Well, Happy New Year! (I hope.)

OK, I'm jumping the gun a bit, but I'll be asleep by ten at the latest. My wife and I were talking, and we figured we haven't made it to midnight in about fifteen years. I mean, who cares, anyway? Whoooeeee, tomorrow it will be 2008. Neat. As far as I am concerned, New Year's Eve is simply an excuse to get polluted. And with the DUI laws these days, you'd not be the sharpest knife in the drawer if you were to try to drive home with a snootful on New Year's Eve.

I will admit, I was motivated a bit at the end of 1999, because of all the dire predictions about how society as we knew it would be completely disrupted as a result of Y2K problems (took me a minute to remember that abbreviation, as inconsequential as it turned out to be). I mean, we heard horror stories for five years or more leading up to New Year's Eve 1999, I STILL couldn't make myself stay awake until midnight, and the next morning I woke up, expecting dead computers and digital appliances. I expected never to be able to get my cash out of the bank, and major explosions or malfunctions of half the machinery in the United States, and what happens? Not a DAMNED THING, that's what! All these freaked-out people annoyed me for years, trying to terrify me into believing that I needed to get all my cash out of the bank and bury it in the back yard, and learn to do math on an abacus or something. Possibly that's when I said that enough was enough about all these doom-and-gloom people.

I swear, if life's going good, sooner or later some CT wingnut is going to show up and tell me that life as I know it is going to end tomorrow. Reminds me of those old bearded guys walking around with signboards on city sidewalks that said THE END OF THE WORLD IS NEAR! Did it happen? Hell no! And this sort of behavior has never stopped. If it's not Y2K, it's the environmentalists telling us that we are destroying the earth -- assigning Godlike powers to pissant humans. We couldn't destroy the earth if we detonated every nuclear device on the planet simultaneously. It's BS, and they know it, but Greenpeace has to find a way to keep their pockets lined, and so we're stuck with "recycling," crappy engines with ultra smog control in cars that have less guts than a go-cart had in the '60s, you name it. And when it all turns out to be BS, they just go on to the next "life as we know it will end" scenario.

For instance: anyone remember the oil tanker Exxon Valdez crashing in Prince William Sound because its skipper was drunk on his ass? Immediately it was claimed that the damage from the spilled oil was so bad that life would, for all intents and purposes, cease to exist in Prince William Sound for the foreseeable future. They sent a bunch of environuts out there to clean all the oily birds up, and they sprayed detergent on the rocks to get the oil off of them, and, according to author Bjorn Lomborg in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist the damage created by the cleanup was harder, by far, on the Sound than the damned oil spill was! But nature's resilient, no matter how Godlike our ability is to destroy the planet (insert sarcasm emoticon here). They claimed that the Sound would NEVER fully recover. Once it had been determined a few years ago that the fishery industry in the Sound was better now than before the oil spill, we didn't even hear an "Ooops!" from the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. Just dropped the story like a hot potato, they did, and moved on from there to the next tragedy of the Earth's lifetime.

So if I'm grumpy, I have reason to be. I'm inundated by kooks with agendas, all trying to convince me that something bad, devastating, or at least sinister is going to happen at any moment, and that it's inevitable. Conspiracy theories abound. Wanna know why I HATE conspiracy theories? Because of things like the overreporting of Y2K and the Prince William Sound oil spill, that's why, especially when, after they've annoyed the living hell out of me for years and then when the crises turn out to be nothing at all you just never hear them mention it again, and they make up another one!

So, in this rambling post, I wish you all a Happy New Year, free from stories about how the government is trying to control the food supply by exterminating bees (that explains why we had to roll our windows up in the truck today to keep them from swarming into the interior). Free from yet another Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory. Free from the latest revisionist historian holding forth on how bad or perverted Abraham Lincoln really was.

If I can have just ONE YEAR, before I die, where REAL problems are found and can be solved, rather than these "tempest in a teapot" scenarios, I'll die happy.

