It had been my plan since about last February for the next annual Christmas music entry to be "Remakes That Don't Suck".  However, after spending way too much time in 02011 considering some of the most ill-conceived ideas ever re-recorded, I have dropped that plan.  I only found three, one of which is kind of questionable.  While they're included below, here's my 2K11 holiday mix:

1. "Santa Baby", Madonna.  Eartha Kitt did a fine job with the original, and the mid-01980's version of Madonna was a dead-on accurate choice for this version.  Laurie happens to like this tune, which is not an insignificant consideration.

2. "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie", from Pogo.  Last year's list included a "Deck the Halls" parody as the #2 track, and this one seems to be an appropriate followup--and possibly the start of a tradition around here.  The linked version here only includes the first verse--there may be five more in the canonical list, but the first is the best by a wide margin, from both musical and technical perspectives.

3. "Snoopy's Christmas", Royal Guardsmen.  As long as we've got one comic strip tune here, let's keep the theme going.

4. "Christmastime Is Here", Vince Guaraldi and Orchestra.  Three in a row from the comics.  (I'll stop now.)  Here's a holiday tune that should just not ever be remade.  What Toni Braxton did to this song is criminal, in my opinion.

5. "It's A Marshmallow World", Dean Martin.  "MW" has a curiously cloudy history, so much so that it was difficult to pin down who recorded this first.  That having been said, whether or not it was Frank Sinatra, it was not Dean Martin.  That having been said, and I cannot stress this enough, this is not a Christmas song.  There's no real mention of any winter holiday, and so much like "Jingle Bells", "Frosty the Snowman", and "Winter Wonderland", to name a few, radio stations could continue playing this into February--yet they don't.  Tragic.

6. "What Is Christmas?", Trans-Siberian Orchestra.  I have to tip the ol' visor to a holiday tune with a stanza like "What is Christmas?/Candles everywhere/A fire hazard/Any other day".  The point made slightly earlier on, that Christmas may just be "an ex-cuse to tolerate snow", is also worthy.

7. "Christmas Dragnet", Stan Freberg.  This one is a particularly timely and poignant entry, coming as it done on the heels of Harry Morgan's death Wednesday.  As a Freberg tune/sketch, it falls somewhat uncomfortably in between "St. George and the Dragonet" and "Green Chri$tma$", combining the features of each without quite rising to the level of either.  But since Joe Friday is more on our minds this week than usual, and since the piece is not by any stretch awful, here it is.

8. "7:00 News/Silent Night", Simon & Garfunkel.  Third (and final) on the list of worthy remakes, this is one that could easily be remade again--all you'd need to do is record a new news track to be read over the tune.  This could be a (depressing) annual tradition.  That of course, is only sort of a good thing.

I am reminded, in considering this track, of WLS-Chicago's Holiday Festival of Music, which was noted for tracking Christmas preparations and explaining holiday traditions at the top of each hour in and around holiday tunes during the countdown to midnight on 24/5 December.  In the midnight segment, there's an extended piece which includes a poll-taker asking people what their favorite Christmas song is, and "SN" heads the list--by design, of course, because the aircheck leads into a version of the song.  Nonetheless, I'm not sure that that would really win an open poll.  I suspect its popularity on that piece is more a matter of "I must think of some Christmas song quickly...um...Silent Night!" than any real preference for the tune.

And while it would be nice to have this one end the collection, you can't go out on a track that closes by talking about 5 more years of war in Vietnam, so...

9. "Christmas In Heaven", Monty Python.  This one makes the cut in part because it provides a tenuous connection between another very non-Christmas song and Christmas.  One of the very non-Christmas songs that still manage to slip in to "all-Christmas, all-the-time" radio playlists is "My Favorite Things", from The Sound of Music.  I can't explain it, and certainly won't try.  The closest connection between that tune and any winter holiday is found in a passage from this song: "It's Christmas is heaven/There's great films on TV/The Sound of Music twice an hour/And Jaws 1, 2, and 3".

I doubt that that's the reason why we hear this song in December (and in no other months of the year), but I suspect it's the best explanation we're going to get.  And it's still not a holiday tune.

