perfidy

It's like clockwork.

Every year, right along with the weepy encomiums to some Jewish schmoe who got nailed up for trying to get people to be nice to each other and the kitchy, dippy foolishness that drips from every tree, building, and television in these United States, come the nattering nabobs of negativity.

"Christmas is too religious!" "It's too secular!" It's too commercial!" "It's unfair to atheists!" It's unfair to people without families!" "It's unfair to me!"

Any more it's really just part of the season. Suicides rise. Families split. Hospitals fill up with busted legs, busted lips, and bitter husbands full of spite and too much eggnog. In fact, even in years where the pundits don't crow about some fatuous "War on Christmas," its almost fashionable to talk the season down like we're all super cool teenagers trying to distance ourselves from our oh-so-humiliating parents.

Personally I mostly dig Christmas. Sure, I don't so much love the six-week shopping season and all the glitter and chintz, but I guess other people do so live and let live is what I say. But do I love spending time with my family, opening mystery boxes fulla loot, and gorging myself on turkey, cookies, and wine. C'mon! That's a good time!

Nevertheless I am in the habit of being deeply negative about Christmas music. In general, I hate it. Aside from a few beautiful classics (mostly hymns) Christmas music as a genre is the cloying and nasty auditory cousin of cat pee, of puke and disinfectant, of unwashed old ladies wearing far too much perfume crammed into a tiny hot room. Worse yet, I can't just block it out. My mind doesn't work that way. If it's playing, I'm listening, and if I'm listening, I'm suffering a little. Poor me, right?

It's easy for me to get worked up about this; I just ride in on the surf of everyone else's bitterness. But even as I can get carried away in paroxysms of fury at "Little Drummer Boy" and techno editions of "Sleigh Ride," I think it is also worth remembering (for me and you alike) that Christmas means more things than fatty rum drinks, crammed full malls and caterwauled carols. You've got to find the good and try to ignore the bad.

In his faux-memoir Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor writes about the town's Catholic priest, Father Emil, who foregoes a second finger of brandy on Christmas eve because

[e]ven on Christmas Eve, one finger is the correct portion, by him, and it's a miserable mistake to think that two would be twice as good, and three even better, or putting both hands around the bottle and climbing into it. That's no Christmas. The true Christmas bathes every little thing in light and makes one cookie a token, one candle, one simple pageant more wonderful than anything seen on stage or screen.

Christmas is indeed more special the more simple things are kept. If you're a Christian, better to focus on the simple beauty of Jesus' life work, and celebrate the joys of family and friends. If you're not, it is a season to find solace in friends or family, or the simple pleasures of solitary contemplation and silly Santa headgear.

This all comes to mind because a few weeks ago there crossed my desk a modest and gentle-hearted Christmas music compilation that I actually enjoy, curated by maverick filmmaker John Waters. Waters' films are like a grotesque inverse of Keillor's pretty small-town jewel boxes. Of course, where Keillor is likely to serve the Lundbjergs a plate of tuna hotdish in that slow tweed voice of his, Waters is more likely to serve Divine a dogshit sandwich in a nasal Baltimore honk. Still, at the core of their best works is a sweetness that makes them kindred souls.

A John Waters Christmas (which came out in 2004) is a slam-dunk collection of Christmas music that fully embraces the cheesy, kitschy side as well as the sour grudging side of the holiday, and spikes both with a bracing dose of the bizarre.

Given that it is John Waters it's a no brainer that he would have included something from sweet-natured freakshow Tiny Tim, in this case "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Tiny Tim's Disney counterparts The Chipmunks show up too, with a loopy version of "Sleigh Ride" that hammers the irritating little tune into your head with brio.

Even better than these already high points of kidding-or-not Christmasania are the less well known selections. Waters has managed to track down a rare copy of the legendary "Santa Claus is a Black Man" by Teddy Vann, and he includes it as the capper on a wide-ranging set of outsider Christmas music ranging from the high camp of the sad-orphan ballad "Happy Birthday Jesus (A Child's Prayer)" and treacly story "Little Mary Christmas" to the bitter empty-wallet rant of "Here Comes Fatty Claus" (with the immortal chorus "Here comes fatty with his sack of shit"). These are songs you can't believe were ever recorded, much less released to the public. Were the artists serious? Could they possibly have been serious? If so, what were they thinking?

However, Waters didn't put this together to mock Christmas with chintzy foolishness but to celebrate the myriad ways people approach Christmas, positive and negative. Thus in the midst of all the demented novelty sing-alongs and syrupy dying-orphan songs there is time for real beauty. "First Snowfall," a fuzzy winter instrumental by the Chicago hipster band The Coctails, is a gorgeous meditation full of mellow vibraphone and Theremin. This quiet piece is complemented by the classic doo-wop of "Christmas Time is Here" by Stormy Weather and the Motown sound of "I Wish You A Merry Christmas" by Big Dee Irwin and Little Eva. All three are high-quality and perfectly serious well wishes for the season. Moreover, let's be frank. Despite his bizarre voice and appearance Tiny Tim wasn't putting us on, and his rendition of "Rudolph" is as sweet and true as can be.

This is the key. No matter how outrageous Waters' films may sometimes be, they retain an innocence at their heart that disarms all the layers of winking irony that viewers lay on top.

