Happy Holidays (2015 edition)

Apparently, novelty candidate Donald Trump and some random Youtube pastor have decided that the annual "War on Christmas" is starting again: this time, it's because Starbucks changed their cups to plain red (which is particularly stupid, since what Starbucks removed from the cups wasn't Christian imagery; it was just random snowflakes, reindeer, and other secular decorations).

But as usual, the cries of "they can't say 'Merry Christmas' anymore!" are also going up. (I particularly like Trump's quote: "If I become president, we're all going to be saying, 'Merry Christmas' again. That I can tell you." Because he thinks that's a law he can pass? And people complain that OBAMA is a "dictator"?)

But, you know, "happy holidays" is actually a valid thing to say for the rest of the year. It isn't that there's a war on Christmas - somebody seems to have forgotten that there are other holidays.

For example, today was Veteran's Day. Speaking as a veteran, fuck you if you're ignoring it in favor of something a month and a half away. (The British call it "Armistice Day." If you happen to be Canadian, it's called "Remembrance Day" - same thing, just more polite.)

If you happen to be Hindu, this whole week is a celebration, based around Diwali (most of the festivals have different names in different parts of India, since they have a cubic buttload of languages in that country). You missed Dhanteras on Monday, but today is specifically Diwali, the "Festival of Lights," which spiritually celebrates the victory of light over darkness, knowledge over ignorance, good over evil, and hope over despair. It's a big-ass party, and you're missing out on it just because you're too small-minded and provincial to move out of your comfort zone.

It also happens to be Kali Puja, where the remembrance of Kali sets you free from evil, both within yourself and from the world around you. So there's that. And then tomorrow, the fourth night of Diwali, is called Govardhan Puja, when Krishna defeated Indra by benchpressing the Govardhan hill. (Seriously - look it up.)

And then, on the fifth day of Diwali, we have Bhai Dooj, which is all about celebrating the bonds between brother and sister. (It's a little bit sexist, to be honest - the sister is supposed to cook the brother's favorite food, and it's all about the duty of a brother to protect his sister, and a sister's blessings for her brother. But, hey, if they aren't yelling at each other? That's a bonus right there.)

Then, this Sunday (November 15th) through Wednesday morning (the 18th, if that math is a little hard for you) , we have Chhath Puja, which is thanking the Sun god for his blessings (and maybe getting a little spiritual cleansing in, at the same time). It's famous for being the holiday when Hindus bathe themselves in the waters of the Ganges and epidemiologists have heart attacks.

The day after that, November 19th, is the Great American Smokeout. Not really a holiday, but since my mom smoked herself to an early grave, I support it. So there it is.

And for Pete's sake, we haven't even made it to Thanksgiving, people! How can you bitch about "taking Christ out of Christmas" when you're ignoring "Giving Thanks"? (And for my own little part in the War on Christmas, Santa needs to haul his fat jolly ass back on the other side of Thanksgiving, where he belongs!)

Advent begins on November 29th, too. You're going to bitch about ignoring Christmas, but all you do with Advent is pull pieces of chocolate out of a calendar?

For that matter, both the Christian tradition and our secular friends have a whole flood of holidays throughout the month of December, as I've covered before. Feel free to review some of them if you're curious.

Among the Buddhists, the 8th of December will be Rohatsu, or Bodhi Day. (Rohatsu literally means "8th day of the 12th month," incidentally.) It commemorates the day that the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautauma, or Shakyamuni) achieved enlightenment. Traditions vary amongst Buddhist sects, but usually include meditation, study of the texts, chanting the sutras, or simply performing kind acts toward others.

Now, Chanukah this year will run from sunset on Sunday, December 6, through Monday, December 14, 2015. This should be moderately important to Fox "News" watchers, since they like to trumpet the importance of the "Judeo-Christian tradition." Weirdly, the "Judeo" half of that seems to fall to the wayside a lot.

Which means that they'll also be ignoring the fast of the Tenth of Tevet (in Hebrew, עשרה בטבת‎, or Asarah Be'Tevet), which happens to fall on December 22 this year. It commemorates the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, and among observant Jews, it's a day of fasting from dawn until dusk, with a small service at the end of the day.

Most interestingly, to me at least, December 24th (Christmas Eve to most Americans) has a special meaning this year. It also happens to be Eid Milad ul-Nabi, the Sunni celebration of the birth of the Prophet: the Sunni celebrate it on the 12th day of Rabi' al-awwal (the third month in the Islamic calendar); the Shia celebrate it on the 17th of Rabi' al-awwal. (If you're curious, some sects of Islam, particularly the Wahabbi, consider the celebration itself to be bid'ah, an unnecessary religious innovation.)

Depending on where you are in the world, the observance can be anything from a solemn ceremony to a carnival atmosphere, and can include anything from an exchange of gifts to doing charitable work.

So you see, there are plenty of holidays to come through the end of the year. And with about 3 out of every 10 customers not being Christian (and even among the remaining 70%, there being a lot more than just Christmas to be observed), obviously, it's only reasonable to say "Happy Holidays!"

Thank You For Your Service

It's that wonderful time of year in New Mexico, when we pack dried-out tents full of explosives, which are sold by sweating meth-heads smoking cigarettes.

Every year, this state loses thousands of acres of land to wildfires. And we celebrate independence by firing pyrotechnics into dried grass. Because that makes sense. But let's not worry about little, unimportant questions like "physics." Instead, let's consider the realities of living in the 21st Century.

For example, a few years ago, we had the C-Student President, whose advisers felt we needed a permanent base in the Middle East. So he took us to war. Around 68 hundred American soldiers died for this idiotic attempt to flex our military muscle. But, more importantly for (but oddly related to) the following issue, 970,000 soldiers were damaged (mentally or physically) in the course of fighting in those two related wars.

I figured out, some years back, my own minor insanity. I have the mildest case of PTSD ever reported - I just get cranky and irritable when shit starts blowing up. Which, if you think about it, just qualifies more as "survival instincts" than truly being PTSD.

But here's the problem: explosions have somewhat lost their thrill for a certain percentage of the American populace.

Remember, more now than for any generation of American people in decades, when shit blows up, it doesn't make you want to stand proud. It reminds you of a time when you didn't have control. When your friends and comrades were getting killed around you, and there was nothing you could do.

There was a time when the Republican party celebrated the sacrifices of the American fighting forces. Now, they'd like to forget they exist.

But maybe, just maybe, you can remember them, just for this year. Every time you blow something up, you're reminding them of a time that they'd rather forget. Every firework you set off hurts someone in ways you can't begin to imagine. Be respectful of our troops.

Some of them sacrificed more than you think.

Happy Holidays 2014! Our sporadically-annual review

Well, Thanksgiving is over, that last piece of turkey breast is shoved to the back of the refrigerator, and it's time for Fox "News" to start flogging the War on Christmas.

(Trivia: in the 1920s, Henry Ford published a series of anti-Semitic articles, and noted that “Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone's Birth.” But it wasn't until 1959 that the John Birch society published a pamphlet to warn the nation about an "assault on Christmas." In case you were curious where all this started.)

