Your "It's a Goddamn Christmas Miracle" Quizo Update

Before we get to the meat of this week's missive, a quick request: is anyone today going to be very near the Utrecht art supply store on Broad Street? I need something from there and am not able to go into town to get it. If you can do this favor for me, I will grant you a great largesse this evening, bearing in mind that vis a vis the distressingly-specific item I require the usual true Grail/false Grail rules will apply. Please drop me a line if you are able to conveniently swing by the place.

Anyway, onwards.

The phrase in this week's title was actually spoken by me twice in the last four days. The first came on Christmas day, when for the first time in recorded memory everyone in my family got perfect gifts.

Now understand that buying gifts for my parents is alternately an exacting and excruciating process. Shopping for my mother is the former. While her tastes are so complex as to make the Minoan labyrinth look like the straightaway at Daytona, if you can hew close to certain high points - cozy British murder mysteries, Magnum PI, and the collected works of Sinbad - you're pretty much okay. Shopping for my father, on the other hand, is one of the greatest exercises in futility known to man. The house is littered with stacks of books, movies and various gadgetry that were gifts for Christmas, birthdays, Father's Days, etc, that lie unwatched, unread and unused. Not that he is rude about receiving such things, he just never seems to DO anything. Like, ever. It's quite amazing, really; my father is probably the best-read person I have ever known and I have NEVER SEEN HIM READ A BOOK. So getting gifts for Dad is quite tough as it's an amazing chore to get him something he will actually lay hands on more than once.

This year I decided to obviate both of these problems by getting something that they would BOTH use to great extent: a new television, a big flatscreen hi-def job. I had a very nice one picked out and bought up, and on Christmas I had a friend with a hatchback (so as to fit the box on the back deck) give me a ride over to the Death Star to pick it up. This was at maybe 10AM on Wednesday morning. You may recall that early on Wednesday there was a bit of bother with an ice storm, but by 10 it had gone away and everything was clear. I, however, on the way to the car, managed to find the only remaining patch of ice in all of Northeast Philadelphia, slip on it, and bang up my knee pretty badly. It didn't seize up completely until later in the day so I managed to get the TV home all right, but when my knee DID seize up later that night I was presented with a considerable problem.

Since I had long since decided to present the TV as a Santa-style come-downstairs-on-Christmas-morning-and-oh-my-god-there's-a-TV-there! sort of gift, I was left with the difficulty that once my parents had gone to sleep (at 2 in the bloody morning), I now had to not only hook up a brand new large LCD television and dispose of the old one in complete silence, but I had to do all these things on one leg. The fact that I managed to complete this Herculean task should not be understated. That part in and of itself was a minor goddamn Christmas miracle, but it did unfortunately mean that I was basically immobile on Christmas Day.

Come the blessed morn I woke up and, not wanting to ruin my Santa Claus moment, laid awake in bed for a solid two hours waiting for my parents to go downstairs so I could hear the great gasps of surprise and joy. After lying awake for two hours I heard them both go downstairs and, not hearing any gasps of any kind after about ten minutes, I hobbled my way down the stairs.

"What the FUCK?!" I said. I gesticulated wildly at the new television. "No reaction? Seriously? NOTHING? Brand new big-screen TV and it gets NO FUCKING REACTION?"

"Actually," my mother said, "it fits in with the room so well we both walked past it the first time without noticing."

"WITHOUT NOTICING?" I was still shouting, I feel perfectly reasonably.

"Without noticing, well, this is funny," my father said.

It was at this point that I stopped shouting and wildly flailing my arms about long enough to realize that in front of the Christmas tree was a complete set of brand-new golf clubs with one of the oversize decorative bows that we normally hang from the living room light fixtures stuck to it. As my father just got a new set of clubs, I just received a new golf bag from them for my birthday last month, and my mother does not play golf, these were clearly for me.

I wistfully handled the bow, looked at the TV, and said, "I should have thought of this."

"It's sure as hell not three coats," my father said.

Eventually the full-on present-opening commenced. I ended up with the clubs - which are, amusingly, decked out in white, black and orange - and a GPS for my car. My mother got the camera she's been dying for from my father. She gave him a plane ticket to go Spring Training again this year. They both got an astonishingly awesome TV from me.

Once we had coffee and breakfast, I looked at them and said, "is it just me or did everyone get absolutely perfect gifts this year?" This has never happened before, not even close.

We all agreed that everyone had.

"That," I said, "is a goddamn Christmas miracle."

My second utterance of that phrase in the last few days came last night around 7PM when I finally accepted the fact that the Eagles were going to make the playoffs in what has to be the most incredibly unlikely way possible. I had read on some football website that going into Sunday the Birds had something like a 5% chance of making the playoffs. They might have beaten the Cowboys, sure. And the Bears or the Vikings MIGHT have lost, just slightly maybe, and there was a very poorly-packed snowball's chance in hell that the Buccaneers would blow it as two touchdown favorites against the Raiders, but there was basically ABSOULTEY NO WAY IN THE ENTIRE MULTIVERSE that all three of these things would happen.

By kickoff at 4:15 not only had both the Bears and Vikings lost, but the Bucs somehow DID blow it to the Raiders, and as the game was starting I sent around a text to my friends urging them to contribute to a fund that would allow us to send Al Davis a quart of fresh human blood as thanks for opening a playoff window for the Eagles. (Come on, you know he's a vampire. Or that he at least bathes in the stuff.)

