The Best Modern Song About The 19th Century

As kids, my parents had a "hi-fi." You youngsters nowadays won't believe this, but there was a time when, with audio, bigger was better. I know, I know, it sounds crazy, but it's true. Now, music players are the size of a quarter and clip onto your lapel. But when I was little, they looked like this:



And played records, which looked like this:


That's right: music used to come in tangible form. If you wanted to "swap" music, you picked up the record and took it to your friend's house.

One of the records that I listened to on that hi-fi when I was a kid was a record that I expect was originally purchased by my Dad. Neither Mom nor Dad had great taste in music, but Mom's was slightly better than Dad's. Dad likes the Bee Gees, and a lot of other really, really junky music. (I'm excluding, from that "junky" label, Herb Alpert & His Tijuana Brass, which I hated when I was a kid but which I really like, now.)




Mom, like I said, had slightly better taste. She had a lifelong crush on Rod Stewart, who rarely made good music, but she also liked Elvis. And The Beatles.

So Dad had the, um, quirkier taste in music, and that's why I think that Dad had the record that for a long time was the undisputed choice for this category -- because how many could there be, right?

Dad's record was "The Battle Of New Orleans," by Johnny Horton -- and I listened to it so many times that I can still sing it from memory:



Historically accurate, rhymes, good beat: that song had everything you could want, including some humor. (I am assuming that US soldiers did not actually use an alligator as a cannon.)

So "The Battle of New Orleans" was a shoo-in for this category, until I heard this song:



That's right. There was suddenly competition in this category. And what competition! A song about the original Dark Horse, James K. Polk. And it's catchy, it rhymes, it has humor and historical accuracy, too.

How to choose among the two? I re-listened to them today and have now decided that it's close but I'm going to go with "James K. Polk" as The Best Modern Song About the 19th Century, and here's 3 reasons why:

1. It has a theremin in it. The theremin is underused and underappreciated as an instrument.

2. I admire anyone who can pick out a president that nobody cares about and make him a legend. In high school, we formed a group called "Rebellious Youth Without Phones." The sole purposes of this group were to promote riboflavin as our favorite food additive, and Ulysses S. Grant as our greatest president. (You cannot believe how cool I was in high school, can you?)

3. It's tough to use "manifest destiny" in a song and still have the song be cool, but They Might Be Giants did it.

There you have it: "James K. Polk" is The Best Modern Song About The 19th Century.


Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

The Best Celebrity Recipe

This post has been removed and will appear in my upcoming book Up Was Macaroni.  Click here to find all my books on Amazon.


Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

The Best Narnia Book

I just watched the movie The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, which has a longer title, I know, but I'm not going to put all of that up here. And it was pretty good, too; they captured the spirit of the book pretty well and the kids were good actors and the characters and animals looked more or less like I pictured them looking (which I think is a phenomenal thing for a director and actors to do. When I saw the Lord of the Rings movies, they looked exactly like I'd pictured. But J.R.R. Tolkien used a lot of description; C.S. Lewis is more sparse with his, so getting it right, right being the way I think it should be, is pretty good.)

The Boy, by the way, did not like Lion, and is not a fan of Narnia, which I find disappointing. However, his introduction to Narnia was less than desirable. About a year or two ago, The Boy got himself into some minor trouble and was looking to avoid grounding. I told him he could get out of being grounded if he read a book and did a book report on it, and said he had to do one of the Narnia books. He chose the shortest one, The Magician's Nephew, and reported on that.

His report was that it was boring. I took that with a grain of salt because first of all, this is a kid who is so against reading that he reported that the Harry Potter books were boring, too, and never made it past the fourth one. So clearly he's insane. The Harry Potter books were so good that I pre-ordered the seventh one and set aside an entire night to finish it, staying up until 3 in the morning... so clearly I am not insane.

I also took it with a grain of salt because The Magician's Nephew was not the best of the Narnia books. It was kind of boring. I had suggested that he either read Lion, or, if he was going to go out of order, that he pick The Best Narnia Book, which is The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

I bet I read Dawn Treader fifty times in my life. When I was a kid, I used to go to the library weekly (I remember my card number: it was 4208) and take out stacks of books; new ones and ones I'd re-read over and over. Sometimes the little card in the book had my number 7, 8 times in a row. That's how much I read when I was a kid.

That level of reading explains why I am almost completely unfamiliar with pop culture from the late 70s and early 80s. People scoff when I tell them I never watched "The Dukes of Hazzard," but I didn't.

I would like to say that the level of reading also explains my almost complete lack of a social life until I was 20 or so, but that's not true. Reading was not the cause of the lack of a social life -- being overweight and having glasses and an eyepatch had a lot more to do with it. Reading was the beneficiary of my lack of a social life.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was my favorite of the Narnia books because it was so focused and because the adventure was just so different and so spectacular.

Spoiler alert!

And I'm even more diligent about putting in those spoiler alerts since everyone in the world seems bound and determined to wreck Lost for me. I'm still only 1/2-way through the second season and I know that puts me way behind, but do we have to slip Lost references into everything? They led off The Soup with "Lost" jokes one night. And this past week, Entertainment Weekly had an article called "There Will Be Blood... On Ben," and in the first sentence that explained that headline, they also revealed that a character on Lost is, in fact, an Other -- something that I had not yet found out in the show. So if I agree that I am pathetically behind on Lost, could we not spoil it for everyone for no reason? I expect it all over now; I think we're a step away from people having t-shirts with Lost spoilers on them at my health club. I'll be jogging and someone will pass me and it'll say Jack dies in the 3rd season.

Anyway, here's some spoilers for Dawn Treader: I loved the character Reepicheep, a large rat with a rapier. I liked the fight with the sea serpent slowly crushing the ship. I loved that Eustace became a dragon for a while, and I liked the part with the invisible dwarves that had one foot. But more than that, I liked the magical atmosphere of the book. As the Dawn Treader the boat got further and further away from land, Dawn Treader the book got more and more fantastic and ethereal; while the crew sailed away from the known world, so did the reader and so did the writing. So at the end, when they set off in a coracle to go over the edge of the world, it was something completely different.

And I liked the way it was written. Dawn Treader was my first experience with a sad kind of happiness. I was young then and didn't fully understand how happiness and sadness could be linked together and each make the other both more full and more tolerable. How sadness leavened happiness like salt on popcorn, making you appreciate it because you were aware of the lingering pain nearby. And how happiness could carry sadness with it and make you appreciate the sadness.

It's that sadness/happiness joinder that stands out now, years later. The voyage was to the end of the world, literally: the Pevensies were not coming back to Narnia, and Prince Caspian was not coming back to Narnia, but it was all right, somehow, because things had to be that way and because they, and we, were all better off for it. That lesson carried over into life, where frequently happiness and sadness intermingle. When we get an unexpected bonus that helps pay bills, we are happy for the bonus and sad about the bills, and our life is fuller for that experience. When someone dies after a long illness, we can be happy they are free from pain and remember them fondly, while missing them terribly. When a baby is born, there are sometimes hours of pain and trauma and suspense before you look at your little son or daughter and smile.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader taught me to understand that: to understand that transitions between one world and another, between youth and adulthood, between happiness and sadness, are not to be avoided or shunned; they are to be embraced because without the one, the other is less.

Plus, it's a terribly exciting book. Let's not lose sight of that.

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

The Best Thing About Winter

... is that it ends.

Ha!

