Christmas Eve in Washington

It is time to write a Christmas post.  And I was not really sure what to do.  But then, I thought that, after blogging about my favorite pop-rock Christmas songs last year, I should take on a different song this year.  

That song is “Christmas Eve in Washington” by Maura Sullivan.  (You can read about the song’s origin here.)

I’m not saying that it’s the world’s greatest song (and from a music production standpoint, the vocals could use some serious de-essing), but for many years it was an inescapable part of the Christmas season here.  Over the last decade, though, the song has largely vanished from local popular culture.  

Nitpicking the lyrics of Christmas songs is probably not something that anyone wants to read (although I have done it before), but there is an inconsistency that I have noticed.

The song begins with the line:

It’s snowing tonight in the Blue Ridge

And that line always won my respect, because it tacitly acknowledges that the chance of snow on Christmas in the immediate Washington area is nearly nil.  The only hope for a white Christmas might be found thirty-five miles away in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  And therefore I got the impression that the song was written by some who really knows what Christmas Eve in Washington is like.  

But, later in the song, there comes a contradiction:

Snowmen peak in through the windows

Snowmen can’t peak in through the windows, because there is virtually no chance of snow on Christmas, and not much chance of snow at any other time, for that matter. 

Anyway, it’s something to keep in mind during the mirthful merriment of the season, or whatever.

It’s Landmark

I may have to revise my movie-watching criteria (as related in the previous post) to the following:

*Star Wars

*Lord of the Rings

*based on someone whom I once knew 

*featuring a mall which I once knew

The trailer for next year’s Wonder Woman 1984 is out.  Some scenes for the movie were filmed at Landmark Mall in western Alexandria.  The mall can be seen in the trailer between 0:33 and 0:47. 

Landmark was the local mall from my childhood onward, and the mall that I knew best.  It wasn’t the fun mall for hanging out when I was a teenager; that honor would probably have gone to Springfield Mall.  But Landmark was, for many decades, a dependable place to buy socks.

Wonder Woman 1984 uses Landmark as a typical shopping mall of the Eighties, but, ironically, what one sees in the movie is not how Landmark looked in 1984.  Landmark was originally an open-air mall; it underwent renovations in the late Eighties and reopened as en enclosed mall in 1990.  

Landmark was available for filming because it is the stereotypically dying modern mall; for the last few years it has been entirely unoccupied except for an anemic Sears.  The mall is slated to be torn down and turned into a mixed-use retail and residential development. 

But we’ll always have Wonder Woman 1984.  

Sartorial Cats

Midnight

And the kitties are sleeping

Downstairs by the furnace

While birdies are cheeping

—David Letterman, back when he was funny

The movie Cats, based on the long-running musical of the same name, is out now.  Realistically, there is no chance of me seeing this movie.  I am not a fan of musical theater.  And I’m not really all that fond of cats either.  Indeed, over the last twenty years I have, for the most part, only seen movies which fulfill one of the following criteria:

*Star Wars

*Lord of the Rings

*based on someone whom I once knew 

However, like most people with internet access, I have been watching the trailers for Cats to marvel at how bizarre they are.  There are many oddities on which to comment, but the question that stands out for me is why some of the cats wear clothes, and others don’t.  Obviously, cats don’t wear clothes in the real world.  I have never come across a cat smartly dressed in a three-piece suit.  Evidently, for the cats of Cats, clothing is not obligatory, as it is in human society.  What factors, then, determine whether a cat is clothed? Does the clothing serve some practical function?  Or is it an indicator of social status?  Or is it simply a fashion choice?

And, ultimately, I don’t really care about any of it.  And so, you might ask, why am I writing this?  I want to boost my total number of blog posts for 2019 while I still have the chance, and it is a lot easier to write about irrelevant pop-culture items like this than about anything more substantial.  

The Mega-Holiday

Back in November, in one of my occasional attempts at being funny, I suggested a technique for keeping the spirit of Halloween alive after the day was over.  In reality, on Thanksgiving I was walking around and noticed that, even at that point, there were still a few houses with Halloween decorations (one of which was a spider “skeleton”).  And then that night there were television specials featuring Christmas music, and the next day everyone started putting up Christmas decorations.  