Over at xkcd, there's a slightly different take on holiday music today which makes some of the same points I've been hinting at for the past 7+ years:

 

 Io Saturnalia!

It was never a goal of mine to be an entry in the index of a book*.  Yet in the index of the recently-published Engaging Resistance: How Ordinary People Successfully Champion Change by Aaron Anderson, one finds the following entry:

Bolman, Mark, 80, 85, 86

“It’s hype,” Las Vegas roulette-dealer-turned-numerologist Judith Gabriel said. “People get caught up in the drama and misinterpret the facts.”

--for that is where I always look.

Loyal reader Kristie of Allen Park, MI has reported that Detroit radio station WMGC-FM went all-Christmas yesterday.  That is, they started playing all-Christmas music before Halloween.  As I said on Facebook yesterday, this is wrong on every conceivable level.

However, in the spirit of...something, at least Magic-105's listeners will be spared the questionable Halloween music that will be flooding the airwaves tomorrow (and indeed, already started last week in some circles).  While there's a rich trove of Halloween novelty music, mainstream music hasn't really embraced the holiday, and so we're in for many repetitions of "Thriller", a few unnecessary parodies of "Monster Mash", and some horror movie tunes.  Not exactly a "must-listen" experience, except for "Werewolves of London".

To call my reasoning on this point "grasping at straws" is almost unfair to straws.

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26 October 02011*: In Death, As In Comedy...

it all comes down to timing.

In the outpouring of grief--some of it genuine, some of it almost cultish in its devotion--surrounding the death of Steve Jobs, most of the nation lost sight of the loss of a far more important figure in computing when Dennis Ritchie passed away on 8 October.  The man invented the programming language C, co-created the Unix operating system, and originated the "Hello, world!" program that is a staple of introductory programming courses.  When I have taught C, BASIC, or C++, I have modified that to "Yo, Earth!", but that's just me being whimsical.

That's 2.1 accomplishments of lasting significance, for which he deserved a far better memorial.  In that way, Ritchie will take his place alongside such luminaries as Groucho Marx and Mother Teresa, who mis-timed their deaths to occur too close to far more visible--though not more accomplished--figures (Elvis Presley and Princess Diana, for those without the initiative to check on this themselves).  I understand that the three more-celebrated folks all died young, but that doesn't justify the imbalance of recognition.

To borrow from The Economist's obituary linked above: printf("goodbye, Dennis\n");

And thank you.

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*--As of today, and only as of today, I can click on my USA Today bookmark and not get the 9/11 drama.  It's about time.  Of course, it was also about time 6 weeks ago.

10 October 02011*: On Baseball Geography

So the four World Series semifinalists are from Dallas, Detroit, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. We might as well start calling it the "Flyover Series" right now.

The honchos at MLB HQ must be very unhappy over the way things have played out--no New York teams left, no California teams left, nothing all that mediagenic about the four hometowns remaining.  Even the team from Dallas isn't using the city's name.  Sportswriters too--not only are there no really glamorous road trips left for them, there's a very real possibility of some rather unpleasant weather for the games that remain, and I don't just mean the heavy rain in Texas.

To which I say: Ha.

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*--All indicators are that USA Today continues to wallow in post-9/11 dysphoria.

30 September 02011: Notes As The Third Quarter Closes

1. USA Today is still wallowing in post-9/11/01 aftermath darkness (The Markives, 19 September 02011).  Cut it out, folks.

2. I find it amusing, bordering on depressing, that so much of the ongoing remembrance of 9/11/1 is tied to the phrase "Never forget"--like that's possible.  Too many people--including but not limited to USAT--have too much interest in dragging this memory out again and again and again.  The obsession may subside next year--a lot of the increased hype this year seems to be connected to the fact that we're at year 10, a nice round number--but it will surely return.

3. My solution to the recent college sports conference realignment madness is simple: The Big East should stop sponsoring football.  They have never, to my view, been a legitimate BCS participant--that doesn't matter--and they have far too many members (6 out of 14 once the current transitions shake out) who don't offer the sport at the FBS level*.  That does.  Two birds, one rock.  You're welcome, world.