This could have been the shortest nomination ever, but I am feeling wordy as I sit here, on February 16, 2008 (that date is there for you people who go back and read this months -- nay, years -- from now) as I sit here, on February 16 and look outside at the snow and the cold and think about the promise of the snow and the cold. (And if you are reading this, person in the future, I hope that you are doing so on a warm day. Look outside. Is it sunny? If so, think back in time to me, sitting here typing this and looking at feet and feet of snow.)

I had to run an errand today. I had to pick up Oldest's TV from the repair shop. As we brought it outside, the repairman, in a t-shirt, said "It's not so bad today," and I agreed that it was not, in fact, so bad.

It was 9 degrees.

Such is life in Wisconsin. Life in Wisconsin means that you don't think it's that bad when it's 9 degrees. In fact, you wear t-shirts at that temperature.

I continually wonder, all winter and every winter, how I ended up here? I don't mean in a literal sense: I was born here, and went to school here until I was 18, and then went to college here because it was cheaper to go in-state, and chose my law school the same way (it was a good law school, the UW Law School. It was ranked 43rd when I applied. It was ranked, I believe, 60th when I left. But I don't take all the blame.) Then, if you graduate from a Wisconsin law school, you get to practice law in Wisconsin without taking a bar exam...

... that's right, Wisconsin is home to a bunch of untested home-grown lawyers...

... so I stayed here and now I've got a family and all these cats, so it looks like it's cold for me for the rest of my life. Or at least until I get rich enough to move somewhere without having to look for a job there because I don't want all the stress of moving combined with all the stress of having to look for a job and if I was rich, there would be no stress of either sort, so I could convince Sweetie to let me move. Until then, though, until you readers make me rich, I am stuck with winter, and I hate it.

I mean how did I end up here, a person who hates the cold living in what might as well be the Arctic circle? Maybe I am in the Arctic circle.

I didn't used to hate winter. When I was a kid I didn't mind winter. We had snowball fights and built snow forts and used them to throw snowballs at cars (okay, we used our arms to throw the snowballs. We used our forts to hide from the cars when the drivers stopped because they objected to having snowballs thrown at their cars.) We played ice hockey on the swamp and I cross-country skied as a teenager, and we went sledding and otherwise had a fine time in the winter, as fine as we did in the summer.

And then it ended. My love, or like, of winter, ended. Somewhere along the way, I realized this about winter:

It's #$*$#($&%@! cold!

Cold in a way that I no longer can tolerate. From October 1 to May 1, I freeze to death. I can't get warm enough (until I start sweating) to do anything, and I have to lug around that big coat and gloves and a hat. And my feet get wet. And our driveway has sloped sides and so the more snow we get the harder it is to get it off the driveway because you can't throw the snow up the edge anymore and you just try to heave it out of the way and it slides back down, so the driveway gets narrower and narrower-- it's only about 6' wide now. Any more winter and I won't be able to leave the house.

Why should I leave the house, anyway? I don't ski anymore. I don't ice skate (and if I did, there are indoor rinks available, even in Wisconsin. If they can play hockey in Texas, I don't need winter to ice skate). I don't even sled, which I might do except that the kids are all the wrong ages to sled and besides, I've got a bad back now.

I run into people, now and then, who try to defend winter, and they try to give me things that I could do, but the problem is that all of those things require going outside, and if they didn't then I wouldn't have to suffer through winter to do them. Anything I can do in winter means one of two things. I can get cold and then get warm, by going outside and then back inside to do whatever it is I'm going to do. What's the point of that? Or, I can get cold and then get colder, by going outside and staying there. And there's no point to that.

Those people, the Freeze Meisters, keep trying, and they always pull the same final argument out, too: What about Christmas? they ask. Wouldn't you miss snow on Christmas?

No.

No, I most definitely would not.

Remember that scene in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation when Clark looks outside and envisions his swimming pool, all sunny and warm and "Mele Kalikimaka" plays?

Okay, there's something kind of sad, I agree, about basing your life on Clark Griswold's fantasies, but I'm going to do it anyway:

"Mele Kalikimaka" would be my motto. I can't imagine anything better than being warm on Christmas and wearing shorts and a t-shirt and sitting out on my deck and humming Christmas carols. If I want to see snow on Christmas, I'll watch re-runs of the "very special Christmas" episodes of 80's sitcoms. And when I reach that point, I'll change this nomination from "The Best Thing About Winter... is that it ends" to The Best Thing About Winter Is That I Escaped It.

The Best Song For Valentine's Day

I can play many songs on the guitar, with varying degrees of skill. The degrees of skill vary from "not god-awful" to "I can almost tell what song you are playing." The songs include such rock standards as "Free Falling," and "Suspicious Minds." (And Sweetie and I used to duet on "Suspicious Minds," and we were good.) I also have written my own songs, including The Big Mouth Frog Blues. Those songs, though, are light on romance, and Sweetie deserves romance.

But my own idea of romance tends to lean more towards The Big Mouth Frog and less towards the roses-and-jewelry ideal. Sweetie's learned to cope with that: for this Valentine's Day, she gave me a list of what she would like for a present. Want to see the list? Here it is, from memory:
Perfume.*

When I told her she should put some other things on the list to at least preserve the mystery, she wrote squiggly lines, like what Charlie Brown's parents would write to him if they wrote instead of talking. Sweetie takes no chances with me. (She got her perfume this morning. She's also getting roses, two dozen of them delivered; don't tell her!)

I am, as you can tell, frequently at a loss to convey to Sweetie just how I feel. At least I was until I came across The Best Song For Valentine's Day, "A Wonderful Life" by Rosa Chance Well.

I found this song on Muruch, a great music blog, and was overwhelmed by its simple beauty. The beauty of the song, not the blog (although the blog is very good!) Rosa Chance Well, according to their label, consists of Vanessa Downing and Dean Taormina, who apparently were in a band named "Samuel," then a bunch of other bands with cool names like "The Wicked Farleys," before actually recording an album with help from two others. The label says that their music "comes to feel like a bracing hand on the shoulder," but that's not what "A Wonderful Life" feels like.

"A Wondeful Life" feels like that moment when Sweetie and I first got together -- the first time that I ever woke up in the morning and looked across the pillow and saw her sleeping there, and knew that we were going to be together forever and knew that it was perfect that we would be. It is a quiet, loving, hopeful song that in a few words encapsulates how you feel when you realize that you cannot live without the person you're looking at:

From afar, cross my heart
You were sent
By the stars.
Valentine, be mine.
We will have
A wonderful life.

When you're brave
When you're wrong
I will always lend my hands
Butterfly
Precious find
We will make
Wonderful plans

And it's all right
With you in this world.
And I'm all right
With you now.

And it's all right
With you in this world.
And I'm all right
With you now.

And it's all right
With you in this world.
And I'm all right
With you now.

I couldn't find a video or player -- but you can click here to listen to the song:

A Wonderful Life, by Rosa Chance Wells


I wish I could say things like this song says things. But with the song, I can at least play this for Sweetie and give her an idea of what's in my heart.

Happy Valentine's Day!
*Sweetie gave me a brand and a store, too. But I'm not providing any free advertising here.

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

Also, I am aware that I previously nominated "True Companion" as The Best Romantic Song. There is no inconsistency -- that's my wedding song. So I can't go around just using my wedding song for Valentine's Day now, can I? I don't think so. You've got to mix it up a little -- keep 'em guessing. Romantically, that is. Keep 'em guessing romantically.

