Snowflakes don’t have to fall. Bells don’t have to chime. Trees don’t have to glitter and portly bearded chaps definitely don’t have to don red and white suits. Christmas is a simple frame of mind: a wamth that can be felt all year round; a glow of hope and wonder; a stirring fireside glow of peace and tranquility. And a quality whiskey.

If you want to believe in Christmas – if you truly want to believe – dismiss the kitsch and the materialism, the crass marketing and insincerity, the cynicism and the stress. If you want to believe in Christmas just stand still for a moment on a crowded shopping street and look around and watch as people collectively ignore their own inane, selfish lives, and begin to think of others.

The true Christmas is not a Coca Cola dream, it’s a warm cwch on a cold day. It’s family and friends. It’s recognising each other and wishing people well. The true Christmas is not an expensive gift, it’s a happy smile. The true Christmas is an emotion that can be felt all year round. Some people keep that spirit, others let it go. The songs, however, can always be with us.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas x

Glasvegas – A Snowflake Fell (And It Felt Like A Kiss)

Sufjan Stevens – Christmas in July

Charlie Brown & Linus – The Christmas Story

Christmas time is here and I couldn’t be happier!

Christmas time is here

Happiness and cheer

Fun for all that children call

Their favorite time of the year

I love Christmas and all the sights, smells and sounds associated with it, but particularly the sounds.  Christmas music moves me. So, for the next four Musical Mondays leading up to Christmas, I’ll be featuring some of my favorite Christmas songs.

When it comes to Christmas music during the holidays, my DH are worlds apart.  We have quite different tastes when it comes to our favorite music, especially Christmas music.

For Allan growing up a young lad in the UK, a new Christmas pop hit topped the charts every holiday season.  In fact, the movie, Love Actually, pokes fun at this UK Christmas tradition.

Sure the usual Christmas classics, such as Crosby, Sinatra and Martin are equally cherished on both sides of the pond, but there are some UK Christmas classics I had never heard before Allan introduced them to me.

Allan has a Christmas compilation CD of UK holiday hits from over the years and honestly the songs on this CD make me anything but merry.  Some of the songs are so depressing, I feel compelled to tie a noose around my neck.  One song in particular, Fairytale in New York by The Pogues, makes me want to drown my sorrows with some Irish whisky rather than deck the halls with boughs of holly.

To shake off the depressing mood of his favorite Christmas tune, I crank up one of my favorite upbeat, happy holiday hits because for me, Christmas is truly the most wonderful time of the year!

Mr. O'brien

I’m in the mood for ambitious fiction. Earlier this year I was blessed with a run of incredible reads,  topped off by Yvegeny Zamiatin’s masterpiece, We.

Mr. Zamiatin

Since then I’ve taken on more projects that inevitably have eaten into my reading time, and I am becoming more zealous in my quest for inspired reads. Ambition is the only flavor my literary palate wants to taste right now. I’m hungry for books that make me break out the booksdarts and re-read for pure pleasure. I want prose and plots that cause reactions, page turners that remind me how lucky I am to know how to read.

I’m compiling a list (in no particular order) of ambitiously written books and additions are requested in the comments section! I’d love suggestions for a 2010 reading list…

Mr. Baldwin

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

The Inferno by Dante

Morvagine by Blaise Cendrars

Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller

Candide by Voltaire

The Electric Koolaid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Black Boy by Richard Wright

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? by Edward Albee

Bowl of Cherries by Milliard Kauffman

The Whapshot Chronicle by John Cheever (as well as many of his shorter works)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

The Iliad by Homer

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Her by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

The Twits by Roald Dahl

Lolita by Vladamir Nabakov

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Monkeywrench Gang by Edward Abbey

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Peanuts by Charles Schultz

Mr. Abbey

more:

Bluebeard/Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Matilda by Roald Dahl

Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger

His Dark Materials Series by Phillip Pullman

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’brien

White Noise by Don Delillo

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

The Watchmen by Alan Moore

More..?

