Emilie was 28, the boy, 3.
Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts
"Emilie lived alone with her little boy who clearly believed she was sleeping and might wake up."
"Emilie had not contacted anyone since before Christmas, suggesting that she may have died before this time. Her father spoke to her son over the phone and was simply told that she was asleep."
Emilie was 28, the boy, 3.
Emilie was 28, the boy, 3.
"On behalf of the entire team here at the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama, we wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas."
Least Christmassy Christmas email of the day.
"O Holy Night"... over and over.
What's your favorite version? When have you had enough?
I was going to pretty much do exactly that post a couple days ago! But I never completely got my act together and now I've been scooped.
Ah, well... I did it with "Blue Christmas" in 2004, in the first Christmas on this blog, and things were much harder then... because we didn't have YouTube.
I was going to pretty much do exactly that post a couple days ago! But I never completely got my act together and now I've been scooped.
Ah, well... I did it with "Blue Christmas" in 2004, in the first Christmas on this blog, and things were much harder then... because we didn't have YouTube.
Choir from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University covers “Bed Intruder Song” as X-mas carol.
(Via Bloggingheads.)
Here's the original. Kinda puts Santa in a different light doesn't it? He's climbing in your windows....
ADDED: "The Bed Intruder Song" has a long Wikipedia entry.
Critical receptionThe original interviewee, Antoine Dodson also has a Wikipedia entry. He was chosen "Meme of the Year" in the 2010 Urlie awards. Here's a Washington Post piece declaring that Dodson "is one of the strongest people we’ve seen in a while," that he has "an inner strength that is worthy of awe and respect."
... Jason King, a music professor at NYU was quoted by NPR as saying "It's catchy. It has a really good hook, but it's problematic, too. There's a way in which the aesthetics of black poverty—the way they talk and they speak and they look — sort of becomes this fodder for humor without any interest in the context of the conditions in which people actually live." Baratunde Thurston of The Onion told NPR:"As the remix took off, I became increasingly uncomfortable with its separation from the underlying situation. A woman was sexually assaulted and her brother was rightfully upset. People online seemed to be laughing at him and not with him (because he wasn't laughing), as Dodson fulfilled multiple stereotypes in one short news segment. Watching the wider Web jump on this meme, all but forgetting why Dodson was upset, seemed like a form of ‘class tourism.’ Folks with no exposure to the projects could dip their toes into YouTube and get a taste. [...] The creativity unleashed has been amazing, and what mitigates my fears of people minimizing the gravity of the situation is how Antoine himself has responded and taken charge of his own meme."
Nina Totenberg: "I Was At – Forgive the Expression – a Christmas Party at the Department of Justice...."
Brent Baker at NewsBusters does not understand why Totenberg said "forgive the expression." In his headline, he uses the same quote I've used in my headline, but he puts the ellipsis 5 words before I've put mine.
ADDED: I can't say "say no more" without thinking of this.
ADDED: I can't say "say no more" without thinking of this.
"Simply having this 12-inch Christmas tree in the room with them made them feel less included in the university as a whole..."
"... which to me is a pretty powerful effect from one 12-inch Christmas tree in one psychology lab."
When people who did not celebrate Christmas or who did not identify as Christian filled out surveys about their moods while in the same room as a small Christmas tree, they reported less self-assurance and fewer positive feelings than if they hadn't been reminded of the holiday, according to a new study.
The university students didn't know the study was about Christmas, said study researcher Michael Schmitt, a social psychologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Nonetheless, he said, the presence of the tree caused non-celebrators and non-Christians to feel subtly excluded.
"Carol of the Bells"... the iPad version.
(In case you were offended by yesterday's
About that Christmas tree.
I said it's okay — and green enough — to get an artificial Christmas tree. Then Professor Yin came in with some scary stuff about lead, and Professor Bainbridge says don't get a tree at all, and don't even get presents — give it all to charity.
The rent-a-Christmas-tree business.
A live, potted tree is delivered to your house and, later, removed, to be kept, potted, on a lot, and tagged with your name, so you can be sure to get the same tree year after year.
We're told this arrangement appeals to "eco-minded consumers seek a natural tree without the possible guilt of dumping it curbside later." But — hello! — trucks have to drive around delivering and picking up these things, and growing them and preserving them in pots takes some doing. Possible guilt. What nonsense! Why not buy a cut tree and have it ground up into mulch in the end?
But "eco-minded consumers" are people with money to spend on their own good feelings about themselves. It doesn't matter what's really "green," only what they think is green. These people pay $100 a year for the scrawny tree. And how does said tree feel? Permanently pot-bound.
