Weekend!
Yeah, it’s a day early, but it looks like the weekend might be getting here a day or two early as well. Better safe than sorry, right?
Well, we’re lucky enough to have family in town, so we will be visiting them tomorrow. We’re bringing the carrots, celery, Ritz Crackers (classy!), and cheese. I’ll probably also bring a bottle of wine, just in case. After that, we get to go home and celebrate The War On Christmas by sitting quietly in the dark. After that, we’re seriously grateful to be able to visit friends visiting from out of town by taking them out to dinner and, the highlight of the upcoming weekend, we’ll be spending Saturday evening with the family we forged together over the last decade and a half and recuperating from the previous week with them.
From us and ours, to you and yours, I hope that this weekend is spent with the folks you love the most surrounded by too much food, just enough drink, and a surprising lack of drama.
Happy Whatever.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Photo is “Merry Freakin’ Christmas” taken by Mr E?, used under a creative commons license.)
Ritz Crackers (classy!)
I dunno, I’m with the late Mitch Hedberg in thinking those Ritz folks just put out a damn fine product they should be proud of.
http://youtu.be/nXqExx13ma8Report
At work, I saw a comment in a source file that said:
We used to sort this list. We still do, but we used to too.
Bergheads are everywhere.Report
He’s like the genial slacker Jedi – when he was struck down, he only became more powerful.Report
Also, apropos of nothing, I was reading through the Savage Love comments over at AVClub this AM, and there are a LOT of lonely people out there in pain. Whoever decided that placing Christmas (with all its media-bombardment imagery of happy-together-familyness) right up next to New Year’s (which is the time you traditionally realize that another year has passed, and once again you have failed to stick to your goals and achieve all you believe you should’ve) was a good idea should be slapped soundly and repeatedly. These holidays shoulda been separated by six months – or better yet, they should be celebrated on alternating years.
If you know anybody who’s alone right now, please pick up the phone and give them a call. Make plans to get together with them, and keep those plans. Invite them to spend time with your family during the holidays. It’s not too late to add one more, you know there’s plenty of food.Report
My Jewish Christmas Day movie will be Mr. Turner. There might or might not be Chinese food. No plans for Saturday or Sunday yet.Report
The Interview is going to be shown at some Bay Area theaters on Christmas, so that’s a possibility.Report
Hey @mike-schilling and @saul-degraw, it looks like I am going to be in SF at the beginning of Feb. for a few days. Not sure how much free time I will have, but maybe we could do a dinner or happy hour or something.Report
That would be amazing.Report
I’m down. I want to see if you are runic or in Linear B.Report
…is that some kind of D & D thing?Report
@glyph
It is a pun on your name!!!!Report
Well done, saul. well played.Report
Food on Christmas was:
2 Double Cappuchinos
and
$20 of Chinese.
(and a bit of wine for dessert).Report
I’ve been binging Audrey Hepburn movies as I knit a sweater. Unusual in that this particular sweater is for me; though my needles are always busy, I seem to have none without excess wear.
Thus far, I’ve watched Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The latter has scenes of drunkenness that rather astonished me; not to mention a lack of moral turpitude on the part of both the main characters. Love, I suppose, is the great redemption being it’s theme.Report
I’ve seen Charade maybe 20 times on TV, but never all the way from the beginning.Report
I have Sabrina up next, and then Charades.
I’m now worried that it won’t be watchable.
And I forgot How to Steal a Million, the first (and Hepburn’s first, since it lists her as
‘introducing Audrey Hepburn). I liked it a lot; particularly the glimpses of modern art in the museum.Report
Charade is great: James Coburn, Cary Grant, Walter Matthau. And Hepburn looking as beautiful as is humanly achievable.Report
@zic
Your point was that they were not upstanding, though they were troubled and lost, and the words you chose were “a lack of moral turpitude”? That means they display a lack of “a very evil quality or way of behaving” according to Webster. It would have been hard for us to know what else you were saying about them other than that if you said exactly what you meant.Report
…Sorry, that one’s misthreaded obviously.Report
@zic, I think you mean a lack of morals from both main characters. Moral turpitude is a bad thing. Its why the law has category of crimes called Crimes involving Moral Turpitude.Report
I said exactly what I meant, @leeesq
She was carrying messages in and out of prison for a mafia boss and living off the generosity of various men and he was a kept man; a writer who’d published a book of short stories, but no longer wrote.