The Eagles had a window. The stars had all aligned, save one. They just had to beat the Cowboys and incredibly, unbelievably, the Eagles would make the playoffs. It was going to be rough, though. The Cowboys are no pushovers. They're still a fantastically-talented football team, and the Eagles policy of "never cover the tight end" would only make someone as good as Jason Witten even more dangerous. And, hey, Tony Romo can't dick it up in December forever, can he?

About 90 minutes later, after Pacman's second mistake in 90 seconds had given the Eagles a total of ten free points, I sat there open-mouthed, staring at my television in disbelief. Eventually I found words and said aloud to my otherwise empty living room, "you've gotta be fucking KIDDING me."

As halftime struck I called my father, in Florida with my mother to visit his aunt.

"The Cowboys have basically quit," he said. "The game is pretty much over. But don't discount Andy Reid's ability to fuck this up."

"Even he would have to try pretty hard to blow this one," I said.

"This is the Eagles," he said. "Never forget that." So I went to watch the second half, waiting for the Eagles to blow their lead and return to normalcy.

When Merrill said, "there's a timeout on the field! The score is, and we are not drunk, 34-3 Eagles!" I realized that this was actually going to happen and I was possessed by a strange euphoria.

After the game ended I just sat there, not quite comprehending the ridiculous sequence of events that had led to this point. I looked over at the tree, all lit up, thought about a happy family with perfect gifts, two weeks off from work, and the Eagles in the playoffs on a new big screen TV, and just smiled and again spoke to the empty room:

"It's a goddamn Christmas miracle."

If all those things happening at once aren't that, folks, I don't know what is.

JLK

Your "Psychotic Christmas Shopping Extravaganza of Doom" Quizo Update

It's Christmas week! And let me just say that it is about goddamn time. For, in addition to the holidays, Christmas week brings with it Christmas Quizo tonight, featuring an entire evening of holiday-themed questions and me giving out presents (I'm sure we all know by now what "presents" means).

I am a big fan of Christmas (check the website entry for last December 25 for more details on that) and the people around me are also big fans of Christmas because it is the time of year in which I act the most human. There are precious few times one can basically be guaranteed I will be in a good mood and so many of them are conditional - requiring a Chelsea win or a really good episode of Doctor Who or top set aces against two pair - that the people who have somewhat stupidly chosen to be friends with me enjoy it when the more insane aspects of my personality take a back seat and I act like a normal, sane, happy person for a week or two.

However, the "normal, sane, happy" part doesn't happen until one freakishly abnormal thing takes place: my annual Christmas shopping trip. The whole thing started out as a sort of quirky Christmas tradition, but as I got older and my obsessive-compulsive tendencies became, well, full-blown obsessions and compulsions, it became something much more insane.

The first year back in high school when I had a car at Christmas, I went to Willow Grove Mall the Sunday beforehand to do my Christmas shopping. Since even back then my gift-giving practices were a little overzealous I did this weird thing where I went around to different stores in the mall not buying anything, just making notes on my Christmas list about what might be good for the various people on my list. Once I had good lists for everyone I sat down in the food court and make final determinations on who was getting what, then went around getting everything. Yay for shopping.

The next year, by some weird calendar hoodoo, I ended up going shopping at Willow Grove once again on the Sunday before Christmas. In a VERY weird coincidence, and one that basically would turn my Christmas shopping into an OCD ordeal for the rest of my life, I actually ended up parking in the same space in the parking lot I had the year before. And, once again, I went around to various stores in the mall marking down possible gifts for people, even adding a couple stores this time, before buying anything.

The year after that I was sitting around on the Sunday before Christmas, just minding my own business, and I had the sudden thought that MY BRAIN WILL EXPLODE IF I DON'T GO TO WILLOW GROVE RIGHT FUCKING NOW! I zoomed the hell over there, and when I arrived saw that the space I had used the last two years was open and knew that I HAD to park there. Once I got inside I HAD to go to an even-larger number of stores than the previous year and not buy anything.

This, my friends, is how compulsions are born: your brain tells you that something completely irrational is absolutely necessary, and you agree.

Over the years this entire process has turned into a regimented set of rules for Christmas shopping, which cannot be deviated from lest a nervous breakdown ensue:

- It happens at Willow Grove Mall on the Sunday before Christmas Eve (thus obviating the need to shop on the 24th should Christmas fall on a Monday).
- The same parking spot must be utilized, way off to the side in the lot behind the Ross.
- A complete circuit of EVERY store in the mall will be undertaken while buying nothing, only making notes. This circuit will begin at the Limited (or whatever it is now) across from TGI Friday's, continue through the entire first floor, including department stores, and then move up to the next floor, where this circuit is repeated until the third floor has been covered in its entirety.
- The key to the "looking" part is so that every single gift possibility for every single person on the list is exhaustively researched, insuring that the eventual choice is the "perfect" gift. You cannot possibly have missed something if you look at every single shelf in the entire mall.
- After the note-taking circuit is complete, lunch is taken at the food court.
- When lunch is complete, the "buying" circuit begins, once again on the first floor, and then moving up to the third floor.
- If the buying circuit takes more than three hours - it often does - dinner is taken at TGI Fridays (an unfortunate if necessary choice). Oreo Madness will be ordered.
- Once the buying circuit is complete, the presents will be taken to the Fox Chase Cancer Center charity wrapping station to be professionally wrapped. The charity wrapping people will receive a donation equal to double the quoted price rounded up to the next multiple of ten dollars because it's charity, for fuck's sake.