As usual, the Most Important Sign that there's a War on Christmas is the prevalence of people uttering the phrase "Happy Holidays!" instead of "Merry Christmas!" An Un-American Act which blatantly fails to ignore the fact that not everybody is Christian!

But, because I'm something of a troublemaker, let's consider that little fact. Why IS "Happy Holidays" more appropriate than "Merry Christmas"?

There are any number of strange commemorations and artificial "holidays" set in December and early January, like National Bouillabaisse Day (December 14) and Poinsettia Day (December 12); I'm going to do my best to ignore those, in favor of religious (and semi-religious) holidays which might possibly mean a little more to a larger number of people.

(An argument can be made that Maple Syrup Day is holy to the Canadians, but, unlike the Américains impies, they celebrate it on February 6, when the sap first starts to flow, rather than December 17. So I'm feeling pretty safe on this one.)

December 22 is Forefather's Day, commemorating the Pilgrim's landing on Plymouth Rock. You want a whiter, more all-American holiday? And how come you didn't celebrate it last year, you commie?

The day after Christmas, December 26 is Boxing Day, which is mostly (but not entirely) only still celebrated in England.

If you're catholic, there's a whole string of feast days for various saints, if that's what you're into. (After slightly over 2000 years of history, they have wa-a-a-aayyy more than 365 saints, so there's a lot of overlap on them. You wonder if the saints sharing a particular day get along - do they go out drinking together on their day?)

In fact, you know that whole "12 days of Christmas" thing? It's twelve specific feast days, running from Christmas Day through Twelfth Night (5 January). There's a whole list of specific holidays for each of the twelve days; there's also a bunch of saint's days that have been tacked on. Both these lists vary depending on which flavor of Christian church you're dealing with. (There's also some question of how to tack on Epiphany - the day the Wise Men were supposed to have arrived - which is 6 January. If you're interested, you can read up on it on your own.

The point is, even if you're stuck on the "We're a Christian nation!" thing, you don't even have to leave your own traditions for "Happy Holidays" to be more accurate than "Merry Christmas." But we're better than that, right? We can accept that almost a quarter of the American population is not Christian, and maybe they have the right to have their own traditions, too.

For example, December 4 through December 21, a roughly 2-week string, are considered Zappadan, celebrating the life and works of Frank Zappa. Popular culture also gave us Festivus (you know, for the rest of us) on December 23.

Among the 6.6 million Jewish Americans, Hanukkah runs from December 17th through the 24th. And since our Christian friends like to talk about the "Judeo-Christian tradition," it's a little silly to complain about honoring that one, isn't it?

But this is America, and like it or not, there are plenty of people of other religions, too.

If you follow Tantric Buddhism, the 16th is Dakinis' Day, when they make offerings to the Dakinis (female embodiments of enlightened energy) and Mother Tantra. Among the Tibetan Buddhists, yesterday (December 13th, 2014) was Lha Bab Duchen, celebrating the Buddha's descent from heaven after teaching the Dharma there. And coming up on the 21st is Shakyamuni Buddha Day, where they meditate on the Buddha's teachings and strive to fulfill the Precepts. And the 29th is Tara Puja, the fast of Bodhisattva Tara (she has a lot of aspects - it's a little confusing, looking in from outside).

In the Islamic calendar, you just missed Arba'een (Arabic: الأربعين‎, "forty") on the 12th - a Shia observance that occurs forty days after the Day of Ashura, commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of Muhammad. However, coming up on either the 3rd or 8th of January (depending on whether you're Sunni or Shia), we have Mawlid, celebrating the birthday of the prophet Muhammad.

If you happen to be African-American, Kwanzaa runs from December 26 through January 1, and it's a commemoration of African heritage; having first been celebrated in 1966, it's now officially older than a lot of the people bitching about it.

Here's a thought: if you're going to complain about people not honoring your white, Christian traditions, perhaps you shouldn't complain when they hold celebrations in honor of theirs.)

Praise it and blaze it.

Easter is a strange holiday. I'm not even going to look at its pagan roots: the concept isn't really in dispute any more. But Easter is, if viewed from one angle, an opportunity for conservative Christians to explain that their support for the death penalty is proven by their approval of nailing some guy to a stick and letting him hang there until he dies. Or something like that.

Has anybody noticed that Easter this year comes on 4/20? It's a popular meme among the marijuana crowd online. However, to put it in another light, it can be used as evidence that Jesus supports medical marijuana.

Probably because the Bible can be used to support pretty much any viewpoint out there, there are plenty of verses that can be cited to support this position.

Isaiah 18:4 - "The Lord said unto me, 'I will take my rest and I will consider in my dwelling place like a clear heat upon herbs.' "

Ezekiel 34:29 - And I will raise up for them a plant of renown, and they shall be no more consumed with hunger in the land, neither bear the shame of the heathen any more.

Genesis 1:12 - And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:29-31 - God said, "Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth.…To you it will be for meat." …And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.

Revelations 22:2 - In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

Psalm 104:14-15 - He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth; and wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart.

You can google the term "easter grass" and come up with a lot of sites that sell it, but I think you'll be disappointed with what you get.

And you can even drag politics into it. Remember, the US government is conducting a war on drugs, whereas Matthew 5:9 tells us "Blessed are the peacemakers." I'll bet you can do that math on your own.

There are those who will try to tell you that the Bible condemns drug use: one explanation is that the original Greek word for "sorcery," pharmacea, is the same root word for "pharmacy." Look hard enough, you'll see explanations for the use of herbs (to include marijuana) as medicine only, because all drug companies deal in poison. That's not only a little extreme, but shows an open ignorance of history: much like chemistry and alchemy have the same roots (as do astrology and astronomy), early wise women and hedge wizards started concocting drugs to help people. But many of their naturalist practices came from pagan roots (and berries, but let's not get into that...): the priestesses would often double as healers. And if they could help people more than the Christian priests and their prayers, the witches must obviously be condemned as evil (otherwise, people might go see the pagans for help).

This is also where you'll find the argument that the actual phrase should not be "suffer not a witch to live," but "suffer not a poisoner to live." Sorry, guys. The specific translation there should, in fact, be "witch." It's just that pagan priestesses of the time knew enough about natural medicine that they could also concoct poisons.

In a similar vein, there's an old French word, grimoire, that refers to a book containing magic spells, such as what would be owned by a witch or sorcerer. The root for that word was grammaire, which was a book of grammar (usually Latin, in the early days; the same source gave us the Olde Englishe word grammarye). But much like with the Tea Party today, somebody with a little knowledge frightened the average illiterate peasant back then; so somebody with a big thick book was probably up to no good.

And much like with pharmacea, that's the difference between the root of a word and the actual definition.

But, really, what can be more pot-induced than a holiday based around hard-boiled eggs and ample supplies of chocolate?

Happy Holidays, y'all!

You know, it's that time of year again; as we approach the end of the year, we enter the Holiday Season. And just like every year of late, there are those who can't be happy unless they're given the opportunity to feel angry about something. And this time of year, the majority of them are the fine folks who don't believe in American values like "inclusiveness" and other sentiments best expressed at the base of the Statue of Liberty (you know, that whole "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" thing).

