Friday (Not So) Random Ten, Christmas Edition

I was originally planning on simply posting my 10 favorite Christmas carols. But then I thought, why not do a list of my favorite Christmas albums?

And so, in no particular order, and some choice tracks:

1) A Charlie Brown Christmas - Vince Guaraldi

"Linus & Lucy"

2) Barenaked for the Holidays - Barenaked Ladies

"Elf's Lament"

"God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" (feat. Sarah McLachlan)


3) Joy - A Holiday Collection - Jewel
"Ava Maria"


4) The Christmas Song - Nat "King" Cole
"O Come All Ye Faithful"


5) Pretty Paper - Willie Nelson
"Pretty Paper"


6) Christmas Island - Leon Redbone
"Christmas Island"

7) Have a Holly Jolly Christmas - Burl Ives
"Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer"


8) White Christmas - Bing Crosby
"White Christmas"


9) A New Thought For Christmas - Melissa Etheridge
"Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)"


10) Christmas in the Heart - Bob Dylan
"Do You Hear What I Hear?"

"The first couple of songs, I thought were horrible but fascinating. Then it grew on me." - My mother's review.

My Favorite Christmas Song (not on any of the albums):
"Little Drummer Boy" - Bing Crosby & David Bowie


There are a couple of other albums I consider essential. Unfortunately, one of them is a Victorian Christmas cd and the other is a Japanese Christmas cd I picked up one year, and I can't track down either of them. So I can't tell you what they are. Sorry about that.

Merry Christmas!

Why I'm Not Going To Be Around

I'm totally reneging on my "I'm going to post about Whedon every day", but I have a valid excuse. First, it is my sisters' birthday today, and second, my Uncle Jerry died. Between the two, things have been a little hectic. My Uncle Jerry was best known for three things, those being looking vaguely like Waylon Jennings:

<--------(Uncle Jerry)   (Waylon Jennings) ----->

Witnessing his older brother (my grandfather - who looked vaguely like Willie Nelson) getting jumped by some neighborhood kids, running home to get his metal roller skates, and then beating those kids with the skates at the age of six; and for subjecting my family to one of the worst family reunions ever.

He'd been working as a handyman at an Irish resort in upstate New York, and decided that since the bar was well-stocked and he had a trailer all to himself that he would organize for the rest of the clan to come. And we did come. And the first afternoon, it was alright. Sure, each individual family changed rooms around three times before succumbing to the realization that the rooms weren't going to get any cleaner - or look any less like they'd been decorated in the mid-70s at the height of the orange and brown revival. But the place also had an Olympic sized pool and as much dangerous playground equipment as any family could ever possibly want (which was a lot). And the bar was well stocked, so that was something. But then a rain storm rolled in and refused to roll out, the power went out, and the only emergency generator was hooked up to the bar. Which is where a majority of my family stayed. For four days. The other place we all gathered was the cleanest room, which happened to be my family's. It had several perks: it was closest to the bar, it was on the ground floor (which was convenient for when people were stumbling back from the bar), and it had a trash can. The trash can was important because we had to manually flush the toilet, and pouring water into the back of the tank was the preferred method. This was also the summer several of the younger members of my family were being potty trained, and they were horrified and confused at the lack of flushability the toilets offered. We finally all abandoned the reunion when the from Ireland parents of one of my cousin's husbands called him in a panic, ranting about the "shanty Irish" and to get the whole family out of there. Since the rain hadn't let up and the bar money was running low, most of us took their advice and got out. For those too young to drink (like me) the whole long weekend is burned into memory. For those who were old enough to drink, most of the long weekend seems to be a blur. What we learned, though, is that about forty of us can live in one room for four days without fighting; many of us felt closer after the weekend, and some of my family members feel like Uncle Jerry just proved how well we are all able to get along. I learned that you can make a quick buck walking by a drunk relative with someone else's kid, because that drunk relative (especially if it is my Uncle Eddie) will help himself to someone else's bar money to pay for babysitting - much to the bewilderment of the person the bar money originally belonged to, especially if the kid in question wasn't his or her own. So, all in all, what Uncle Jerry gave us all were stories, and a lot of them. And in my family, that is the greatest achievement.

