Tag Archives: culture

Icy What You Did There

As I was herniating myself the other day while out shoveling my driveway for the 87th time this winter after a surprise un-forecasted overnight snow of seven inches, I stopped to try and remember what my lawn looked like and got to conTIMplating exactly why I live in Minnesota, being that it is so nonsensically cold here that Satan has his own line of credit at the local Burlington Coat Factory.

Why would anybody voluntarily reside where you have to watch heart-warming movies to keep your body temperature at a survivable level and the phrase ‘beating the heat’ has no meaning other than an NBA win over Miami?

Then there is the whole ‘Neighbor Challenge’ thing.  Notice our Christmas card from 2010: Continue reading →

This is it! The Diet Starts…Monday

Oh how I love New Year’s with all of its revelry in celebration of an arbitrary moment in the incessantly monotonous passage of time.  What better reason to party?  What I don’t love however, is that it is (once again) time to be pressured into taking stock of my stockiness, throw my considerable weight around in considering my considerable weight, and ask myself why I don’t look like the touched-up models and celebrities I see in photo-shopped magazines and professionally enhanced videos.  Is it because I am (ulp) normal?

Well, I’ve (once gain) had it with being normal!  I look and feel like an average human!  Ugh!  And so over the New Year I have (once again) resolved to immerse my typical averageness in the very American and very lucrative dieting and starvation industry so I can more closely resemble the media fantasies we all know and worship. Continue reading →

Am I Racist if I Dream of a White Christmas?

Evidently writing about racism is like working for the CIA:  just when I thought I was done and out, they pull me back in.  Race, racism, race baiting, race profiling, race walking, race horses, race for the cure, emb-race the suck—enough already!  It’s time that we as a culture dug deep, looked within, and somehow found the strength to stop being so stupid.

The latest manufactured media hullabaloo is about the race of Santa Claus.  That’s right, Santa Claus.  And it all started with Slate blogger Aisha Harris.

Who?

Exactly.

Aisha got everybody riled up by saying that Santa should be a penguin.

A what?

Exactly. Continue reading →

Am I Racist if I Stay Home on Black Friday?

Here we are in Nickname Week again: Thanksgiving Thursday followed by Black Friday followed by Small Business Saturday followed by Sleep It Off Sunday followed by Cyber Monday followed by TIMMY Tuesday et cetera, et cetera, advertisement nauseam.

Thursday is the actual holiday that is causing this moniker mayhem.  It is known as Thanksgiving, or as they say in Texas, THANKS-giving.  Of course, they say a lot of things in Texas you don’t really hear elsewhere, like PO-lice and GUN rack.  Be that as it may, I will try to arise from my turkey coma long enough to pass off as this week’s post a few reflective reflections to test your reflexes.

Thanksgiving was first declared a holiday by George Washington, but credit is usually given to Abraham Lincoln because he freed the slaves and wore a really cool hat.  Continue reading →

Most People Just Celebrate Halloween for the Boos

It won’t be long now and the neighbor kids will be running across my lawn and, under the approving eye of their loving parents, practice extortion.  They call it trick-or-treating, but everyone knows it’s just a huge shakedown.  Here I am a grown man and I have to shell out a Jujube so some little six-year old brat doesn’t unload the leftover tomatoes from his grandpa’s garden on my screen door?  What kind of sick tradition is this?  I don’t even know what a Jujube is.

It turns out that the tradition of Halloween is one of those Christian origin things that people prefer to ignore the origin of…like science, or equality, or torturing people to get them to recant—oh wait; everybody remembers that last one.  It’s true, though.  Halloween is a religious observance; something about remembering all the saints and martyrs who died of hypoglycemia.  But don’t tell the politically correct secular police or they might get all hissyfitted into a new pair of whinypants and we’d have to start calling it Holidayween and kids would no longer be allowed to ‘cross’ the street to trick-or-treat. Continue reading →