“Jingle Bells” is not a Christmas song. It is not even a song about bells. It is a sleighing song, which is widely regarded as the only thing dumber than actual sleighing.

I am not trying to deny royalties to the writers of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” “Frosty the Snowman,” or “Winter Wonderland” (well, maybe “Winter [...]

I didn’t think it would. I’m still sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop; that’s just my default setting now. I’m going to need a few days. Moments ago, I realized my head and neck were incredibly sore because I have been clenching my upper body for 18 hours.
“Jim: do you now regret [...]

…is not going to happen. Been there. Though I’m sure I’ll be sorry four years from now. I did get a nice deja vu blast when I read some of my ‘04 post mortem ponderings:

So, these new justices that the president is going to finally, thank God, at last save the Constitution with in the [...]

While you’re waiting around here for me to say something interesting (and good luck to you, sir or madam) why not check out my most recent iFanboy column?
I know what you’re thinking: “Something something Spider-Man blah blah Catwoman.” But, in fact, no; today’s offering would fit in quite well on this very site. It hews [...]

In addition to my usual writing duties at the comic book discussion site iFanboy.com, this week I was also lucky enough to guest host (or, I guess, guest cohost) their Pick of the Week podcast. Every week, the gents take turns picking the best thing they read last week as well as discussing any [...]

1988: Hard Drives
“So, let me get this straight: in order to play the game, you have to sit here and load a copy of the entire disk onto this ‘drive’ before you can do anything with it? Um… yeah. Good luck with that. My computer has 256k of RAM; all I have to do to [...]

Paul Montgomery really likes Superman.
I strongly disagreed with Paul Montgomery before I even knew him, but saying so would be rude (and get me strung up by the people in the comments section).
Even I like the occasional Superman story, between you and me, but it’s pretty doggone occasional.
In fact, that company’s whole publishing line is [...]

This just came to my attention:

In the Charlie Brown Christmas special, Charlie Brown gets his little tree because he is depressed, since he feels the holiday is becoming overly commercialized and plastic…
…and now they’re marketing a plastic version of it.
How’s that feel? Living in that world?
Get the turkey out of the oven to make room [...]

From a product page on Amazon.com:

Did Paul Shaffer do the music for Pirates?
Does Chevy Chase play the undead monkey?
I’ll be workin’ on this one like a Rubik’s Cube for the rest of the week.

“181 things you need to know now”
NOT PICTURED ON THE COVER: a thing that happened in the news this week
Problem: things keep happening, and you don’t have time to keep up with them all. More to the point, things that seem like a big deal on Tuesday turn out not to be worth a good [...]

Between Paris Hilton, Larry King, and the Apple iPhone (“$600 really will fill that hole inside you this time”) this has been– how shall I put this?– not the most patriotic week of my life. If you were stuck in the elevator inside my head, the muzak would not be Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the [...]

-You cannot make it through ten minutes of commercial television, radio, or (especially) movie trailers without hearing the record scratch. I just heard my third one today. The pleasant background music is playing, and then someone says or does something shocking and– “wha?! she’s a dude?!”– the music is jarringly interrupted by the scratch of the needle being [...]

This afternoon, I was scheduled to be on a conference call. The fellow who set it up called me hours before it was set to begin and said, “The guy who always has your back on conference calls and I aren’t gonna make it; could you run that call?” This was no surprise after being [...]

About a month ago, my bosses approached me about taking a new job. They had a task that needed doing– a kind of project coordination, air traffic controller thing– and they thought I would be just the perfect fellow to watch the 500 green blips on the screen and make sure they didn’t hit each [...]

Plazes.com in a sentence:
“I wish it was easier for strangers to find and kill me.”
What are you laughing at, twitter.com?

Many, many years ago, when the internet was as a newborn babe and Saturday Night Live was starting to look like it was in real jeopardy of being canceled due to a couple years of sheer awfulness, I read on a Janeane Garofalo proto-fansite a reference to a vicious behind-the-scenes takedown of the show that [...]

I propose that the next version of Netflix require the user to write a summary of what s/he was doing/thinking the night s/he added each disc to his/her list. Just anything. “Drinking, suddenly remembered watching the Three Stooges on Saturday nights.” “Saw Snakes on a Plane; reminded me of Delta Force; seemed like campy fun [...]

frustration
aggravation
rage
violence
flight

This morning, I walked into my office the same way I always do, the same way I walked out last night, only to find that the door I walk through every day on the second floor has been walled off.
Just walled off. Last night it was a door. Today it’s a wall. Why? No reason. [...]

This morning, I typed “Woohoo!” in an e-mail and Outlook’s spellcheck corrected it to “boohoo.”