Neither of them were good, upstanding people; they were troubled and lost, though good-hearted, confused about right and wrong; though their livelihoods did recall today’s gig economy to some degree.Report
…I guess the question is, is there a reason @zic was expecting more moral turpitude on the part of Miss Golightly and Mr. Varjak? Possibly the characters are portrayed as less morally flawed than Capote did?Report
Not gonna lie, I really like Roman Holiday. Watched it again recently with R., along with The Fugitive Kind.Report
Hey, Zic. Breakfast is the movie that I use to demonstrate some of the ineffable qualities of “humor”. Stuff that is laugh-out-loud funny in this time period is seen as downright offensive in others… or worse, missed completely.Report
Some of all great humor is about insight. But, 30 years later, sometimes we can forget it was insightful at the time. Carlin did a good bit of humor that was really just observational.Report
My aunt is hosting a “Christmas luncheon” this weekend, at the end of which my parents will be visiting.
Due to Clancy’s hectic work schedule, we won’t be doing much for Christmas here at the Himmelreich-Truman house. But preparing for a visit from my parents is harder work than cooking Christmas dinner would be. Especially as I am doing it with little assistance and a little girl attached to me.
To add to that I dismantled the crib yesterday and finally put our bed up off the floor (it had remained there due to a lack of bed rails, which I also installed.
A lot of this is stuff we’ve been needing to do anyway. Having a deadline isn’t such a bad thing, because it spurs me to action.
I basically have three days to work (including today), and three floors to get into decent condition.Report
I’m staying with my parents for Christmas.Report
Good luck.Report
@jaybird
We get on pretty well.Report
Uncle Story: When we brought over the cheese tray, I gave the nephews a short speech about the thought processes that went into why we didn’t buy cheese that required cutting. “We didn’t want to cut the cheese at our house but then thought about whether we’d want to cut the cheese at your mom’s. We thought about having your mom cut the cheese but since she was cooking, she might not have time to cut the cheese.”
And so on.
It was well-received.Report
I’m assuming that afterwards everyone gathered round for the traditional Pulling of the Finger.Report
Is that a Midwest expression? I’ve never heard anyone say it in real life.Report
You’ve never heard “cut the cheese?”Report
Only on TV and in movies. I will quiz my kids and report back.Report
It should be pointed out that “cut the cheese” is a term used primarily among the pre-adolescent. Once one hits puberty, one probably switches to more Anglo-Saxon terms before settling into the more Latinate.Report
Maybe Kazzy could weigh in? He’s probably as close to an insider as we have.Report
“Break wind” is another one, though I think I’ve only seen that in books.Report
And Spinal Tap.
http://youtu.be/P7V406XfAaI
I think all the cool kids are “floatin’ air biscuits” now, daddy-o.Report
Both kids knew “cut the cheese”. I’m such an L7. I should make like the wind and blow.Report
Fun fact about Tap’s Break Like The Wind album: people who are old enough to remember when CDs were supplanting LPs will recall that they were initially being sold in “longboxes”, totally wasteful 12-inch cardboard boxes that allowed CDs to be placed in the standard LP bins and afforded more space for the album art (AKA marketing/logo/branding space).
Spinal Tap, always on the lookout for technology that goes up to the next level, brought a new innovation to the marketplace with this CD: the Extra Long Box (18 inches).Report
We are heading off for a quick visit with my wife’s family in Ohio today. We’ll be back tomorrow evening and we have eight glorious days of vacation stretching before us. This is traditionally the week when we try to finish up lingering projects, start planning next year’s projects, put away the Christmas decorations, etc. It’s also when I try to squeeze in as much hunting as possible. Looking forward to all of it.
Oh…UL vs UK tomorrow. Hoping my Cards can pull off an upset and prevent the blue monster from getting an undefeated season.Report
The Doctor Who Christmas special was good. It managed to walk that uniquely Dr Whoish fine line of being emotional, funny, scary, have good character moments, a double helping of insanity without being to nonsensical or hand wavy.Report
I don’t generally care for Christmas Specials, but Moffat seems to know how to do “wintry wonder” without making it too “Christmas” for me.
Also, if you haven’t watched the It’s always sunny in philadelphia “Christmas Special”… you should.Report
@kazzy
Are you going to the Bronx tomorrow?Report
@scarletnumbers
Just saw this… sorry. I did indeed go to the game today. Ugh. Not only was it just an awful game, but holy crud what an awful way to lose.
We really need to shrink the number of bowls by several orders of magnitude.Report