Take that conference out of the equation, and you free up a collection of schools that could stabilize the Big XII, Conference USA, and the Mountain West, with a new BCS berth going to the last of those three.  We can talk about the problem of the Sun Belt Conference later.

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*--Plus the enigma that is the folks from northwest Indiana, whose presence doesn't improve the conference's case.

21 September 02011: The Persistence of Time and Memory

Long-time readers may recall that I saluted Mathew Brennan's birth back in 02007 by noting that his birth coincided with the US and Canadian dollars reaching parity with each other for the first time in my memory.  In fairness, and on the day after Matt's 4th birthday, I am compelled to point out that today, the Canadian dollar is worth $0.9971990086 US--for the first time in his life, the US dollar is worth (a nearly undetectable fraction, but still...) more than its counterpart from our friends to the north.

Data from the good folks at xe.com, who have sent me a daily email with current exchange rates for years now, which has made this mild obsession possible.

Oh, and happy birthday, Mathew.

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19 September 02011: Just One Word

for the folks over at USA Today: Nine-elevenoughalready!  (A coined word, but one that's quite necessary at this point in spacetime.)

As I type this (2:47 PM EDT), the target of that link, which is their main page, continues to be draped in black and awash in September 11, 02001 reminiscing.

There's such a thing as an appropriate remembrance, and there's wallowing in an aftermath.  This is the latter.  We had plenty of both last week, and this is taking it too far in time.

Stop it.  A big part of USAT's early appeal was its use of color in the daily newspaper; it is odd in the extreme that they've cast that aside for this long.

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11 September 02011: Just One Question

But first, some highlights from last night:

Now to the question: What will Sports Illustrated decide is more worthy of the cover of next week's issue than Michigan's 35-31 triumph over Notre Dame?

This is a non-scientific survey posing as an interest of mine, but I've noticed over the years that ND beating U-M frequently makes the cover.  Michigan winning?  Not so much.  There are exceptions, but the general pattern is as I have described it.

Responsible Cable News Outlets To Devote Sensible Amount Of Airtime To 10th Anniversary Of 9/11

2 September 02011 (Has it really been a month already?  Oops.): The Most Versatile Spanish Word...

is undeniably "imbécil".  (No translation required, I trust.)

Such an audacious claim as that requires explanation: While visiting the Cayman Islands last month, we had occasion to sample the television programming of the Warner Channel, broadcast from Miami for Latin America.  "WB Super Prime" brings American primetime TV to that market, with the amusing and necessary addition of Spanish subtitles.  In watching Two and a Half Men and reading along, as I am prone to do, I noticed two things:

First, that the subtitles don't always represent a faithful translation.  (I don't know a lot of Spanish, but I know enough to find omissions.)  No surprise there.

Second, that the word "imbécil" finds frequent use as an all-purpose noun for words that I can only assume don't translate well from English.  (The mind of the reader is left to imagine what those might be.)

On to other matters: The College Football Embarrassment Of The Week Award goes to the University of Utah, which not only scheduled a game for yesterday against a Football Championship Series opponent (Montana State), but canceled afternoon and evening classes to accommodate the game.

Another example of "this target isn't even a challenge".

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As we, collectively and as a nation, tease out the ins and outs of the latest product of our "fascism of absolute freedom" government that is the proposed debt ceiling pact, I have one simple suggestion that I think would make what's coming both more interesting and more sensible:

With regard to this 12-person committee that's charged with proposing how we're going to get the rest of the way out of this so-called mess,
John Boehner should appoint the Democratic representatives and Harry Reid should get to choose the Republicans.

No veto power, no right of refusal, no votes--each side gets to pick whom the other side sends into the mess.  I can almost guarantee that this will get us a more reasonable group of 12 people than what we're going to get otherwise.

15 July 02011: Something For The Children

Recently, I got an email from Mom alerting me to the language issue on Crayola crayons:

Just read the latest installment of the Markives and wondered if you knew that Crayola now lists the color names on each crayon in three
(count 'em, 3) languages?  How PC can you get?  Think of all the languages they are slighting. 

I agree.  There's only one solution: Esperanto (and only Esperanto)!