People like (just as an example) Bill O'Reilly, who want to pretend that there's some kind of "War on Christmas." They have decided to make themselves angry over something as innocuous as wishing people "Happy Holidays," instead of saying "Merry Christmas."

This is a particularly stupid thing to get cranky over, if you think about it, because the time in question, often referred to as the "Christmas season," runs from Thanksgiving through Christmas, and usually spills over into New Years, which is three holidays right there.

(I'm going with the current, somewhat commercialized version of the "Christmas season" - you know, "free market = good thing" - as practiced here in America in the 21st Century, so keep your cranky little historical interruptions to yourself - I might just mention them later anyway. And incidentally, the current "Christmas season" seems to have extended itself almost to Halloween at this point, which is yet a FOURTH holiday.)

December is just littered with minor Christian holidays, some of which (depending on your particular flavor of Christianity) are considered of relative importance, such as the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8) and the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12 (which is moderately popular here in New Mexico for some reason).

(A little trivia for you: the "Immaculate Conception" doesn't refer to the birth of Jesus, but to the day Mary was conceived, probably a decade and a half or so earlier: see, in order to give birth to the child of God, her birth had to be "immaculate." A lot of good Christians get that wrong - it's pretty much a Catholic thing.)

December is particularly full of Feast Days to various saints, from St Francis Xavier (December 3) to St Lucy of Syracuse (December 13). Yesterday, December 6, was St Nicholas Day, if it helps - that, at least, has a Christmas-based attachment to the holiday.

At least five of the December saints are Johns, if you count one non-English variation: St John Damascene (December 4), St Juan Diego (December 9), St John of the Cross (December 14), St John of Kanty (December 23) and, of course, St John the Apostle (December 27).

A lot of the saints were Johns; that's why Jesus needed to make sure that the prostitutes got into heaven first (Matthew 21:31). * ba-dum CHING *

Now, that last John (the Apostley one) is actually a part of a whole series of Feast Days (an even dozen of them, in fact), which make up a string of holidays immortalized in the song "the Twelve Days of Christmas." You'd think that somebody fixated on Christmas traditions could at least remember that much.

There's a whole buttload of secular holidays and commemorations going on: December 10 is Human Rights Day, December first was World AIDS Awareness Day; it seems like every time you turn around, somebody wants to remember, bring attention to, or sell something. Look up International Civil Aviation Day, and Poinsettia Day (which is also Christmas-related, if it helps - December 12). In fact, today (December 7, 2013) is National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. (Did you remember? SpaghettiOs did.)

December 22 is Forefather's Day, commemorating the Pilgrim's landing on Plymouth Rock. You want a whiter, more all-American holiday? And how come you didn't celebrate it last year, you commie?

The day after Christmas, December 26 (which is also St Stephen’s day, one of those Twelve Days of Christmas I mentioned earlier) is Boxing Day, which is mostly (but not entirely) only still celebrated in England.

December 4 through December 21, a roughly 2-week string, are considered Zappadan, celebrating the life and works of Frank Zappa. Popular culture also gave us Festivus (you know, for the rest of us) on December 23.

If you happen to be African-American, Kwanzaa runs from December 26 through January 1, and it's a commemoration of African heritage; having first been celebrated in 1966, it's now officially older than a lot of the people bitching about it. (Here's a thought: if you're going to complain about people not honoring your white, Christian traditions, perhaps you shouldn't complain when they hold celebrations in honor of theirs.)

But just because other religions aren't Christian doesn't mean they don't have their own celebrations. For example, if you're of a particularly pagan turn of mind, December 21, 2013 will be the Winter Solstice. Among the Germanic people, this was known as Yule - it's one of the many pagan celebrations that the early Christian church hijacked. (Where do you think the term "yuletide" comes from?) There's also Saturnalia, which is a festival based around fertility rituals that comes from the Greco-Roman traditions (and certainly sounds like more fun than another round of carol-singing).

For our Hindu friends, Friday the 13th this year will be Gita Jayanti, celebrating the "birth" (creation) of the Bhagavad Gita; technically, it's held on the Ekadasi (11th day of the waxing moon) of the month of Margashirsha in the Hindu calendar, so I did that math for you.

If you happen to be of the Buddhist persuasion, tomorrow (the eighth day of the twelfth month) is Rohatsu, or "Bodhi Day," commemorating the enlightenment of the Buddha. (If you happen to live in a Zen Buddhist monastery - I don't, but your mileage may vary - this would be the last day of a week-long sesshin, or meditative retreat.)

Hanukkah ended on December 5 this year. Since our right-wing friends like to trumpet the term "Judeo-Christian traditions," it's surprising how few menorahs I saw in the windows.

If you are a follower of the Jedi church, I really don't know what to tell you. "Life Day" is a Wookie holiday, and falls about once every three years on our calendar. But the first human awareness of it came about this time of year in 1978. Make of that what you will.

In that magical era of the Fifties that conservatives like to pretend was a special time in American history when everything was perfect, they liked to refer to America as "the melting pot," where people from all cultures could live and thrive. So, really, if the phrase "Happy Holidays" offends you, perhaps you should consider why you're such a crappy American.

The War On Thanksgiving

The entire country (outside of corporate boardrooms) seems to be up in arms about all the stores being open on Thanksgiving, which is traditionally a national holiday. It all started when Wal-Mart, that bastion of worker abuse, announced that they were going to beat "Black Friday" by a day, and everybody started following suit.

The lefties view it as just another example of the corporations treating workers like machines, with no time for their families. The right wing, on the other hand, has a somewhat more nuanced view: knee-jerk patriotism demands that they wail and cry about this abandonment of traditional American values, but brainwashed worship of unfettered capitalism won't allow them to criticize big corporations. So the whole situation makes them angry, but they don't know what to do about it.

The answer is fairly simple, though. If you don't like stores being open on Thanksgiving, don't shop on Thanksgiving. Tell all your friends not to shop on Thanksgiving, and explain why. Social media is an important part of this: send out the word on Facebook and Twitter, post videos on YouTube and Vine, or even post a message on Google+ (if you're particularly fond of the sound of your own voice echoing off empty walls).

You can even slant your message to match your audience. "Abusing the workers" won't resonate with the Fox News crowd, but "destruction of American values" seems to do it for them.

Protests might work, but you'd be giving up your holiday at that point, and it's a little late in the game for that anyway: you aren't going to get massive crowds to help you out. So the best way to get your message across is through your wallet - by not using it. If the profits for sales on Thanksgiving don't pay for the employees to come in that day, the corporations aren't going to do it again.

Making friends on Facebook

Hmmm... I don't know if this is a good sign. I mucked with one idiot, and it's like Lays potato chips.


Somebody break it to me gently. Am I in danger of becoming a Facebook troll?

(Click to embiggen.)

