Category: Uncategorized

This Tuesday’s Carnival of the Canucks will be hosted at Jim “BlogsCanada” Elve’s blog, Officially Unofficial. If you have any suggestions for what should go in, be sure to drop him a line!

For more details about what the Carnival, see this entry.

It reads like something straight out of John Hughes’ teen coming-of-age movies from the 80s: unpopular geek gets voted valedictorian as a joke and uses the opportunity to chastise his class.

From one high school nerd to another: Nicely done!

Found via this MetaFilter post: In Defense of Scrooge, in which poor Ebenezer is viewed in a sympathetic, almost heroic, light: facing off againts freeloaders, advocate of population control, and victim of a home invasion — nay, terrorists! — from the spirit world. Funny stuff, and Canadian Content to boot!

My favourite part of the article is are this little aside about the difference between right and left:

During the night, our Mr Scrooge is taken hostage by three kitchen-poster terrorists (admittedly dead terrorists, but cutbacks are upon us and we all must make do, &tc). Two of them look suspiciously well-fed. Perennially Indignant Cappuccino Crusaders have been, it seems, always with us, which leads me to paraphrase a conversation between P.J O’Rourke and another journalist:

“How come whenever something upsets the Left you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas when something upsets the Right you see three letters in the National Post?

“We have jobs.”

“It’s funny,” as the mobsters on The Simpsons would say, “because it’s true.”

Equally amusing is this bit from the comments, in which a blog entry of a WTO protester is quoted. It mirrors the complaints that some of the liberal arts students at Crazy Go Nuts University, who saw themselves as progressives (especially those at the main paper, the Queen’s Journal had with the engineers, whom they saw as dangerous conservatives making serious inroads with student government, organizations and conferences:

that is a problem with the left, that while we have meeting after meeting to decide what we are going to meet about, the right wakes up, decides to screw over a bunch of poor people, does it, then goes to sizzler.

Family tradition is for us to have a Christmas gathering for the extended family a couple of days after Christmas, and this year is no exception. It’ll be all aunts, uncles, cousins and close family friends at my parents’ place tonight, gathered for dinner, followed by a gift exchange and then…the jam-and-karaoke session. Mom and cousin Anna will take turns on the piano, uncle Jorge will break out his acoustic guitar and amp, cousin Kara will bring her flute, brother-in-law Richard and sister Eileen will try the new Yamaha keyboard I got them for Christmas and I’ll be playing you-know-what. That will probably be followed by karaoke. True to Asian stereotype, Mom has not one, but two karaoke devices, both capable of displaying lyrics on a video monitor.

(Also true to Asian strereotype, I have a karaoke machine in my house; I inherited mom’s old karaoke box. It’s so old that it takes eight-track cassettes.)

Of course, the point of this posting is to announce that tonight’s main course is one of my favoutire dishes, lengua. That’s beef tongue in mushroom sauce. Mmm…tongue…

This is from last year (with a little polishing up), but it’s worth repeating.

While I do believe that some traditions should be put to rest, I also believe that a lot of tradition-bashers are poor-impulse-control cases. Having abandones any actual tradition or culture of their own, they fill the void with a couple of Utne Reader platitudes, a mild revulsion for anything even vaguely Judeo-Christian, even if it aligns with their beliefs, a pro-pot slant and a half-formed belief in eye-for-eye karmic payback.

Standing for almost nothing, they tend to fall for just about anything.

Chris Baldwin’s summed it up pretty handily — and perhaps unintentionally — in a Bruno comic from last year:

To borrow the line about Klansmen and Martin Luther King Day: C’mon, Bruno, how hardcore a secularist must you be to not want a day off?

Of course, those of us who celebrate Christmas would argue the exact opposite: here we took a beautiful Christian holdiay and destroyed it through corportization and “We’re white, we’re straight, we’re sorry!” guilt.

(There’s a Randroid who would take another tack and say “here we took a beautiful commerical holiday and destroyed it in usual religious fashion.” Haven’t we developed some kind of Ayn Rand repellent yet?)

In the end, I believe that intent counts.