Thanksgiving. It’s the official start of the Christmas season. That means it’s time to reflect, give thanks, spend time with friends & family, enjoy lots of Christmas music, eat way, way, WAY too much turkey, ham, Christmas cookies (& pie, mmm pie!) and reminisce with those classic Peanuts TV specials.  So, to kick off the holiday season, I’ll be watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and enjoying that great Vince Guaraldi music. Here’s a clip to enjoy on your turkey day.  Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

Cheers,

jt

Happy Thanksgiving!

Did I post this same completely perfect and lovely Charles Schulz cel illustration last year for Thanksgiving? Yes. Suck it up, because it’s the best.

Wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving in all of it’s meanings for you.

Many years ago I took my four small children to the Pretoria zoo. There was a sunken bear enclosure with two bears in it. The words on the sign read: Ursus arctos horriblis. That’s the scientific name for grizzly bears. We spent some time there, leaning over the rail, throwing peanuts down to them.

Standing straight up on their hind legs, begging for the peanuts, they looked so cute, so friendly, the expression on their faces so much the antithesis of aggression, trustworthy enough that if allowed to, you’d enter the den with your kids — well perhaps not with your kids — and give them each an affectionate pat. You just knew those two bears wouldn’t harm a fly. They were just overgrown teddy bears.

Well, if you had been there and that’s what you thought, perhaps you should have looked again at the sign bearing the scientific name for those teddy bears: Ursus arctos horriblis.

Horriblis! That’s right. Horriblis.

So what do you think would happen to someone who ventured into a grizzly bear enclosure?

Well it just happens that someone did venture into a bear enclosure recently. I’m not sure if a European brown bear is a grizzly, like its American cousin, but I’d stake my bottom dollar on it, this European brown bear was a horriblis.

So what happened? Here, see for yourself.

It’s still a tad early to break out my Christmas DVDs, and as far as Thanksgiving goes, there are really only two DVDs worth watching (A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and Garfield’s Thanksgiving, both of which I’ve reviewed before). So with this week off work, to fill a little time, I took down a DVD I picked up about a month ago and popped it in: Peanuts 1970s Collection Volume 1.

Like the 1960s collection I reviewed a few months ago, this DVD includes several TV specials I’ve already reviewed in their original DVD releases. Also like that one, I got this DVD mainly for the specials I didn’t already have in my collection elsewhere. I can only hope that when this line gets to the 1980s, we’ll finally get a DVD collection of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. Rather than run through all of them again, this set includes the previously-released cartoons You’re Not Elected, Charlie Brown, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, and It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown.

Now for the new cartoons. On DVD for the first time, we have the 1971 special Play it Again, Charlie Brown. Although almost all of the Peanuts specials made ol’ Chuck the title character, this special is really about Lucy and Schroeder, the Beethoven-loving pianist of her dreams. In an attempt to win his heart, Lucy arranges for Schroeder to have his first public piano recital. Schroeder is initially grateful, and it seems that Lucy’s plan may actually be working… until she discovers the recital she’s signed him up for is a rock and roll concert — no Beethoven allowed. As you can imagine, Schroeder is none too happy with this news, so Charlie Brown and the gang step in to help. This is definitely one of the better episodes on the disc, certainly the best out of the three “new” cartoons. There’s a lot of great music here, and it gives a spotlight to a member of the gang who usually spends his time in the background.

Next up is There’s No Time For Love, Charlie Brown, the 1973 special that ultimately inspired the epic motion picture Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Or something. With his grades struggling, Charlie Brown sees a chance to redeem himself by writing a paper on a class trip to a museum. But a misunderstanding strands Charlie Brown in a supermarket with Peppermint Patty and Marcie. And as if his grades weren’t a big enough problem, the girls’ conversation about how lovable ol’ Charles is may wind up being more depressing than anything else. The Charlie Brown-Peppermint Patty-Marcie pseudo-triangle has always been one of the most interesting relationships in Peanuts. Both girls, clearly, are in love with Charlie Brown, although Patty would never admit it, and while he’s completely oblivious to their feelings, it doesn’t save his own feelings from being shattered. It’s a kind of sad little cartoon, even at its funniest.