Fortunately, this coincides with one of my occasional "I should really brush up on my Esperanto" quests*.  I'll start with the standard 8-pack: ruĝa, oranĝkolora**, flava, verda, blua, purpura, bruna, & nigra.  And a bonus color from the 48-pack: dolcamara.  That leaves 39 for the good folks at Crayola to tease out.  I'm not sure how "raw sienna" translates.

Speaking of dumb ideas related to children's playthings, the Colorado Department of Human Services is considering a proposal that will require day care providers to provide dolls in at least three races.  This is another example of "where isn't the joke?".  Here's mine: How about Human, Romulan, and Klingon--would that count?  It ought to--and it might make for a better day care experience for the kids.

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*--The last time I had one of those, I reached the limit of 100 online renewals (~ 4 years) on my Esperanto book checked out from the MSU library and then had to return it.  I think that if you reach that limit without someone else wanting the book, there should be an understanding that, although the library retains ownership, you get to retain possession indefinitely.
**--Esperanto distinguishes between orange the color and orange the fruit (the latter is translated as "oranĝo").  Good on them.

26 June 02011: Samoa Canceled My Birthday

Not permanently--just for 02011.  I'm sure it's nothing personal.

Samoa has decided to reroute the International Date Line so they're on the same side as Australia, with whom they have closer trade relationships, rather than the same side as the USA*.  Fair enough.  This requires that they basically skip a day to effect the change, and after a brief flirtation with wiping out New Year's Eve 02011, the decision has been made to X out December 30.

I understand this decision, and the rationalist in me supports it completely.  However, the personal impact is something I cannot be so casual about.

It's not uncommon to see feature articles appearing in late December that list the perceived disadvantages of a birthday in the weekettes surrounding Christmas.  I've always been skeptical about these--personally, I've never understood what's so bad about having one's birthday gifts wrapped in Christmas paper, and I think that anyone who sticks a candle into a fruitcake** is, ipso facto, a little nuts to begin with.  But this threat--short-lived though it may be--is a new one.

That having been said, I spent some time playing on the I'net last night, plotting a hypothetical trip out there for that non-day.  It might, on some level, be fun to be in Samoa when the calendar flips from Dec. 29 to Dec. 31, miss a birthday, and in some sense not get a year older.  Why should the Feb. 29 babies get all of the fun?

Reasonable flight schedules are available, as are unreasonable ones.  Detroit --> Denver --> Las Vegas --> Honolulu --> Apia, anyone?  Didn't think so.

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*--They have also switched from driving on the right side of the road to the left to foster closer ties (and cheaper imported cars) with Australia.
**--Which I have never seen done.

3 June 02011: Something Old, Something New

The new: The family portrait on the main page, which may have been the first time since the clan expanded to 21 people that all 21 were in the same place at once.  Such a convergence as that needs to be recorded.  Natalie's not facing the camera, but we have some time to work with her on that.  Certain of my nephices have come to understand what they should do when Uncle Mark--> points a camera at them, so there's some expert understanding that we can tap.

The old:

The Hangover Part II made somewhere north of $117 million in its opening weekend, despite the frequent panning from film critics.  (Cheer up, guys: The week after Christmas is coming.)  In it, my doppelgänger Zach Galifianakis is sporting a new look, with a shaved head.

I didn't inspire that, and I won't be mimicking it.

For my own part, I will be content to sport the "classic Alan" look, for which I have been recognized on my last three Las Vegas trips.  In the most recent installment, I was walking along the Strip when a guy riding in a limousine got my attention and asked "Hey, are you him?"

Not an easy question to answer, depending as it does on the value assigned to the variable "him" in that proposed equation.  I established that he was looking for Zach G., and confirmed that I was not that "him".  He nonetheless called his female companion to the window to see me.

I hold out some hope that Hangover III--for there will surely be one--will return to the scene of the original.

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It was a very bad year for new TV shows set in New York City for no good reason, a pastime which I decried years ago (The Markives, 5 November 02004).  It was with some small measure of regret (for these shows were actually not bad) mixed with a certain satisfaction that I noted that Better With You and Mad Love were both canceled after their first season.

Now if we could also get the network powers that be to stop these shows before they reach the air, or at least send a flood of notes to change the location, then...well, the world won't be measurably better, but I'd like it more.