I’m certain there is no malice, no implicit “convert or die” message and no forcing of one’s beliefs on others when someone wishes someone else a Happy Chanukah, Eid, Diwali, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Tet or even Festivus, the actions of certain vicious zealots notwithstanding. Balanced minds do not see any implied Hitler overtones at Oktoberfest nor Hirohito/Tojo insinuations at the sushi house, and neither do they see the Crusades in Christmas.

When people say “Merry Christmas”, most of them are really saying “Happy Holidays, and I’m celebrating them Christmas-style. You do your thing, and I’ll do mine. Come by for drinks.”

That what I’m really saying, anyways.

No matter what you believe, enjoy the break from the hustle and bustle of 21st century life. Be nice to each other. Hug someone you love.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Racism/Sexism/Homophobia is a nasty three-headed rottweiler that’s been beaten with a rubber hose and hasn’t been fed for days, which is why one always gets bitten when approaching it. This is why more critical accounts of the origins of Kwanzaa are hard to come by: there doesn’t seem to be a way to publish one without being accused of hanging with the pillowcases-as-hats crowd.

In this post, I wrote:

My own feeling is that although Kwanzaa’s roots are pretty dubious, but I’m still looking for a non-drooling-right source to corroborate the evidence gathered against it.

Kathy “Relapsed Catholic” Shaidle, who wrote a controversial Kwanzaa poem, came through for me, providing me with two articles that don’t come from what I refer to as the “drooling right”.

(I find FrontPage too “drooling right”, just as I find IndyMedia too “loopy left”. My own political leanings are along the lines of Eric S. Raymond, who wrote: “Liberals, by and large, are fools” and “Conservatives, by and large, are villains”.)

The first is The Truth About Kwanzaa, written by an African-American woman.

If the Christian focus of the previous link bothers you — although I’ll bet that a Buddhist one wouldn’t — there’s a Telegraph editorial that expresses some doubt about its authenticity, along with some remarking on how you can’t say “Merry Christmas” anymore.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I do it again: here’s Tony Pierce (who’s a black hipster from L.A.) on Kwanzaa. I also found this Dartmouth Review piece.

Thanks, Kathy, for the links!

If you want to discuss Kwanzaa further, feel free to make a comment. I’ll be on and off the computer all this week.

In this post, I reported — in reference to the YULBloggers — that YUL is the airport code for Montreal’s Mirabel airport. Aaron informs me that YUL is actually the code for Pierre Elliott Trudeau (formerly Dorval) airport, and YMX is the code for Mirabel.

As you may have guessed, I never fly to Montreal — I either drive or take the train.

I managed to forget to add one link, so here it is. Striding Cloud makes the same observation that I did while watching The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King: the “Riders of Rohan vs. the Elephants” battle scene feels like an homage (or, if you’re more cynical, a rip-off) of the “Snowspeeders vs. the Imperial Walkers” battle scene from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. I was half-expecting Eowyn to yell out “Use your tow cables and go for their legs!” The Legolas bits in that battle were pure Luke Skywalker — so much that George Lucas should be in tears, exclaiming “Finally someone steals an idea from me!“.

However, I couldn’t figure out the sense of deja vu that I got when he slid down the elephant’s trunk in his classic “Sk8r Elf” style until I read Striding Cloud’s post: it’s the same thing Fred Flintstone does in the title sequence for The Flintstones! If only Legolas screamed “Yabba-Dabba-Doo!” while doing it…

In this post, I made a reference to “Boston’s Deepest Blogger”. The problem is, I originally didn’t link to the right blog. The error has been corrected, but let me state for the record that Jay “Makeoutcity” McCarthy is Boston’s Deepest Blogger.

The title of Boston’s Cutest Blogger goes to The Redhead, of course.

Once again, my thanks to David “Ranting and Roaring” Janes for organizing the Carnival, and to all the Canadian bloggers for providing me with such rich linking material.

It would appear that the Carnival has a logo:

David’s also provided a schedule for the next few Carnivals:

• Next Tuesday, December 30th: Jim Elve of BlogsCanada, the definitive listing of Canadian blogs, takes the reins.
• Richard at Just a Gwai Lo mans the Epiphany shift on Tuesday, January 6th.
• Michael at Discount Blogger’s run is on Tuesday, January 13th.

Send them links!