The Best Video on Youtube That You Can Find By Searching for “The Best Video On Youtube.”

The Best Video on Youtube That You Can Find By Searching for “The Best Video On Youtube.”

The babies are finicky eaters these days.

I have a laptop.

Those two facts do not seem to go together at first, but they do when I add in that the babies eat better if I let them watch cartoons and the like while they eat—it distracts them so I can get some food into their mouths.

I use the laptop for that; I park it near their chair and look up stuff on Youtube for them to watch. They primarily like “Mahna Mahna” and “Laughing Baby” – these two:





You can see how much Mr F, at least, likes Mahna Mahna here:



But I get bored just watching those over and over again, so I throw in other things that I think they might like – mostly nostalgic videos from when I was a kid. But the plethora of stuff you can watch got me wondering – what would be considered The Best Video on Youtube?

And how would you find it? I don’t want to work my way through 10,000 “dramatic look” reinterpretations – the only good one of which is “Curses!”


Because most of the videos will be bad, right? And because I’m lazy, right? So here’s what I hit on: My incredibly scientific method would be to search for “The Best Video On Youtube” and then watch some of those.

Surprisingly, out of the 100 mocha-zillion (a number I made up that is equal to how much I dislike people who order fancy coffees at places like Starbucks when everyone knows that the more you pay for coffee, the worse it tastes) videos on Youtube, only 111 of them can be found by searching for “The Best Video On Youtube.”

Here’s the number one most popular of those, titled “Sexy Student Goes Wild 4 Sex.” I wonder why this one is so popular? Let’s watch:



Ha! They tricked you, didn’t they? Tricked you so bad that you will never ever buy Bristol Boys. That video is the Youtube equivalent of chat lines – you think you’re going to end up having a wild, sexy time, and instead, you get some direct-to-DVD movie.

So, clearly not The Best Video On Youtube. The girl’s not even pretty.

Then there’s something called “Free Running – Le Parkour.”



That actually is pretty cool. But here’s the thing. “Free Running” is what it sounds like – it’s a sport that involves just running as fast and hard as you can in some direction no matter what obstacles are in your way. It actually seems dangerous and exciting. But danger and excitement are very hard to capture in still pictures and quick cuts. That’s where you MTV generation kids will miss out - -your inability to pay attention to something for more than 2 seconds will ultimately mean that all your movies and TV shows will look like this.

I saw this trend coming when NFL highlights stopped showing the whole play. Instead of the 70-yard touchdown run, we saw the last 2 yards. Because, hey, we’re busy people with our iPodding and Wii-ing and stock trading on our iPhones and second marriages and all, so we can’t watch the whole run.

So they took a cool idea and made it Not The Best. And, in case you are wondering how to make your videos popular, you should note this: “Sexy Student Goes Wild 4 Sex” has 1.5 million more hits than “Free Running—Le Parkour.”

And when I noticed that, I thought of a little experiment. Remember that video of Mr F and Mr Bunches watching “Mahna Mahna?” I put it on Youtube and called it “Mahna. Mahna.” As of today (February 9), it has 54 views.

So I, today, retitled it “Sexy! Sexy! Sexy!” I will check in and tell you how many views it has next week.

Anyway, back to our quest to find The Best Video On Youtube That You Can Find By Searching for “The Best Video On Youtube.”

Number three on the list was “How to Levitate Anything Light,” which would not seem to be, strictly speaking, necessary, given that the things are, well, light – so how hard is it to lift them? But I gave it a run:



So the kid was pretty good at it, and had the presence to explain his own mistake on the video. But, while I’m sympathetic, I didn’t think this was the best. What is impressive is that he’s third on the list with over 100,000 views and his video features no Sexy Students Going Wild 4 Sex, and nobody about to break their fool head.

I then skipped over “Corbin Bleu Interview,” and Evanescence video, a “Titanic Deleted Scene” that promised a leper colony – hilarity is bound to ensue, right? – and something called “depende huevos cubanos.” My Spanish is rusty, but I think that means “Cubans need eggs” and it didn’t sound promising.

This one did, though, which tells you something about me: The next in line was “A Shark Attacks Naked Strog.” How could I skip that? It has one of the necessary elements of being the best – sharks – and a second – nakedness. And it had a “strog.” What’s that? Let’s find out:



I try to stay positive here, but I can’t always. That might be the single worst video I’ve ever seen. How high is the guy filming it that he’s laughing at it?

Plus, that’s a dolphin, Naked Strog.

Then, whoa—it’s “Sexy College Student Goes Wild For Sex.” Same student, it looks like, only this one only has 21,000 views. Maybe spelling out “for” instead of abbreviating it “4” meant that people lost interest while reading the title – it was too long?

Maybe I’ve been doing this wrong. I thought that more hits = higher quality, but if the public knew anything about quality, “Futurama” would still be on the air and Jessica Simpson would be the kind-of-pretty girl working at the convenience store. So let’s go to the end.

There are exactly TWO videos there at the end of the list that have zero hits. Two videos that nobody, before today, had ever watched. One of them is 3:48 long and featured a guy named “Randy Orton.” I don’t know who that is.

The other is 0:08 seconds long and is actually named “The Best Video On Youtube Ever.” So I watched that one first, and, frankly, the guy who made it is right. (I’m assuming it’s a guy, because this kind of video is a guy thing. Only a guy would bother doing this.)

And frankly, I can’t believe this isn’t more popular, because I almost spit coffee through my nose when I watched it, and then almost did it again when I watched it a second time. It’s perfect. The timing is perfect. The graphics are perfect. The music is perfect. It all came together in one sublime experience that only takes 8 seconds to watch. So, “Bigtigers4life,” I bestow upon your effort the title of The Best Video on Youtube That You Can Find By Searching for “The Best Video On Youtube.”

The Best Kids' Show From When I Was A Kid

This post has been removed and will appear in my upcoming book Up Was Macaroni.  Click here to find all my books on Amazon.




Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

The Best Candy Bar To Eat In Sections

Why can't you buy a Peanut Butter Twix in the candy aisle or at the gas station anymore?

I know, they're not "gas stations," they're "convenience stores." But I only go there to get gas, except when I have to get milk and don't want to wait in the lines at the grocery store just for two gallons of milk. Although we need more and more milk every day now. We go through milk faster than I go through gas, and a fair amount of the gas I use is used going to get milk.

Must focus. Peanut Butter Twix. Must focus. Peanut Butter Twix.

Only the most-tired of you out there will be in doubt as to what The Best Candy Bar To Eat In Sections is by now, but I will spell it out for you in case there are some readers who did not begin their day, as I did, with a giant cup of coffee and Mika's "Love Today" on CD in the car. The Best Candy Bar To Eat In Sections is "Peanut Butter Twix."

Now take a moment to watch "Love Today." Really crank up the sound. Your boss won't mind. Not once he hears the song:

Don't you feel more upbeat and happy? I do. That's not the official video, by the way; it's a commercial or commercial wannabe by this guy, TonyDivine, who is clearly very talented.

Must focus. Peanut Butter Twix. Must focus. Peanut Butter Twix.

Why can't you buy a Peanut Butter Twix as a regular candy bar? And why are they in red wrappers? And why do I have to buy six of them just to get one? And why do I have to get them in the 'snack' aisle at the grocery store? And why doesn't Sweetie buy Peanut Butter Twix instead of Milky Ways, which I'll eat but I won't be very happy about.