This has set me to wondering if, in the same way that everything between Boston and Richmond has been merging into a megalopolis over the last several decades, everything from Halloween to New Year’s Day might merge into one mega-holiday that runs continuously from early October into early January.

One hundred days of a skeleton in a Santa suit serving us turkey . . . 

Roy Larsum

I woke up this morning with two words lodged in my head: roy larsum.  I didn’t know what they meant, but I knew exactly how to spell them.  They sounded like a name—Roy Larsum, but then, maybe they weren’t a name. 

Something like this happens to me every so often.  I’ll wake up with some sort of random phrase in my head.  And I’ll feel the need to research the phrase.  And nothing will come of it.  

But still, I felt the need to research my new mystery phrase, so I went to Google.  

Roy larsum without quotations marks returned a bunch of hits for people named Roy Larson.

Roy larsum with quotation marks returned no hits at all.  

I will note, though, that now that I have written this blog post, should anyone be looking for roy larsum, that anyone will get one hit.   

Linear Clouds

Linear clouds—that sounds like a jazz album.

A Fun Post-Halloween Activity

Halloween is eleven days behind us.  Yet, while walking around yesterday, I saw that many people still had their porch pumpkins.  Perhaps Halloween has become such an important holiday that we want to extend the Halloween spirit into the first weeks of November, in the same way in which we wish to extend the spirit of Christmas through the end of December.  

Thus, I am providing step-by-step instructions for a fun activity by which one can keep a little bit of that special Halloween magic alive.

1. Assemble a group of a dozen or more of your friends.

2. Provide each member of the group with a dark, hooded robe which will fully obscure his identity.

3. Provide each member of the group with a battery-powered lantern, ideally one with a design reminiscent of archaic candle- or oil-based lanterns.  (Bonus points are awarded if you refer to your lanterns as “lanthorns”.)  

4. Shortly before midnight, congregate in an uninhabited area such as a cemetery or woodland.  Don your robes and activate your lanterns.

5. Emerge from the uninhabited area and walk silently in single file down the sidewalk, holding your lanterns in front of you.  

6. Select a house which is clearly occupied, but whose occupants no one in your group knows.

7. If possible, fully surround the house, or, if prevented from doing so by fences or other obstacles, form a semi-circle in the front yard.  

8. Begin chanting in deep and ominous tones, preferably in Latin.  

9. When the homeowner emerges to question or challenge your group, do not acknowledge him in any way except by increasing the volume of your chanting and the menace of your intonation . . . 

Okay, on second thought maybe it’s better to put Halloween behind us and start looking ahead to Thanksgiving.

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 10: The Owl

I finish this year’s set of Halloween skeleton posts with the owl (available for $19.49 at Target), which contains a unique and compelling mix of mistakes.  

As with other fake bird skeletons, this one has bones where the tail and wing feathers should be.   

And the sternum (which connects the ribs at the front of the body) looks much like the sternum of a human being, and not at all like the deeply-keeled avian sternum.  

But the biggest issue is the presence of ears.  Certain kinds of owls do have tufts of feathers on top of their heads which superficially resemble ears, but these tufts are not anatomically associated with the internal ear, and are not involved with the sense of hearing.  And even if owls did have external ears in the manner of mammals, mammalian external ears are cartilaginous, and not part of the bony structure of the skull, a mistake common to fake Halloween skeletons of various mammals.  Thus we see a compounded double error of confusing feather tufts with mammalian ears, and presenting mammalian ears as bony projections from the skull.

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 9: Snakes

It is interesting to note that all tetrapods (the land vertebrates, i. e. amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) have essentially the same skeleton.  The bones vary in size and shape between species, but whether it’s a salamander, an armadillo, or a condor, the basic skeletal elements are mostly the same.  The biggest potential variation is that some elements can be lost due to evolution.  Snakes (which are, evolutionarily speaking, a highly successful group of legless lizards) are an extreme case, lacking almost everything except the skull and the vertebrae and associated ribs.  (There is also a hyoid bone and, in a few species, tiny remnant hind limbs.)

There are numerous plastic snake skeletons available.  

This one (available at Amazon for $14.94) lacks ribs entirely.  

This other one (available at Target for $12.60) has ribs, although they are not exactly realistic.  