This is how I have done my Christmas shopping for the last 14 years. On average it takes six to seven hours to complete. At its worst, the year I was working at the water company and making scads of money and buying presents for everyone I had ever met in my entire life, it took thirteen hours. I am not making this up. If you don't believe me you can ask Reg and Nick tonight. Over the years I have, in my generosity, decided to inflict my Christmas shopping insanity on various friends and they have been victims the last couple years (though no one has ever made it through the entire process). I actually do this shit.

At least I DID do it, until yesterday. This year was different because of my acquisition of the delicious service known as "Amazon Prime." If you aren't aware, this is a thing you can get from Amazon that gives you free two-day shipping on pretty much everything. I call it the "you'll never shop in a store again" deal, and I am an unabashed endorser of it. When you combine free two-day shipping with Amazon's price difference from retail (usually the 30-40% range) and throw in sales tax as the cherry on top, we're talking about a difference of a couple hundred dollars. That's too much money to do my shopping the old way.

"All right, brain," I said. "I don't like you and you sure as hell don't like me. But we need to think of some way to work this out."

"MUST DO SHOPPING AT WILLOW GROVE! MUST USE PARKING SPACE! MUST MAKE NOTE-TAKING LAP!" my brain said.

Lousy compulsive brain.

Eventually I hit on what I thought could be an important loophole: the key underpinning of this entire process is the buying of Christmas presents at Willow Grove Mall (and the parking space, but that's easy enough). As long as THAT necessity is fulfilled, I thought the rest of it might sort itself out. So, I thought, if all I have to do is actually spend the money at Willow Grove, then I...

This is why, if you happened to be at the food court at Willow Grove Mall around noon yesterday, you might have noticed a distressed-looking man sitting at a table in the food court, chugging can after can of Mountain Dew while pecking away at a laptop.

Yes. I brought my laptop to the mall and did my shopping on Amazon there. And it worked! My shopping got done and I didn't have a nervous breakdown.

As Dexter would say: the code is fulfilled.

See you tonight for Christmas Quizo, which should be a lot of fun. If I don't see you, enjoy your holidays.

JLK

Your Felonious Quizo Update

In a funny coincidence, I actually had TWO completely different friends going off to cut down a Christmas tree this past weekend. Like, actually go someplace and chop down a live tree, as opposed to the rest of us who just go to the place with the light bulbs strung up on clothesline and buy a pre-cut tree. Seriously, when did strings of bare light bulbs become the international symbol for "buy Christmas trees here" anyway?

Speaking to one of them after the fact, I said, "how did the murder go?"

"What murder?" he asked.

"You murdered your Christmas tree. I'm asking how it went."

"It isn't murder!"

"Sure it is. The tree is alive when you get there. It's dead when you leave. Murder one, man."

"Well than what does everyone else do? Is that murder too?"

"Oh, no. Cutting down a live tree is murder. Buying one at a lot is just disposing of a body."

I love Christmas.

A reminder, folks, that we are on at our special Monday night football time of SEVEN (7)(VII)(sept)(sieben)(zeven)(siete)(syv)(sette)(that's Homer Simpson, sir, one of your chowderheads from Sector 7-G) in the PM. That should set Drago straight...

JLK

Your Thursday Regret: The One Where The Masses Rise Up Against Me

My family had some fairly serious money troubles when I was a really young kid. My parents, god bless them, were spending basically every cent they had (and then some) educating my sister and I, and that didn't leave a whole lot of wiggle room for anything else. As I got older things started to loosen up a little but they didn't really get completely cleared up until... oh, I'd guess sometime when I was in college or thereabouts.

Around Christmas, when I was very young at least, my mother wouldn't say anything, she'd just look worried all the time. As I got older my mother had a familiar Christmas litany. I swear she would say the EXACT SAME WORDS every year: "it's going to be a lean Christmas." She would say that in an attempt to cushion the blow for when that year's present haul wasn't as impressive as the previous year.

I didn't notice at the time but I now realize that every time she said that when my father was in earshot he would just smile, basically to himself. Somehow my mother never realized that every year, without fail, my father would go out on Christmas Eve in an orgiastic frenzy of present buying and every year, without fail, no one would be disappointed.

One Christmas present, though, that my father did NOT buy came when I must have been 8. Amongst a sea of other presents were two videotapes: one had the first three Star Wars movies on it, and the other had the first three Star Trek movies. Apparently the A/V department at my father's school had gotten their hands on a tape-to-tape recorder, and my dad went and rented all those movies and put them onto single tapes for me. I'm assuming they were recorded in SLP or "picture quality, what's that?" mode, though admittedly the crispness of said images is not that big a deal when a) you are 8, and b) your TV is as big as an RV but only has a 19" screen, thus rendering the quality of the tape pretty much a non-issue.

So I had these tapes. My memory of them is remarkably vivid: the label on the Star Wars tape was written in my dad's giant all-capitals block-letter handwriting, and the label on the Star Trek tape must have been written by whoever it was at Girard who made it; the handwriting was considerably smaller and more elegant than my father's. I had these tapes and, in probably the first instance of the obsessive nature with which I would inhale entertainment for the rest of my life, watched them over and over and over and over AND OVER again. My parents didn't mind - it is worth noting that when I was that age they weren't much older than I am now, and they were both long-time gigantic nerds to boot - and my sister was 6 and, I dunno, I guess she was around or something.

