2005 is almost over - good!

This is the time of year when we should reflect on the year past. Examine the successes, the failures and review the things worked and what didn't so much. Other people use the time to crow about predictions they made that came true, or trends that have developed that they started.

Um, no. I'm not much into that.

Instead, I'm going to tell you something that you can actually use. Something so profound that a year from now you will look back and say, "That bastard Shamus was effin right!". Next Christmas you'll be sitting around a table talking about world politics or the latest news about the deadly avian bird flu and guess what? Somebody will bring this topic up and you'll know where you heard it first.

Flying cars.

That's right, your next car will be able to fly. The automakers perfected the technology last year, but are collectively holding back the release of the flying car for 2006 to coincide with the 59th anniversary of Amelia Earhart's loss at sea.

It's going to change your life. Me, I can't wait to pile the kids in the family flying car and zoom off for a picnic lunch in the high peaks of the Adirondacks. I wonder how good a Panera Frontega Chicken sandwich tastes at 5400 feet? I bet it's effin great.

See you in 2006, beeyotches. Whatever you do, stay the hell away from drinking those "purple motherfuckers". It's nothing but trouble.

Dear Santa

My kids leave Santa a note with his cookies and milk, and the carrot for Rudolph. She also left a blue crystal for Santa. This was the note from this year. I left the creative spelling intact.

Dear Santa,
How are you? Me and Dan are fine.
How do you do the trips when Rudof get's a bloudey nose?
Your friend,
Emily

P.S. Write back


(the reply was written by me in block letters because Emily checks our handwriting against Santa's letter)

Dear Emily and Dan,
You were both pretty good his year. Be sure and remember to wash behind your ears!
Luckily, Rydy has never had a bloody nose so far, but thanks for asking about that.
Thanks for the crystal and the milk and cookies. Yummy!
See you next year (hopefully).
Santa

Bad Santas

There's a hilarious website with a collection of pictures of kids crying
with Santa. My kids were scared of Santa at first, until it sunk in that he
was responsible to the magical deliveries that appeared under the tree.

Toys or not, some of these Santa's are way too freaky looking to make any kid comfortable.

This guy needs a drink. Or needs to drink less before suiting up.


This kid is crying because of the horrible attempt at a Santa outfit.


This Santa is saying, "Kill me. Kill me now."


I think Santas guts fell out into his suit.
But he doesn't seem bothered about it.


You can see all the crying kids and creepy Santas here.

My Christmas Card For You

There was a bizarre accident at the household, and the list containing all your snail mail addresses was lost. I greatly apologize, and hope that you will accept these online cards as substitutes for the missives I would have sent out by hand, had cruel fate not stepped in as it did.

(click them to see them full size)






You're welcome,
Shamus O'Drunkahan

The Return of the Magnificent Dancing Bastard

The crowd was elegant, polite and had scrubbed behind their ears. We greeted coworkers as we made our way through the Mariott ballroom to our table located right off the dance floor. The Christmas Party got underway.

Dinner was rather drawn out, but that left time to talk with the people buzzing from table to table. Soon, the music started and the dance floor opened for business. I spotted Sanji surveying the floor, head bobbing to Bob Seager‘s “Old Time Rock in Roll”.

“Sanji is sizing up the competition.” I said, poking my buddy next to me.
“Yeah, remember him last year? He was insane!”
“He was a magnificent dancing bastard.” I agreed.

It took about 3o minutes until the DJ started a “Dance Funnel”, where the dance floor opens and people glide down the middle, in pairs o one or two, showing what they have.

The first dancers kept it pretty calm. Gradually the bar was raised, tempo increasing like a car on a hill who’s parking brake has slipped. Then, the man in black stepped forward.

He glided down the funnel arms and legs in perfect synchronicity. The feet shuffled in perfect coordination with the head bob, arms moving in a fluid, almost hypnotic motion. The crowd, recognizing who the man was, erupted in cheers. Sanji was in the house.

He danced with people, sometimes a crowd of three or four, sometimes just on his own. He paused occasionally when the song just didn’t do it for him, but those moments were few. The DJ halted proceedings at one point and awarded him the award for his dancing, a little Christmas tree that starts to dance when there is noise. He put the tree on the floor and the two of them danced a victory groove, the crowd joining in.