The Republican War on Thanksgiving

In 1621, after the difficult, unrelenting labor of starting a colony, the Pilgrims, using planting techniques taught to them by the native Wampanoag tribe, celebrated their first successful harvest with a feast, which they shared with their native American neighbors (who we later almost wiped out, there being only about 400 survivors sixty years later, following King Philip's War).

This is the most important, most truly American holiday (the Canadians have a similar observance, but they're just our little northern clones anyway, right?). It's a day of forgiveness, a day when families travel from across the country to get together, eat our traditional meal, celebrate our mutual heritage, and nestle securely in the bosom of warmth and family.

Except, perhaps, for this year.

Because of the Republican insistence on "Free Market" capitalism and a winner-take-all mentality, now, with record unemployment around the country, the cost of the Thanksgiving meal is rising faster than inflation.

With the current annual inflation rate of 3.5%, the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner has risen 13%, and the cost of getting together with family and friends has increased even more than that.

The average airfare for travel to the top 10 most popular destinations in the U.S. for Nov. 23 to Nov. 27 has jumped 11% over last year, according to an analysis by Orbitz, one of the nation’s busiest travel websites. That means the average round-trip ticket for Thanksgiving rose to $373 from about $340.

Flights to New York for the holiday will rise the most, jumping 20% over last year, with an average round-trip price of $342, according to Orbitz. Round-trip flights to Los Angeles will increase 12% to $429, according to the travel website...

You won’t escape the higher prices by driving: Gas prices reached the highest levels ever in the week prior to Thanksgiving, according to the Automobile Club of Southern California. The average price of self-serve regular gasoline in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area was $3.82 a gallon last week, 66 cents higher than the same time last year.

With one in three Americans living at or below the poverty line, the GOP is trying to ensure that they cannot celebrate their own heritage. The Republican Party is trying to ensure that an Ayn Rand dystopia, with the richest living in luxury off the sweat of the working poor, is the model for American society.

The Republicans are trying to destroy Thanksgiving! And they're doing it in subtle ways, as well! The Christmas decorations, celebrating their dreams of commerce and overindulgence, come out earlier every year; the Christmas carols are already playing in all the stores; and the conservative-controlled media beats the drum, insisting that shopkeepers must say "Merry Christmas" instead of the more open, accepting "Happy Holidays," as if Thanksgiving didn't matter in the slightest!

This Republican War on Thanksgiving must be stopped! We must stride into the stores and demand that the carols be cancelled! "Turn off that crap! It's not even Thanksgiving!"

Websites are springing up devoted to bringing back our national holiday from the brink of extinction. We must support them; we must also support retailers like Nordstrom, who insist on celebrating each holiday in turn, and not skipping over the ones that can't be exploited by the greedy, and venal, and unamerican!

We must ask where the Thanksgiving displays are, and why they are overshadowed by some obese Germanic troll in a red suit! We must write letters to store owners, corporations, and our Congressfolk, demanding the return of our national holiday!

Radical conservatives must be stopped from destoying our heritage!



Please note: this is intended for satirical purposes only, and if you're stupid enough to take it seriously, you probably fall for that "War on Christmas" crap too, don't you?

But that I burn much more in boiling sweat

See that white tent, just past the SUV that photobombed me? That's a fireworks tent set up in a parking lot.. It's got balloons, one sad little "Fireworks!" banner (that's the orange thing off to the right), no air conditioning, and a cheap plastic roof (whatever they're making cheap tents out of these days).

The person behind the plain wood counter in the tent is smoking. I didn't go in to look. They just always are.

We live in a desert. The temperature is going to be in the high nineties all week.

See that sign in the building beyond it? Looks like a number one? That's the logo for Page One Books, the largest locally-owned bookstore in Albuquerque. Which happens to be 30 yards away from the fireworks tent.

Because people are stupid.
___________

I'm not a big fan of fireworks, as it turns out.

The Wallow Fire, the largest wildfire in Arizona history, spread into New Mexico around the Luna, NM area. As of today, it's 80% contained.

Update/expansion: It was started on May 29th. So far (and 24 hours later than the initial post here, it's at almost 90% containment), it's destroyed roughly 540 thousand acres. Six towns (Eager, Springerville, Nutrioso, Alpine, Luna and Blue River) were evacuated, and it's taken almost 2,000 people to fight it.

Los Alamos was evacuated because of wildfires today. The fires have, in fact, crossed over into the boundaries of the Los Alamos nuclear lab, if you're curious; that's called the Las Conchas fire, and as of today, it's eaten about 45,000 acres of the Santa Fe National Forest, and as I write this, it is zero percent contained.

The 346 Fire in Belen, NM (named after the Highway 346 Bridge, currently its northern boundary) is a mere 150-acre fire; it's destroyed 3 houses and several outbuildings, and is threatening about 150-200 more. Earlier today, they suspected that they'll have it contained by Wednesday. Of course, they weren't taking into account the 25 mph winds (with 40 mph gusts) that are kicking up.

The Horseshoe 2 fire in southeast Arizona never made it to the New Mexico border. It destroyed 223 thousand acres, but is now considered contained, as of Saturday. Crews will be downgrading to a Type 3 team Wednesday, if nothing goes wrong.

The Pacheco fire, north of Santa Fe, has only destroyed about ten thousand acres. It's been going a week and a half, and it's currently about 10% contained.

State law in New Mexico prevents them from implementing a ban on fireworks, even during one of the worst fire seasons ever.

Oh, and in case you missed it, next Monday is the Fourth of July.

Clothes make the man.

So, in the course of our office's annual Solstice/Kwanzaa/Festivus/Christmas/Zappadan festivities, I was part of something that I'd never been involved in (or, to be honest, even considered) prior to this.

21 years in the military, couple of years working security for the DOE - I always had a uniform. So nobody ever suggested that we have an Ugly Christmas Sweater Contest.

Of course, that same excuse meant that, on top of not having a clue about this type of competition, there was one other thing I didn't have - an Ugly Christmas Sweater.

However, I had a secret weapon that nobody else in my office had access to: the Trophy Wife.

Have I mentioned that the Wife is crafty? As in, she knits, she sews, she does needlepoint, tatting, macramé, net-making, braiding steel cable - basically, if it can be translated to "playing with string," she does it. (She's also inordinately fond of cats - personally, I see a connection there.)

And suddenly, less than a week after telling her of this contest, I found myself in possession of a sweater. An awesome sweater (if, when saying "awesome," you quietly swallow the "-ly gawdawful" when speaking to the Trophy Wife).

Yes, the front has five individual, hand-crafted penguins on snowdrifts, two hand-crafted snowmen, and about eighteen hundred tiny, sparkling snowflakes. When the light hit me just right, I looked like the Christmas float at a Gay Pride parade. (Of course, I say that in a good way.) You couldn't photograph this sweater with a flash.

The truly awe-inspiring touches were on the back, though.

Yes, those seven snowflakes are hand-crocheted. And the scarf on the snowman? It's knitted.

None of them stood a chance. Although Susan, in the red, gave it the old college try, with her gold poinsettias hot-glued to her chest, and the sparkly trim at the neck and butt.