I was already a big Star Wars fan, even at 8. Empire was the first movie I ever saw in a theatre. I had books and action figures and all that stuff. My course as a lifelong Star Wars nerd was locked in around my fourth birthday. (Thanks a fucking lot, Mom and Dad.)

I don't remember specifically liking Star Trek BEFORE I got that tape, but I sure as hell did afterward. I went the same way as I did with Star Wars, vacuuming up as much material as I possibly could; if you think adult collectors of things like this are sad you should see it at that age; when you're 8 or 9 paraphernalia is like crack, and with the associated addict behaviors to boot.

In the process of my multimedia hoovering I learned basically everything there was to know about Star Trek at the time. It is worth noting here that this was before the days of the net and Wikipedia and whatnot where over the course of a couple hours you can, Matrix-like, download every vital piece of information about an entertainment franchise directly into your brain and have the equivalent knowledge of having seen every episode/movie/whatever without ever watching a frame of film/reading a page/whatever. I learned everything about Star Trek the hard way.

So in 1987 when I saw a commercial for "Star Trek: The Next Generation," oh, man, it was like the derrick drill hitting that oil field for the first time.

Nerd.

EXPLOSION.

I was instantly hooked on TNG, even though I distinctly recall telling my mother at one point during the first season that though I loved it and it was my favorite thing on television it still wasn't as good as old Star Trek. Still, I watched it with an obsession that would be pretty frightening were I to witness it now in a 9-year-old. When I would get grounded and sentenced to "no TV" my parents would have to make an exception for TNG because I would go completely BERSERK if I didn't get to watch it. It was the first time I was ever completely hooked on a television show. I'm pretty sure that TNG is still the only show where I watched EVERY SINGLE EPISODE at their first-run airtime. In the years since I've gotten pretty compulsive about watching Lost or Galactica but I still DVR them from time to time. Back then, though, I'm almost positive I watched 7 years of TNG eps the very second they aired.

The first seeds of doubt started with little things. Tiny things. Why does a Frenchman have a British accent? I didn't hit that one until I was about 14. What's the point of having shields if there's like 900,000 ways around them? Wow the holodeck and transporters seem to malfunction a lot. Wow there seem to be an AWFUL lot of these anonymous crew members who die with regularity. What the hell does Worf DO, anyway? "Security Chief?" What the fuck is that? The ship has enough firepower to blow up a planet and there's a GUY whose job it is to keep the ship SAFE? From what, the Great Green Arkleseizure?

But these questions occupied the back of my mind, a dark, humid corner where another voice sat saying "if Luke kissed Leia in Empire and they were revealed as siblings in Jedi then these movies aren't planned out very well, but that means..." which we now recognize as the first steps on the road to madness.

I ignored that part of my brain - the part asking distressing questions about Star Trek, at least - for a lot of years. We still had Trek movies with delightful regularity (if not delightful or regular quality) and TNG was, by all accounts, on television in full-blown syndication something like 45 times a week. Somewhere in there, though, there was this, I dunno, gap between when TNG was on everywhere three times a day to when it started its abortive, ill-considered run on Spike, when there was very little Star Trek to be had.

(Side note: what genius decided that it was a great idea to make STAR TREK the flagship show of what is, essentially, the Frat Boy Channel? That is one person, folks, who does not fucking well understand "branding.")

When TNG came to Spike there was this giant promotional push (like you do) and I sat down to watch - seriously, intently WATCH - Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time in several years.

After a few weeks I came to a conclusion:

It's not that good.

I'm sorry, folks, it really isn't.

Part of the reason it's not that good is because of the one part of it that is truly amazing: Patrick Stewart. Even if he wasn't such a great actor - and not to take anything away from the rest of that cast, but he's so far past any of them it's not funny - if nothing else Picard was the only character on the show who was REMOTELY interesting. Every other crew member of the USS Enterprise-D (that's right, goddammit, it's the Enterprise-motherfucking-DEE) is a bland cipher at best or a one-note joke at worst. Dutiful Riker. Naïve Data. Worf the Warrior. And the rest, here on Gilligan's Isle. Seriously, Troi, WHAT THE FUCK IS SHE ON THAT SHIP FOR? She doesn't do ANYTHING.

The actors - all of whom are quite talented, except for maybe Dr. Crusher, whose character was construed so narrowly as to be practically two-dimensional and thus provide no insight into the actress - are all trying very hard, but you can see in the first couple years the show straining against Roddenberry's vision of a perfect 24th century human utopia (which, while philosophically interesting, makes for acutely bad drama) and then, after he left, TNG became stuck in the rut that strain created. By then boring anti-drama had become part of the show's DNA and every time they tried to break out of it things came across as strange and off-putting. The Klingon civil war arc is so out of character for TNG it seems like it's from some other show entirely (possibly the later, exponentially better DS9), the late-seasons "romance" (a term used here in surely its loosest sense) between Troi and Worf is as clunky as Russian poetry, and even Q got tiresome after far too many appearances down the years.

