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 Wonderland” a little) but I feel it’s important during this season of festivity and generosity to reflect on just how many Christmas songs have f***-all to do with Christmas. No Santa, no Jesus, no mistletoe. Not even any nog. Just a song about riding around in a giant horse-drawn sled, and how much fun that is.

How much fun does that sound like? How likely is it that anyone doing that in 2006 would be laughing all the way, oh ho ho, as opposed to remarking all the way, “This is ridiculous,” “how did anyone even think this up as a mode of transportation,” or “Holy Christ, this brakeless horse-drawn contraption will kill us all”?

I would also contend that even in 1857 the constant ringing of bells attached to a horse’s bobbed tail would only make spirits bright for about a minute and a half before sending you running off the back of the sled, o’er the fields, but I’m not prepared to make a big deal about it. What I do find insidious is that “Jingle Bells’” lyrics contain an ad for themselves. “Oh, what fun it is to sing a sleighing song… and we just happen to be doing that right now!”

(Are sleighing songs a genre? Were sleighing songs the 1850s equivalent of surf rock? I can think of two.)

Only working together can we hope to stamp out “Jingle Bells” in our lifetime. According to a recent study by the International Christmastime Jolliness Institute, 47% of all people who think they hate Christmas actually just hate that song.

“Jim: do you now regret your caution, pessimism, and dourness in the face of overwhelming polling in Obama’s favor?”

Nope!

So, Obama wins by more than any Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson. Record-breaking turnout, record-breaking results, unequivocal victory. Whatever happens next, we have it coming. That feels good.

So, these new justices that the president is going to finally, thank God, at last save the Constitution with in the next four years… what exactly are they planning to do that they cannot currently get going with a mere 7/9ths appointee majority? If 7/9ths won’t get it done, I’m not sure I want to know any longer what “it,” “done,” or “get” is. Are they worried that O’Connor’s going to be a holdout on that amendment legalizing eating the homeless? What sort of cases should I be looking forward to?

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 quite closely to the themes explored here in years past, specifically “One of the Most Privileged People in Human History Complains About His Childhood.”

I’m composing my thoughts on a lighter subject– mortality and the ultimate futility of it all– but that’s going to take a little while to keep from sounding like it came out of a random text generator. My baby’s not letting me get a good night’s sleep these days, and the more I try to write a decent page the more it comes out looking like I tore it into confetti first.

To enjoy a show for a couple of years and then find yourself on said show is an experience that is hard to describe. It’s rather schizophrenic: the people from the iPod are talking to me, telling me to do things!

Mind you, if you don’t read the things we’re discussing, I don’t know what it will do for you. But if you’re a friend of mine, I’d rather you find out about it here instead of stumbling across it the next time you’re Googling my name to find out if I’m still alive.

“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 play a game is put in the disk and go. You have bought a lemon here, my friend.”

1991: Gerardo

“Oh my God, Mark, you have to get in here; you will not believe what they’re showing on Video Jukebox right now! There’s this shirtless guy doing the lamest rap I’ve seen since that one they did for Dragnet. Bahaha! ‘Rico… Suuuuave’!! Ohhh, if I laugh any harder I am going to throw up. Ach! Mariachi guys! My God, was this locally produced for public access? We have to cherish this moment, Mark. This is the most ridiculous thing that has ever been captured on film, and we are the only people we know who will ever see or hear it. I’m almost embarrassed for them, thinking this was something they should release to the public. We should tape this, or we’ll never be able to convince our friends it existed. It will certainly not be a top ten hit for several weeks later this year.”

1994: Friends

“Get a load of this, now. Yeesh. TV just gets more and more derivative every year. A bunch of single friends palling around in New York between their apartments and their favorite coffee shop? How much more obviously could this show rip off Seinfeld? A successful show is like blood in the water for these hacks– oh my God, was that a monkey? Okay, twelve seconds of this was enough. Sorry, NBC; if you can’t be bothered to name it, we can’t be bothered to watch it. Enjoy your thirteen episodes before being replaced by an episode of Dateline. Better luck next pilot season, girlfriend from Family Ties.”

2003: Ang Lee’s Hulk

“Well, the movie didn’t light my world on fire, but did you see how Lee would put multiple angles of a scene on the screen at one time, in panels, just like a comic? That was a real innovation, my friend. No matter how well this movie does– and I think it ought to do pretty well– a year from now, you’re going to see that technique in every movie that comes out. In five years, we won’t be able to remember a movie that was done without it.”

In other news, my baby tried to pull my head off.

So I chewed off her arm.

But we put it behind us.