Sweetie: I ate the Milky Ways under protest. All four of them.

Peanut Butter Twix was the first time in my memory that a candy bar "branched out" and used the name of another candy bar to establish a brand and lure in the people who already loved the 'original' version. Back in my day -- 1983, the year Peanut Butter Twix was introduced -- people were forced to buy products, watch movies, and wear clothes that had no apparent relationship to products they'd bought, movies they'd watched, or clothes they were wearing.

That's right, kids. You can't imagine the horrors we faced, walking through a store with no clue about whether or not we'd like something, having to constantly go outside of our comfort zone. You people have all grown up watching endless "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" movies and remakes of "The Brady Bunch" and "Starsky and Hutch." Your sodas all have names that begin with "Coke- ", "Pepsi-" or "Mountain Dew-."

I'm not just exaggerating, either. Over at MountainDew.com (Yes, there's a "MountainDew.com." It's here) they list seven brands, all beginning with "Mountain Dew." They include "Baja Blast," "Live Wire," and "Code Red." Note that none of those names give you an idea of what the soda tastes like. It's enough to know that it's "Mountain Dew," right?

There's also "Dew Iced... With Mountain Dew." There should be a special award for the PepsiCo employee who managed to fit "Dew" in their twice. I bet Generation Y members cry with relief when they see that.

But in 1983, marketers didn't know that we would all just blindly buy something if it had a familiar word in front of it. They had to convince us to buy things like soda and candy bars even though those sodas and candy bars might be entirely unrelated to anything we'd ever bought before. (They weren't entirely unrelated, of course: everyone knows that there's only three companies in the world that produce all the products we use and all the entertainment we watch. Just like everyone knows that all colas use the same exact formula and the differences are only in our heads.)

So in 1983, and before, marketers had to convince us that "TAB" was something we wanted to buy. (A task they largely failed at; "TAB" in my memory is associated with fat women in leg warmers and with cancer.) (Please don't sue me, Coca-Cola. I can't help my memory.)

Then came Peanut Butter Twix. The candy that changed the world. I know, I give a lot of credit for changing the world to seemingly innocuous things like Jennifer Aniston's hair, but I'm always right when you stop to think about it. And I'm right here, too, because I'll bet that this was the first real instance of rebranding (unless you count the 1 zillion varieties of "Bun" candy bars, but nobody does.)

Twix had a real image at that time: The chocolate candy with the cookie crunch. At least, that's how I remember it. It might actually be "The only candy with a cookie crunch." (See, Coca Cola! I'm unreliable!) The manufacturers then messed around with that, and came up with Peanut Butter Twix, which originally sat there in the yellow wrapper -- the yellow wrapper that I can't even locate on Google but which I know existed -- on the candy rack at the Piggly-Wiggly, drawing your eye in with its blaze of unfamiliar mixed with the familiar. Twix? But Twix isn't in yellow. And what's this about peanut butter? Twix doesn't have peanut butter. But it SAYS it's a Twix.

It was irresistable. Or so I thought, but it turns out lots of people could resist it because Peanut Butter Twix didn't last forever or take over the candy world or make it to the cover of Time or anything. They pulled it off the shelves for a while, and then it resurfaced, this time in a red wrapper and located in the snack aisle, but it was too late for me and probably for others, because I'd moved on to Butterfingers and Sweetie does the grocery shopping, and because candy bars are not supposed to be bought in the snack aisle, they're supposed to be thrown onto the conveyor belt at the end of your groceries, or grabbed while you wait in line at the gas station. Candy bars should come in ones, not packs of six or 10 or 50. They should be eaten on the ride home from wherever you bought them, either sitting in the back seat while Mom drives, or sitting in the front seat while your babies have a contest in the back to see who can say aaaaaaaaaahhhhh the loudest and longest.

And, to finally get to the point of this, they should be eaten, if at all possible, in sections and using a system, and that's what Peanut Butter Twix was The Best At. For all the hoopla about how to eat a Reese's, or that you can eat M&Ms without them melting (a lie, and I can prove it!) in your hand, Peanut Butter Twix was both the first and the best for eating in sections.

Here's how I'd do it: Open up the candy bar. Take out the first one. (Remember, with Twix, you get two, and not a cheesy, miniature "two" that's really less than one, like with Heath and Mounds and Almond Joy. You get two full-size bars.)

Eat the peanut butter off the cookie first, carefully scraping the peanut butter and chocolate top, but not the sides or the cookie, until there's no peanut butter left.

Then nibble the chocolate off all the ends until there's just cookie, with a little bit of chocolate and peanut butter that you missed.

Finally, eat the cookie. Savor it, mingled with the memory of peanut butter and chocolate that still lingers in your mouth.

Then-- voila!-- another one awaits you!

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

The Best Music Video

I was alive when MTV first came out. I remember watching MTV with my uncle (who was just a little older than me -- those crazy Catholic families!) and my older brother (also just a little older than me) when I was about 16 or so, and MTV had been around long enough that the novelty had worn off.

This was long before I noted the trend in music videos that lets you instantly know, even with the sound turned off, what kind of music you're watching.

I just re-read that sentence, and had to stop and think whether it made sense. But it did. Imagine if you could go back in time and say to Mozart, "There will come a time when you can use the phrase "what kind of music you're watching" and it will make sense. I bet I know just what he would say:

Ich bin traurig, spreche ich nur Deutsches, also verstand ich Sie nicht, verrückte Person von der Zukunft.

(Which is German for "I'm sorry, I only speak German, so I didn't understand you, crazy person from the future ")

My theory on music videos is this, before I get further sidetracked from the sidetrack I was on: Each category of music has its own "type" of video that it doesn't stray far from. Take emo/pop punk (Like Jimmy Eat World or The All-American Rejects). Groups like that make videos that show the group playing in some unusual location with people going about their ordinary business around them. So they play their music in a pool (Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle") or on a beach (Blink 182's "All the Small Things") or a parade (My Chemical Romance's "Welcome To The Black Parade.") This is meant to show, I think, how unusual and out-of-step the bands, or we, are.

Meanwhile, rappers and hip-hoppers videos are only parties or dance contests (Rihanna, "Pon de Replay," Jay-Z and Beyonce, "Crazy In Love") while heavy metal and hard rockers invariably lean towards concert footage mixed with drinking. The messages here are even more obvious -- hip hoppers are crowd-pleasing dance partiers, while rockers are, well, rockers.

I know, I know: there are those who break the mold, but far fewer than you think.

So I was about 16, and we were watching videos, and the video for The Police's "Synchronicity II" came on. That's the one that has a post-apocalyptic Sting looking all Billy-Idoled and singing from what appears to be a dump equipped with sound equipment. And, frankly, none of it makes sense. The song title itself is dumb -- "Synchronicity II?" Nobody ever heard Synchronicity I, which is also apparently a song. The lyrics also talked about the mundanity of everyday life, painting a picture of people's daily existence, while, apparently, Grendel was coming forth to attack them. Or the Loch Ness monster. I'm not sure what Sting meant. But worst of all, the video had nothing to do with the song. Nothing at all. And I said so to my brother and my uncle; I said "This video has nothing to do with the song."

They just laughed. They never even explained why they laughed, and I was left, as usual, wondering what it was that the cool people got that I didn't.

So that's yet another reason why I hate people. But it's also a reason to hate music videos-- because MTV showed me (as so many other things have shown me) just how uncool I was, but also because the videos made the lyrics to the song pointless; why write a song about people's everyday lives being threatened by something crawling from a dark Scottish loch if you're going to illustrate it by having Sting strut around a garbage dump in Billy Idol's hand-me-downs?