In both of the above cases, the skull is much too massive and lizard-like, unlike the highly specialized, and generally weird, skulls of actual snakes.  

There is even this two-headed skeleton, which was once available at Spirit Halloween.  It suffers the previously observed problems of lacking ribs and having an unsnakish skull.  But two-headedness is indeed a real phenomenon in snakes and other reptiles.  It has been known to occur in the squamates (the lizard and snake group), the turtles, and even Hyphalosaurus, a Cretaceous choristoderan, but as far as I know there are no examples from the archosaurs (crocodilians, pterosaurs, dinosaurs, and birds).

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 8: The Octopus

I have addressed the matter of Halloween skeletons for invertebrates before with a post about a spider “skeleton” in 2017.  (There is also a scorpion “skeleton” available.)  But I felt that I had to take note of this octopus “skeleton” (available for $14.99 at Spirit Halloween), because it takes the fake invertebrate skeleton concept to new heights of ridiculousness.  A spider at least has a rigid exoskeleton, which might lead someone to think that it has a bony internal skeleton.  But doesn’t pretty much everyone know that an octopus has no virtually hard parts?

Introducing a New Year of Halloween Skeletons

The Halloween season is here again, the time of year when it feels as if there should be some cool adventure to be had.  I don’t know exactly what it would be.  A full zombie apocalypse might be too much to ask, but something should happen.  And of course it never does.   

Also it is the spooky time of year when the days are overtaken by darkness, and I am again inspired to undertake my unrealized dream of writing fiction, particularly some sort of fantastical horror.  And sometimes I’ll get an idea, or even start to write something, but it never works out, because I lack storytelling ability.      

And again I find myself critiquing the scientific accuracy of fake animal skeletons used as Halloween decorations.  On would think that after two years and seven installments, I would run out of material.  But I keep finding more (mostly) wonky skeletons.  Using fake skeletons, both human and animal, in Halloween decorating has become a huge trend; indeed, in 2017, the year in which I started this series, the Wall Street Journal had an article on the popularity of such decorative skeletons. 

Here are links for the series from the past two years:

The Home Depot Tyrannosaurus

The Raven

Assorted Mammals

The, Um, Spider

The Home Depot Triceratops

The Bat

Frogs

The Graveyard of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons (not technically part of the series, but related)

Ric Ocasek

Rick Ocasek, the leader of one of my favorite bands, the Cars, died in September.

My time writing this blog has seen the deaths of members of some of my favorite bands, specifically Ray Manzarek, Keith Emerson, and Greg Lake, as well as of others who, though not among my absolute favorites, were still immensely talented musicians whose work I enjoyed, like Tom Petty and David Bowie.  I haven’t blogged about any rock star deaths (with the exception of a brief mention of Clarence Clemons), but I felt that I had to blog on Ocasek because the Cars were a band for whom the height of their success aligned significantly with own life; Heartbeat City was one of the first albums (if not the first album) that I ever bought, back when albums came in the form of cassette tapes.  

The Cars were kind of a classic rock band, and kind of an alternative band.  And some people even see them  as something of a punk band, or at least punk-adjacent, but to me they sound more like an art rock band that played only shorter songs.  And whatever they were, they had lots of Top 40 songs in the Eighties, which shows how much better popular music in the Eighties was than popular music today, because today a band that awesome (if one still existed) couldn’t get within a mile of the Top 40.  

*        *        *        *        *        *        *

Coincidentally, just prior to Ocasek’s death, I was considering writing a humorous blog post about giving up on the modern world entirely, and going “Full Generation X”.  

(I don’t know what particular aspect of modern life would spur me to abandon it, but I suspect that it might be K-pop, which, for those who don’t know, is an entertainment phenomenon in which a group of twenty to thirty 14-year-old Asian Michael Jackson impersonators performs synchronized dance moves.) 

Once I went Full Generation X, my personality would undergo profound changes, including:

*I would speak only in quotes from the movie Heathers.  

*My memory would start to get fuzzy around the last year of Seinfeld, and would end entirely following the final season of Friends.

*Whatever cognitive processes that had once occurred in my brain would be replaced completely by Cars songs.