(I hope those images work, or everything I just wrote will look insane. More insane.)

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 for my head.

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.

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 goddamn by Thursday, meaning reading about said things would have been a monumental waste of your time.

Solution: a magazine could be printed once a week that just f***ing told you the news that happened that turned out to be important or meaningful.

Exact opposite of solution: a magazine could be printed once a week that assumed you were reading the “news” five times every single day. It would provide detailed analysis of the stories you didn’t read, along with content that was 65% health news because only aging Boomers buy magazines. On one hand, it would tell you nothing, but on the other hand it would cost you money and make you want to punch a wall.

Grrrrrr.

My current position on electoral politics is pretty similar. “Who do you like in ‘08?” “Well…! There are currently 24 people running between the two parties. By the time I can cast a vote in the Missouri primary, roughly 4 will remain, and my opinion about the other 20 will have been rendered completely moot by some old women in New Hampshire 6 months prior. So here’s what I’m going to do: 1) not care at all 2) rename every debate night ‘Playstation Monday,’ because I am utterly powerless and impotent.’” I admit that I am secretly a bit concerned about the overall outcome, of course, because (not to be outdone by Alec Baldwin’s nakedly ridiculous threat to move to Canada) I did publicly declare that a McCain vs. Clinton race would prompt me to kill myself. And God help me, America, I want to live.

So, here’s my question: what is a “rec-ord”?

Ah, the big plastic platters? Used to play music… oh, with the needle? Those things my parents used to have when I was small? And I’m very old now, and haven’t seen one in person in easily twenty years? I’ve had a CD player since 1989?

I see.

That’s… yeah. Are we planning on retiring that one any time soon? No? Just gonna get louder and more annoying until everyone who remembers where the sound originated is dead? Gotcha.

-Also, I would like to renew my call to retire the “Save” icon. 99% of the time on a PC, “Save” is a cartoon picture of a floppy disc. My last floppy disc sighting was about 12 years ago. Kids who’ve never seen one are creeping up on driving age. Let’s brainstorm something else. Life preserver. Crucifix. I don’t care.

-Another renewed call: it’s 2007. Just tell me your domain name. Telling me that I get to your web site by “visiting double-you-double-you-double-you-dot” anything has officially reached the stage where you’re insulting my intelligence. I’m hip to the need for the Ws; as it turns out, this is not my first night on AOL. Again, the web was popularized in roughly 1995. Let’s go ahead and lump that time-wasting chestnut in under whatever exemption the “http://” and “1″ from long distance calls got.

-Finally, if you find yourself watching the NBC Nightly News, here’s a good way to blot out the day-to-day horrors of the world: every time Brian Williams begins a segment with “There’s a growing controversy in this country…” take a shot. You might want to consult your doctor first. I’m starting to wonder if it’s actually the name of a featured segment, he says it so often.

Since he’d run the last call, the fellow sent over his notes from that call to help me out.

The notes were six lines long, and the fourth line was:

a lot of discussion occurred that I missed.

I opened this lifeline to professionalism after the call had already started and it became clear that none of us were entirely sure what the call was about. After ten minutes of waiting, I called the site’s designer and reminded him we had a call, which took him by surprise. When he got on the call, it was quickly determined that the conference call which the other guy had set up, ditched on, and put me in charge of was for a site that had completely launched and was totally finished two weeks ago. None of us had any reason to be there.

I can’t decide whether this makes me an idiot, makes them idiots, or proves beyond a doubt that this new role they’re moving me into is absolutely necessary.

Also, the first guy they offered it to quit after they offered it to him. I decided I’m not reading anything into that.

This new job would not replace my old job, but rather be sort of stacked on top of it for a while. For the time being, I would do my old job 50% of the time and my new job the other 50%. Previously, getting my old job done took 100% of my time, so I looked forward to what kind of magic spell would make this feat possible. From what I can tell, the spell is something along the lines of “Abracadabra, your lunch hour has disappeared!”

Nonetheless, I accepted the challenge. It seemed like the smart thing to do, given my long-term goal of taking over the world by doing things for strangers that don’t seem important at all. They put me in touch with a guy who’s done it all a million times who’s in all the same meetings as I am anyway, and he has been showing me the ropes.

At this moment, I’m on a conference call with England and Ireland about a new Irish site for our company. I’ve never worked on an international site here, so I have no idea what the process is, and the guy who’s done it a million times agreed that this would be the perfect time for such a call knowing full well that he was triple-booked and had no intention of showing up. He saw that the boat’s fuel tanks were low and said, ”Now’s the time to head into open water! I’m just going to go check on the lifeboat.” So I am leading the call with literally no idea what I’m talking about.