This is not to say there aren't moments where the show, through some fortuitous alchemy of script and acting and direction, didn't pop and sometimes even take flight. The episode where Q flings the ship into the Delta Quadrant and we meet the Borg for the first time is remarkably good television, and the Borg's return in The Best of Both Worlds is as satisfying as any season finale/premiere two-parter I can think of. This is true DESPITE the fact that every Borg appearance on the show after are such horrific cock-ups that retroactively poison every instance previous, and that it would take First Contact to truly "make" the Borg. The one with Jean Simmons as Admiral Satie, the witchhunt-y episode (The Drumhead? Maybe?) is, to my mind, the best hour of pure acting (and probably writing) in the entire series. And "Cause and Effect" is a fantastic, just a truly fantastically-executed hour of science fiction, though it occupies a black space in my heart because, in what is surely the greatest irony in the history of the universe, it is the single episode of TNG I have seen more than any other; for a period of - I am not making this up - almost 10 years it seemed like just about every time I turned on TNG "Cause and Effect" was on. And John De Lancie, overused though he was, is still always a joy to watch with Stewart.

But those, and a few others, are really only a couple high points in what is an overall run of surprisingly depressed quality. One almost gets the sense that after 20-some-odd years between Star Trek and The Next Generation the time spent on TNG was the creators learning how to make Star Trek, at least on television. The fact that Deep Space Nine is SO good - and even ten years after it went off the air when I catch it I am STARTLED by how good almost every single episode of DS9 is, and how remarkable the whole series became - is some pretty strong evidence in that direction. Of course, the dreck that was Voyager and the first two seasons of Enterprise undermines that argument somewhat, but shut the hell up.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying TNG is bad. It isn't. Especially if you compare it to some of it's contemporaries; it is more than probable that part of the reason we have such fond memories of Next Gen is because, for science fiction fans at least, the available alternatives were so unpleasant. It isn't bad. At times, even, it's pretty good, but on the whole it's just not nearly as good as we remember it.

And, of course, if I could just bring myself to not watch it when it's on, I wouldn't have to think about this so often.

JLK

A Story for Christmas

When I was a kid we used to have bubble lights on our Christmas tree. If you don't know what bubble lights are you have been severely deprived. Whereas your normal Christmas tree lights are just that, little light bulbs, bubble lights are truly the height of Christmas awesomeness. They're lights, yes, in the traditional red and green, but in addition to the light bulb they have on top this little vacuum tube full of liquid that, apparently, has a boiling point somewhere around the temperature of a hot breath, since once the lights are on the liquid inside starts bubbling. They're awesome.

Over the years we have accumulated a collection of Christmas ornaments that requires an advanced degree in twelve-dimensional hypermathematics to accurately count and space on the tree has become more and more precious. The only downside to bubble lights, and it's stretch to even get to this, is that they take up a lot of real estate, and somewhere around my early high school years a determination was made that the space previously given over to bubble lights would be occupied by the ever-increasing numbers of non-electrical ornaments we possess.

For as long as I can remember - and when it comes to Christmas my memory is remarkably clear going back to when I was 3 in our first house - we have always bought and decorated our tree on Christmas Eve. Every year I bitch, and bitch loudly, about the fact that I want the goddamn bubble lights on the goddamn tree, though since my father sacrilegiously went and bought an artificial tree back when I was in college it changed to bitching loudly about wanting goddamn bubble lights on the goddamn fake tree and why can't we get a goddamn real tree anyway. Year after year I am denied, and I have to spend another Christmas without bubble lights. This year was no exception.

One thing that WAS an exception this year was very late tonight, when I came downstairs to find my parents unwrapping gifts they had gotten each other.

"What the hell is all this?" I said.

My mother said, "we always open one present on Christmas Eve."

This is a complete lie. As most of us know my memory is, to put it mildly, like a steel trap to begin with - how many people do YOU know that can quote the entire script of Ghostbusters? - and when it comes to Christmas I DO NOT FUCK AROUND. The 36 or so hours between waking up on Christmas Eve and going to sleep on Christmas are my absolute favorite hours of the entire year. I am a total idiot for Christmas. If you offered me the choice of spending every day for the rest of my life watching Chelsea win the Premiership in the morning and the Devils win the Stanley Cup at night while constantly eating Santucci's Pizza and smoking Silk Cut cigarettes in a shiatsu massage recliner, or just having Christmas Eve and Christmas Day over and over again, I'll take the Christmas option 1000 times out of 1000. I love Christmas.

So I was having none of this "we always open one present on Christmas Eve" shit. -I- have never, not once in my life, opened a present on Christmas Eve. If this is something my parents have been doing after I went to sleep since I was a kid, fine, but don't tell me I've ever opened a goddamn present on goddamn Christmas Eve.

"Here, you open one too," my father said. "Ooh! Pick the one on the top of that pile there."

I reluctantly picked up a gift that had been clumsily wrapped with two different kinds of wrapping paper, one looped around each axis, with a tag on it that said "TO: SON FROM: PARENTS."

This is what happens when we let my father wrap gifts.

I tore at the "wrapping" and found...

A bubble light!

Not just any bubble light, but a bubble NIGHT light! One you plug into the wall, with a little Santa Claus cavorting around the vacuum tube.

"A bubble light, sweet!" At this point I was still inordinately pleased about it.