Finally, we get the 1974 cartoon It’s a Mystery, Charlie Brown. Sally, Snoopy and Woodstock take center stage here, when Sally is required to do a science project based on something from the natural world. The next morning, Woodstock is horrified to discover his nest has been stolen. Snoopy, in true Sherlock Holmes fashion, dons his deerstalker cap and sets out to crack the case. This is a nice little spotlight on Snoopy and Woodstock, and the nature of their friendship, and it also allows him to interact a little with a lot of members of the cast, including Linus and Lucy, Pig-Pen, and Peppermint Patty (who totally misinterprets Snoopy’s intentions) while trying to solve the crime. The climactic scene, with Lucy taking off her psychiatrist hat in order to offer “legal aid,” is a really good piece.

We also get a new short documentary on this disc: Woodstock: Creating Snoopy’s Sidekick. While every fan knows that Woodstock was a later addition to the comic strip, and didn’t even have a name for the first three years of his existence, this short discussion about the character does a very good job of discussing not only the circumstances of his creation, but analyzing the impact he had on Snoopy’s character, how he allowed more tales to be told that wouldn’t have worked with any of the kids. Woodstock was a character that more easily assimilated into Snoopy’s fantasy world.

This is a pretty good DVD, even if you already have half the cartoons in the set (as I do). For the fan, it’s worth getting.

Brezsny qualche settimana fa, mi ha preparato un oroscopo che diceva che sarei riuscita a mettere a fuoco molte cose. Dopo tutto quello che è successo in questi mesi, forse ci arrivo con qualche settimana di ritardo, ma sono proprio una ragazza Lucy. 5 cent. please.

Adapted from a traditional Thai recipe.

Serves 2.

Ingredients:

1/2 medium Green Papaya, grated
1/2 cup steamed Green Beans, cut into 1″ long pieces
1/2 cup rough chopped, dry roasted Peanuts
1 tbs crispy fried Shallots or fried Onions (Optional)
For Dressing:
1/4 cup Lime juice
2 tsp Ketja Manis (Substitute: 2 tsp soy sauce + 2 tsp raw sugar)
1 finely chopped Red Chilli (Substitute: 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes)
1 tbs chopped Cilantro (Coriander)
A pinch of salt

Method:

Whisk dressing together.
Toss with grated papaya.
Sprinkle roasted peanuts and fried shallots.

I will praise God’s name in song and glorify him with thanksgiving.

 Psalm 69:30

(I’m taking a break from blogging, twittering, etc. for this week. Blessings to you and yours!)

Quando l’attacco di bulimia porta all’arresto. E’ quello che è successo a un uomo di 35 anni di Beersheva (nel centro di Israele). Nel cuore della notte, e con tutti i negozi chiusi, il protagonista non ha resistito all’attacco di fame e ne ha scassinato uno pur di mangiare il suo snack preferito: le patatine al burro d’arachidi “Bamba”. Le più vendute nel Paese.

Dopo avere forzato la serratura della saracinesca sotto casa l’uomo si è messo a mangiare le patatine sul posto abbandonando la confezione sul bancone. L’indomani, il proprietario si è accorto dello strano furto ed è stato lui stesso a indirizzare la polizia sulle tracce di un cliente abituale, descritto come un consumatore compulsivo di “Bamba”. Il lavoro dei poliziotti – facilitato dal fatto che sul sacchetto c’erano le impronte del 35enne – s’è concluso con il fermo e la confessione. “Avevo i crampi allo stomaco”, si è giustificato.

Chissà se, la prossima settimana, il giudice proverà a chiudere un occhio o lo obbligherà a stare a non meno di 50 metri dalle confezioni di patatine.