(There on the right, incidentally? That's Andie, who discovered that thrift shops in Albuquerque have an amazingly limited selection of Ugly Christmas Sweaters. But she found the Winter Shawl. Somehow, it made her want to go play bingo.)

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the awesome power of the Trophy Wife. Who I love with all my heart. Despite this (admittedly award-winning) sweater.

Underserved Christmas stuff

There's a lot of songs and stories around this time of year. And you always get to see the good stuff. Unfortunately, you see it over, and over and over. Until you can't stand it any more. Conveniently, there's also a lot of stuff out there that you really don't see enough.

Weird Al, for example, did his tribute to Christmas and nuclear war.


In the 1958 pilot to the series 77 Sunset Strip, they introduced a hep-cat character named Kookie, who turned out to be a serial killer. But he was so popular that they decided to ignore that completely. Efram Zimbalist, Jr., did a bumper for the second episode where he looked into the camera and informed the audience "We previewed this show, and because Edd Byrnes was such a hit we decided that Kookie and his comb had to be in our series. So this week, we'll just forget that in the pilot he went off to prison to be executed."

(His predilection for standing around combing his hair actually led to Connie Stevens and him making the most annoying hit song ever, "Kookie, Kookie, Give Me Your Comb." Look it up for yourself if you just have to hear it.)

But he did take Clement Moore's classic The Night Before Christmas, and left us one of the more awesome retellings, Yulesville.


(Oh, and a big tip of the Santa hat to Gilligan at Retrospace for finding that one.)

There really isn't much you can add to the following video. So I'll just give the six word summary: Neil Gaiman did a Christmas poem.



Seattle DJ Bob Rivers likes to do Christmas songs. Like this one.


Now, the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside" isn't by any means underserved, or unseen, or even possible to get away from. When the universe finally suffers from it's inevitable heat-death and spirals away to nothingness, the last thing that will be heard might well be this song dopplering away. As far as I'm concerned, this is the best version (and I picked through a bunch to finally go back to this one, including the Miss Piggy version).

Please note, however, the oft ignored date rape lyric.

Yes, if you listen carefully, he slips a roofie into her drink.

Or at least that's what you'll think whenever you hear this song from now on. Merry Christmas.

Halloween Videos #4 - The Final Chapter

You'll notice that I mostly avoided heavy metal - the horror-movie element is pretty obvious throughout the genre. That being said, I thought Rob Zombie's "Hellbilly Deluxe" was one of the all-time great albums.



The video could have been helped by a higher production budget, though.

Now, the Squirrel Nut Zippers put out an album in 1998 called Perennial Favorites, which had no real hits, but a video in the style of the old Max Fleischer (Betty Boop) cartoons.

.

And finally, this Halloween season, we have a song which almost everybody knows, happily screamed by children for decades now. Literally decades - it was twenty-six years ago (crap, I don't feel old...) that they released the first movie (or the first step to creating a multi-media franchise, depending on how you look at it), Ghostbusters



This is another video you may never have seen. It was released along with the movie, but has never been packaged with DVD releases, because shortly after the movie came out, Huey Lewis (of "Huey Lewis and the News," who had a video in my previous entry in this series) sued Ray Parker, Jr., for plagiarizing "I Want a New Drug," which had been a hit earlier that same year.

They settled out of court, on the agreement that neither one would mention it ever again. Which is why Ray Parker then sued Huey Lewis in 2001 for mentioning it on VH1's Behind the Music - karma is a motherfucker.

It's good that nobody clued in the British pop group "M" in on the possibilities - they could have sued Huey Lewis for lifting from their song Pop Muzik. And on back into history, as several other people have used that theme, or one like it. (This is all explained in a short story by Spider Robinson called Melancholy Elephants.)

The video, like the movie that spawned it, was directed by Ivan Reitman, and had cameos by a bunch of celebrities who'd had no part in the movie, like Chevy Chase, Irene Cara, John Candy, Al Franken, Danny DeVito, and several other New York based stars.

The model, in case you're curious, was Cindy Harrell, a young model and actress who worked primarily in commercials, but with a number of TV and movie rolls, for almost a decade, from 1980 through 1988. She's now a wife, mother of two, and activist, working on education, the environment, and national security: she was one of the driving forces in procuring $25 million in government funding to launch and expand the UCLA High Speed, High Volume Laboratory Network for Infectious Diseases, which helps the Department of Homeland Security on bioterrorism issues. (It must be nice to be married to a studio executive, and able to afford to be a mother and activist...)

Ray Parker, incidentally, said that he wrote the song in two days (Huey Lewis, interestingly, had been approached to write the theme song, but bowed out due to other commitments). He has said that he would have felt silly singing the term "Ghostbusters!" ("I ain't afraid of no ghosts" is better?), which is why you only hear it from the background singers.

Halloween Videos #3 - Entirely Superfluous

Now, in my previous post, I showed some examples of videos where the use of horror imagery was directly related to the lyrics of the song. That, of course, didn't always happen. In fact, one could even use the phrase "very rarely" in this context and not be out of line.

Huey Lewis and the News had a relatively huge hit with "Doing It All For My Baby," but their video was pretty much unrelated to the song. (This is the shortened version - embedding on the full-length, almost-eight-minute version has been disabled. It's here, though, if you'd like to see it.)

There is absolutely no reason for this video to be set in a haunted castle with a mad scientist running amok in the basement, but there it is.



The single biggest hit for the Greg Kihn Band would easily have to be the song Jeopardy. Now, an argument can be made that the zombie-themed video is a metaphor for our progagonist, seeing the freedom of his single days flying away. Yes, that argument can be made, but it would be wrong.

The lyrics to the song make it obvious that, far from being about a man who doesn't want to get married, it's about a man who thinks his relationship with his girlfriend is coming to an end. Somewhat unrelated to freedom, zombies, or anything of the kind.



(On an interesting (but only vaguely related) note, Greg Kihn has since written four novels, one of which, Horror Show, was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers Association of America.)

Sheena Shirley Orr was born in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, Scotland on 27 April 1959. At the age of 20, she married Sandi Easton, the first of four husbands; she was divorced from him within eight months, but kept his surname on stage. Sheena Easton had a string of hits throughout the 80s; in 1983, she had a (barely) Top 10 hit with "Telephone," which had absolutely nothing to do with the video that they filmed for MTV, but managed to be an interesting homage to the monster movie.



(Personally, I didn't care; even ignoring the bad 80s makeup, she was easily the hottest woman around. For me, it was easy to ignore substance and just concentrate on the style. But I was always shallow that way...)

Halloween Videos #2 - Integral to the Song

In the 80s, some (OK, only a few) uses of monsters in videos were actually related to the song itself. Sometimes, the relationship was only as close as a cultural reference.

For example, let's take Walter Egan. He had really only had one hit: if the lyric "For you are a magnet/and I am steel" doesn't start ringing in the back of your brain, count yourself lucky.

(And don't look it up - just trust me, OK?)

Meanwhile, he had... well, a kind of non-hit, a song that basically went nowhere, but got a little (very little) airplay, mostly based on a video that also didn't go very far. It's alternately rendered, depending on where you look, "Fool" (or "Full") "Moon Fire." (And, really, nobody but Walter, his agent, and his wife really give a crap what the lyric is...)



