The Novelty Wears Off

Weekend Assignment #142: Your Christmas/Holiday gift is the ability to expunge one highly annoying yet popular Christmas/Holiday song from the history of the world. Which one is it?

Didn't we do this last year, or maybe the year before?

Oh, well, it doesn't matter. The song that occurred to me immediately is the same one that a lot of people probably thought of: Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer by Elmo & Patsy. Oh, it's kind of cute the first time, and really rather catchy. But it's been heavily overplayed ever since it came out over 20 years ago, back when I was still selling records for a living. Moreover, it's awfully cynical in its portrayal of Santa, and I don't respond well to that. No, that's enough. Let's give the song a long rest now - forever would be good.

But that's just one of many novelty Christmas songs that treat the holiday trivially or satirically at best, scandalously at worst. About six years ago, John tracked down a bunch of them to listen to, and I made my way through as many of them as I could stand. Most of them were awful: mean-spirited, cynical, rude and crude, hopelessly dated or just plain boring. I remember there was one with Albert Brooks and his kid that I especially disliked.

I went looking tonight for the CD I thought I had with some of this stuff on it, trying to refresh my memory of what could possibly by worse than Elmo & Patsy. I didn't actually find the worst of it, but between a later compilation, my memory of Christmas Past and a little digging online, I did find these less-than-stellar novelty songs, many of them hits in their particular time and place:

• Happy Hairy Hippy Harry Claus by Rocki Lake & The Gross Group
• I Was a Teenage Reindeer - Jim Backus and Daws Butler
• Santa and the Flying Saucer by Dickie Goodman
• Make a Daft Noise for Christmas by The Goodies
• I'm Walking Backwards for Christmas by The Goons
• Nite before a Hip Christmas by Frank Evans & Santa’s Helper
• A Terrorist Christmas by James & Kling
• Nuttin' For Christmas by Stan Freberg
• I'm A Christmas Tree by Wild Man Fischer (Duet with Dr. Demento)
• I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus by Kip Addotta
• Yellow Snow! Yellow Snow! Yellow Snow! - I don't know who does this, or want to
• Yulesville by Edd "Kookie" Byrnes
• Santa & the Purple People Eater by Sheb Wooley
• Santa Claus Is Surfin’ to Town by Soupy Sales

I didn't listen to A Terrorist Christmas or the Yellow Snow one; the titles alone are enough to put me off. Call me a lapsed Anglophile or worse, but I can't get behind Spike Milligan or the Goodies doing pointlessly, boringly, incomprehensibly "daft" things for two-minutes-thirty. The hipster jive Christmas entries were practically their own subgenre at one time, but now they're quaint and embarrassing. The best of them is probably I Was a Teenage Reindeer, simply because it's fun to listen to Backus using his Mr. Magoo voice as Santa and Daws Butler (Huckleberry Hound et al.) as the reindeer. I've heard Wild Man Fischer before, and as I recall he's distinctly unmusical and annoying. Stan Freberg deserves a lot of credit for his Looney Tunes work and old time radio rebroadcasting and clever 1960s commercials; but his version of Nuttin' for Christmas is especially twisted, and not in a good way.

But the worst of this particular batch of novelty songs is probably Kip Addotta's I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus. I've always hated even the regular version of that song. It's perverse in ways that most people don't seem to recognize. If the kid narrator really thinks that's Santa, then he or she should be upset rather than amused. After all, the kid's mom is apparently cheating on her husband with an immortal saint! How is that "a laugh"? Kip Addotta milks the perversity further by making it an apparently gay relationship, taking it way beyond a kiss with the kid watching, and ultimately revealing that "Santa" is Mommy after all. Sorry, but that doesn't make it all right.. Even if the kid ultimately understands that Daddy isn't being an adulterer, he shouldn't be watching his parents get it on, all for the sake of some prurient chuckles.

Yeah. I think we have our winner. That song really doesn't need to exist. I'm not in favor of censorship, but I'd just as soon never hear that again.