Earth First

Gas prices have finally hit and surpassed four dollars on national average, and our president is going on his final European tour to remind everyone that we "are all too dependent on hydrocarbons" (and seriously, who would blame a European leader -any of them- for responding to that gem with a solid punch to Bush's nose?). So let's talk about energy, the crisis, and the affect the whole deal will have on our economy. First, I must say that I am incredibly angry that we Americans had to wait until gas prices became unbearable economically to have a majority of us -and our government- seriously consider alternative fuel sources. Prior to this, it was Willie Nelson riding around in an ethanol powered bus and Prius owners who seemed to actually be taking steps forward -and the Prius people were doing so partially because the car became synonymous with "cool". The rest of us? Well, we killed the electric car early on in that model's lifetime; and although many companies were paying lipservice to finding alternate fuel sources (I can't open my Newsweek without seeing bp advertising that "There's energy security in energy diversity"), it seemed more like a PR campaign than a real attempt at change. Kind of like Phillip Morris sponsoring anti-smoking campaigns. There just seemed to be something incredibly disingenuous about the whole thing.

We have been told for quite a while "we have reached our peak oil production and some oil geologists [believe] that 90 percent of the world's oilfields have been tapped". But America kept on gobbling up energy resources, kept on buying SUVs, and kept our collective head under a rock. Because as long as it wasn't affecting us economically right that second, then we could deny any validity to claims that it would adversely affect us in the future. We could believe that some solution would magically appear at the right moment without us having put money, time, or energy into finding it. And we are paying for our short-sighted idiocy: "When gasoline was selling closer to $1 at the start of the decade, American households were spending some $300 billion each year to drive their cars and heat and cool their homes. They are now spending some $700 billion a year on energy. Household gasoline bills in the coming year will rise about $100 billion -even if the national gas prices stay near $4 a gallon through 2008". And gas prices staying at $4 a gallon now seems unlikely.

Meanwhile, the gas prices "are threatening everything from summer vacations to Meals on Wheels deliveries" and are also responsible for the ingredients that make those meals becoming more and more expensive as well. What Americans forgot, or never learned, or didn't find relevant, is that "oil goes into making virtually everything, including steel, aluminum, plastics, rubber, fabrics, transportation ...and food. People don't generally associate food and petroleum, but petroleum is used to make fertilizers and in vehicles used for planting and harvesting, storage and processing, and the trip to the market for the final sale from the freezer in store to the freezer in a home". Great.

I can't blame everything on ordinary Americans' spending habits though; I can blame some of it on their voting habits. Republicans blocked even discussion of a tax bill aimed for oil companies who were making "unreasonable profits". By the way, Exxon made $10.89 billion profit in the first three months of this year. I can definitely see where taxing them -or even talking about taxing them- is a bad thing. And in the past, our government has apparently "created a disincentive for new technologies and new ideas" by doing things like "mandating that so much ethanol is made and that it has to come from corn sugar" thus diminishing the exploration of creative solutions. Doesn't that just take the biscuit?

Now Americans are finally getting into the swing of things, doing things like trading in their SUVs and carpooling to work, and possibly even thinking about buying a hybrid. We drove 11 billion less miles in March 2008 than in March 2007. And maybe -maybe- we've learned our lesson. Because if we had been investing in and investigating alternative fuel and energy options seriously, we probably would not have gotten to the point where food and gas prices are rising to the further detriment of our economy. If we had been serious about voting people into office who would have fought to have the automobile makers actually work toward more fuel efficient vehicles; who wouldn't have made "light trucks" exempt from such laws; or went after automobile companies who began designing other vehicles to fit the "light truck" definition in order to circumvent the regulations for higher fuel efficiency, we would be farther away from this position today. If we begin to cultivate a mindset recognizing how potential negative effects of our actions that may accumulate in our future are important to consider and work to prevent, maybe our current situation will not have been for naught. Unfortunately, I don't believe it has. I think we will do our best to get ourselves out of this situation in the short term, and then continue along with the mindset we have always embraced and has best been summed up by a bumper sticker my father had three cars ago: "Earth First: We'll Strip Mine The Other Planets Later".