I will admit that as this new year begins, my nerves are more frazzled than Gary Busey trying to program a VCR. The reason for my significant apprehensive trepidation is that I’m pretty sure I’m about to lose my job, which will significantly reduce the opportunities I have to drink free coffee and/or surf the net. This deduction stems from a couple of recent hard-hitting news stories that lead me to believe I have enough strikes against me to be mistaken for a public school system. Continue reading
Mission Opossum-able
As the year-end approaches, the internally redundant question that is often asked and repeated by the likes of Johnny Mathis, Harry Connick, and Rod Stewart is: “What are you doing New Year’s…New Year’s Eve?” A popular New Year’s activity is to watch people drop things. This is usually done while consuming copious amounts of alcohol and so the most commonly dropped item is one’s inhibitions, but there are any number of more tangible items to watch being dropped all around the world.
Perhaps the best-known dropped item is New York’s Times Square ball. This is a tradition that started over 100 years ago and has more recently come to symbolize how many times Mayor Michael “Compared To Me Scrooge McDuck Is A Pauper” Bloomberg has himself dropped the ball during his administration. Continue reading
From All of Me Here at conTIMplating.com…
During this season of frosty snowmen, resting gentlemen and geese getting fat, may the ring-ting-tingling of silver bells deck your halls with such ding-donging merrily on high that good king Wenceslas comes a-wassailing and may your lovely branches be just like the ones you used to know. And while you’re rockin’ around the Christmas tree with Parson Brown and your mommy’s kissing Santa Claus amidst delightful fires, may you remember that silent, holy night in the little town of Bethlehem that brought joy to the world. In other words… Continue reading
My Shopping’s Done. You?
Pardon me while I wax nostalgic such that it’s all shiny and the water on it bubbles up to where you could use it to wrap fragile mailings, but Christmas just isn’t what it used to be. It probably has something to do with my considerable and snowballing oldness and its accompanying cantankerous irritability. Get off my lawn, by the way.
When you’re a kid every Christmas is like, well…Christmas. It was an enchanted time of sugarplums and fairies and sugarplum fairies and more sugar but not quite so many fairies. They were days of innocence in which an infant could travel to grandma’s in the back window of an LTD and if you sat too close to the fire in your PJ’s they would melt right onto your skin. It was back when it was perfectly safe to drape a month-old, dried-out evergreen tree in the same red-hot incandescent light bulbs we used in toy ovens to bake tasty treats. Continue reading
Uninformed Because of Holiday Distractions? This May Help…
Here we are in mid-December—the time of year when, amidst our holiday bustle, we begin to pause and somberly reflect on why this is the only time of the year anybody ever uses the word ‘bustle.’ It is also the time of year when we don’t really pay much attention to what is going on in the world in terms of history-making and/or altering news stories because we here in the West are so reverently focused on the birth of the Christ child and all the frantic patriotic consumerism it affords.
Combine that with 93% of all US network coverage being about either Lindsay Lohan or a make-believe crisis wherein Democrats and Republicans are making an hubristic grab for money and power by pretending to be Thelma and Louise, and it creates The Perfect Storm of Notorious movie-title metaphors. Continue reading
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