I should point out that I'm not against all novelty songs, or Christmas novelty songs. I actually like The Twelve Pains of Christmas and the Bob & Doug MacKenzie 12 Days of Christmas, and even I Yost Go Nuts at Christmas if I don't have to hear it more than once a year or so. Pretty much any novelty song gets annoying if overplayed, but some of them are cute and fun in small doses.

Extra Credit: Fruitcake: Ever actually eat any?

Yes, of course! I try to get some every year. I've never understood why it's almost culturally mandatory to make fun of fruitcake and assume that it's inedible. Hey, it's fruit, in cake! Okay, it's really candied fruit in an especially dense "pudding" or quickbread, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

There are, however, two potential problems to avoid in choosing a fruitcake. One, you need to find one that's nice and moist. Dry, hard fruitcake is indeed pretty close to inedible. But there are lots of fruitcakes on the market that aren't dry at all. The other issue, if you're like me and have a hangup about alcohol, is that most fruitcakes are made with rum or brandy or both or something. Supposedly it gets burned off, but I don't like the taste of the stuff in any case. Walgreen's usually has a cheap, moist, alcohol-free fruitcake in a round brass container. Works for me! And afterward I have this:

Jewelery and crystals not included.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Novelty Songs, Christmas, Scalzi, Weekend Assignment

Truth Shall Be Thy Light

As of December 3rd, the Wikipedia article about Fayetteville-Manlius High School had four large banners across the top, proclaiming its inadequacy. Two of these notices were worded as follows:

Some information in this article or section has not been verified and may not be reliable. Please check for any inaccuracies, and modify and cite sources as needed.

and

This article or section needs copy editing for proper spelling, grammar, usage, tone, style, and voice.

At that point, I had written about half of the article myself. Although (as you know, Batman) I am typo-prone, I'm pretty sure it contained no misspellings, or errors in grammar or usage. As for the reliability of information, all but two of the facts in the article came from the school district's web site and related pages for the district's foundation and alumni. These sites (albeit not every relevant page therein) were also cited in the article. But they weren't "inline citations" - that is, they weren't numbered footnotes. They were either links next to the relevant text or listed in the reference section at the bottom. Because there wasn't a tiny number sitting at the end of every fact, somebody, who wasn't even logged in as a registered Wikipedia editor, decided there were no citations to support those statements. Au contraire!

I would have thought the banners were a sort of vandal edit, were it not for the fact that the person who added them also looked up who the first Hall of Distrinction alumni were and added the info. Besides, the ISP was listed as being in Kansas or someplace like that. If someone were to deliberately mess up the F-M H.S. article, one would expect that person to be from Central New York. After all, who else would even care?

So I ranted for a bit, in a couple different places. Then tonight I removed three of the four deprecating banners, and added nine inline citations to six source pages. Now I can stop being aggravated about it, until next time.

Right: my high school yearbook. It's evidence, but not a "reliable source", probably, that the yearbook name is Oakleaves and the school colors are green and white.

Ironically, the two facts that I didn't manage to source were someone's claim that F-M students tend to be financially well-off white kids (true in my day, but definitely not the image the school district is trying to project in 2006) and the source of the melody for the school song. It's sung to the tune of Aura Lee. The first verse and chorus are as follows:

Guarded by the old oak tree
Symbol of our goal.
Steadfast as our pride in thee
Its strength will write our scroll.

Fayetteville-Manlius
Truth shall be thy light.
Pledge we now our loyalty
To colors Green and White!

If you don't know what Aura Lee sounds like, you'll probably know it better as the melody of the Elvis song Love Me Tender.

Anyway, I say that's ironic because of that "truth" reference. I had to write the scroll myself, thank-you-very-much, and the truth apparently didn't shine brightly enough on the first pass. So here I am, helping it along, showing my loyalty to colors green and white, and that terrible, stupid school song I've hated and made fun of for over thirty years.

