The Markives

23 December 02025 (Merry Christmas Adam!): ACATT Radio: A Report From The Field

I spent a week listening to an ACATT radio station for a few hours each day while driving around southern Nevada. This particular station's holiday library appears to consist of about 15 albums, plus a handful of the 21st century's equivalent of 45s with classic tunes by their recognized masters. Messrs. Ives, Como, Crosby, and Williams were included there, as was Leroy Anderson and his band's instrumental Sleigh Ride. That part of the listening was fine.

The rest of the playlist (those 15 albums) was disturbingly limited, perhaps even by the standards of someone less committed to ferreting out obscurity in holiday tunes than I (which is to say, almost everybody). It would seem that the key to holiday success is to cut an album with the following songs:

O Holy Night
It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas
Do You Hear What I Hear?
Sleigh Ride, with lyrics (ugh)
Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas--This one was everywhere, and no one had the decency to sing a version with the original lyric "Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow".

That's really all you need. It's okay to fill out the album with other songs--more ardently Christian singers might want to throw in another traditional carol or two, for example--but it won't matter, because they won't be played on terrestrial radio. It helps if you're a woman--among those 15 albums, only Michael Buble stood out as a cover artist with a Y chromosome.

I have no doubt that extensive market research has shown that this is what the local audience wants, and good on everyone involved for delivering, but if anyone wants to make the claim that ACATT radio is largely the same few songs played on repeat in multiple versions--well, they'll get no argument from me after this little experiment.

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14 December 02025 (Happy birthday yesterday and tomorrow!): ACME-22/AVMX-16--Another Orbit, One More 10-Pack

Searching for obscure holiday tunes this year was a multiple-month quest. Odd, then, that this list is arriving 4 days later than usual. That can be chalked up to the push to get book #7 off my desk and on someone else’s desk.

Mission accomplished—it’s with the production team. Time to celebrate, with these additions to my personal Christmas(ish) canon.

1. Takin’ Care of Christmas, Randy Bachman. Another collision between classic rock and holiday tunes. That’s two genres that one would think might not overlap so much. And yet, it often works, as we’ve seen in AVMX-9 and with this one.

Fred Turner, the ball is in your court.

2. Christmas In New York, Kelsie Watts. Another geographical song. This one wins out over Fairytale of New York for 2 reasons: 1] The latter isn’t quite obscure enough to meet my reasons for compiling these annual lists, and, 2] to be honest, I’m not a big fan of it. Having visited New York City a couple of times in recent years, it’s useful to have some awareness of the places being mentioned, though I don’t think that familiarity is 100% necessary.

3. Ding Dong Dandy Christmas, The Three Suns. “Suns”, not “Sons”—in case you were thinking Fred MacMurray might be a-chiming* in here. This is a fun little instrumental which throws some church bells in and among the jingle bells that we often find as an indcator in holiday instrumentals.

4. The Girl On Candy Cane Line, Hollyberries. Defying expectations here, this one doesn’t exactly deliver the kind of tune one might expect given the title or the artist’s name. And that’s a good thing.

5. Santa Doesn’t Know You Like I Do, Sabrina Carpenter. Sabrina makes her third appearance in AVMX as she takes her residency on the pop charts over to the holiday charts. That said, there’s no chart overlap for her tunes there; this is not one that gets a lot of airplay—which is what we celebrate over here.

6. Gifts for Me, Meghan Trainor. One does not mess with a successful model, and as long as Meghan continues to put out new holiday music, she’s welcome to the #6 slot. I’ll even look the other way when she wants to travel to Remake City, though a rework of the overplayed songs of the season won’t be showing up here. I have my limits.

7. Who Says There Ain’t No Santa Claus?, Ron Holden. Time for time travel. This might be a touch twangier than I’d ordinarily like, but it grows on a person after a couple of listens.

8. The Reindeer Boogie, Hank Snow. As long as we’re looking at songs from before my time, let’s stick around and enjoy this one. It kind of falls into that “fun, but not necessarily funny” category that I’ve been filling up these past few years.

9. Christmas Was Better In The 80s, Futureheads. I’m not sure I agree with this sentiment, but it’s not a bad argument for that point of view.

10. Have Yourself A Very Liberal Christmas, Capitol Steps. While we wait for the Capitol Fools to turn their satiric edge to the winter holidays, let’s enjoy this 02009 tune by a Nancy Pelosi impersonator. Somehow, I don’t see any Speaker of the House since NP getting anything this amusing attributed to him.

Io Saturnalia!

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8 December 02025* (Happy birthday tomorrow!): Rise Of The Machines? Not So Fast!