I studied the man, trying the grasp the essence of his power, but was left scratching my head. He wasn’t flashy, like a professional ballroom dancer, and he wasn’t out of control like a drunken frat boy. He moved like he was driven by primal beat, and his arms, legs and head were outlets for him to express the music in motion.

Once the music was over, he was gone, just the wisp of smoke after the flame has been snuffed. He left us with only a fresh memory, and a dimly lit MPEG movie to hold us over until next year. Me? I was left with a headache and the memory of Jose Quervo shots. Who’s effin idea was THAT?

Oh yeah, that was mine. Bad idea.

Dance Like A Bastard

Tomorrow (well, tonight), is the company Christmas Party. Like the average party, there is alcohol mixed with spouses and the people you work with. I hang with coworkers at happy hour and other events, and the party is a fun extention of those times. The real blast comes from the coworkers who reveal a side you never saw before. They dont make it to the other events, and are the unknown commodity.

Last year, one guy in particular blew us all away. After dinner, the music started and people were lubricated enough to take to the floor. Sanji started slowly, busting a move here and there, but keeping it on the down low. A few hours in, he totaly lost his inhibitions, and started using the "A" moves tht he had been holding back. The bastard could dance!

Well, if by dancing you mean flailing and bumping like an epileptic who missed his last shot.

Sanji soon wore out his wife, and started taking the other wives out to see if they could keep up. They couldn't. He blew through our table and moved on to the next. At one point he flung a partner onto the floor in a move from "Grease" that John Travolta pulled off with much less pain to Olivia Newton John.

You couldn't help but crack a smile at his serious demeanor as he bent and jived and kicked and spun. It was dizzying, yet we couldn't look away.

At some point, there were no more willing partners, and the party for Sanji, was over. But I admired his drunken spirit. And the funny thing is I don't even think he had a drink all night.

We'll see if Sanji has any new moves tonight.

Presto

I love magic.

If this clip doesn't amaze you, check your pulse, because you must be dead.

You'll Be Needing These

If you have kids, then you need these gloves. From now on I'm going to give them to any of my friends who have kids, and when they ask what they will need them for, I will tell them story of last night.

I was doing the "last rounds", checking to make sure the kids were still breathing before turning in for the night. In the corridor outside their rooms, I met with a nasty smell. At first I thought my dog had gotten sick, but Smooty was laying in the kitchen with a clothespin on her nose.

Backtracking, I realized Dan's room was the source. Based on the stregnth of the odor alone, I immediately started a bath and retrieved the trusty gloves (see above). There was no way this wasn't going to be bad bad bad. Slowly drawing back the blankets, I was curious to see no visible evidence of an accident. I lifted him and still saw nothing but my eyes began watering like sprinklers in July from the pugent aroma wafting from his pj's.

I carried the groggy kid to the bathroom and slowly peeled his feeted one-piece pj's (now feted) off his shoulders and saw he was commando underneath. "Dude, where's your underwear?" I asked him, but realized he had shucked them and was balls-free. Unless we stood over him when he changed into his pj's, he shucked the restrictive underwear for the freedom of being "hanging free".

Sparing you a description of the actually toxic mess, I'll just say that the feeted pj's contained what could have been a disastrous and bed-destroying accident.

The PJ's couldn't be saved. I used them to wipe him down, then lifted him into the soapy bath to finish the washing. The pj's were double bagged and tossed outside to freeze (and saved for the next time my brother is in town, when I'll hide it under his heated car seat for a little surprise for the ride home from his god son).

Believe me, you don't want to attempt this kind of clean-up without really serious gloves. And maybe a hazmat suit including an air tank, but that tends to scare the kids.

You Won't Win This Car, Idiot

Ever been to the mall and seen the car with the "Win This Car!" sign next to it? All you have to do is put some personal information on a small entry form and place it in a cardboard box and you have a chance of winning the car. How easy is that?

I enjoy watching the idiots scramble for a pen, eager to fill out the little entry forms, dreams of themselves behind the wheel of this flashy new vehicle. I mean, how many people could possibly enter this drawing? And with a limit of one entry per person, the odds are pretty good, right?

