If you love Christmas pop music as much as I do, you know that 90% of it is dreadful. (You also probably apologize to your significant other a lot.) For every "Fairytale of New York," "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," and "Merry Christmas from the Family," there are dozens of cynical little crapcicles that reek of contractual obligations ("Step Into Christmas"), wretchedly puerile "jokey" songs ("Grandma Got Run Over etc."), 
overproduced/uninspired versions of public domain carols (pretty much every R&B or country version of "Silent Night"), and well-meaning originals that land on the wrong side of the hypnotic/annoying line ("Wonderful Christmastime"). 

But still - that remaining 10% does wonders for filling one with a warm, nostalgic glow when it's time to see if that heavy jacket still fits. (It does - you look great.) And here's a wonderful collection of 80 Christmas pop songs from the 40s - early 60s that's currently on sale at Amazon for six bucks. Make with the clicks:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GYV17AQ/ref=dm_ws_ec_mdl_dp_B00GYV17AQ

You've got some genuine classics here, like Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," Mel Torme's "The Christmas Song," and Brenda Lee's adorable "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree. You've got some gorgeous crooning from the likes of The Platters, Billie Holiday, and Nat King Cole. You've even got some genuinely fun novelty tunes, like Chuck Berry's "Run Rudolph Run," Dean Martin's "Baby It's Cold Outside" (no, it's not a date-rape song, it's just smarmy), and Eartha Kitt's delightfully purring "Santa Baby" (Julie Newmar was supposed to be sexier than her? Balderdash). 

                                                          (Exhibit A.)

You won't love 'em all, of course, but I'm the last person to judge you for enjoying a song I don't care for. (Unless it's "Mele Kalikimaka." Fuck that song.) You may not dig the big-band style that dominates the collection, or you might balk at the notion of Perry Como showing up on your iPhone. But c'mon - 80 songs for six bucks. You could delete over half of 'em and still walk away feeling like Larry the Liquidator. But before you delete...pause. Let the songs breathe a bit. Sure, some of this music is treacly and filled with cheese, but there's something so pure about holiday music from the 40s and 50s. Even the toss-offs (Sinatra sounds like his mind is on his next martini) have a certain cliched soul feel just right on a chilly night. These are original recordings, and their lo-fi sound is part of their charm. Even those of us with playlists filled of Naked City, Bad Brains and Angelspit can appreciate some good old-fashioned corn when fall really starts to kick in and you realize a hot chocolate would really hit the spot right about now.

So there you go - a little Holiday Music Tip from your Uncle Matthew. Do with it what you will. If you ask me nicely, I might even tell you what my all-time favorite Christmas pop/rock/jazz recordings are. If you ask even more nicely, I might even stop.

A good friend of mine, who happens to be the Director of Digital Content at PMA , spoke to my Intro to Professional Writing students tonight. I learned much more about her actual job - since our time together (we're also neighbors whose boys play together often) usually revolves around recipes, creating silly memes, a glass of chardoney, book chatter, the latest New Yorker or other "literary" magazine... I'm feeling a bit like a mental midget right now and as I'm delving deeper into the world of digital content, realizing how little I really know (although I can fake it really well) and how much I need to learn. And I'm in awe of her skills and ability to move fluidly among the communication worlds.

Apropos of learning, E. mentioned a local chapter of women who are teaching other women to code. Can't remember the name at the moment, but they meet at Wegmans, and they partner experienced with newbie programmers, and although my plate - nay, my tupperware - runneth over with hustling to freelance, repping for Young Living Oils, Celedon Road and Visalus, playing with a 4 year old son, doing the wifey thang with my hubby, I think I need to check out this coding group.

I've dipped a toe into the coding waters of website html. I can bold and highlight and italicize with the best. But this new world beckons. I have to remind myself not to dismiss my potential ability because I'm mathematically challenged. I see patterns - many patterns - everywhere, and isn't coding nothing more than a collection of patterns you manipulate?

Heck, by producing my son, born 01-01-10, a miraculous example of binary basic, am I not qualified to take my place among the other coders out there? I think I'm going in.

{Takes deep breath. Leaps.}

Beware the autumn people. For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September & November touches October & then instead of December & Christ's birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again & old October & so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. For these beings fall is ever the normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond.

Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? the grave. Does blood stir in their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss betweeen the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gust they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, & surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles - breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.