In another curious geographical trend, it was also a bad season for sitcoms set in San Diego, as we are losing both $#*! My Dad Says and Mr. Sunshine.  This, of course, continues a curse going all the way back to That 80's Show.  Chicago fared far better, with both Mike & Molly and Happy Endings making it through to the fall schedule--although why the latter did so is something of a mystery to me.

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change the rules.

Laurie and I returned, somewhat more quickly than usual, to our preferred runaway of Las Vegas last week, which meant a renewed quest for pictures of American postal abbreviations among the signs of the city (The Markives, 29 March 02011).  Nine were left at the start of our trip, and four remain now.  To get those five, however, I had to modify some of the rules I set out at the start of that quest.

1. No more than one picture at any one location: This was something of a "put this rule in to make it more interesting" kind of thing, and thus it wasn't something I felt too bad about discarding.  I had gotten Connecticut in March from the Bonanza Gift Shop ("the world's largest", in their words), on a sign advertising "Cactus".  All well and good.  It was only on the return that I noticed that they are also selling Indian jewelry--and thus had a sign covering New Jersey.

Target acquired.  Later on, I noticed (I don't know why I didn't catch this the first time) that Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon contained an embedded New Hampshire abbreviation--the fact that I had already tapped it for Illinois seemed like much less of a barrier.

2. Use official 2-letter USPS abbreviations: I had actually relaxed this one twice in March, once for Texas (Texas Station didn't have any TX's that I could find, so I figured the name would suffice) and once for Florida (My picture of the Fl in "Flamingo" picked up the "a" due to the font in use, which I decided wasn't an imposition.).  Montana, Maryland, and Minnesota were captured by letting go of this restriction--it helps that one of the major north-south streets near UNLV is Maryland Parkway.

That wasn't enough to nail down New Mexico, South Dakota, Tennessee, or Vermont, but we'll be back in Nevada someday, and the quest will continue.*

After that...who knows?  I was toying with two-letter Internet country codes as the next photo challenge, but there are a lot of those.  There are sensible restrictions that could be used, though, so that may be next.

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*--I also have to find abbreviations for the District of Columbia, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico.

On April 26, the Chicago Cubs' record was 10-12, which means they missed out on being 11-11. The team had previously
hit every .500 increment from 1-1 to 10-10. They did set a new major league record, as two teams had previously made it to 9-9.

On Sunday, 10 April, it was 85 degrees or so around these parts.  Today, we have two inches of new snow.

I submit this as evidence that, being as we are immersed in the runup to both Easter and Passover and thus in one of the holiest weeks of the year, the Big Guy is just reminding us all who's really in charge.

In light of the recent unpleasant weather in the Carolinas, where 2/3 of the immediate Bollman clan is vacationing right now, I shall resist calling them out on their convenient absence from Michigan during this fluctuation.  But I'm taking careful notes.

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Seattle school renames Easter eggs 'Spring Spheres'

Really.

Political correctness trumps mathematical correctness.  Would it have been too much, as long as we're destroying common sense in the service of...nothing, really--to call these treats "spring ovoids" or "spring ellipsoids"?

Both terms would be a better description of the shape of the container.  Neither one should be necessary.

I appreciate that the student volunteer who caused this flurry of crazy wants to keep the school's name out of the press, but I'd really like to be able to identify them for the mocking they so richly deserve.

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29 March 02011: Convergence

Sometimes my lines of thought wind up converging in ways that surprise me.  Case in point: There's a nascent secessionist movement going on out West right now, where some officials in the southern part of Arizona want to break away from the north (and its fanatical right-wing ways, they would say) and form a new state, possibly to be called Baja Arizona.

While it's safe to call this an extreme longshot, I find myself drawn to it for a variety of reasons:

1. A new US flag.  I've mentioned this before (The Markives, 21 August 02009 [scroll down from here]).

2. Some interesting postal play. The Post Office abbreviation for Baja Arizona would, in all likelihood, be BA.  This connects to last Thursday's post, and so we have Las Vegas observation #4: Having successfully photographed the entire alphabet in the signs of Las Vegas in 02007, I was casting about for a new photo challenge for this trip.  While the 676 possible two-letter combinations would certainly have been a challenge, I'm reasonably certain that that would have been on the far far side of achievable.  Not for lack of looking, but I have yet to find, say, a "QQ" out there.