Wrong, Poindexter. Read some of the fine print and you'll learn some interesting facts:

• The car you see is not necessirily the car you win.
• There are hundreds of these cars, in malls all over the country, and they are all part of the same drawing, for a single car.
• The contest may go on for as long as a year.
• The average number of entries is in the neighborhood of 5-6 million other suckers.

So guess what? Your odds are akin to having Oprah call you up and offer you one of her cars for free..

Oh, and also, you just gave your personal information away to complete strangers AND you gave them the rights to sell your information to subscriber lists.

I wouldn't worry about it. Identity theft and telemarketing aren't really THAT annoying, once you get used to it...

When the lights go on in the city....

Outside light displays. It's one of the things I detest about the Christmas season.

Untanging the lights, trying to fix the strings that are not working because one damn bulb is out somewhere. Going up on the ladder in the freezing cold only to have the plastic clips snap off due to the frigid temperatures - it's a whole miserable production that I avoid like the plague.

Luckily, I live in an area with low expectations as far as fancy house light displays. A few strings and you fit right in.

I would never make it in this guy's neighborhood - check out this display.

Holy effin light show, batman.

Update! Ziggy Still Sucks.

Ziggy's still a steaming pile of unfunny excrement. This one was in Sunday's paper, and made absolutely no sense, let alone make anyone laugh. My 5-year old even had to ask me why it was funny, and I couldn't tell him.



Have your credit card ready? Is California so much more expensive? Is it the only state that accepts a credit card? Or do they just not accept cash?

How the hell does this shit get pubished?? Somebody tell me!

Skywalker

This sounds like fun - the New Grand Canyon Sky walk

• Scheduled to open Jan. 1, 2006 Hualapai Indian Reservation
  
• Juts about 70 feet into the canyon, 4000 ft above the Colorado River Will accommodate 120 people comfortably
• Built with more than a million pounds of steel beams, and includes dampeners that minimize the structure's vibration.
  
• Designed to hold 72 million pounds, withstand an 8.0 magnitude earthquake 50 miles away, and withstand winds in excess of 100 mph
  
• The walkway has a glass bottom and sides...four inches thick
  

I'm there.

Can you imagine how much fun it would be to run around in that thing? It reminds me of something I used to have for my hamster.

Holiday Cheer

I imagine the message on the back of this Christmas card was something like, "Set up our tree today. Damn I think I'm drunk."

Trouble With The Trees

*I reposted this entry after a system meltdown of some kind. I recovered the
text, but not the comments.

Many years back we bought an artificial tree, the first one I had ever owned. At first I felt I had opted out of the long tradition of huffing out to the woods and chopping down a real tree to hoist up in the living room, as my family had for all those years growing up, kids screaming and parents yelling as the branches scrape the walls and knock pictures down, then rotating the tree for 3 hours until the bare patches were properly hidden.

Fake trees, it turned out, are easy to maintain, festive and safe to the house. No watering is needed! And I don't have sap all over my paws after hoisting it into place. Why do people still do it? When I ask real tree people, they say "tradition". Well, so was getting a free toaster when you opened a savings account at your local bank, but we got rid of that tradition, now didn't we?

It's about time someone came out and said it. Real Christmas trees are a health hazard. You've had your flu shot, you say? What about the other residents of your home?

Let's talk about Armillaria Root Disease. This fungi infects healthy trees, either killing them outright or predisposing them to attacks by other fungi or insects. Once in your house, the fungi is like a child in a store with many confections within easy reach. Ever heard of Diplodia Blight of Pines? This disease attacks pines and is most damaging to plantings of both exotic and native pine species in 30 Eastern and Central States. Symptoms are brown, stunted new shoots with short, brown needles. Sound familiar? If not, have a look at your tree on January 2nd.

"But Shamus!" (I can hear you saying), "I only purchase Southern Pines!"
Then you've just bought yourself a chance in the Fusiform Rust of Southern Pines lottery. Millions of dollars are lost annually to timber growers because of the disease. The fungus Cronartium fusiforme requires an alternate host to complete its life cycle. Any volunteers? How about you, Mr. Houseplant?

Get with the program people. Let the live trees purify our air and enhance our outdoor landscape as either evolution or the creator intended. Go buy yourself a fine artificial tree and make that your new tradition. Let some other sucker worry about White Pine Blister Rust. You don't want that in your house, trust me.