The good news is I accepted these responsibilities without a raise, so as I try to fake competence I’m not distracted with conflicting thoughts of how I’m going to spend all that money.

“I wish it was easier for strangers to find and kill me.”

What are you laughing at, twitter.com?

My efforts were doomed. We hadn’t gotten to the technological stage yet where old issues were archived online, and even the most rabid fansite wasn’t bug-nutty enough to transcribe the whole thing. I thought, “Boy, I’d love to get my hands on that at a library or something… maybe I can order a back issue from somewhere if it’s not more than $5,” and then promptly went and did my history homework.

That should say “did my history homework and promptly forgot about the whole thing,” but I didn’t. Though I never tracked down the physical magazine, I have thought of the article on and off– and continued to search for it online– for nearly twelve years. I didn’t know the author, but I remembered that it was in New York Magazine and it was called “Comedy Isn’t Pretty.” Every so often, I would be minding my business when suddenly the ball marked “New York Magazine article” would tumble out of the bingo ball cage that is my mind and I’d be frantically Googling for ten minutes or so. I never found it.

A few weeks ago, NBC did a whitewashed quasi-documentary about this godawful period in the show’s history for sweeps. In this doc, those years were amazingly transformed into a golden comedy renaissance that was misunderstood by the public and those stodgy critics. This is what happens when a show’s history is recounted by the network that kept it on the air. Anyway, in that show, those interviewed mentioned my article and their desire at the time to literally viciously beat the man who wrote it, as he had gained their trust backstage and betrayed them, like Judas with taste.
“Hey,” I thought, “there’s that bingo ball again.” Again I turned to Google.
And New York Magazine had seen the show too. And they too had been disappointed in the whitewash.

So they put up a PDF of the mother-loving article.

After eleven or twelve years, it’s sitting on my desktop. I don’t know what to do. I’m almost terrified to read it.

I recognize that this is not an interesting story. I just 1) found it illustrative of something about myself that I cannot otherwise articulate and 2) wanted to share my nerd joy. The white whale is cut up into steaks in my freezer!

Have you ever looked at your list of prospective movie rentals and suddenly realized that you didn’t want any of them to show up at your house at all?

Wow. Ninja Turtles 3? Am I the only person who knows this password?

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. Just makin’ stuff a little harder.

As a metaphor for the week, it was a little on-the-nose.

With that in mind, I cannot put into words the joy I felt this evening when I saw that someone else has captured the constant Borders phenomenon that is the manga hobo.

Even though I myself am in the aisle to buy a comic book, nothing turns me into an old man faster: “Holy @%$#, buy it or get out! How are you here at 2:30 in the afternoon? Get a job!”

It’s just… there’s a cafe with forty-five goddamn chairs ten feet away.

I love it when these things happen and the people responsible say, “Well, we do a super hero TV show, but I have never opened a super hero comic book. I have no prior experience in the genre in which I work.” Well, then, it’s a good thing you don’t work alone.

Sighted by Bill Michalski on his travels, this poster raises vastly more questions (and gorges) than it answers. Somewhere, someone was eating a taco and thought, “this is good, but I wish it was also a chili dog.” That this is sold in the same venue as cheap alcohol is no accident. What must it taste like? How could someone unpack this from its carbonite sheath when the truck brings it to the store, put it in some kind of chick incubator, and then look someone in the eye when they bought it?

I’m suddenly reminded of being in a record store at the mall in about 1992. A little boy was trying to buy a CD that consisted of Christmas songs being barked by dogs as a gift for his mother, and the guy behind the counter flatly, steadfastly refused to sell it to him.

“No. No, I’m sorry. You can’t put this under the tree for the woman who gave birth to you. I can’t do that in good conscience.”

“She wants it.”

“No, listen to me. No she doesn’t. Go find something else.”

Seriously. Pizza tech support. It’s like the bank; you never talk to the people who will actually make or deliver your pizza.
“Thank you for calling Pizza Hut, your call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes, my name is Melinda, except it almost certainly isn’t, may I have your telephone number with area code, please? Could you please spell your full name? Could you please read me the numbers on your bar code tattoo? Oops, sorry; not supposed to ask for that last one for another couple of months.”

Surprisingly off-putting. When the doorbell rings, I fully expect to find a robot with a touch screen on the other side.

I hope the irony was not lost on too many in the viewing audience.

We now enter one of my favorite times of the year: that sweet spot when football is over and baseball hasn’t started yet. For the nerd, it’s like lying out on a blanket in the grass, gazing up at the sky as twilight falls on a mild summer day. Cherish these glorious days, these days when “60 Minutes” and “The Simpsons” start on time and the news is about things that happened.