Oh, and by the way -- I just got off the phone with my dad, who lives in Laramie, Wyoming. Seems, after my brother talked him into moving there so that he could be close to my brother, my brother pretty much ignores him. But that's not the main problem. He called me up and told me he can't stand it anymore and wants to move out here to Arizona. It was about 8 degrees below zero when he called. Last year he missed a week of Christmas with me because the Denver airport was buried in about three or four feet of snow. I thought about telling my dad to cheer up, because "global warming" would take care of all those low temperatures for him. I mean, Al Gore's got it all figured out, right?

Yeah, right. I told Dad to get a plane ticket and that I'd pick him up at the airport. WHY? Because global warming is bullshit, and that's my MAIN wish this year -- not to hear those two words -- global warming-- come out of anyone's mouth for at least a year, starting tomorrow.

So, again, Happy New Year -- free from nuts with weird, baseless theories designed to turn the brains of thinking people into mush. Think I'll be looking over my copy of The Skeptical Environmentalist again. And I urge you to buy a copy, and demand that the paper used be virgin paper produced from trees found in old-growth forests.

Herp

Well, another Christmas has come and gone

Every year it's the same: frantic preparations, often involving months of planning, to get everything ready for Christmas. The perfect presents for loved ones, plans for what Christmas dinner will be, whether or not there's enough wrapping paper and bows around, you name it. And then -- it's over. It's always sort of a bittersweet experience for me. Everything went great, Katie and Suzie were happy, dinner went off without a hitch, and no major catastrophes occurred. Santa was good to us, as always, and Katie was thrilled with her new Squawkers McCaw.

So now the tree sits, forgotten unless I think about clicking the lights on. It's always reminded me of that Hans Christian Andersen tale about the Christmas tree: first decorated with candles and ornaments while children danced around it and admired it, and then unceremoniously pitched downstairs into the coal bin. My wife says I'm depressing, and it bugs her whenever I mention the Andersen fairy tale, but I'm always the one who has to wish the tree goodbye at the recycling center, and it's sort of depressing.

Christmas always reminds me of my childhood, and I associate it with good smells (cinnamon, particularly) and with my mom, who was the one who instilled a love of Christmas in me. I doubt I'll ever outgrow it, which I think is a good thing. The rest of the year I have enough time to be grumpy, or to worry about things that can't be changed anyway, but at Christmas I have a lot of time to reflect on all the places I've been over the years, and the events that have brought me to this point in my life. I have regrets (who doesn't?) and I have triumphs to remember, also. The one thing that never leaves me, however, is that Dickensian feeling I get when Christmas comes around (A Christmas Carol is one of five must-have books that I would take to a desert island if I were forced to do so).



And now that we have five-year-old Katie to celebrate Christmas with, it reminds me, no matter how much garbage I have to deal with in the rest of my life, that there are some things that transcend all the garbage. It's energizing watching the wonder in a kid's eyes when they run to the tree on Christmas morning, and they take in the view of all the presents, and the candy canes that Santa brought while they were sleeping. It takes me back forty years or so to see it, and brings back that feeling within ME, too. It's hard to know that I will have to wait another year to get that feeling back, but I'll get by. What I really hope, however, is that I have created another Christmas junkie in my daughter, and that she will have good memories of ME, as I have of my mother, when Christmas reappears in her adulthood long after I've gone.




For now, I hope each and every one of you had a wonderful Christmas, and that none of you are too old to believe in Santa. Once that goes away, it's all downhill from there. And as Charles Dickens's character, Tiny Tim (not the goony dude, now mercifully dead, with the falsetto and stringy black hair, but the little crippled boy) observed:

God bless us, every one.

In defense of REAL Christmas trees

Year after year it gets worse. More and more people talk about their "Christmas trees," which actually are the equivalent of plastic and metal ornament hangers. I remember when these things started taking hold a fairly long time ago, but back then they really looked bad -- bad as in they looked like a bunch of big, green, furry pipecleaners attached to a central stem. Now they're just an affront to my sensibilities, not that this matters to anyone.

As an example of my background, I offer a picture of me in about 1954 or so in front of our family Christmas tree.