But one video, ultimately, cut through and won me over, and that video is The Best Music Video. It's the video for Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice." Here's the lyrics for "Weapon of Choice:"


Don't be shocked by the tone of my voice
Check out my new weapon, weapon of choice
Don't be shocked by the tone of my voice
Check out my new weapon, weapon of choice
Listen to the sound of my voice
You can check it all out, it's the weapon of choice
Don't be shocked by the tone of my voice
It's the new weapon, weapon of choice

[2x Chorus:]You can go with this,Or you can go with that,You can go with this,Or you can go with that,You can go with this,Or you can go with that,Or you can throw with (us)

Walk without rhythm it won't attract the worm
Walk without rhythm and it won't attract the worm
Walk without rhythm and it won't attract the worm
If you walk without rhythm ah, you never learn
. . . .

Organically grown, through the hemisphere I roam
Too big love to the angels of light
Yeah, and my girl
She just don't understand
Is gone beyond being a man
As I drift off into the night, I'm in flight
She's a Boy scout no doubt
but I'm going to hold my cool,
because of easy rules
Yeah, so move on baby, yeah
Halfway between the gutter and the stars, yeah
Halfway between the gutter and the stars, yeah

How are you ever going to illustrate that and have it make sense? Simple. You get Christopher Walken to dance around a hotel:




I love this video, and named it The Best, for two reasons: first, it so completely divorces the song from the video -- is so devoid of any link to the song-- that in a tantric way it comes completely around and could not be more related to the song. (Don't think about that too long.)

Second, because of how cool Christopher Walken's dance is. If I win the lottery, I am going to spend all of my time teaching myself to do that dance, and then buy a hotel to do it in. That's right: I will devote my life to recreating this video. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

The Best Movie Monster

Hey there! This essay now appears in my book, "Do Pizza Samples Really Exist?" on sale through Lulu (click this link to buy it!)


Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

The Best Children's Book

Have you noticed that many things intended for children are awful?

I've noticed it, probably because I have 16-month-old twin boys who have been showered with things intended for children, but who, despite having been showered with those things, insist on playing with a cut-up-cardboard box and bouncing on the couch. I probably would have noticed it anyway, even without Mr F and Mr Bunches, because I like kid stuff -- good kid stuff-- and use it in my everyday life by (for example) watching Disney's "Hercules" to clear my mind after having watched "Jeepers Creepers" by myself one night.

I'm a careful consumer of kids things because, like I said, many of them are awful; they just assume that kids are brain-dead and that parents will show them anything that encourages hugs. And among the awfulest can be childrens' books. I read to the boys every night. Okay, almost every night. Some nights, football is on. And some nights, Daddy is just plain tired. You try hauling two boys around in a laundry basket for 30 minutes. I'm not as young as I used to be. But most nights I read to the boys, because I want to spend time with them and because I want them to like reading. I think it's a shame that kids don't like reading anymore. I'm not going to go off on some old-fogey rant about how kids wouldn't know a good book if it bit them in the butt. I'm just saying: kids don't like to read.

And part of that, to go back to my original point, might be because books, especially books for kids, are so frequently bad that we forget how good a good book can be. So I read my guys good books every night. Those books range from Disney stories to Winnie the Pooh to Shel Silverstein poems to Dr. Seuss; I focus on the good ones, the ones that are fun and imaginative and stick in your mind.

Then I came across The Best Children's Book, which I got for only $1 at our library as a used book and only then found out that it was very recently on the best seller list; the used books I get from the library are usually not major smash hits, but this one was.

The Book is Mo Willems' The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog.

I didn't preview this book before buying it; I'll buy anything that looks remotely good and is only $1, and I liked the cover illustration's hand-drawn crayon-y feel: (Plus, I liked the liberal use of exclamation points!) So when I sat down to read it to the boys, I had no idea what to expect. But from page 1, I was enthralled.

The story is simple and is spelled out, mostly, on the cover: the pigeon finds a hot dog. But before he can eat it, the duckling butts in and wants to know what the hot dog tastes like, and the pigeon gets testy because he thinks the duckling is angling to get the hot dog.

That description doesn't do it justice, quite, because the way the story unfolds, Willems does an excellent job of showing the character of the Pigeon and the Duckling and giving them each distinct personalities. There's no narrator; the Pigeon and Duckling talk directly to each other and to the reader (I'm a sucker for books that break the fourth wall).

What makes it the best for me, I think, is that the Pigeon and the Duckling are not saccharine-sweet characters that are all about hugging and loving, like they're the Charmin Bears absent bodily functions or something. These are fun, interesting characters in a kid's book. The Pigeon, at one point, goes on a tear about the Duckling and mimics him because he's so upset that the Duckling is bugging him, while the Duckling just keeps working on the Pigeon.

And the book is fun to read out loud, which is important. I do the voices, wherever I can, and the Pigeon and Duckling are fun to do the voices of (for your info, I do the Pigeon as a sort of street-hustler, while the Duckling has a higher, fake-innocent voice.) The boys love it when I get to the part where the duckling asks "Would you say that it tastes like chicken?" At least, I think they love it. They stop wiggling and trying to hit each other with bottles at that point, and if that's not love, what is?

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

The Best Knock Knock Joke

My nephew is 6 years old now. He’s tall enough that I keep thinking he’s 10 or 11, but he’s only six. And he loves jokes. Which is lucky, because I love jokes. Or lucky, that is, until you realize that kids never get tired of jokes. Tell them one joke:

A guy walks into a bar and says “I’m looking for my friend.” The bartender says “Who’s your friend.” The guy says “He’s got a wooden leg; name’ s Pete. Have you seen him?” The bartender says “I don’t know. What’s the name of his other leg?”

And they want a zillion more.

How come you can’t starve in the desert? Because of all the sand which is there.

And you have to keep them coming until you run out of jokes and fall back on “Pete and repeat were in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was left?” and you hope they grow tired of it but they don’t.

And also that last joke is not as funny if the kid doesn’t know what “repeat” means.

And that last joke is not funny when the kid tells it to you. I recommend quickly saying “the other guy,” except that then you’ll be just another boring old uncle.

Luckily, I have The Best Knock-knock joke of all time. Little kids love knock-knock jokes, even when they don’t get them. They love “Boo!” “Boo who?” “Don’t cry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” and “Dwayne,” “Dwayne who?” Dwayne the tub, I’m dwowning,” and more.

I thought, until I happened, just happened, to be home on one Friday night, that this was The Best Knock-Knock Joke:


Person A: “I’ve got a great knock-knock joke. You start.”

Person B: “Okay. Knock knock.”

Person A: “Who’s there?”

Person B: Jaw drops a little. Stands there dumbly. Laugh at him/her.


That’s a great one. And it can also, sometimes, end the joke onslaught.

But a few years ago—10 – I happened one Friday night to be home. I know, you’re shocked, and so was most everybody, given that I was known in my day as a carouser. (Note: nobody who uses the word “carousing” or any variation thereof to describe “carousing” is a “carouser.”)

(Also note: people who say “let’s party!” or any variation thereof are losers.)

(I'm just saying.)

