Where’s Ebenezer Scrooge when we need him the most?

Christmas is coming!

I know, this is only July. But the fine folks who peddle merchandise to us on cable TV don’t want us to be caught unprepared five months from now. Perhaps right now you are sipping your iced tea and casting an appraising eye on your front lawn, just imagining the wonder and joy of all the new holiday displays you can install there to light up the night and hyperinflate your electric bill between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.

Never fear, you have friends in the Christmas business. Today’s Special Value at QVC is an EIGHT FOOT HIGH by EIGHT FOOT WIDE “Inflatable Animated Musical Carousel w/2 Spot Lights” and I’ll let them describe it:

Bring the holidays to life with this animated inflatable carousel lawn ornament. This very merry display spins just like a real carousel and features four prancing reindeer carrying Santa Claus, a snowman, a polar bear, and a penguin.

For an extra touch of cheer, the decoration plays four favorite Christmas carols–”Deck the Halls,” “Jingle Bells,” Up on the Housetop,” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Play the songs on a continuous loop or set them to motion sensors as a festive welcome to passers by. Tethers, stakes, and two spotlights are included for setup. The music box requires 4 AA batteries, not included. Using the built-in fan blower, setup takes approximately 10 to 15 minutes.

Measures approximately 8′Diam x 8′H.

UL listed.

Made in China.

All for only $129.54 plus tax and S&H. And if you buy more than one at the same time you can save on S&H!

Bah humbug. This kind of crap reminds me of maybe the best line ever written in a popular song. In Kinky Friedman’s immortal They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore (“they don’t turn the other cheek the way they did before”), a Jewish guy talks back to a redneck bigot who’d spewed verbal abuse at him, ending with ” . . . and you [Jews] killed God’s only son.” Our hero’s retort: “We Jews believe it was Santa Claus who killed Jesus Christ.”

Amen.

(The Kinkster wrote that song almost 40 years ago, I think inspired by Israel’s stunning “upset” victory in that six-day war back in 1967 or so. I still have fond memories of seeing Kinky and his band the Texas Jewboys perform in Houston back in the early 70′s. Hell, if I still lived in Texas I’d vote for him.)

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NOTICE AND DISCLAIMER: This post constitutes my personal fair comment on merchandise offered publicly for sale by QVC online and on television. QVC may own or assert copyright in or of the image and/or text description or merchandise displayed above. QVC is welcome to it. Don’t steal their stuff.

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The Great Outdoors

George in Denver has posted a letter to his dearly (and recently) departed wonderful dog, Sweet Melissa, about a recent weekend camping trip. My favorite parts are about all the damn schlepping it seems to take to get yerself out into the great outdoors. Here’s a bit of George’s explanation to Melissa:

Camping is when you load up the car with food and shelter and blow-up mattresses (and the pump to blow them up) and toilet paper and snacks and booze (lots of booze) and flashlights and bug spray and seven layers of clothing and sunscreen and zip-up bags to sleep in and pillows and coolers filled with ice and a shovel (to bury you know what!) and a saw and a hatchet and fold-up camping chairs and hats and ten pairs of socks (they get wet!) and hiking boots and running shoes (for me, at least) and trail shoes and underwear (if you happen to do underwear) and cameras and feelings of adventure and good tidings ’cause you’re going to be in the wilderness and might see Bambi and, well, lots of gas in the tank and air in the tires. But, sweetheart, that’s just the beginning.

The whole thing is here.

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Accidentally and hypothetically

Friend stirred her coffee and grinned. “What?” I ask, thinking do I have spinach stuck in my teeth.

“Oh, nothing.”

“Come on. You’re up to something.”

“Well . . .”

“Tell me.”

“Hmm. OK. It’s like this.” She sat up straight. “I was just thinking of an, um, hypothetical situation which would be funny.” Looked right at me.

I decided to play along. “OK, this is just hypothetical, this thing. Right?”

“Yes, exactly.” She paused to collect her thoughts, a little smile curved her mouth before she started. “The story would go like this. Early one morning on the way to work a person stops to pick up dry cleaning and parks her car in a space right in front of the cleaners. It’s early enough that there are several empty ones there.

“She goes inside, has to wait a minute for another customer to finish her pickup, and picks up her items.

“When she walks out she sees that a car has just been parked next to her car in the empty spot to the left – and really NEXT to it. The car is a shiny sporty thang with leather seats, which is sitting over the line well into her space, leaving maybe 24 inches of clearance on the drivers side of her car. Male driver of said car (let’s call him Clueless Dude), Bluetooth headset and all, is just getting out of the car as she exits the building, right in front of him.

“Clueless Dude doesn’t make eye contact, may not have even seen her. She’s very annoyed that with all the space available, CD slams his stupid car right up next to her car. She, well, sort of accidentally bumps the side of his car with her car doors as she maneuvers her dry cleaning into the back seat and herself into the driver’s seat. ‘Cause to tell ya the truth, there’s no way to open either door and get in without touching CD’s ride.

“She’s just pissed enough to desire some sort of revenge, but not crazy enough to do any actual destruction. Belting herself into her seat, she sees that CD is still occupied at the cleaners’ counter. Hey, maybe he just accidentally parked like that, after all.

“Somehow – she would claim if ever asked that it was just an accident – some water ends up on CD’s fine leather seats just before she drives away. See, she rolls down her car window right after starting the engine, then reaches for the 24 oz bottle of water she has in the cupholder, for a drink. And somehow ends up clumsily holding that bottle sideways facing toward CD’s car’s open window that is so VERY CLOSE to her own, and grabs it and squeezes it real hard for a few seconds as she tries not to drop it.

“Anyway, there is a nice strong stream of pure clean water there for a second or so, from her car window which arcs satisfyingly into CD’s car, clear past the mid-point and probably nicely landed on the driver’s seat.