-Bradbury

OK, here's a youtube-y link of my goofy kids earlier this evening. Hoping they work harder on math, because I don't think this is gonna do it for them.

I spent my evening teaching One Post Wonder to just Do The Right Thing when you paste a giphy link, or a youtube link, or a link to more or less anything that's meant to be embedded on the interwebs.

But now I'm going to shut off my computer. Because in our house, that's what happens at 9pm these days.

It's an adjustment!

There's a new post in my blog, Harbinger of Doom, regarding Rangers in D&D.

Other than that, baby-wrangling and LARP prep take up almost all of my time. We did take a break to play a bit of the new (?) - new to us, anyway - Portal 2 DLC. Short version of my review so far: Amaze.

Happy Birthday Brian Blessed!  I remember your warlike bellowing fondly, and today at work makes me want to have an honorary Brian Blessed Primal Screaming Hour ... so Happy Birthday to you and AAAAARRRRGGGHHHHH!

Whenever I drop V off at the train or at work or one of us leaves the house for some reason, I always think of the xkcd cartoon about considering your last words to everyone. I think the punch line was something like a couple saying something to each other like, "pick up some fucking milk on your way home, would you?" and what if that was the last thing you ever heard from them?  So I always worry too much about making sure I say, "I love you" to him and giving him a hug or a smooch or whatever. 
Usually when I drop him off at the train, as he crosses the street to the steps, I'll roll down the window and shout, "I love you!" and he'll get the slightly embarrassed face you'd expect on a kid whose mom is dropping him off at school and yelling it in front of all the other kids. he'll say, "I love you too," but it's with an air of "jeez, lady, do you have to shout?"

Considering that our neighborhood has a near-constant mantra of shouted cursing rolling from end to end of the district like an ocean wave, passed from junkie to alcoholic to nut to junkie to alcoholic to nut and so on, the result is that people who have their brains in order just stay as quiet as possible. My response to this is that maybe there should be more positive shouting. 

For example, when I call the dogs to come inside, I yell, "Hey ladiiiiieeeees!" or "What is up, my bitcheeeees?" 

if they refuse to come inside, they get, "Madam? Your Majesty?" until they give up.  All of this is always followed by enough "Good girl! Good Girl!" to make it sound like I'm advertising a dog food by that name. 

After two years of having lived next to Ant'ny and The Octomom's constant fighting, shouting, beating their dogs and calling their kids "motherfucker," I feel like I have to make a joyful noise to counteract their audiblebile (like that? see what I did there? "Audibile" would have been even better but autocorrect wouldn't let me do it without capitalization and quotation marks).

This morning, I rolled down the window to shout, "I love you," to the hastily departing Vincenzo, and I could already see his shoulders rising against the oncoming tide of embarrassment. I knew the rail trestle over my head would echo madly and make the whole thing worse, so instead, this is what came out of my mouth:

"What do we want? PEACE!
When do we want it? NOW!" 

He looked at me like I was insane, but he was laughing, so it was a good thing. 

This evening's nightly leap into the World Wide Rabbit Hole transported me onto the official site for actress/singer E. G. Daily. And just like that, my first serious adolescent celebrity crush came a-rollin' back. 

I'm pretty sure Valley Girl is the movie that got that ball rolling. Here's a nice collection of snippets from the movie - but really, if you haven't seen it, you should check it out. It's smart, funny, raunchy, and about six times better than it probably should have been. E. G., also known as Elizabeth, is the one with the biggest hair - no small feat for a teen cast in '83.

I mean - come ON. That's just not fair. I was doomed. Before I saw her, I was unaware that I had a "type" - I just liked pretty things. (I realize this post is making me dreadfully shallow. Sorry. I was 12.) But suddenly I knew exactly how I liked 'em: short. Curvy. Un-thin. Big eyes. Irrepressible smile. Slight husk in the voice.  Cute, rather than "pretty." In the pantheon of purely superficial methods for judging the physical aspects of our fellow humans, turns out these are a few of my favorite things. And Ms. Daily had 'em all. 