I had planned this as the introduction to this year’s 10-pack of underappreciated holiday tunes, but it turned into something much longer that seemed to deserve a post of its own, and so here it is in its own right and a dash earlier than expected.

In casting about this year for obscure holiday songs that deserve better, something peripheral moved toward the center. In holiday tunes as in life itself, the effect of AI (“Artificial Intelligence. Real Irritation.”) and what that might mean for future versions of the holiday canon have taken on a new significance.

Here in 02025, there’s not a lot going on yet, but there are a couple of barely-apparent trends that I’m casually watching.

1. To the extent that it’s involved in this arena at all, AI is far (far) more focused on secular holiday songs than on the spiritual stuff.

This is not much of a surprise, since it’s been quite some time since a new song has been added to the high-rotation playlist on the non-secular side.

Part of that is that the ongoing fragmentation of popular music makes it harder for anything to break through across sub-markets. Part of it is that it’s just easier to tee up an old standard in the public domain (of which there are many, though one might not think so from hearing what gets airtime these days) than invest energy in writing something new. Or, for that matter, even doing something interesting and different** with a classic.

Of course, when we factor in the reality that the point of recording and releasing songs is to make money and the focus at Christmas on traditions, re-re-re-re-re-recording old standards is a somewhat more certain path to financial success than pushing the envelope and expanding the world.

2. There's some amusing movement toward AI involvement in Christmas comedy that I had not foreseen.

Perhaps this is because that field is a little more wide-open. Parodies of Christmas songs that aren't about the season itself ("Now CBS Has Letterman" and any number of "12 Days" takeoffs, for example), though not exactly uncommon, tend not to have an enduring presence anywhere.

Admittedly, the results so far are mixed, but we're early in the game.

For better, worse, or otherwise, though, a lot of stuff coming out of this branch of AI music is decidedly not safe for radio airplay (even satellite radio) or polite company. That doesn't mean it's not funny, or fun to listen to.

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*--Alabama did not deserve inclusion in the College Football Playoff. From Sports Illustrated: "It’s beginning to feel like the College Football Playoff format has a secret rule that grants an automatic bid to Alabama." That says a lot. End of pontification.
**--These are not necessarily the same thing.

30 is an interesting number.

From my past life as a number theorist, it's significant as 2 x 3 x 5, the primorial of both 5 and 6. (That would be the product of all primes less than or equal to the given number.)

From my current life as an applied probabilist, 30's noteworthy as the payoff (to 1) on some of the worst bets at a craps table: the one-roll bets that the next roll will be a 2 or a 12. These bets have a house advantage of 13.89%--not quite keno-level bad, but still two of the worst bets you'll find in a standard casino with table games.

30 is, of course, the day of my birth, which (rightly) matters to me more than to most people.

Today, 30 marks the number of years since Laurie's big car accident. A lot has changed in that trilogy of decades--my employer and her employer, for two--but we're still together and still speaking to each other.

I might not have guessed that, had I been asked in 01995, but it's worked out pretty well all around. And if no one asked then, it's certainly because we had other concerns that were far more important than the long-range future.

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16 November 02025 (Happy birthday yesterday and tomorrow!): Trash Talking Considered

Another D-III football regular season is in the books, and with it another year of running up and down the visitor's sideline and watching a lot of very different sidelines.

1. Engineering students trash-talk differently.

Not every student at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology majors in engineering, but they all have to take 3 semesters of calculus, including the football players. They seem to be aware that not every college football player does this. And so we get insults like "If you showed them a derivative, they wouldn't know what to do with it!" and "That guy's probably failing Remedial College Algebra!"

There's a certain level of accuracy in both of those assumptions.

I was reminded of the following quote from Dr. John Sturgis on Young Sheldon:

We'll be mocked by physicists, engineers, even mathematicians. And they don't just say you're an idiot... they prove it.

That said, the boys from RHIT were a little chattier than the average sideline is with the chain gang. We got to talking briefly about what else I do at Albion, and they were impressed by the fact that I work in gambling mathematics. I gave an invited talk on blackjack math at Rose several years ago, but it was before any current football players would have been enrolled.

2. Ardently religious schools have slightly better-behaved sidelines than more secular colleges, but the relationship between spirituality and good behavior isn't a simple one.

While we learned no new curse words from the Hope or Calvin players or their coaches*, Calvin was a bit more rambunctious, and a little more willing to taunt opposing players specifically by number. One might have expected differently.

It may have helped in both cases that the games weren't remotely close, and favored the visiting sides.

This year's other visitors, on the other hand, were as non-creative with their language as we've come to expect, although not quite to the point of "Do you think they know any other words?" from several years ago..We played that team at their place this year.

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*--I did hear a "Gosh dang it!" on the Calvin sideline. That was as close as they got to anything unprintable.

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