Here's a clue: Buy a nice artificial tree.
It's totally eco-friendly, in an honest and non-self-indulgent way. You'll save hours of trouble every year. I wouldn't have done this myself. I thought you had to buy a real tree. Oh, the many years when I put up the real tree — often by myself, which is not easy — and once I got a husband who could help me, he — my horticulturist husband — pushed me into getting an artificial tree!
You can have your possible guilt. I've got my possible irony.
We're told this arrangement appeals to "eco-minded consumers seek a natural tree without the possible guilt of dumping it curbside later." But — hello! — trucks have to drive around delivering and picking up these things, and growing them and preserving them in pots takes some doing. Possible guilt. What nonsense! Why not buy a cut tree and have it ground up into mulch in the end?
But "eco-minded consumers" are people with money to spend on their own good feelings about themselves. It doesn't matter what's really "green," only what they think is green. These people pay $100 a year for the scrawny tree. And how does said tree feel? Permanently pot-bound.
Here's a clue: Buy a nice artificial tree.
It's totally eco-friendly, in an honest and non-self-indulgent way. You'll save hours of trouble every year. I wouldn't have done this myself. I thought you had to buy a real tree. Oh, the many years when I put up the real tree — often by myself, which is not easy — and once I got a husband who could help me, he — my horticulturist husband — pushed me into getting an artificial tree! You can have your possible guilt. I've got my possible irony.
The high-speed rail boondoggle at its worst — in California.
Via Instapundit, Reason has the nauseating details:
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, we just elected a new governor whose central election promise was to say no to $810 million connect Madison and Milwaukee by high-speed rail:
But, anyway, we have a nice train in Madison:
A train and a Christmas tree in the Wisconsin State Capitol.
The California High Speed Rail Authority is committed to breaking ground on a leg of the train that will serve passengers between the unincorporated town of Borden and the half-incarcerated town of Corcoran.Corcoran!
Whether you call it the train from nowhere or the train to nowhere, nobody will be riding it even when it’s done. That’s not libertarian cant: The actual plan for the $4.15 billion leg is that upon completion it will sit idle until other sections of track are completed.$4.15 billion!
Background: The CHSRA needs to break ground by September 2012 or lose $2.25 billion in federal funds. The U.S. Department of Transportation has for reasons of its own favored the sparsely populated Central Valley for this first leg of the thinly imagined high speed rail project.Reasons of its own? Can we get an investigation?
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, we just elected a new governor whose central election promise was to say no to $810 million connect Madison and Milwaukee by high-speed rail:
Scott Walker has made no secret of his aversion to high-speed trains, but before he goes any further with his plans to derail the planned Milwaukee-Madison line, Walker might consider some earlier chapters in Wisconsin's transportation history. They indicate that the governor-elect could be putting his state in reverse.Connections! We're all about relationships among people.
As long as there has been a Wisconsin, residents have labored mightily to establish connections with each other and with the world beyond the state's borders. Although disputes often arose in working out the details, the general trend was unmistakable....
The idea seems oddly nostalgic at first - why build passenger trains in the 21st century? - but it actually fits an emerging settlement pattern. Not in my lifetime but perhaps in my grandchildren's, and for better or worse, an interconnected megalopolis will sprawl from Benton Harbor, Mich., to Minneapolis-St. Paul. As the empty spaces fill in, there will be a demand for some form of transport that's faster than cars but has more frequent stops (and fewer exasperating waits) than airplanes.The columnist — John Gurda in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel — is imagining a megalopolis in the future and telling us what people then will want. But people don't even want trains now. We drive cars. Or we take planes. There's also the bus. True, a bus doesn't go at a speed in between the speed of a car and a plane, but come on. Pick one. Road or air.
But, anyway, we have a nice train in Madison:
A train and a Christmas tree in the Wisconsin State Capitol.
"The threat was very real. Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale."
The NYT reports on an Oregon teenager's attempt to blow up fake explosives — given him by the FBI — that he thought were real. According to the FBI, he wanted to kill everyone who showed up for a Christmas tree lighting in Portland.
Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was arrested at 5:40 p.m. Friday just after he dialed a cell phone that he thought would set off the blast but instead brought federal agents and police swooping down on him.ADDED: I already had the tag "Christmas bomber," so I used that again. There's a new spin on the "War on Christmas."
Yelling "Allahu Akbar!" — Arabic for "God is great!" — Mohamud tried to kick agents and police after he was taken into custody, according to prosecutors....
[T]he sting operation began in June after an undercover agent learned that Mohamud had been in regular e-mail contact with an "unindicted associate" in Pakistan's northwest, a frontier region where al-Qaida and Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents are strong....
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