So I was home on a Friday night, a stunningly rare event, and I happened to turn on the TV and see a short-lived show called “Brother’s Keeper.” (You can read more about it here if you want.) That show didn’t last long, but it made an impact on me that all the seasons of Lost will likely never achieve (and I’m only ½-way through Season 2 so no spoilers!) It gave me The Best Knock Knock Joke.

What I present to you in this nomination is the Best Knock Knock Joke because it allows you to yell a little, act like an animal, interrupt, and at the end of it, it still makes the listener think a minute and then laugh -- it's an intellectual knock-knock joke that involves yelling and animal noises. Plus, kids love it. So, without further ado, I give you the first ever TBOE Players Production of The Best Knock-Knock Joke:

The Best Cartoon Series By Matt Groening

Okay, I did not go see The Simpsons Movie, and I do not intend to and don’t want to. I was very much a fan of "The Simpsons" back when the Simpsons were cool and funny – when Bill Clinton had more to do than hog the stage while Hillary fumes on the sidelines mentaling shrieking "It’s my turn you chunky..."

Well, okay.

"The Simpsons" went through three distinct phases. There was the early, rough era when Homer was a little too alcoholic and mean and the jokes had an unfunny edge to them. There was the all-too-brief middle era when the show was one of the funniest on TV, and then there’s the remainder of the show’s 18-decade run, which is marked by not being funny and too many episodes that have Lisa in them.

Why is it that every sitcom family, even the animated ones, have to have a socially conscious girl in them that sucks the life and humor out of the show whenever she’s on the screen? Think of Tina Yothers. Remember how much "Family Ties"stopped being even slightly entertaining when she was onscreen? You always knew that she was about 1 minute away from some patronizing speech about the rain forest. Just like Lisa Simpson. I think it’s because Hollywood writers are liberals, and because sitcom writers are in their minds important novelists who resent writing scripts for TV shows and want to spend their time writing big important books that nobody would want to read anymore than they want to hear sonorous speeches from Lisa Simpson. But because they can’t write those novels – or because they can but nobody wants to publish or read them – the writers have to make a living writing for sitcoms and so they plug those speeches into the Tina Yothers character and the studio heads go along with it because they think they’re Doing Good by letting the speeches get on the air.

I bet if I could remember much about "Alf" beyond the fact that it was a puppet that looked sort of like a baby Snuffleupagus that ate cats, that show would have a self-important daughter with concerns about the world we live in.

But Lisa was not the only problem with "The Simpsons." She was the only problem that existed for the whole too-long life of the show, true, but there were more problems and the biggest problem was that The Simpsons stopped being funny or relevant and started trying to hard. It went from being a fun mockery of us and society and people in general to something that just couldn’t buy a laugh.

I think I lost interest when Homer became a conceptual artist and flooded the town. The show that brought us "Stop The Planet of the Apes, I Want To Get Off" had devolved into an episode where Homer impossibly flooded Springfield so that Marge could paint again, or something. It was all too much – it was show-offy and unrealistic in a way that wasn’t funny, it was just painful.

I recently– okay, last year – checked in to see if I’d find it funny again, and watched half an episode in which Marge gets hooked on some online game only to find that Bart is a master character that’s killing everyone. First of all, that ripped off "South Park," which was funny because South Park had an episode in which a character keeps pointing out that the Simpsons had done something first, but not funny in a way that made you laugh because of the Simpsons; it was funny in a painful way. Second of all, making fun of online games? Wow, there’s a target nobody’s touched yet. Hey, Simpsons’ writers – what do you think of high gas prices? Aren’t they outrageous? Maybe Lisa could make a speech in favor of solar power! And Homer could wreck the sun?

If I see that as an episode, I’m suing.

What makes "The Simpsons" suckiness so remarkable is that the show sits alongside proof of Matt Groening’s actual genius, the good Groening creation, "Futurama."
Futurama got such a raw deal. It’s already a tough sell – a science fiction cartoon that’s not The Jetsons. But it was on Sundays, on Fox, which meant that it was pre-empted for 9/5 of the year because of football, and when it wasn’t pre-empted it aired immediately after football, and for most people, football and funny-sci-fi-cartoon are not an obvious link. And that combination led to its early demise on Fox and sort-of resurrection on cable.

Futurama was, is, brilliant and hilarious. Loosely the story of the adventures of Fry, who accidentally cryogenically froze himself while delivering a pizza on New Year’s Eve and woke up in the future, it managed to include science and humor and commentary on modern – our modern, nowadays – society alongside absurdities and parodies. It featured easy targets like "Slurms Mackenzie," the hard-partying mascot for the drink "Slurm," and in that episode parodied beach movies and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." And it went after harder targets, more abstract ideas, like the time the professor made an entire universe in a box, and got into a battle with the alternate selves of the characters who thought that our universe was in a box in their universe.

Futurama had great characters. Not just Fry, who was awesomely stupid but genuinely nice, but Leela the one-eyed orphan mutant kickboxing star captain who is Fry’s love interest. It had Bender, Fry’s best friend and roommate and also an alcoholic thief degenerate soap opera star robot. There was Zap Branigan, the sort-of-William-Shatner-esque space captain who might have been wearing pants and might not have been.

Futurama also was hilariously, insanely, funny. The stories were jumping off points for one-liners and site gags and twisty innuendos and plots. A stop for refueling leads Fry to buy a service station sandwich, and eat a crunchy black thing that turns out to be a tomato, resulting a worm infestation that makes him a better, smarter person who Leela loves. The professor’s invention of mutants to play against the Harlem Globetrotters results in time breaking down and jumping at random, giving the humans a chance to cooperate with the Globetrotters to save the universe – and giving Bender a chance to try to become a Globetrotter.

As absurd as they might sound, the stories always amounted to more than they started out to be – because they had a little heart in them. When Fry makes a deal with the robot devil and gets the devil’s hands, he uses them to play the holophone – a clarinet that creates holograms – like a maestro, impressing Leela with the symphony he wrote. Leela, though, goes deaf because of a trick the Robot Devil plays, and ultimately Fry must give up his hands (and his chance to impress Leela) to keep her from having to marry the Robot Devil. But in the end, we see Fry practicing the holophone on his own, determined to impress Leela through his efforts.

Futurama also has the distinction of being the only cartoon to make Sweetie cry – in the episode where Fry tries to track down his lucky 7-leaf clover, only to learn that his older brother, Yancy, had appropriated it and taken Fry’s identity to become a great space explorer. Enraged, Fry goes to rob his grave – SPOILER ALERT – but learns that Yancy had in fact named his son after Fry and given his son the clover because he missed Fry so much after Fry disappeared into the future.

It takes a special sort of genius to make you laugh and cry in an episode that features grave robbing.

That wasn't my favorite episode, though. If I had to pick one, I'd have to go with the one where Fry tries to buy underwear, only to realize he doesn't have enough money. Remembering that he had a bank account, he goes to get some cash and finds out that because of accrued interest over 1000 years, he's deliriously wealthy. Using his money, he goes on a spending spree buying... old 1980's artifacts, including the last can of sardines in the world, which for reasons too complicated to get into, the world's most loveable industrialist wants to get from him. And it's even funnier than it sounds!

Futurama presents a future that looked both inviting and scary, funny and disturbing, exciting and mundane. A world where you could work as a delivery boy but you’re delivering things to planets that are collapsing or controlled by human-hating robots or giant Amazons. A world where petting zoos included Tyrannosaurus Rexes and you could regrow your hands after the dinosaur bit them off. A world that looked a lot like the one we see all around us only it was new and different and fresh each time we blinked.