Then I looked at the back of the packaging, which contained a warning so dire I am compelled to present it in its entirety:

"WARNING: Never leave night light unattended while plugged in. Turn off when leaving home and before bedtime. Vial contains methylene chloride. If exposed to the liquid, contact your local poison control hotline. This product is not a toy! To avoid the risk of personal injury, fire, burns and electrical shock, it should not be played with or placed where small children can reach it. Do not place vials near other sources of heat, such as fireplaces, heaters, radiators, open flame, or other light bulbs, as glass vial may shatter. Vials are made of glass, do not drop, crush or hit. If vial breaks, do not breathe vapors, open window and ventilate room. If fluid gets in eyes, immediately flush with water. Liquid inside bubble lights will stain carpeting, vinyl flooring, upholstery, and other materials. Do not touch bulb while lit. Allow bulb to cool."

After reading the warning aloud I looked up at my parents and said, "are you trying to kill me?"

My father said, "what the hell is methy-whatever?" That bit scared me as well; Wikipedia says, "it is widely used as a solvent , the general view being that it is one of the less harmful of the chlorocarbons." Oh, good to know my Christmas present is full of one of the LESS harmful chlorocarbons. (I'm not going to bother looking up what a chlorocarbon actually is, I'm sure it's dreadful.)

I actually plugged it in in the kitchen, and I can see it now, bubbling away, and I know before I go to sleep I'm going to have to go in there and turn it off. Frankly, the prospect of touching the damn thing scares the living shit out of me.

But I'm sitting here now, at the dining room table on my laptop in the middle of the night, listening to the Muppets Christmas album (the one with John Denver, my absolute favorite) and nervously eyeing the bubble light in the kitchen, getting anxious about tomorrow (well, later today) being the first Christmas in years that isn't just me and my parents and the insanity that is sure to bring, and you know what?

It's all good.

In fact, it's great.

Because even with the impending insanity of family coming over for Christmas and hoping the gifts I got people will go over as big as I want them to and praying that the UN doesn't realize I have a chemical weapon plugged into the wall in the kitchen, all that stuff aside, after I read that warning the three of us ended up sitting in the living room laughing our asses off and having a good time, I remembered... I dunno, call it what you want; the message, the reason, the underlying theme, the lesson, the story, the defining aspect, the whatever. I remembered the point - whether for you today is a sacred observance or a secular reason to have a good time and exchange gifts or whether it's just another day - of the whole shebang, the one thing I think all of us can come away from today with regardless of circumstance:

We're all in this together.

If nothing else, we can all take heart in that.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

JLK

Your Happy Holidays Quizo Update

Well, folks, tonight is our last Quizo for three solid weeks - I don't care how much Fletcher and Palestra Jon bitch and moan, I am not repeat not spending Christmas Eve with you lot - and as is our standard custom, tonight is our special Holiday Quizo. Bear in mind, however, that tonight's speed round will NOT be the Twelve Days of Christmas. I don't want a repeat of last year and certain people... let's call them, say... "Steven of the De-SEPTA-Cons" showing up with a pre-made speed round answer sheet.

So, yes, tonight is our big holiday bonanza. And I'll even have presents, though whether "presents" means "candy" or "insults" is something I have not decided yet.

Over the weekend I heard one of the songs from the new Sweeney Todd movie and suffice it to say I am underwhelmed. I am not a fan of Tim Burton movies to begin with, and having him turn one of the best (and one of my personal favorite) musicals ever into a cinematic train wreck does not exactly make my cup runneth over with anticipatory excitement. When you have two leads who while outstanding actors are not, shall we say, amongst the upper echelons of the world's great singers (which you basically have to be to even have an outside shot at performing Sweeney Todd remotely successfully), and you add to that the garish, emotionally-malnourished, utterly-without-subtlety hackery of Tim Burton, and those of us of a theatrical bent - if not the rest of the world at large - are in for a severe dose of disappointment.

I think I'm going to go watch The English Patient just to get the taste of Tim Burton's Sweeney out of my brain.

I will, however, before tonight's festivations, give you an early Christmas present:

http://tinyurl.com/3dq8m5

Just watch it. Trust me. It will make you weep with joy. If it doesn't, well, I hear there's a Tim Burton movie coming out that may be right up your alley.

JLK

Your "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" Quizo Update

You know, it occurs to me that your special teams have to be really, REALLY bad to make the Packers look good. I mean really, really, really, REALLY BAD.

On a positive note, the Philadelphia Binge Festival - it's like the Fringe Festival, only less healthy - opens next Tuesday with my production of Patrick Marber's "Dealer's Choice" in the restaurant at the Dark Horse Pub. Shows are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday Nights at 8 and Saturday afternoons at 4, September 18-29. Tickets to the show are a scant ten dollars. Doors will open ( i.e. I will be standing in the doorway, glaring at you, demanding money) 90 minutes before showtime, though if you want to eat/drink/whatever I strongly recommend arriving no later than an hour before curtain - I learned last night that I can't fit as many people into that room as I had previously, and space is going to get taken up very quickly. I'm a fan of early arrivals for pretty much everything in general, but in this case not only do you get a good seat but after paying me (thus putting a temporary halt to the glaring) you then get to take your time eating the... er... delicious dinner the DH provides.

It is worth noting at this point that my mother has always claimed she married an Italian so she would not have to spend the rest of her life making Irish food. Short of teaching me how to read and write I consider this to be the smartest move she's ever made.