In 1983, the Rolling Stones released Undercover their (yes) 23rd album (not counting anthologies and outtakes). And it included an unmemorable song called "Too Much Blood," where a leaden Mick Jagger tries to rap, using the details from a story about some Japanese man murdering a girl in Paris.

The whole limping, abused corpse of a song includes Texas Chainsaw Massacre references and the Sugar Hill Records' horn section, and Mick completely fails to engage the audience with a song that the Stones have never performed live and which appears on no compilation album. But it does have a weird horror-movie video to go along with it, and includes Keith Richards and Ron Wood playing lead and rhythm chainsaws. Which has to count for something.



And of course, there's always 1988's hit from INXS, "Devil Inside" (INXS's lead singer, Michael Hutchence, depressingly, apparently didn't die from autoerotic asphyxiation, as the urban legend tells us - he just hung himself... it's sad when you have to let a good story go, isn't it?)



Of course, in the end, the fact that the video might actually reflect the content of the song has never been a major draw, has it?
________

Update (10/29/10): The longer I left it lying there in the ditch, the more I knew I had to go back and fix that fourth (now fourth and fifth) paragraph, with the poorly-worded description of the Rolling Stone's song. A run-on sentence with pronoun mismatch and some unneccessary (and apparently completely random) words thrown into the mix could not be allowed to continue. So I put it out of its misery.

Halloween Videos #1 - The Vampire

Despite a profusion of idiots trying to call it Satan's Holiday, today's celebrations of Halloween are actually more closely related to the Christian practice of "souling," which originated in the United Kingdom and parts of Europe in the late medieval era. The poor would go door-to-door on Hallowmas (the "Mass of the Saints" or All Saints Day, November 1) collecting "soul cakes" (basically small spice cakes, about the size of biscuits or small muffins), in return for offering up prayers to the dead on All Souls Day (November 2). And it simply migrated to the evening before All Saints Day ("All Hallows Eve," or Hallowe'en) sometime in the intervening five centuries.

See? It's Christian. Now go away.

Some "High Church" sects keep trying to make it Reformation Day, celebrating the Protestant Reformation. But somehow, dressing as Martin Luther, nailing epistles to the neighbors door and running off doesn't sound like a lot of fun. (Especially because running in robes is a tricky business, as any Catholic altar boy will tell you.) Neither does dressing as Calvin, shrugging at passers-by and saying "Well, you're damned regardless."

Now, the costumes? Yeah, the Celts used to wear them to ward off evil spirits during Samhain. But unless you also douse all the fires in your house, set up a bonfire in the middle of the street where you toss the bones of cattle slaughtered as food for the winter, and then everybody lights their hearth from the bonfire (making a spiritual bond between you and your neighbors), you aren't really following Celtic practices, are you?

The supernatural associations of ghosts to All Souls Day (and eventually Halloween) provide an obvious link to other supernatural creatures, which have also become associated with Halloween celebrations. And many of the more famous monsters have become burned into the American consciousness with the passing of time, and have migrated into all manner of cultural media, including the music video.

But no monster in music videodom (is that a word?) has gotten more attention than the vampire.

(Wow. Had to go through some rhetorical hoops to keep this from being a total non sequitur. I think I made it, though.)

Eddie Money actually had a hell of a career in the 80s and early 90s - 11 studio albums, a buttload of singles in the charts - all based around a voice that sounded like he was so congested he could barely breath.

Meanwhile, in 1982, he released a single from the album No Control called "Think I'm In Love." (He apparently misplaced the initial pronoun in the title on his way to the studio. It was a tragic loss.)



Meanwhile, five years later, on the other side of the Pond, and treading in more techno/dance waters, the Pet Shop Boys released their last #1 single, "Heart."



(And in case you're curious, that is indeed Sir Ian McKellen in full Nosferatu regalia.)

And five years after that (and, in fact, five years before it became universally reviled for its use in A Night At the Roxbury), a Trinidadian-American singer named Haddaway had his first (and arguably biggest) hit with "What is Love?"



At the time of its initial release, this song hit #1 in thirteen countries throughout Europe and Asia (it only reached #11 on the US charts), and this video was on heavy rotation on MTV Europe. If you're reading this in the US, it's quite possible that you've never seen it.

Easter among the heathens

You know, I usually avoid the World Nut Daily, because it's just a cesspool of everything that could possibly be wrong with religion. But because I took a look at Chuck Norris' column, I was curious about exactly what was going on these days in that rank, steaming corner of the internet.

And it turns out that they're just the gift that keeps on giving, aren't they? They're the all-Birther, all-fundamentalist, all-the-time network, and they don't care who knows how freakishly crazy they actually are.

CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Group) isn't conservative enough for him, so Joseph Farah, the head lunatic in this Internet Arkham Asylum, decided to set up his own convention. ("Taking America Back"? From whom? OK, Joey... we need to explain that whole "democratic process" to you, OK?)

I mean, maybe they should clear up the lawsuits from the first convention before they move on to the next money-making weekend. What'd'ya think?

(Hey, Joe! Maybe you could get Jeff Gannon to speak! I hear he isn't doing much these days...)

But World Nut Daily has these little problems with things like reality, and they really don't seem to care whether they're telling the truth or not, just a long as the story they're trying to tell fits their single-minded agenda.

For example, they have an article titled "Praying in park puts man in jail for 9 days," which is the story of Julian Raven from Elmira, NY, who... well, let's let WND tell you the story.

A Christian who prayed in a public park with six other people is serving a nine-day jail sentence for disorderly conduct even though his case is under appeal and charges against the others were dismissed or overturned...

"According to his wife, police escorted him out of a court hearing … in handcuffs in front of his crying children to begin serving his nine-day jail sentence," the organization said in a report.

But wait! There's more!

After a quick ad trying to sell you survival kits in case you aren't taken to Heaven in the Rapture, they tell you how Raven and three other people were arrested because they prayed in the middle of a Gay Pride gathering! Terrible, isn't it?

Three defendants were removed from the case almost immediately, leaving four to be convicted by Elmira city Judge Thomas Ramich of "disorderly conduct."

But the convictions for three – Gloria Raven, Maurice Kienenberger and Walter Quick – later were overturned in the Chemung County Court.

Funny thing, though. If you try to find this story in the media, some of the details don't quite match up. You know, little things. Stuff that really doesn't matter.

Like, well... you know, the other three people's charges weren't overturned by the court. It seems that they accepted a plea bargain. But our boy Julian? Yeah, he wasn't arrested for praying - he refused to pay a $100 fine. So the police picked him up.

That's the kind of high-quality journalism you find at WND.

But there's more than just twisted versions of the news on this site. Reality hardly ever intrudes into their little world. I mean, you poke around a little bit, and you suddenly discover that, even though WND has been leading the fight for years in the War on Christmas, suddenly, they decide to start their own little War on Easter.