-Murder convictions are overturned when DNA proves guy’s innocence

-Guy goes home

-Guy is immediately arrested when DNA sample proves guy strangled completely different girl, even though guy was never even a suspect in her death

I picture the Law & Order detectives showing up to cuff him, at which point Don King bursts through the wall like Kool-Aid man shouting, “Only in America!”

There’s something about the phrase “thank goodness for DNA!” that also cracks me up a lot, though I realize that it shouldn’t. The fact that it shouldn’t is probably part of why it does.

“Take the retirement money,” she implores me. “Right here out of the I.R.A. 64, 65; what’s a year when you’re already that old? Get a toy! DVD burner! Warcraft!”

And it’s tempting, God bless her. But “the good stuff always gets cheaper,” I tell her, often adding “baby,” and after spending thousands and thousands of dollars in my lifetime I have finally started to realize that it all ends up in the same place.

Still, there is such a thing as waiting too long.

Bill Gates is unveiling Windows Vista this week. Anything I tried to buy now would almost certainly come with it. New Windows doesn’t happen often, but every time it does it’s like opening up the newspaper and seeing, “English 10.0 ReLeased To-dai; Gleep Glop Glorp; Verbs at End of Sentences Always Now Come.”

It’s not a lot like that, but it’s a little like that. And there’s the next six months of your life.

Luckily, that gets better if you wait too.

You don’t have to schedule an appointment with your therapist to figure that one out. Time to shake off those blues and get back to the keyboard.

Work has presented me with the most fascinating paradox lately: how can I be so stressed out about something I don’t care about? At all?

To paint you the most basic watercolor-by-numbers picture of my job that I can: imagine that you are a research scientist. In your lab, a merry little hamster runs and runs on a jolly little wheel. Look at him go! Your job is monitor the hamster and measure everything about his jog, for Science. How fast does Hammy run? How often does he have to stop for water? How much water does he drink? Does his little heart go pitter-pat? And so on. You write it all down, think about it, and report on what you think it all means. You’re doing the job because you’re an expert at figuring out what it all means. You’re a trained figurologist from the Institute of Thinkology. With the right wheel, you and Hammy could cure AIDS.

Now imagine that this simple, simple job never gets to the figuring stage anymore because you have to spend all day repairing the broken wheel, mending the broken latch on the rusty cage, reattaching electrodes, and chasing Hammy around the lab after yet another monkey-aided escape attempt. Recently, as Hammy was running, you actually watched the wheel break off its axis, roll through the cage door, and carry Hammy right out into the traffic outside. And all you could think was, “This time, maybe I just let him go. If Hammy ends up under a radial, maybe that’s what it takes.”

I mean, we can’t even figure out what the monkeys are doing here. Nobody remembers ordering them for anything.

Now imagine that your research, rather than curing HIV, was being applied to the prevention of, let’s say, dandruff. Lip chapping. Now you’re starting to get a feel for why, when I get invited to my third conference call of the day, I occasionally think, “Or, you know what I could do? I could go home to bed.”

That’s exciting to me. I am as big a fan as you can possibly be while also not technically realizing that the band has been broken up for 11 years. I mean, I guess I knew the drummer quit, and that the drummer was 1/3rd of the band, but in my haste to graduate from college and invent the blog using only a Franklin stove I guess that last dot never got connected.

I’m still in a better mood than I have been in a month.

(Don’t get too depressed: you’ve got over six months before it’s officially a decade. And six months passes totally slow now, right? Right?)

I can tell you this much in the interim: my nephew (age: 1) is scared s***less of knees. He was here last night, and he’s in the “Dumbo’s magic feather” stage where he actually can walk, but he just doesn’t believe that he can. As a result, he will only travel from points A to B via a network of grabbable objects en route, usually a grownup’s finger which he holds while somehow walking faster than the grownup himself can walk on much longer legs. Last night, he was headed to some distant toy and/or dangerous wire via the touch of our couch cushions. It seems that my sister and her husband, granola as they are, have a “no shorts” policy in their house, because when their son’s grasping, reaching, searching hands got to my hairy, naked leg hanging over the couch, he literally stopped in his tracks and gazed awestruck at what he felt, his jaw hanging and his face conveying, quote, “Holy s***.” He looked down at my knee as if he had just accidentally touched Curium. This scene would be repeated three more times in the hour that followed. In addition to finding this hilarious, I had to admit I was a bit jealous; as cynical as I am, it was nice to see someone who could still be surprised by a leg and its skin.