10, and just seeing the final score doesn't really explain a few things about the game. I think this was the best matched Utah vs. BYU game in years. BYU's statistics (twice as many passing and rushing yards) really show that they played the better game and should have clearly been the winners, not just the almost heart-broken losers. There were no touchdowns until the final quarter of the game (ridiculous on the part of both teams). Utah's march down the field to score their touchdown was very well executed. The fact that I think BYU's offense could have stopped them several times doesn't detract from the fact that they came the whole length of the field to score.

As much as I loved (and went hoarse shouting because of) the miraculous 4th and 18 pass from the Cougar's own 16 yard line, I can't believe the Cougars let themselves get into such a dangerous position to begin with. . . . All in all, I'm ecstatic that BYU won (and will be playing UCLA in a rematch in the Las Vegas Bowl game). But like, last year's game, a solid thumping of the Utes would make us all happier than bringing us down into the dregs of despair before coming back to win. Enjoy the photos (that mean's you Kara and Melissa).















The field, some 60 seconds after the game ends.




Two minutes after game end.



Seven minutes after game end.

Good times were had by all (or at least 90% of the crowd anyway).