While sitting in the Denver airport and pondering this issue, I hit upon two-letter USPS state abbreviations.  That was sufficiently complex to be challenging and yet still within range of the possible.  There would, I realized, be some tricky abbreviations (NJ, for example), but it seemed like an interesting quest.  Over the next week, I tracked down 41 of the 50 states* among the signs of the city.  As for the 9 holdouts, I took some pictures of individual letters and will be working on merging them together into placeholder photos until they too eventually fall before my Nikon on a future trip.

BA would be easy to pick up--at Bally's, for example, or Mandalay Bay.  Another reason to approve, although perhaps not a widely-shared one.

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*--And a territory or two.

24 March 02011 (Happy 10th!): Vegas 13 Aftermath

A couple of observations on our latest runaway to southern Nevada (This may become Part 1 of a short series):

1. A new form of either street performing or panhandling out in LV is the person who dresses up as some famous person or fictional character and attempts to garner tips for photographs with passersby.  Over spring break, I saw several Michael Jacksons, a collection of Elvii, a Hello Kitty, a Buzz Lightyear, and some poor soul who was dressed as the "Welcome To Las Vegas" sign, among others.

I don't view this as a viable career option, but one morning, while passing through an unnamed Strip casino, I was approached by a woman who noted my resemblance to Zach Galifianakis' character in The Hangover and asked if she could take a photo with me.  Being a reasonable sort, I agreed--and now my picture is in two different collections of strangers' travel photos.  The other is a shot in full kilt formal wear, taken in Scotland when Laurie and I were walking back from Dan & Anne's wedding.  The photographer in question, who never contacted us directly, seemed excited about the notion of seeing someone in actual Scottish regalia.

That having been said, the bobblehead of that character on sale in at least one gift shop didn't look enough like me to be worth the investment.

2. Speaking of panhandlers, a twist on the folks asking for spare change on the street, in and among all the homeless veterans and other down-on-their-luck folks, is the subspecies whose signs simply read "Why lie?  I need beer!"

I find this neither amusing nor moving.

3. Comedian Allan Havey had some sharp words directed toward me--in extremely good fun, of course--on this trip.  It's a risk you assume when you're seated near the front in a comedy club.  I got the standard "What do you do?" question, and responded "I'm a mathematician."  A few comments about card counting later, he went for the kill: "This guy--he was probably the smartest kid in class all through school, and he still has all his hair.  I hate him."

Pretty funny, actually.

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2 March 02011: Still Here, Really

In response to a number of inquiries (A number greater than 1?  Maybe.), yes, this site is still up and running.  Life has diverted my energies recently.

But with the recent death of Jane Russell, I find myself motivated to comment.  Specifically: Jane Russell was still alive? 

Seriously, if asked, I would have guessed that she had passed away years ago.

There is, to my mind, a need for some kind of "Who's Not Dead Yet?" resource.  Abe Vigoda's status is carefully tracked, of course, but that's not enough.  Here's an opportunity for a Web-savvy public servant.

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18 January 02011: Hail Ophiuchus! or My Sign?  Neon!

I was intending to ignore the whole revision of the superstitious nonsense that is astrology that broke in the news last week, but it appears that a reader of this site was wondering when I'd get to it.  When you have so few readers, you can afford to take requests like that.  So here goes.

My credentials to address this vital issue--such as they are needed--are these.  Prior to 02011, I had done the following:
    1. Pronounced "Ophiuchus" correctly without laughing--and meant it.
    2. Knew that Ophiuchus existed and lay on the zodiacal band in the sky.
    3. Actually saw that constellation.

---

11 January 02011: Heidi Redux--A Tale For 1/11

I don't know if this affected anyone else, but very early this morning (so the clock had rolled past midnight), I was watching the end of the BCS Championship game.  The Auburn kicker lined up, the ball was snapped, the kick went up...

and then an Emergency Alert System test started.  Following the black screen and attention tones, the system switched me to the designated alert channel, which is, of course, the Home Shopping Network.

111 indeed.

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