It is worth noting further that I have been reliably informed by a number of sources who I consider quite trustworthy that the food at the Horse is excellent. I would not think for even a second to disparage the fare the DH provides, more that I am disparaging the entire genre to which it belongs, i.e. Irish/English cuisine, which by any reputable measure is absolutely repulsive. They say Scottish food is based on a dare; I would contend that Irish food is (or at least should be considered) a form of biological warfare and thus banned under the Geneva Protocol. That said, I have been repeatedly told that if one actually desires to take ones' life into ones' hands, the food at the Horse is a top-notch exemplar of Irish cuisine.

Of course, one year back when I was young my father got an unfortunate pang of nostalgia and asked my mother if we could do the traditional Italian dinner on Christmas Eve, which if you are not aware consists of seven different kinds of fish (aka, in typical Italian-American pidgin, "the Seven Fishes"). This was a poor choice on his part. This is not, I must add here, like the time a few years back my sister called us from her home in San Francisco on December 24 to tell us that her and her friends were "doing like we did way back in the day and eating the Seven Fishes," as she rattled off a menu consisting of lobster, crab, shrimp, mussels, oysters, sea bass, and scallops, leading to my comment "those aren't the Seven Fishes, those are seven things that live underwater, and five of them aren't even fucking fish."

It is worth noting yet again that - to my understanding - no one actually knows what the "official" Seven Fishes are supposed to be, so don't bother going to look them up, thinking I'm going to ask what they are tonight. I am not. If you sort of Rube Goldberg the Seven Fishes and construe it as seven Mediterranean fish that likely would have been part of a large dinner in actual Italy, well, you are in for one goddamn disgusting dinner. In terms of "worst Christmas ever" the year of the Seven Fishes ranks right up there with the year my dad - technological genius that he is - tried to book his and my mom's vacation plane tickets online and put them on a flight out on December 25 instead of 26 and we didn't even HAVE Christmas. If you really think about it I believe you'll come to the conclusion I did, that a smoking ruin of a Christmas is at least as bad (if not actually worse) than one where you eat eel.

On second thought, maybe the whole "reading and writing" thing was #1 after all.

Anyway, as far as the show goes, I am told the demand to see it amongst the legitimate theatre community is pretty hopping, so if you want to see it - and I sincerely hope you do, I would very much like everyone to - I would get back to me as soon as you can to make reservations. It's going to fill up fairly quickly. And the show is freaking awesome, which is always nice. Plus you get to eat and drink! (And drink, and drink, and drink...) What could be better than that?

(Hint: it's not seven different kinds of fish.)

JLK

Your "Good News, Bad News" Quizo Update

Okay, the goddamned "f" key on my keyboard here at work isn't functioning properly - you really have to stab at it quite forcefully to make it work - so if it occasionally gets dropped please bear with me. Also bear with me while I try to compose an e-mail while avoiding the letter "f."

Are we all glad to be back? After a terribly long break for the holidays - which a quick OCD glance at my calendar reveals we'll have again this year - we are back in the Quizo swing of things tonight. And, in the spirit of the soon-ending holiday season, my gift to you is this: there is only one "clue" in this e-mail, and it's pretty simple. So don't wrack your brains. Enjoy.

Last night I was watching the Eagles at my friend Mike's house, and we are (literally, all of us) sitting on the edge of the couch as the Eagles line up a field goal with three seconds to go. After Eli Manning basically stopped being Eli Manning in the fourth quarter ( i.e. started regularly throwing the ball to his own team) and the New York Football Giants had clawed their way back into a game they had no right being in in the first place, it had come down to this.

My thought process while David Akers and Koy Detmer line up the kick:

"Well... if they win, that's a win in a playoff game. But if they win that also means that there will be a game during my show next Saturday night. A loss wouldn't be so bad. I'd get a good house on Saturday night. But I'd feel bad about it because the Eagles had to lose to get it. And no one wants to lose playoff games. And oh, god, on a field goal at the end. What if what happened last night happens here? Koy's better than that punk-ass in Dallas, no worries there. No blown snap here, no sir, not our Koy. I want the Eagles to win, but I want people to see the show on Saturday night..."

Then the kick went up and split the uprights, and my thought process became this:

"YEAH! Fuck. OH YEAH! Fuuuuuuuuuck . YEEEEEEEEEEAAAAHHHHH! Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!"

I was terribly conflicted about this whole thing until I realized that I know someone who lives quite literally around the corner from the theatre, so at worst I will miss the very beginning of the game (when the show starts) and a little bit near halftime (when I have to open the doors after the show ends.) So I still get to see the game, and my thinking is that there probably isn't TOO much overlap between the Eagles and Ancient Greek Drama fanbases, so I should still get a decent house for the show.

By the way, Chrissy, I'll be watching the Eagles game at your house on Saturday night.

Oh, and by now this should go without saying: Medea, opening THIS WEDNESDAY! at the Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom Street, tickets $20. How to get tickets, you ask? There are two ways. The first is by calling the box office at 215-563-4330 and leaving a message. The second is by going to our website, at:

http://www.prosfromdovertheatre.com

I strongly recommend the website. The voicemail fills up very quickly and, frankly, I'm just too goddamned lazy to check it that often. Surely we all know this by now.

Plus it's got hot chicks with knives, what else do you want from the theatre?

(Please don't ask what she does with the knives.)

JLK

Your Quizo Update, A Day Late and a Dollar Short

I hope everyone has enjoyed the holiday weekend. I know I did.

For Christmas I received the gift of warmth.

I mean this quite literally.