I'm serious. Another guy named Joe (Joe Kovacs, this time) is opposed to Easter. The sight of fluffy bunnies, baby chicks and colored eggs apparently drives him into an incoherent rage (although, technically, many of these people are incoherent most of the time, so Easter just gives Joey a single topic to focus on).

...there's a very dark side to this centuries-old tradition, and it has to do with the famous Ten Commandments of God.

As opposed to the somewhat less well-known "Ten Commnandments of Google."

The very first commandment of the Big Ten is perhaps one of the most overlooked in everyday life.

You can't wear white after Labor Day?

In just eight words, it states: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." (Exodus 20:3)

Well, yeah, eight words if you're using the King James translation. Nineteen words if you use the Lolcat Bible. ("No can has other ceiling cat!! U gotz other Ceiling Cat, I shoot yous wit mah lollazer eyes. Srsly.")

Most Christians, whether knowingly or unknowingly, violate this very first commandment of God each year by placing before God the actual name of a pagan goddess of fertility and the dawn.

In case you haven't figured it out by now, her name is – believe it or not – "Easter."

That's correct, folks. The word Easter is actually the name of an ancient, heathen goddess who represents fertility, springtime and the dawn.

Some of her symbols are flowers, bunnies, eggs, the sun and the moon. Who'da thunk?

...In different languages and through a variety of cultures, the name of this deity – who in reality does not even exist – is spelled different ways, including Ishtar, Astarte, Ostara, Eostre and Eastre.

Even in the Bible itself, many of God's own chosen people actually followed the customs of numerous Easter goddesses, with her name spelled in the King James Bible as "Ashtaroth" and "Ashtoreth."

And see? That's the real beauty of a WND column. This guy isn't just ignorant about his own religion, he's simultaneously ignorant on two entirely unrelated families of religions!

To be specific, Ishtar is Assyrian and Babylonian, which were essentially the same religion, although there are scholars who might argue the details, and Astarte was a northern Semitic deity, cognate but not identical to Ishtar; but then Ôstarâ, Ēostre and Ēastre are three versions of an unrelated diety from the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon tribes (Ôstarâ being Old High German, and the other two being Old English variants - Ēostre being the Northumbrian form, and Ēastre being the West Saxon version).

But since mass transit really wasn't all it could have been back in the Bronze Age, there wasn't a whole bunch of intermingling between the tribes in England and Northern Europe, and the cultures of the Middle East.

I mean, come on, Joey! Just because these particular mythological beings aren't your mythological beings doesn't mean you have to be completely ignorant about them, does it? That's like saying Odin and Zeus were the same god.

And anyway, it's a little late in the game to start complaining that one of your High Holy Days happens to be rooted in pagan tradition, isn't it? That was standard practice in the early Christian church: if the people were going to have a party on a certain date anyway, the local Christian priest just had to give them a good Biblical reason to have the party, to make their new religion a little more palatable to them.

Be real, Joey. If you're going to fuss about Easter originally being a pagan festival, you're going to have to do away with Christmas, too. And this website you publish your drivel on is pretty heavily invested in keeping Christmas as a Christian rite. You might make them a little cranky if you do that.

Ever hear of "Yule"? That's an old Nordic/Germanic festival, equally pagan in origin, that the Christians stole, and started claiming that Jesus was born on that day. And how do we know that Jesus wasn't born on December 25? (Assuming He was born at all, that is?)

Luke 2:8 - "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night."

Israel is north of the equator. So what do we know about December in Israel? It's winter! The shepherds don't take their flocks into the hills on winter nights unless they're trying to kill them. (Not a lot of call for freeze-dried mutton in those days.)

So, if the Bible is to be believed, Jesus was born in the spring or summer. Meaning that the early Christian Church just grabbed the biggest pagan festival they could find, and pasted the biggest Christian festival across the top of it, just to keep the former pagans happy.

So, yeah, feel free to do away with Easter. But be consistent and kill off Christmas while you're at it.

Of course, you can't expect consistency from Joey K, can you? I mean, after all, the man spends 1,200 words bitching about Ēastre and all her variations, and how this heathen goddess has corrupted the good bible-reading Christians, and then right toward the end, he says this.

And here's a Bible newsflash for you. We're not even supposed to be saying the E-word.

Crack open your own Bible and read it for yourself:

"Make no mention of the name of other gods, neither let it be heard out of thy mouth." (Exodus 23:13)

Uh... yeah, Joey. That's nice. So, what is it you've been ranting about this whole time?

Lies, legends, and Irish history

Today is St. Patrick's Day, which is a holiday composed entirely of legends and misreadings of history.

St. Patrick, who was probably born in Wales, the son of a Roman official, was historically a missionary in Ireland in the fifth century; a lot of the stories about him were probably stolen completely from the life of Palladius (sent by Pope Celestine I as the first bishop to Irish Christians in 431 CE or so). Paddy himself was supposed to have lived from about 387 CE until 17 March, 493 CE. Since damned few people lived to be 106 in those days (or these, for that matter), that's probably wrong.

The legend says that our boy Paddy drove the snakes out of Ireland. Since the fossil record is pretty clear that there weren't any snakes in Ireland after the last Ice Age, that legend isn't very likely. He was also supposed to have used the 3-lobed shamrock to teach about the Holy Trinity, but there's no real evidence that he did.

He's said to be buried, along with St. Brigid and St. Columba, at Down Cathedral in Downpatrick, County Down (notice a pattern there?). Nobody is has ever been able to prove it, of course.

The "wearin' o' the green" is one of the primary traditions around St. Patrick's Day. Until the 17th Century, the color associated with Paddy was blue, but then politics came into the mix.

The holiday was pretty much restricted to Ireland until the 1600's, when a scholar named Luke Wadding got it inserted into the catholic liturgical calendar. In most of the world, St. Patrick's Day is just an opportunity to get drunk, but since the Roman Catholic church is well-known for sucking the fun out of anything, it's long been a holy day of obligation in Ireland.

(Irish MP James O'Mara got St. Patrick's Day to be an official holiday in Ireland in 1903; later, when the drinking got out of hand, O'Mara got a law closing the pubs on St. Patrick's Day passed. That one was only repealed in the 1970's.)

The first St. Patrick's Day Parade in the world was held in Boston on 18 March 1737, and was primarily a political statement by Irish immigrants, who were upset with their low social status and the fact that nobody would hire an Irishman. (The first St. Patrick's Day Parade in Ireland wouldn't be held until 1931.)

George Washington set up what's now known as the St. Patrick's Day Encampment of 1780, "as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence." (So, mostly just to stir up trouble for the British.)

The first St. Patrick's Day Parade in New York was held in 1762 by Irish soldiers in the British Army, so that wasn't real popular. The first American celebration in New York was in the Crown and Thistle Tavern, in 1766, and the parades were again held to draw attention to the plight of the Irish immigrant. Over the years, the New York parades have become the largest in the world. (In case you're curious, the shortest traditional St. Patrick's Day Parade is held in Dripsey, in County Cork, Ireland, and runs about 100 yards. From one of the town's two pubs to the other one.)

Then, during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the United Irishmen wore all-green uniforms on March 17th, apparently just to draw attention to themselves.