The future is like that for all of us: it’s a little bit frightening and a little bit intriguing, and it was fun and comforting to see Fry – us – deal with what we suspected (and feared) the future would be like and make it not so bad after all. It was even better to see that done with a sense of style and humor and even have all the science correct. And it was best of all, frankly, to have it done without a hectoring sister in the mix.

The Best Christmas Movie

Think of all the things that Christmas means or should mean to people. Let’s list them together:

Giving.
Love.
Peace.
Togetherness.
Goodwill towards men.
Salvation.


That’s probably good enough for starters. Ponder those for a second, and then ask yourself: What is the likelihood that a movie about an abusive alcoholic thieving Santa would embody those qualities? If you haven’t seen the movie Bad Santa, you’re probably saying “There’s no likelihood of that,” but you’re wrong.

Bad Santa is The Best Christmas Movie because it not only embodies all of the good things about Christmas, but it does that in a way that does not leave you gagging or grumbling or wondering why it is that when people fall off the roof of the house, the lights always wrap around their ankle and stop them just short of landing on the ground.

The problem with most Christmas movies is that Christmas is so good that people hesitate to have any fun with it or tamper with the usual formulas. Whether or not you’re a Christian, Christmas has come to mean more than just big business; it means all those qualities I began with, and it means cozy scenes of couples curled up in front of a fireplace drinking eggnog, or kids opening presents, or carolers with red scarves and red noses. It’s chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Parson Brown doing the job while he’s in town, boughs of holly, and lords-a-leaping. Filmmakers tamper with that at their peril, or, more often, simply don’t tamper with it.

That led us to the point, just before Bad Santa came out, where Christmas movies would be entirely predictable and entirely sucky. There would be snow. And small towns with main streets. And a scene where the family decorates the tree. And a grumbling boss. And slight – very slight – commentary to the effect of gosh, look how many presents we bought, we should really remember what this season is all about and then a snowball fight and Santa tucking in a little kid.

I blame Charles Dickens and The Grinch. Dickens gave us an idealized version of Christmas that places all Christmas celebrations in Victorian England. If your Christmas doesn’t have a goose, a lad in a newsboy cap, and hot toddies, it probably feels lacking. And The Grinch gave us the Christmas Feast (complete with Roast Beast), the stockings, the trees, and the singing. (Some blame, too, goes to “’Twas The Night Before Christmas.")

From those sources, we created “Christmas, The Holiday.” We dream of white Christmases where the snow begins falling in flakes as large as your head on Christmas Eve, and we watch movies where all those things happen and where everything is so sweet and so predictable and so boring that you can’t watch them anymore. By now we know that the grumpy account executive will see the error of her ways and we know that grandma won’t be left sitting alone all night.

I had had enough, and so, apparently had a lot of people. We just didn’t know we’d had enough, and didn’t know what we’d had enough of until about 1/3 of the way through Bad Santa when Billy Bob Thornton staggers across a parking lot in his department-store-santa outfit. Only the parking lot is in Arizona, and the heat is causing distortion in what we see, and Santa is staggeringly drunk and not even trying to keep his beard on.

At that point, Christmas movies of the past exploded and a whole new era was born. I hope. But I think it was.

Bad Santa is rude and mean and obnoxious and gross and times and rated R and it is both astoundingly funny and still somehow nice enough to qualify as a genuine Christmas movie. The story of an alcoholic safecracker who works as Santa to get access to mall safes just after the big Christmas sales is 99.9% raunchy hilarity and 0.1% sweetness, and even the sweetness is curdled with some tart, the way some candies work both sides of the tongue. Here’s an example: after Billy Bob convinces a kid who lives with a senile grandma that he, Billy Bob, is Santa, so that he can stay there while biding his time until the big heist – which will be Christmas Eve – we expect, from past Christmas movies, that the bad guy will find his heart softening. What we don’t expect is how that softening will be shown. Billy Bob does not change his heart and go out caroling with Thurman Merman. He decorates the house only because not doing so will attract attention he doesn’t want. But he does cook the kid dinner – bologna and salsa fried on white bread. And he tries to make amends by fixing the kid’s Advent calendar after ruining it while on a bender. But he fixes it with whatever’s handy, and hasn’t completely changed, so when Thurman gets an aspirin instead of a candy, all Billy Bob can say is “They can’t all be winners, kid.”

There are, also, no scenes of heartwarming tenderness explaining why Billy Bob might change his attitude. There is no picture from Thurman showing his missing dad being replaced by Santa. We learn that Thurman knows Billy Bob really isn’t Santa at all. And the touching moment when Thurman gives Billy Bob a gift happens when Billy Bob is making out with Lauren Graham and is interrupted by Thurman giving him a hand-carved wooden pickle. That’s sticky with Thurman’s blood.

It all sounds terrible, and sounds even worse when you consider that it’s full of cursing and replete with sexual references, but it works somehow, and I think it works because it takes all of the clichés that have sprung up around Christmas and turns them inside out, allowing them to seem new and okay – like when you’d turn a sweatshirt inside out to wear it a second day. It messes with everything “regular” Christmas movies hold dear – the big bonding scenes between the bad guy and the kid involves the bad guy beating up a bunch of teenagers and then supervising a boxing match, while at other times Billy Bob explains that his beard is fake because he slept with a woman who wasn’t clean – Mrs. Santa’s Sister – and that he and Mrs. Claus are getting divorced because of it (but Mrs. Claus gets the elves.)

I didn’t think, when I first saw the movie, that it would hold such an esteemed place in my mind someday – I just thought it was a breath of fresh air and hilarious. But as it sunk in, I saw that it had achieved something really hard – it had made Christmas movies seem fresh and unique again. And it had achieved something even harder – it had made Christmas seem real again.

That’s the larger point of this. Let’s face it: For all the great parts of Christmas, there are the parts we don’t like to think about or talk about because they take away from the magic a little. If you want a brightly lit tree, you’ve got to spend some time putting the lights on (and ultimately taking them off). A heavy snowfall is magical on Christmas Eve, but it keeps you from visiting relatives and makes you shovel your car out on Christmas Day. We all love shopping for presents, except for the lines and the crowds and the slush and the expense. The table full of Christmas cookies was preceded by a day or two spent in the kitchen and there’s a sink full of dishes.

Yes, Christmas is magical and it’s a celebration of all the good things about people. But it gets that way not in spite of or without all the trouble and stress and worries, but because of it. Christmas takes all the ordinary stresses of life and multiplies them: we have to cook everyday, but it’s not everyday that the whole family is going to eat it. We have money worries all the time, but we don’t spend all of our time hoping to find that perfect gift for the kids to show them how much they mean to us even though sometimes we’re crabby with them. We’re surrounded by music and movies and books, but it’s only about one month per year that those movies and music and books stop being about how hot people’s girlfriends are and start being about Angels From The Realms Of Glory.

So at Christmas, we amp up the stresses, but we amp up the good feelings, too, and if we do it right, the Giving, the Love, the Peace, the Togetherness, the Goodwill towards men, and the Salvation drown out the worries and stress and bad feelings, and we can appreciate, for a brief time, just how beautiful life really is.

Bad Santa taught me that. It made me laugh, and I enjoyed it, but it also made me appreciate how the bad things can make the good things so much better. And that’s why it’s The Best Christmas Movie.