It didn't hurt, of course, that Valley Girl was rated R, and E. G. bared a good deal of her naughty bits on the screen. But so deep was my crush that I nearly turned away at those parts - it just seemed disrespectful to see my future prom date in such a state. (Nearly.) Besides, she was as wholesome as Donny Osmond baked in a vanilla pie in Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and she was totally my girlfriend in that movie, too. You remember her in that, right? She was Dottie, who had a serious unrequited crush on our titular hero, and what the actual shit, Pee-wee? How are you not saying "screw it, I'll get another bike," whisking her up in your arms (she's very pickupable, which is another plus), taking her to the park and smooching her on the jungle gym before sneaking into the skating rink without paying because Ms. Daily is all about having fun? How are you not holding hands with her during Ladyhawke as you try to position your knuckles on her mini-skirted leg, because it's just "more comfortable that way?" How are you not asking her to slow-dance to Bob Seger's "We Got Tonight" even though you know you'll be spending the next four minutes desperately trying to hide your erection? 

Since then, E. G.'s had her share of "work" done, which is her prerogative, of course, but still a minor disappointment. But I'm delighted to learn that even though the last movie I saw her in was The Devil's Rejects (2005), she's as active as ever, appearing in a bunch of movies and shows and doing a slew of voice-over work, arguably her bread n' butter. She's even got a nice singing career going; her slightly weather-beaten voice is a fine instrument for the pleasant country-pop she favors. And she still has that way of looking right into the lens as if to say "Matt, I've got all these tiresome boys after me and all these actressy things I gotta do, but what do you say we find some bleachers and see if we can get to second base, which is perfect because I'm honestly not quite sure what you're supposed to do on the following bases."

That's what that look is saying to you guys too, right? Um...right?

- . - . - . - . -

This has been the first installment of Matt's Childhood Crushes. Tune in next time as we discuss Diane Franklin, with a special focus on what happened when Matt discovered an odd but vital film entitled Second Time Lucky. Ta.

Just played our second show at Philly's Primary Stages tonight (it's a two-night event), and maaaan, what a difference a day makes.  Last night I sounded like ass thanks to the incoming plague, but last night before bed I ate 87263786 libbz of vitamins and herbs and rocks and branches and waved a dead chicken over my altar... and after sleeping all day today, it appears I have dodged the bullet of full-blown plague and have acquired only half-a-plague, glory glory hallelujah. 

So yeah, tonight went really well. The playwrights, actors, and directors did a bang up job.  We've been the house band for about 3 years now, it's neat watching certain directors, actors, and playwrights improve over time. We definitely have our favorite playwrights and actors, and we get extra-excited when our favorites pair up because we know it'll be a great piece.  They got a good crowd on both nights, but tonight's crowd was a bit bigger and a lot louder. To save time at intermission we'll sometimes play unplugged, and tonight we did, which was a mistake in that people didn't really hear our intermission stuff over their talking, but it was also fine because we're smart enough to know that the night (especially our short intermission set) isn't about us anyway; it's the playwrights', actors', and directors' night... we're just decoration. :-)  You can save yourself a lot of frustration in life if you can step back and know your place in the world from situation to situation. It's not always about you, and that's OK.  Healthy, even.

With that, it was a pretty full house tonight, and many people were seeing us for the first time. I gotta admit, it feels reaaallly good when an audience sees us and thinks, "Yawn, mid-40s-ish acoustic duo" when we first take the stage, and they're screaming "HOT BREAKFAST!!" by the end of a 25 minute set of mostly originals. Definitely made up for my sickly pipes of last night. My voice still wasn't 100% tonight, but I could compensate for the weak spots for the most part. I felt good about it.

(Interruption: Why are my motion detector lights going on outside every 2 seconds? (Another interruption: My tablet autocorrected "motion detector" to "moron detector" which makes me very happy. That would come in handy.) )

In other news, the other night we couldn't fall asleep because we were giggling like 5th graders at a sleepover because of this thing we "invented" called the "fart tube."  I'll explain it in a future post, because it's slightly more than just a tube for farts, I'll have you know. As you can imagine, it is so ridiculously juvenile and completely idiotic... yet we wanna involve our friends in a video project surrounding the Fart Tube, similar to Kevin Regan's "punch people in the face" photo series. (That is a Kevin Regan thing, right? I never knew.) 

Like I said, I'll explain the fart tube in a future post. You'll just have to wait.

HOW'S THAT FOR A CLIFFHANGER??

(ps: I have never used the full-blown OPW site; I've only ever used the mobile site. Gee, this is really quite lovely! Swell joerb, Sean M Puckett  and Thomas Boutell! So purty! I can tag people! And rich text!  HOLY CRAP!)