Garrison Keillor gets his rage on

I was with him for the first five paragraphs, but then:

Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that’s their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite “Silent Night.” If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah“? No, we didn’t.

Christmas is a Christian holiday – if you’re not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don’t mess with the Messiah.

I happen to like all those Chrismas songs written on Tin Pan Alley; and it seems churlish to deny Rudolph while singing “O Tanenbaum”–whatever do trees have to do with the birth of the Savior?  And the inveighing against economic elites reads uglier in light of the prickly comment about “Jewish guys.”  I knew that Keillor was a sourpuss and a bit of a lecher, but I’d never pegged him for an anti-Semite.  Oh, I’m sure a clarification will be forthcoming and all will be forgiven, but I’ll remember.  And as a token of my indignation, I will continue not having listened to A Prairie Home Companion for over a decade.

Silver Lining, cont.

Video Game Watchdog Shuts Down, Victim of Economy

That first report card, which singled out bloody first-person shooter games “Doom” and “Duke Nukem,” made an instant splash on Capitol Hill in 1996 and made the annual reports issued each holiday season by Walsh’s National Institute on Media and the Family a news fixture.

But there was no video game report card this year, and there won’t be any more. The institute is closing its doors, a victim of the poor economy. Walsh, the group’s founder and president, is packing his books as his staff of eight full-time employees prepares to shut down Dec. 23.

Eight full-time employees to monitor video game violence?  How big a chunk of our economy is devoted to paid do-goodery?  Let us hope that these eight souls soon find themselves productively employed, perhaps in making hot dogs or selling housewares or somesuch.

Dubai Broke?

Every financial catastrophe has an upside.

The Dubai government has done its best to deny that a problem exists, claiming recently that the population would rise this year by 400 000, flying in the face of all independent assessments, which predict a sharp fall. The anecdotal stories of cars abandoned at Dubai International airport with credit cards in the glove box have become the stuff of legend, and not the image that the government has sought to project.

Maybe somebody will break the lock on the dungeon holding all those Filipino slaves before the city sinks into the sand like the Fritz Lang-inspired metaphor that it is.

Nanoo, Nanoo

In an episode of Mork & Mindy, Mork is visited by his Orkan superior, who has the body of a 10-year-old boy (for reasons I don’t remember).  They divert themselves with a game of Orkan Checkers, which is played on a board of two rectangles, black and red, with a single white piece the size of a saucer.  After thinking a long while, Mork opens by moving the piece from the red field to the black.  “Check,” he says.  Mork’s visitor makes (apparently) the only move available to him: he moves the piece from black back to red and declares victory.  [youtube]

Replace the single white disk with a gross of metal figures and you have miniatures gaming in essence.  In such a game, strategy, tactics, even luck are irrelevant.  The outcome is determined entirely by the initial placement of pieces on the field.  Miniatures gamers are animated by the same neural gangleon that motivates bug collectors, not armchair generals.  I gather that there are some who would “improve” our favorite passtime by prettying-up the figures; I can’t cotton to such a womanish point of view.

May He Bless and Keep the Tzar…

So the President has gone to fetch the Olympics for Chicago.  In this endeavor I hope he fails.  Should it prove otherwise, we hereby offer refuge to Ed when the menagerie rolls in.

Tangentially, did they really move the Pro Bowl to Florida?  Yet another weekend I’ll have to spend shut indoors with the curtains drawn.

Rousseauism Squared

Never mind agriculture.  It seems the human race took a wrong turn when it decided to walk upright.

This Danish campaign poster reads:

“A walking helmet is a good helmet”
“Traffic safety isn’t just for cyclists. The pedestrians of Denmark actually have a higher risk of head injury. The Danish Road Safety Council recommends walking helmets for pedestrians and other good folk in high risk groups.”

The slogan is catchy in Danish since it kind of rhymes. All in all it’s a brilliant project. Let’s save some lives.

I’m sure that in the future, concrete sidewalks and hard brick will all have been replaced by Nerf material.  All in the name of safety, of course.  But there’s something I learned from watching nature programes on TV: the safer the environment, the softer the creatures acclimated to it.  It’s high time we re-introduced anthropophagous predators to our cities to weed out the weaker members of the herd.  How’s that for cost-savings, eh?  Eh?

The Kids Are All Right

‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’

Somehow I missed this winningly titled article, Get a Life, Holden Caulfield.

These days, teenagers seem more interested in getting into Harvard than in flunking out of Pencey Prep. Young people, with their compulsive text-messaging and hyperactive pop culture metabolism, are more enchanted by wide-eyed, quidditch-playing Harry Potter of Hogwarts than by the smirking manager of Pencey’s fencing team (who was lame enough to lose the team’s equipment on the subway, after all). Today’s pop culture heroes, it seems, are the nerds who conquer the world — like Harry — not the beautiful losers who reject it.

Every now and again, something I read in the newspaper really perks me up.  But the best line was the last:

Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ”

One wonders whether pharmacutical improvements will be treated as basic hygiene in the near future; listless moodiness might soon be equivalent to offensive odor.  The future is looking bright!

Yet More Silver Lining

Harvard is in trouble.  Not really news, but The Atlantic’s blogsite gives a good treatment.

Spell This, Sucka!

There are few things I hate more than the National Spelling Bee.  Have they ever used a word that wouldn’t appear in publication italicized as foreign or capitalized as proper (e.g. Homeric, not homeric)?  I swear one day I’ll find a deaf kid and a lawyer and get an injunction placed to limit their word list to those extant in American sign language.  That’ll fix ‘em.

More Silver Lining, cont.

Wall Street Journal reports the demise of bling.

The recession is cramping the style of hip-hop artists and wannabes — many of whom are finding it difficult to afford the diamond-encrusted pendants and heavy gold chains they have long used to project an aura of outsized wealth.

In an attempt to keep up appearances, celebrity jewelers say rappers are asking them to make medallions with less-precious stones and metals.  Some even whisper that the artists have begun requesting cubic zirconia, the synthetic diamond stand-in and QVC staple.[emphasis added]

Bring it, recession.