Technorati Tags: Wikipedia, Manlius, Personal

Christmas Starts a Little Early

As unorganized and mostly clueless as I've been so far in shopping and preparing for Christmas, I've nevertheless been on the receiving end of several nice gestures this week. On Monday, I received a box of Godiva chocolates from two people from another department, for whom I do a couple of journal entries a day (the accounting kind, not the blogging kind). A few minutes after that, the guy from India who will be helping me get caught up on a backlog at work gave me another present to unwrap: a Parker pen. Several people in Accounting got these, which he brought from India with him. Neither of these are Christmas presents per se, but they certainly help to get me in the Christmas mood!


Meanwhile, I enjoyed a bit of banter with someone who sends me certan reports a couple of times a month. They represent a lot of work on her part, a bit less on mine, although at one time I used to spend days on them. Yesterday she sent along the latest ones, with the note, "Let's all enjoy the last few ****** reports of the year." I replied that they filled me with holiday cheer.

She said, "I thought that was the egg nog."

I told her I didn't drink egg nog, but that I'd take some hot cider if she had any.

So today I was helping the guy from India sort through some of my paperwork. When I returned to my desk, there was a packet of artificial cider mix on my chair!

I called downstairs to thank her.

"I knew you'd figure it out," she said.

Okay. here's the snowman story.

In 1996, my parents got divorced, and my mom packed up to move to Florida. One day I came across her in the dining room in our house in Manlius, burning the snowman candle I showed you in last night's entry. I got upset. This snowman had been in our Christmas decorations as far back as I could remember.

Mom explained that she was burning the candle as a symbolic goodbye to winter. She was, in effect, using heat to destroy winter, and melt the Syracuse snow forever. But to me, she was burning my childhood. We fought about it, and she reluctantly put out the flame after a quarter inch of the snowman's hat had melted. I confiscated the snowman, and I've had it ever since.

It's not in great condition; the wax surface is encrusted with dust and hair and paper, and transferred backwards lettering from old newsprint. It's discolored in a few spots from other candles stored with it, and there are places where I've smooshed it back together after it got soft in the Arizona heat. But he's still my old faithful snowman, clutching his short black broom and smiling cheerily at me.

And ironically, the snowman still reminds me of my mom, and not in a bad way. As upset as we both were at the time, that incident still says a lot to me about both my mom and myself at that moment in our lives. My mom was trying to purge parts of her past, destroy her inner Syracuse and start fresh in a new place that was warm and, she hoped, welcoming. I was bruised and saddened and threatened by all the anger and blame, and trying to hold on to whatever good I could salvage from my own fading childhood. Yet despite our bitter disagreement over the candle, we were both doing much the same thing. We each invested this little wax artifact with meaning beyond that of any old candle, and tried to use it to shore up our damaged spirits. Although I hurt Mom's feelings that day, I'm still glad I rescued the old snowman, because it means I still have him to remember her by.

Karen



Technorati Tags: Gifts, Christmas, Personal

Top Shelf Decorations

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Show off your winter home decorations. If you've put up something seasonal (or have shots of decorations from seasons gone by) let's see what they look like. These can include lights and lawn decorations. However, don't post pictures of Christmas trees or menorahs. We'll save those for another Photo Shoot, probably next week.

Okay, but it won't be very impressive:

I think there are more boxes of Christmas stuff in the storage room or maybe in the labyrinth of boxes in the front room. But here's what I can find easily, on top of the utility shelves in the laundry room. I thought about trying to pull out just one decoration, but I can't reach into these without climbing on a chair. So we'll just have to wait, won't we?

This is sitting out, though. John bought it a week or two ago. I'm sure we already have one of these. He's sure we don't. We'll see!


This one is clearly mostly wrapping paper. Another one is definitely lights. The one in between, well, it's labeled "gift wrap and stockings and towels, oh my!" It might have two of the three.

And here's my favorite winter decoration of all. I keep it on display in my office year round. There's a story behind it, but I'm not telling it tonight. Sorry.