The "traditional" meal of corned beef and cabbage is an American invention; the actual Irish tradition was to eat bacon and cabbage, but the bacon was too expensive. The Irish immigrants went for the cheaper corned beef made by their Jewish neighbors.

The tradition of puking up green beer is, according to the researches of the son of one bar owner started 75 years ago, in Iowa City, Iowa. (A lot of bartenders hate green beer, by the way. It stains the beer lines, and your beer runs cloudy and slightly khaki for the last few weeks of March.)

So overall, there really isn't a lot of truth to anything about this holiday. Of course, when you're drunk, does it really matter?

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

The "War on Christmas" 2009

The first shot fired in the War on Christmas in 2009 was heard in California in early November. It seems that in San Francisco, a woman with the unfortunate name of Merry Hyatt, a 61-year-old substitute teacher, felt that children were being deprived of their childhood (or some crap) if they couldn't sing Christmas carols in public schools. Even the relatively balanced story showed her to be too mentally deficient to teach anyone not in a coma, since it closed out with her explaining her own mental blind spots:

But she added that in her experience as a substitute teacher in schools in largely Latino, largely Christian neighborhoods in Southern California, she had not often encountered people who do not celebrate Christmas.

"I don’t think I’ve ever had a Jewish child in one of my classes," she said. "If so they never said anything."

If you don't believe in Jews, does that make you an atheist?

The rightards, of course, don't get it. They, living in their dream of victimization, like to make factually incorrect claims:

The month of December has arrived and with it comes the annual attacks on Christmas by the atheist movement and their legal/political arm, the ACLU. For some reason, the Nativity, songs of joy and the celebration of the Christ Child’s birth bring out the rage and open hatred of many people across the United States.

While the truth is, it's only when government money is being spent pimping out Mary and her kid that the activists feel a need to make noise; private celebrations of whatever faith you practice aren't an issue.

And then you've got people who make so many justifications for their belief that there is a "War on Christmas" that they manage to make the term even more meaningless.

So, a quick disclaimer: I'm sure if you search long and hard enough, you'll find somebody who gets cranky and shouty about any religious display. Don't worry, True Believer, that's a significant minority. Less of a percentage than the number of Christians who are so fervently pro-life that they think it's OK to kill people.

Of course, it's possible that available merchandise like this won't make them any happier. (I think it's pretty cool, though.)

But just like in years past, you can find websites dedicated to telling you which retailers are "Christmas-Friendly" and which are "Christmas-Offensive."

Of course, you can always use that same website to tell you which retailers you should go to, because they don't kiss the butt of the theocrats and religious loons. So maybe they do serve some kind of purpose.

The soldiers in the War on Christmas apparently feel that they can put words in their Savior's mouth. There'a a billboard in Ohio reading:

I miss hearing you say "Merry Christmas." - Jesus

Ignoring the fact that... well, shouldn't Jesus be able to speak for Himself? I mean, really now, "Son of God" should probably mean something, shouldn't it?

Now, sometimes the whole "Battleground: Christmas" thing morphs into something so twisted that it gives you a headache roughly the size of the township of Waterbury, Connecticut.

See, what's happening in Waterbury is that the principal of Walsh Elementary School decided to downplay the use of Christmas symbols. It got more publicity when a member of the school board tried to promote a policy allowing each teacher the freedom to decide for themselves whether to hang icons to Santa Claus in their classroom.

The right wing, of course, completely lost their shit over this, with comments like:

"so for a few many must suffer.... you ar in a senses teaching religion....by not allowing these CHRISTMAS celebrations you are teaching the children that there is something wrong with them , so in effect you are teaching the Atheist beliefs..... whats next you going to remove the American flag because that offends someone "

"Another example of why this country is destined to fail"

"What the hell is this country coming to???
We have Christmas, like it or not! And if you are of the faith that does not celebrate it, too bad for you."

Of course, as it turns out, the problem was not the atheists trying to drive God out of the classroom, but the faithful Christians getting upset.

See, that particular school district has a very large community of Pentecostal and Jehovah's Witness families, and they objected to secular decorations causing damage to the Jesus-lobes in their children's brains.

So that particular battle in the "War on Christmas" involved Christians demanding that less-faithful Christians stop interfering with their worship of Christ (or, at least, their particular flavor of Christ). Am I getting this right?

And then you have Taunton, Massachusetts. According to initial reports, a young boy was sent home from school for drawing a crucifix when a teacher asked the students to sketch something that reminded them of Christmas.

This, of course, caused the testicles of much of the right wing to suck up inside their body cavities, causing them to make annoyingly high pitched shrieks of anger. Michell Malkin's testicles, for example, sent her voice to E over high C, as she compared this to murder and alleged child molesters.

Of course, the problem was that the newspaper got the story completely wrong. In reality, the kid drew a crucified stick figure entirely on his own, and then labeled it with his own name. The teacher, reasonably enough, saw this as something to be concerned about. But the rightards were too wrapped up in finding the next Great Liberal Atheist Conspiracy to pay attention to little things like "facts."

Of course, if they even listened to their own wide-eyed rantings once in a while, they might have picked up on the fact that it's unlikely that the teacher would have asked her students to draw any kind of Christmas picture. ("War on Christmas," remember?)

A better clue, though, was unavailable in initial reports. The father came right out and made the following statement.

“It hurts me that they did this to my kid,’’ Chester Johnson, the boy’s father, said in an interview with the Globe. “They can’t mess with our religion. They owe us a small lump sum for this."

I'm thinking that statement explains exactly what this is about. Doesn't take Sherlock Holmes, does it?

But generally, I think that even Jesus would agree with the following statements:

1. If you want to worship Christ, go ahead.

2. If you want a whole manger scene erected, showing the Wise Men coming to Bethlehem to worship the Baby Jesus in the manger, set one up. In your own front lawn. With your own money.

3. If you want the state to pay for it, what the hell is the matter with you?

Is that clear enough?
_________________

Update (12/29): And it looks like I missed one: Rep. Henry Brown (R-SC) has introduced congressional resolution 951, to condemn people who say "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas."

Of course, Rep. Brown's head is so far up his ass that he's licking his own taint.

Indeed, Brown has even attempted to use his resolution as a jab against President Obama. Declaring that the Obamas’ holiday card doesn’t mention Christmas, Brown said, "I believe that sending a Christmas card without referencing a holiday and its purpose limits the Christmas celebration in favor of a more 'politically correct' holiday." Brown’s fight to preserve Christmas and shun "happy holidays" has earned him the title of "patriot" from noted culture warrior Bill O’Reilly.

However, Brown’s 2008 December newsletter wished a "happy holiday" to his constituents for the "holiday season." Although the newsletter had a link to the White House Christmas tree website, it made no other mention of Christ or Christmas. (Click here for a screenshot) And as Slate’s Chris Beam has observed, Brown didn’t introduce his resolution last year, even though President Bush’s 2008 holiday card didn’t mention Christmas either.

So obviously, Henry is doing his best to uphold the fine tradition of inbreeding in South Carolina.