“And no doubt CD would come out of the cleaners, sit right down in his car – and have a real little surprise.”

She stopped, realized she was smiling again, and looked serious. “That would be very immature behavior, if it really happened. And wasn’t an accident.”

“And,” I added, “hypothetical.”

We exchanged grins this time.

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July 9 Birthdays

Here are some names I found on this list of today’s birthdays, a wildly assorted group:

July 9, 1964 Courtney Love, SF, vocalist, Hole, /actress, People vs Larry Flynt
July 9, 1956 Tom Hanks, born in Concord, California, actor, Bossom Buddies, Forrest Gump, Phila
July 9, 1955 Jimmy Smits, born in Brooklyn, actor, Victor-LA Law, Running Scared, New YorkPD Blue
July 9, 1952 John Tesh, born in Garden City, New York, New age pianist/TV host, ET
July 9, 1947 O. J. Simpson, American Athlete
July 9, 1945 Dean Koontz, U.S., sci-fi author, Star Quest, Beastchild
July 9, 1937 David Hockney, born in Bradford, England, artist, Pop Art
July 9, 1933 Oliver Sacks, American Scientist
July 9, 1932 Donald Rumsfeld, politician
July 9, 1932 J. P. Getty, US/British oil magnate/billionaire, Getty Oil
July 9, 1916 Edward Heath, British Prime Minister, 1970-74
July 9, 1901 Barbara Cartland, romance author, Camfield #69
July 9, 1887 Samuel Eliot Morison, historian, Admiral of the Ocean Sea
July 9, 1879 Ottorino Respighi, born in Bologna, Italy, composer, Pines of Rome
July 9, 1878 H V Kaltenborn, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, newscaster, Who Said That?
July 9, 1856 Daniel Guggenheim, U.S., Guggenheim Museum
July 9, 1856 Nikola Tesla, born in Croatia, electrical engineer/inventor, Tesla Coil
July 9, 1819 Elias Howe, Spencer Massachusetts, invented sewing machine
July 9, 1766 J Schopenhauer, writer

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The Fragile Circle

The Fragile Circle

“We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached.

Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way.

We cherish memory as the only certain immortality, never fully understanding the necessary plan.”

– Irving Townsend

George in Denver reports sad news, the passing of his beautful majestic dog, Sweet Melissa. My deepest sympathies to George and David on their huge loss.

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The grace in growing older

One of my favorite book titles is The Grace in Older Women, a Lovejoy novel by Jonathan Gash. I must admit that I recall not a bit of the plot, a sad fact in light of my personal relationship to the whole Lovejoy thing – I’ll have to explain that here sometime.

Today’s column by Garrison Keillor which ran here in the Rocky Mountain News, reflects the grace – and perspective – of a man looking back at his youthful attitudes with wiser eyes. I enjoyed it hugely and you can read the whole thing here.

Sipping coffee as he thinks about his young daughter’s chalking “I Love Dad” on the driveway, Keillor wonders if he should spend more time teaching her how to work, the way his own hard-working family taught him to hoe weeds when he was still of tender years. He writes:

Work is a blessing. There is enough passivity and mediocrity in the world without us adding to it. . . .

The good people I come from were graduates of the College of the Crash, Class of 1929. They valued hard work and persistence. They enjoyed their coffee breaks, not the $3.50 kind with froth and a shot of caramel . . . but the kind where the waitress brings around the glass carafe and says, “Let me warm that up for you.” It was the work around the break that gave the break its sweetness, not the coffee.

Of course he rebelled against this, seeing his father come home tired every night after work, falling asleep in his chair after dinner and going off to bed – to rest up for another day of work. He told himself, “My life will be different. I will think, I will read books.”

Now in his own late middle age, it looks different and he admits his errors:

We rebelled on the basis of poor information. We considered our people to be “vanilla,” as we used to say, meaning bland, but we were ignorant of vanilla. The vanilla bean itself is not bland or simple, nor is vanilla extract; it’s as rich and complicated as chocolate. If the only vanilla you know is what McDonald’s sells, then yes, vanilla means emptiness. But the emptiness is in you, my dear, not in your people.

So you read books and thought big thoughts and sought a different life, and you achieved it, if you did, by virtue of the very qualities you rebelled against which your dad instilled in you. He may not have hugged you or encouraged your fantasy life, but he taught you to buckle down and attend to business and to thrive on it. It was this persistence that enabled you to become the self-absorbed romantic you are today. And now here you are in your pregeriatric years, drinking $3.50 coffee and worrying about how to bring up your children.

Solomon said, “The thing that has been is the thing that shall be; and the thing that is done is that which shall be done: There is nothing new under the sun.” But he never went to Wal-Mart. I miss the old times . . .

We all went to public schools and we knew certain songs by heart, the one about the E-ri-e is a-rising and the gin is getting low and Dinah in the kitchen and the spacious skies of course and praise God from whom all blessings flow. But then the schools started encouraging creativity and kids wrote their own songs, which were crappy, but teachers pretended they were wonderful so as not to stunt the child’s imagination, and the old songs, which truly were wonderful, got lost, which was symptomatic of a general loss of standards carried out by romantic narcissists my age, some of them friends of mine.

I’m groping for grace in my life these days. I’m sure the clothes I wore in my teens and 20′s were ugly as hell to many of my parent’s generation. So I’m holding my tongue about some of the stuff I see young folks wearing now. Reserving the right to certain basic aesthetic opinions, of course, and my disapproval of the “street ho” look being sported by so many young girls and sold by the industrial-fashion-retail complex.

And call me a fuddy duddy, but I still think the Denver Art Museum Expansion is ugly as hell. The good news is that no terrorists would consider bombing it because it already looks like collapsed rubble so what would be the point?

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