****

Yes, I know I didn't get last night's entry updated, although I lay awake at 4 AM writing some of it in my head. But it's not my fault this time. Well, it really is, but not for the reason you think. See, the computer was sluggish tonight as I tried to work with it in between trips to the kitchen to check on the sausage, and during NBC commercial breaks during two of the three shows I watch on broadcast network tv (via cable, of course; the other one is House M.D.). When I downloaded what was on the camera (Sunday and Monday's photos), the computer told me I was critically short on hard drive space, and offered to fix the problem. I said yes, laboriously forced the computer to shut down iTunes and AOL and Firefox, and waited about three hours while the computer compressed some files and deleted others. Then it dumped me into Add/Remove Programs. I removed a few of them, including a couple old versions of iPod softward. Mistake, that. I think I've rendered the curent version inoperable and unfixable. Drat. So not it's late-late-late yet again, and no more time for telling stories. But tomorrow...yes. Tomorrow!

Tomorrow: Ooh! Prezzies!

Karen

Technorati Tags: Monday Photo Shoot, Scalzi, Decorations, Christmas

Placeholder

Hill Valley Courthouse, 2015 version, as seen
on the Universal Studios tour at one time or another

After a late afternoon-early evening nap I'm up too late again, having spent several hours nailing down citations for the Hill Valley article. If you look at it, and I recommend that you do if you like the movie at all, the stuff that's mine is mostly everything that mentions the real world, and everything with a citation. I probably have profound things to say about all this, but not tonight!
Catch you all Monday evening, at which time I hope to fix up this entry a bit before moving on to the Monday Photo Shoot.



By the way, I've been meaning to tell you: those rainbow pictures were indeed John's doing.

Karen


Technorati Tags: Photos, Wikipedia, Tucson

Too Cool to Be Cool (or maybe just too old)

Just in case there's a scrap of my life that isn't already already double-booked, a Wiki-friend introduced me to IRC tonight, specifically a Wikipedia chat room. After leaving the darn thing on for about five hours, I have to say I fail to see its appeal.

Apparently one of the rules of the Wikipedia IRC is that you can't log the Wikipedia IRC, so I can't show you what I saw and what was said. I wasn't watching the screen all that time, but once in a while I'd pop in to see if anything interesting was happening. Well, no. I suppose a little bit of it was interesting,but it wasn't appealing. Not to me, anyway. There was some arcane discussion of biology, concurrent with a discussion of the linguistic awesomeness of French, broken up with vampire references as a way of demonstrating the difference between second person indefinite (You suck his blood) and third person indefinite (One sucks his blood), and a discussion of the brand name Kool Aid having public image issues.

That was the highlight of the evening. Other than that, it consisted of one person helping me learn to set the IRC widget up properly, people asking questions about Wikipedia and being ignored, people trying to start other conversations and being ignored, trolls saying rude things and getting booted for it, and, at the end, teenboys typing about sex and pornography.

And I want to waste my time on this why? If this is what the cool kids are doing, then I'm through being cool. In fact, I'm neither cool not a kid. Or else maybe I'm too cool for the [chat] room.

It has me thinking, though. Despite having been online in one form or another since 1991, I occasionally realize that there are large areas of the Internet experience I've never tried, or else haven't done in years. I've never downloaded music or video from a newsgroup or a file sharing site, never looked at or into de.li.ci.ous or however it's spelled and punctuated, and never done online gaming. Is that so terrible? Does this make me a technophobe?

'Cause I tell you, over and over I see that new technology is only as good as the uses to which it's put. I don't care about the technical ins and outs of digital music, but give me a new way to listen to the Beatles and hear every note and instrument, and I'll applaud it. New televisions sets are high-def, but what does it matter if they're showing Deal or No Deal or other junk shows? Spelling "the" as "teh" and "cool" as "kewl" is interesting looking, but for me it gets in the way of communication. It's basically kid code, and semi-literate at that. I suppose there are well-educated geeks that like and use L33t and textspeak, but I see it as another way for teenagers to conform with each other, and avoid learning how to put the English language through its paces.

And if I'm going to sit in a windowed, virtual room online, and watch three people spar with trolls and ignore everyone else who tries to say anything, it had better be for something a darn sight more compelling than some kid's claim that his younger brother is using his new laptop to download porn.

Karen


More annoying typos corrected Sunday at 2 PM.

