Gwnewch y pethau bychain

Month: November 2005 Page 1 of 3

Squirrel Name Generator

So, katyhh points to the Squirrel Name Generator. And I thought “Well, that sounds cute.” So I went and entered my name, to see what it spit out.

My squirrel name is “Arch Bishop Bushkisser”.

How oddly appropriate. 🙂 (I wonder what my anteater name is….*blinks innocently*)

Tis the season

With the Thanksgiving holiday behind us, it’s time to look forward to December. I love this season, no matter whether it is Christmas or Solstice or Hanukkah or something else entirely, or even if it’s just December. Folks just seem more decent and nice to one another, and the days seem cheerier, and the world is a brighter and happier place. So, in that theme, some holiday oriented links to get the season off to a good start:

  • Tris McCall’s Christmas Abstract
    Ok, I know I post this every year, but I just love this entire essay. Tris McCall runs down all the popular Christmas music and offers opinions on them, according to a very specific and idiosyncratic criteria. I don’t agree with everything there, but it’s compelling reading. Some excerpts

    Linus and Lucy

    Speaking of Peanuts, I consider A Charlie Brown Christmas the high point of Western civilization. Okay, I’m kidding. A little. No, really, since Christian theology has been the font for monumental artistic expression from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to Of The Heart, Of The Soul, and Of The Cross, it’s possible to see the Peanuts special as a sort of crown — a succinct and poetic articulation of ancient principles. If you can understand why Charlie Brown chooses the tiniest and most unhealthy-looking tree in the lot, you’re at least halfway to the proper spirit in which to approach the Gospels. Incidentally, the famous Linus speech I alluded to in the last entry is Luke 2.8-14, straight from the King James Version. I don’t think that is made clear during the program. CBS certainly knew, and they were shitting bricks that audiences would find the special too preachy. This was 1965; in 2003, a project like this one doesn’t even get out of the gate. Thank God it’s been grandfathered in as an annual event — by now it’s too much of an institution for the seculars to gripe about St. Schulz, and really, how much Heatmiser can a person take?

    Have A Holly Jolly Christmas

    God, what a retarded song. What the hell is a “cup of cheer”? It must have taken the composers all of three minutes to put together this lyric. Here are the rhymes, or what passes for them: year/cheer, street/meet, see/me, hear/year. It is a damning critique of our culture that it makes songs like this inescapable for a full twelfth of our lives. Anybody who thinks there’s any ground for substituting “Holly Jolly Christmas” for “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” — on progressive grounds or otherwise — deserves to have to listen to records like this. “Have a holly jolly Christmas/ and in case you didn’t hear,” it wraps up, before it repeats the title as if there are only five words in the whole world. I heard.

    I love Christmas music, so a huge long catalog of the best and worst of the genre is always worth revisiting.

  • Speaking of revisiting, if you’ve ever wondered how some of those Christmas classics came to be written, here’s a wonderful article that goes into just that history. Definitely fun reading.
  • Atlanta’s free altweekly newspaper, Creative Loafing, has a great article this week on Seventeen ways you can make a difference, even if you’re broke. The specific contact info for various volunteer organizations tends to be Atlanta-specific, as is to be expected, but the ideas given here are universal. If you find you have a little spare time or energy this holiday season, see if you can’t find some inspiration here to go and make a difference in someone’s life.
  • Finally, just for enjoyment, absolutely the coolest home holiday lights display I’ve ever seen. Thanks to danea for pointing me towards it.

    I hope everyone has an utterly fantastic holiday season!

Well, that explains that, then



Bizarro, by Dan Piraro

Question of the day

Me: “Ok, so what would you put in a Slippery Lesbian?”

Personal soundtrack

That was the week that was…

So, I kept meaning to post something about this and that and the other thing, and never got around to it, but the week wasn’t entirely uneventful. Highlights:

  • Got to talk to maedbh7 for a good long while last Sunday, which was wonderful. Still a lot of unresolved stuff there, but it was a great conversation, and I really miss just hanging out on the phone with her and talking about whatever random stuff comes up.
  • Also last Sunday, we had thatcrazycajun and singing_phoenix over for dinner, where we ate yummy Thai Chicken and talked and watched a bit of the Muppet Show DVD.
  • Monday, the low point of the week, I dropped by the house to see if the mail had come during my lunch break, and when I got back into my car, it wouldn’t start. Luckily, kitanzi works just up the street, so I called her to come pick me up and deliver me back to work, after pushing the car into a nearby parking space and alerting the apartment office that I would be leaving it there a few days. Inconvenient, but at least it’s easy for us to carpool, since we have pretty compatible schedules and work across the street from one another.
  • Monday night, had a nice long phone chat with catalana, which left me in a considerably better mood.
  • Friday, we had our big Thanksgiving feast at work. I provided beverages (several Coke products, plus a gallon of sweet iced tea from Chick-fil-A). One of the neat things about our office potlucks is that, having folks from all over in our office, we get a wide variety of contributions to the table. There was fried chicken, and green beans, and some sort of little dim sum pot stickers, and fried rice, and stuffing with Jamaican spices, and deviled eggs and three different kinds of potato salad, and pasta salad, and a Jello mold with pears in it, and a wonderful pineapple punch that I got the recipe for and about nine different kinds of dessert, including a delicious thing that Tim’s wife makes that folks in my department know to grab a bit of during the first pass, because if you wait until you’re ready for dessert, you won’t get any. As you can see from my brief post on Friday, I ate waaaaay too much, and didn’t end up eating again until the next morning. But for all that I suffered Friday afternoon, it was worth it.
  • Saturday, we went over to joyeuse13 and abovenyquist‘s house to help stain the walls of the new deck. We sanded the sides of the wall while joyeuse13 went to acquire the right kind of stain, and then with four pairs of hands it went really fast, and is now a lovely warm shade of brown that really makes the whole area feeling welcoming. It’s going to be fantastic once they’re done with all the work.

    After finishing the deck, we ordered pizza, and chatted a good while, the decided to head back up towards our place to change clothes and the four of us went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I really want to see it again, though I don’t know that I’ll manage again in the theatre, but it was a gorgeously produced movie that I found quite enjoyable from start to finish.

  • Before went over to joyeuse13 and abovenyquist‘s, I had called to have my poor car carted off to the garage. They called before we left their house to tell me it was all fixed, and apparently just needed a new battery. I was pleased and relieved, since I’d never had a battery go dead quite that suddenly without warning before, and was sure that it would turn out to be something far more expensive. We dropped by to pick it up en route to the house, and I now have my own transportation again.

Today has mostly been grocery shopping and City of Villains and catching up on CSI. All in all, not a bad week.

Ugggh.

Today, my office had its annual Thanksgiving day potluck dinner. Everyone brought yummy food, and we all ate and drank and were merry.

I. Ate. TOO. Much. Fooooooooood.

Ugh. Want to go lie down now.

Conversation from a few minutes ago:

eloren: At least there was no turkey. Then we really wouldn’t be able to stay awake.
autographedcat: Yeah. Although, Tryptophan Coma would be a good name for a band….

Because, who doesn’t want to feel glittery?

A single word…

Gakked from filkerdave and kitanzi

Describe me in one word – just one.

Please comment to me, then (IFF you want to take part) post this entry to your Live Journal and see how many strange things people think about you.

Soundtrack

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