The Best Christmas Song

It’s only December 4, but I’m feeling Christmas-y. I began feeling Christmas-y, if you must know, almost as soon as the dishes were being cleared away after Thanksgiving dinner. I was able to resist the Christmas feeling when it first tried to wash over me, but I was able to do that at that time this year because the feeling first tried to get into my blood while Sweetie and I were at Toys R Us the first week of November, and they were playing nothing but Christmas music. Still, I fought it off because there’s a time and place for Christmas, and that time and place is beginning immediately after Thanksgiving dinner and continuing on until about 5:00 p.m. on Christmas Day.

That’s when Christmas ends: 5 p.m., December 25. It’s just over, then. The cookies have been eaten, the egg nog has been nogged, the presents opened and played with, the sweaters sweatened. And its at 5 p.m. that the feeling just fades away in the long gray of winter that January represents. I can’t ever feel Christmas-y after that point. When we were kids we’d go to my grandparents on Christmas Day, at night, for dinner and Christmas with them, but it was never right. We’d go there, eat dinner, they’d have the cookies and pies and all that, and the tree was there, and lit up, and they’d give us presents (which were usually a plaid shirt and a complete set of NFL pencils; we liked the latter a lot and would use them in order of our favorite teams, leaving the Cleveland Browns and New Orleans Saints pencils for the February and March, if ever) but it was not the same.

I think that’s because Christmas to me is not the holiday so much as it is the feeling of the holiday, the anticipation, the goodwill and fun that builds up from Thanksgiving on. You begin with a quiet family gathering of turkey and football and jellied cranberries, and that marks the end of regular time. Starting the next day, with the crowds and the shopping – and I always go out shopping that day – Christmas begins building up to the greatest holiday of the year. And I say greatest both from a religious and a secular perspective. If you’re religious – Christian, at least – there isn’t really a better day on the calendar than the day your religion was born. But even if you’re not Christian, the Christmas season has grown to represent more than just the birth of the savior of humankind (if that’s possible.) It’s become a celebration of the better side of people, the side of people that wants to show goodwill to each other, that wants to have peace, that wants to bestow gifts on each other, that wants to sing and be happy and love each other, that wants to give our spare dollar bills and quarters to the bell ringer and drop off a Toy for a Tot and watch the very special episodes of all our favorite sitcoms.

So we begin with the holiday shopping and crowds, and we move on to getting pictures taken for family Christmas cards and sending them out, and we start Secret Santas at the office and get small gifts, and we have Christmas parties with friends or coworkers and tell our wives that, no, the eggnog doesn’t have brandy, I don’t think, and then we cave in and take the kids to see the local theater production of either the Nutcracker or “A Christmas Carol,” and we drive around the neighborhood and look at the lights, and then we have the whole family over, which we swore we’d never do after last year when the kids chased the cats around and nearly knocked down the tree, and Dad is shocked to see that we’re not kidding, we really did get an 8-foot-tall inflatable Rudolph for the yard and, yes, there’s the parrot next to it, and he doesn’t believe that we bought it simply because it was on sale, but, hey, it’s Christmas, so you’ll even put on the slippers that you got.

And then it’s late and everyone’s gone home and the presents under the tree are those that Santa has brought for the kids and you get to sit quietly and drink yet one more glass of egg nog while you listen to music and look at the Christmas tree with the stegosaurus ornament.

And that’s the moment that Christmas is building up to, for me: that quiet moment after all the revelry, where I get to reflect on just how far my life has come, on just how much I love my life and the people in it, and get to do that after a whirlwind of singing and presents and celebrating and too-loud talking that’s stretched out over weeks and ranged from carrying boxes through the snow to stringing popcorn.

To carry me through that, to keep me on a Christmas-keel throughout that, I don’t rely solely on friends and family and presents and decorations. I rely on one of the most fundamental things that can affect mood: music.

Christmas music can be broken down into a couple of different categories and styles. There’s old-fashioned, and new, the traditional alongside the modern. There’s upbeat, happy songs; there are the sad ones that are sad in a good way, that make you melancholy because while you understand the emotion they’re discussing, you’re not going through it yourself. Each of them has their merits and captures a facet of Christmas.

Take one of the better traditional ones – O Holy Night. That’s a great one, especially if you’re religious. It’s quietly uplifting and elevates your mood in a meditative way. But that’s not all there is to Christmas.

Or there’s the bounciness of Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmas, a more modern, stripped-down synthesizer jaunt that celebrates the simple happiness of a family gathering. It gives you a bubbly little happy feeling, but doesn’t encapsulate the season.

There’s the solemn, throat-choking appeal of Do They Know It’s Christmas, a song that never fails to bring on a moment of silence and reminds us that Christmas is a time to help those less fortunate than us. But that, too, is only a part of the holiday.

And the importance of family, of friends, of love, at this time of year is captured by hundreds of songs. Please Come Home For Christmas. (There’s No Place Like) Home For The Holidays. All Alone on Christmas. Some fast, some slow, all a bit sad and reminding you to make sure that you visit Mom with some gingerbread cheesecake. And, they, too, fall short. (Among those songs is one not to miss, though: Fairytale of New York, by The Pogues. It’s heartbreaking and beautiful and almost was my choice for this category – almost. While it paints a beautiful picture, it’s ultimately too sad to win this award. But you should listen to it, and you should listen to it over and over.) (And you can do that here:)

I couldn't pick that one, because it's not The Best. There’s only one song, in the entire pantheon of Christmas songs, that adequately captures the whole of the season, of the holiday, and that song is “Christmas Is The Time To Say I Love You” by Billy Squier.

No, I’m not joking.

Watch and listen:





Did you hear the lyrics? Just the title: Christmas is the time to say I love you. That’s the whole season wrapped up right there, isn’t it? Say “I love you,” to your kids, your wife, your parents, your friends, the world.

The song hits all the marks: “touch of magic,” mentioning Santa and the reindeer, talk of good cheer, the food and drink and candy, the reflections that Christmas brings on (“Memories of the year that lays behind us”) and of the feeling that Christmas engenders: Make you feel that life has just begun.

Beyond the words, though, is the music. I miss the 70’s if only for this reason: they don’t make music like this anymore. There’s no raucous guitar music that builds and builds and builds and piles chords and drumbeats and choruses all together, barely holding it together, the kind of songs that feel always like they could fall into chaos but never quite do, the kind of songs that meld together all the best instruments with a kind-of-screechy singer. The music is not itself especially Christmas-ized. There’s not a lot of bells and organs and harps. But it has a Christmas spirit all its own, in the jumbled happy way it tumbles out onto your ears.

The best thing I can say about this song, though, is that it, more than any other song, lifts me up. It actually gives meaning to the word uplifting for me. I can’t listen to it without smiling and tapping my toe and nodding my head and humming and, finally, singing along.
It starts slow, and then builds and builds and builds until its momentum just takes me and carries me away and makes me laugh and enjoy myself and opens my heart a little. And that, well, that’s Christmas.

The Best Thing That I Don’t Really Know What It Is But Find Weirdly Compelling and Like It:

Look for this in my upcoming collection Do Pizza Samples Really Exist? A The Best Of Everything Book.

Until that's ready, check out a listing of everything I've ever discussed here. Or go buy a copy of my other collection:


Click here to buy Thinking The Lions, And 117* Other Ways To Look At Life (*Give Or Take)

Or, click here to find out how you can win a free copy!




Semicolon

ellipses
by

brianefp

Create a Custom T Shirt Using www.zazzle.com
See other Humor Sayings T-Shirts