Technorati Tags: IRC, Language, Internet

Another WikiRant - Illustrated

I've been obsessing about a couple of my favorite films recently. Right around Thanksgiving I was mostly immersed in A Christmas Story, that wonderful Jean Shepherd film about Ralphie Parker's quest for a Red Ryder BB gun. But just at the moment I'm busy listening to interviews with writer-director Bob Zemeckis, screenwriter Bob Gale, and actor Michael J. Fox about one of my top three favorite movies of all time, Back to the Future. I've been doing this to nail down citations for a trio of Wikipedia articles.


Citations? Trio? Wikipedia? You're probably far from shocked that this has something to do with my Wikipedia obsession, but what's all this about citations and multiple articles? Well, I'll tell you. See, there's a constant struggle on Wikipedia between editors who want to put cool stuff in, especially about their favorite movies and tv shows (these people are called "inclusionists") and people who want to delete what they consider "fan cruft," or any statement that doesn't have a scholarly citation to support it (these people are called "deletionists"). Guess which of these I am. Right: inclusionist.
Still, the deletionists do have a point. There are people who love to paste in cool trivia they found elsewhere online, totally disregarding copyright issues, possible inaccuracy, or even the probability that the fun fact they're adding is already in the article. For example, people just have to mention (again) that Courthouse Square can also be seen in some other movie they like, or that Huey Lewis rejects Marty McFly's band as they play a Huey Lewis song. Yeah, yeah, guys. Read the article first, okay?


Deletionists, and Wikipedia policy, tackle the accretion problem and the one of inaccuracy by applying (and sometimes over-applying) a couple of policies. One policy tries to discourage people from having trivia sections at all, asking them instead to work anything that's important into the rest of the article, and to leave out that stuff that isn't important. Another forbids "original research" - in other words, you're not supposed to make new claims, draw new conclusions, or report on that experiment you conducted at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. Instead you're supposed to cite reliable sources: books, newspapers, magazine articles and so on, preferably something that's online and not fan-based or a blog. That way, if the info is wrong, at least it's not an error on Wikipedia's part, or a guessing game.

It gets taken too far, though. For some editors, any article that doesn't cite multiple sources other than the subject of the article should not be on Wikipedia at all. Every statement, or close to it, should be tied to a citation. But what if you're writing about a work of fiction, for which the main source is the work itself?

One of the Back to the Future‎ articles is one called Back to the Future timeline. It was nominated for deletion today, on the grounds that the article consists of

"Original research. It's essentially an essay that would make a cool blog post or whatever, but doesn't belong here. The separate timelines that form the basis of the article are entirely a supposition of the author."

The article lists what happens in each version of history, as shown in the three movies, and as explained somewhat by the filmmakers. There is little original "supposition," and no one author. But nobody bothered to put in citations, because it was stuff seen in the movies themselves. An article on Hill Valley is objected to on similar grounds. It seems ridiculous to demand that one must cite a magazine or a book for the fact that there's a Texaco station in Hill Valley, or that Marty returned to a different 1985 from the one he left.^[2], as Doc explained in BTTF Part 2. But that's where things seem to be heading. One guy groused today that soon he'll have to list a source for the statement that the thirteen colonies declared independence in 1776.



I'm happy to day, though, that this over-zealous approach does meet with resistance from people who feel that Wikipedia and its readers are best served by a little less rule-mongering and a little more common sense. Most people commenting on the "AfD" are saying that the timeline article is primarily sourced from the three movies themselves, and that besides, it's really cool. I'm personally in favor of citing some additional sources: interviews with Zemeckis and Gale, a FAQ they wrote, and even an old Starlog article on the subject. The article would benefit from that. And it might, just might, get some of the deletionists to look elsewhere for stuff to delete.

Karen

References

1. some other reference
   
2. ^ ^{a b c} Robert Zemickis and Bob Gale, Q&A, Back to the Future [DVD], recorded at the University of Southern California

Typos fixed Sunday at 2 PM MST.

Technorati Tags: Wikipedia, Back to the Future, Time Travel