Christmas morning with the fam (aka "my parents"), we're opening gifts and I get to one of mine in a largish box. I rip the paper off and open her up to find a lovely Izod golf jacket, perfect for those early spring days. Not that I would ever actually PLAY golf in it, as whatever golf gene allowed both of my parents to coach the sport did not get passed on to me. While I can rip a 58 at St. Andrew's on Tiger Woods 2006, my actual golf skill is quite limited, and by quite limited I mean largely nonexistent.

(That reminds me; I need to pick up Tiger Woods 2007.)

Later on in the gift opening extravaganza I come across another large box, and upon opening it find a nice winter coat in a beautiful deep crimson.

"Your leather jacket isn't warm enough when it gets REALLY cold," my mother says. Fair enough. Quite thoughtful.

Towards the end of the present line I have one more large box left. Off goes the paper and the box lid and I find...

Another winter coat. Navy blue this time.

Now there are two interesting things about this coat:

1) The coat is made by a company the owners of which are guys I have, on occasion, played poker with in Atlantic City.

2) It is, by all observations, a second winter coat and third coat overall on the same Christmas morning.

I express my confusion.

"That's in case the first one doesn't fit you," my father says. "Plus, it's from a company called Double Down. That's funny. Because, you know, you play poker. And your mother's right, that leather jacket isn't warm enough when it gets super cold out."

It occurs to me at this point that the guys who make this coat, while nice and reasonably good manufacturers of clothing, are terrible card players. It also occurs to me that my parents are so worried that I will catch the vapors walking the mean winter streets of Philadelphia that they felt it necessary to get me not one, not two, but THREE coats for Christmas this year.

I then realize, after examination of the discarded wrapping paper and noticing the truly wretched wrapping job done on the boxes that my father actually got all three, so Inadvertent Parental Gift Duplication Theory does not apply here.

Funny old world sometimes, ain't it?

There were other gifts as well, all wonderful, but none frankly as funny as three coats.

Then the Eagles absolutely beat the living shit out of the Cowboys, which is about as nice a close to a Christmas as one could ask.

And HERE'S something of interest to at least two or three people. Tonight and tonight only I am honored - HONORED, I say - to be filling in for Quizo Legend Johnny Goodtimes whilst he vacations. I'll be taking over trivia duties at O'Neals (2nd and South) at 8 and The Bard's (20th and Walnut) at 10. I've never done two Quizos in one night, so this should be interesting, inasmuch as me going crazy would probably be something worth watching for sheer entertainment value.

If I don't see you tonight (or somewhere else along the line) everyone have a good New Year's weekend. We're off again Monday, so I'll see everyone in two weeks at the Dark Horse. Drive safe, be good, avoid evil.

JLK

Your Futher Deckage of the Halls Quizo Super-Update

Did I mention that I would have actual Christmas presents to give out tonight? I haven't decided on actual criteria as to who will receive them yet (not least because at this moment they number precisely two), but they will be there, to be sure.

Because - say it with me - I'm a giver.

JLK

Your "Deck The Halls... oh, God DAMMIT!" Quizo Update

Quizo - and here I mean the actual physical sheets of paper which I carry around with me on Monday nights - is obviously generated on a computer. Now over the almost 2 years we've been doing this it's been generated on a number of different computers, but I have tried to be conscientious about keeping everything in one place in the end, between home PCs and work PCs and work laptops and the office in the DH and whatnot. That's one of those things that GMail is great at.

When I had to return my old work laptop this summer I made certain that I got all the files I'd created on it that were mine - stuff for the theatre, personal things, and Quizos - into a zipfile which I then sent myself. This was back in... what was it? July? July.

Flash forward, if you will, to last week, and me telling everyone that tonight would be the return of Special Holiday Quizo. Everyone seemed pleased to hear that. Believe me when I tell you that none of you were as pleased as I was, since doing Special Holiday Quizo meant I could simply re-use last year's well-received Holiday edition, and the thought of Monday when I don't have to race home at the speed of light and spend my precious few hours of free time banging out trivia questions makes me positively giddy.

(Note that last year's Holiday Edition was won by Delicious Bass, who are now in something of a rebuilding phase. One of their team members moved out of town almost immediately after seeing the last play I produced. For a little while I thought I had offended him so badly - what with the murder of the baby and all - that I'd driven him away. Turns out he just got a new job. But if he had actually been shocked at killing ONE baby imagine what he'd think of Medea, opening January 11 at Second Stage, 2030 Sansom, tickets $20.)

(I nominate that for Best-Yet-Most-Circuitous Medea reference ever. Can I cook or can't I?)

So anyway, this morning I wake up, and before I go to work I sit down to find the Christmas Quizo amongst my many files and see if I had to update any of the questions.

Hmm... it doesn't seem to be here. That's odd. Oh well - when I get to work I'll go through GMail and find the copy of it there.

At work - browsing GMail - not there.

I am starting to seriously worry that I may have to do actual work at some point today.

I start going through every place I have so much as shed a digital skin cell in the last year. Home computer - nothing. Remote storage sites - nothing. Old e-mails, several accounts worth - nothing.

I have Quizos for every week for the last year and a half EXCEPT the Christmas edition.

It's the only one I don't have a copy of any more.

The ONLY ONE.

The odds against this happening are so high as to be mathematically disharmonious. I check everywhere again in the desperate hope that I have made a mistake, which in and of itself is exceedingly unlikely.

It's not anywhere.

I have to make it all over again.

Merry fucking Christmas.

JLK