Yep, that's me in diapers, with a great, big floor to ceiling tree with BIG lights on it. Oh, and a nativity scene placed in a built-in niche over the mantle of the fireplace (horror of horrors -- I'm sure this will offend some Muslims somewhere and spur on complaints).

The first picture, at the top, is our current tree. I have some of the same strings of lights from the '50s passed down from my mom (you see her in the photo, now dead). They still work, braided cloth insulation and all, with METAL clips to hold the Bakelite sockets on the branches. None of that plastic stuff. Yes, I use, horror of horrors, those C7 bulbs -- I suppose they'll be banned anyday as hazardous, just as REAL lead tinsel -- called "icicles" by most these days -- was banned long ago. That in itself sucks. It's not as though I ever knew anyone who ate tinsel. The old stuff hung down wonderfully, and there was an added bonus: when we got bored with watching our Lionel train zooming around the track, you could string it across that three-rail track, turn the transformer on and enjoy a bunch of sparks as it shorted the thing out and blew a fuse. My brother and I loved that. My dad, however, was always wondering what the hell was going on with the fuses, and accused my mom of running too many appliances in the kitchen at the same time.

Anyhow, during college I endured another abomination: twinkle lights. They exist now in many forms, with people expressing horror that I still use the big ones. Nuts. As a child of the fifties, twinkle lights on a Christmas tree are about as enjoyable as hanging used teabags on your dog or something. Lights on a Christmas tree are supposed to be reminiscent of the original custom: putting CANDLES on a tree (I suppose my wife, ten years younger than me and therefore immersed in the twinkle light culture, considers herself lucky that I didn't grow up in the 1800s and follow the candle tradition). Anyhow, there is NO WAY that twinkle lights remind anyone of candles. Those big C7 bulbs are what I grew up with, and my wife, early in our relationship, after a feeble stab at wanting a compromise of running twinkle lights up the trunk of the tree and letting me have the big bulbs on the outside -- my mouth dropped open in horror at that thought, as I remember -- has given up and assumed that we will, indeed, have the big lights on our tree. And actually, I think she's grown to like them. You'll be proud to know that I did indeed make my own compromise: in her youth they had little things called bubble lights on her tree, so I added a few here and there to the strings of lights. Oh, and I let her have blinking big bulbs here and there. However, that's as far astray from the Christmases of my youth as I have gone, and it's really not all that bad.

Besides the style of the big lights, people are horrified at the thought that anyone who uses them in combination with a real tree (a tree being an actual organic object) is hovering close to wanting to commit suicide. The numbers of people who use real trees at Christmas are dwindling, which probably explains why it costs around $60 - $80 these days for a decent eight-footer. They only sell about a half-dozen of them in the US, if I can go by what everyone tells me. NO ONE I KNOW uses a real tree. It's NUTS! Christmas these days reminds me of a spoof book I own, published at the time of one of the traveling exhibitions of King Tut's relics in the US, entitled Motel of the Mysteries. In that book, a future archaeologist discovers and excavates what he claims is an ancient funerary complex (actually a 60s motel called the Toot 'n' Cmon Motel). In one of the "chambers" of this complex, he finds a miraculous artifact from this long-dead civilization -- which was driven to extinction by the country of USA (pronounced YOOSA) being buried under an avalanche of junk mail -- the "plant that would not die" (a plastic plant). When I see these Christmas "trees" I always think about that plant.

Here's the deal: I've never had a tree go up like a Roman candle, and I've never known anyone else who did, either. I'm astonished that the sacrifice of living trees hasn't also been banned after protests by Greenpeace, but now that I say it, who knows?

Christmas, as they say, comes but once a year. If I wanted to look at a fake plant, I could go sit in my doctor's office. Children need the sights, the sounds, and the smells (as in an actual tree smell) of Christmas. They grow up soon enough.




Screw fake trees.

Next up: people who consider it baking to go to the store, buy a tube of Pop 'n Fresh dough, and cook pieces of it on a cookie sheet as opposed to, as noted in the last post, actually mixing flour and sugar up with a couple other things and MAKING THEIR OWN (gasp -- what a concept!).