If he had been joking the joke would have fallen flat. But he's not, and A John Waters Christmas ends up a surprisingly fine collection of Christmas novelties.

With his Baltimore charm, his little mustache, and his sly smirky face, Waters is the master of the tacky. Yet he truly loves tackiness for the modest sincerity at its core. Like his movies, A John Waters Christmas sums up all the varied sides of the Christmas season from the bitter to the lovely (not so much with the Jesus-y, but plenty of folks have that covered already) with a gentle winsome cheeriness.

This collection deserves to be on the shelf of anyone with a sweet-cynical bent and a penchant for the weird. This will be in my holiday rotation for years and years to come.

(This post also appears at blogcritics.org.)

It actually causes me physical pain to write the words down in electrons and photons, since I am a godless liberal from Massachusetts, but.... "Merry Christmas" to all the Ministry's readers. I surely hate our freedom almost as much as I hate our American values. And the baby Jesus. But Merry Christmas to all! (It burns! Oh, the burning!)

(Feh.)

In keeping with the spirit of the season, and as a special lagniappe to our Buckethead, here is (via BoingBoing), a wonderful page full of images of aerospace-themed New Years greeting cards from the former Soviet Union.

Hawkins posted his now-annual top ten list of worst utterancesfrom the Democratic Underground, and I couldn't help but go look. It's like rubbernecking adn accidents. You know it's not quite right, but you do it anyway. The sampling of quotes is predictably tendentious and irritating. Of course, you could find equal amounts of goofiness (if not bile) at a UFO convention, Evangelist Tent Rally or a Burning Man festival. But this one just tugs at my heart:

3) seabeyond: "i refuse kentuck i just refuse. why do you think the (American) people are so dumb because they have been being dumb down consistantly alst decade especially during bush time. i refuse and tell my children i refuse to allow them to be dumb down. they had better use their brain to follow me. i have high expectation,. i will not feed into the dumbing down of america. i tell my friends, exactly i expect more out of them, i especially tell my older nieces and nephews and their friends, i will not play their dumb down game

no no no"

I'm afraid that unless his or her) fellow gene donor is a damn sight smarter, his kids have little hope but to play the dumb down game.

From our pal the Maximum Leader, we find this apt Christmastime quiz: Just how evil are you? Without any sort of lying or exaggeration, or gaming the quiz to get the answer I wanted, I discover to my shock (but not surprise) that I am

No doubt some will find this knowledge a confirmation of their warped perceptions of reality.

You don't have to buy anything, donate any money, or even think happy thoughts. Just send us links for the upcoming Carnival of Tomorrow. Futuristic, scientific, or even just weird. Seriously. Just send 'em in, and we'll call off the hit teams headed to your house at this very moment.

Via James of Hell in a Handbasket, we find this heartwarming (and braineating) Christmas poem.

The Canadian High Court has declared that group sex clubs are kosher in the Great White North.

"Consensual conduct behind code-locked doors can hardly be supposed to jeopardize a society as vigorous and tolerant as Canadian society," said the opinion of the seven-to-two majority, written by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin.

I guess you'd have to be both if you're a swingin' canuck.

From a while back, Kathy linked to this interesting research from MIT. Apparently, the tin foil helmets believed by paranoics everywhere to block the signals from the government's mind control satellites actually attract the signals, not repel them. The MIT researchers discovered that,

[after testing] several hat designs, there was "a 30 db amplification at 2.6 Ghz and a 20 db amplification at 1.2 Ghz, regardless of the position of the antenna on the cranium."

..."the helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for 'radio location' (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites."

The researchers speculate that the government is behind the rumour that tinfoil hats protect people from invasive radio signals in order to encourage their use and therefore to enhance the effectiveness of their radio control program.

The author of the Register piece pointed out, though,

We're no experts, but the researchers did admit to using Reynolds brand aluminum foil, rather than the classic tin foil, and we wonder if this could have skewed the results. We wonder also if a tinfoil propeller beanie might scatter the signals more effectively than a plain hat, and offer this humble suggestion for the benefit of the paranoiac community until further testing is complete.

Looks like I will have to do some research into a more effective lining for my baseball cap. And my coworkers always wonder why I am never seen without my hat...

If you are in a repressive work environment, interweb-wise, here's a nifty trick from O'Reilly. Rather than use the rather obvious cloaking or anonymizing services, which are often themselves blacklisted by internal proxy servers and firewalls, use google:

The Google Proxy makes use of Google's translation service. Just enter

http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=www.forbiddensite.com

Where "www.forbiddensite.com" stands for the verboten URL. Google will return an English to English translation of the site. Which is to say, the original site. The connection to the bad site is directed first to Google, so the page won't be blocked unless your blacklist includes google.com. Which is unlikely in the extreme. The "langpair" parameter is set in the example above to English and English. You could, for example, set it to fr|fr to read naughty French sites in the original. Or, you could actually translate them. (In which case, the first variable is the original language, the second is the language you wish to translate into.)

Note, however, that this method of ducking blacklists does not hide your IP from the site you visit, as the cloak or anonymizer sites do.

Ted's got a good joke over at Rocket Jones.