(Tele)Visions of the Past

[I started this post in March or April, and did not finish it until October, which shows that I am no good at getting things done on time, but most people reading probably already know that.]

March was a bad month for television stars relevant to my generation, the dreaded (or, perhaps more accurately, largely ignored) Generation X. 

First came the death of Luke Perry. He played Dylan on Beverly Hills, 90210, which was inescapable for people my age.  (It was the hot teen show when I was a teenager.)

Beverly Hills, 90210 began the trend of teen soap operas, and ever since then there has been at least one teen soap on the air (Dawson’s Creek, The O.C., Gossip Girl, etc.).  Perry had a role on the latest teen soap, Riverdale (the Spock-with-a-beard version of Archie Comics), bringing his career, and in some ways the teen soap genre itself, full circle.  

Then we learned that Jan Michael-Vincent had died.  (He had actually died in February, but it wasn’t publicly reported until March.)  He played Stringfellow Hawke, the lead character on Airwolf.  Airwolf was a show about a heavily-armed combat helicopter from the time when helicopters abounded on prime time television  (Airwolf, Blue Thunder, Magnum, P.I., Riptide . . . ).  And the helicopters were part of a larger prime time television trend of fistfights, car chases, and explosions that made the Eighties a great time to be a ten-year-old boy.

Finally there was the enormous college admissions scandal, which implicated, among many others, Lori Loughlin, who played Aunt Becky on Full House.  

Full House was an intensely stupid show, but I watched it, because in those days I would watch almost anything. (Nobody had the internet yet.) 

If anything good is to come from this scandal, it is that Lori Loughlin might be forced, under oath, in a court of law, to explain whatever happened to predictability, the milkman, the paperboy, evening TV. 

At this point I would like to write a humorous courtroom dialogue between Lori Loughlin and a prosecuting attorney, filled with lots of snarky references to Full House.  But I can only really remember three concrete things about the show:

1.  Uncle Jesse played drums with the Beach Boys.

2.  Uncle Joey had some sort of Ranger Woodchuck puppet.

3.  Someone named Kimmy Gibbler existed.  

About That Last Post . . .

A minimal amount of internet searching reveals that there is actually a huge amount of discussion on the similarities between Taylor Swift’s “Lover” and Mazzy Star’s “Fade into You”—like this and this and this and this and this and this and this.

  And that makes my previous post feel entirely redundant and pointless.  But it’s my own fault for failing to keep up with the current state of Taylor Swift scholarship.

Taylor and Mazzy

Does anyone else think that the new Taylor Swift single (“Lover”) sounds like a lamer version of the Mazzy Star song “Fade into You”?

(And yes, I could google to find out if anyone else does think that, but I’m too lazy.)

For the lawyers out there, I will note that I am not alleging actual plagiarism, just noting similarities between the two songs in terms of the 3/4 time signature, the use of piano, and the overall tone of the vocals.  

Heron Spearfishing

Here we see a Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) holding what I think is a Grass Carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella) in a tributary of the Potomac.  Close examination reveals that the heron has not bitten the fish, but rather has apparently speared it.  The heron walked around with the fish like this for a few minutes, presumably waiting for it to die, then dropped it back into the water to eat it.

I have to wonder if there have been any scientific studies of this type of spearfishing by birds.  (I imagine that there have been although I don’t know the scientific literature well enough to say.)  I recall that it was was once proposed, and then dropped, as a potential feeding behavior for certain types of long-jawed pterosaurs (although I can’t find a link for this).

Mockingbird on Razor Wire

I have had a Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) picture on the blog before, but this bird ups the ante by perching on razor wire.

I imagine that, since Mockingbirds prefer a more open habitat than other songbirds, Mockingbirds are more likely to be seen silhouetted against the open sky, creating opportunities for striking photos. 

  

Colleges That Need Renaming

In my work, I am constantly paying attention to the names of institutions of higher learning.  Over the years I have concluded that there are certain colleges whose names aren’t quite right, and would benefit from some readjustment:

*Denison University should rename itself Denisovan University, in honor of our lost hominid cousins, the Denisovans. 

*The College of Wooster should rename itself the College of Woofter, in honor of a guy with whom I went to high school. 

*Purdue University should rename itself Perdue University, for, well, chicken reasons.  (And isn’t that what most people think already?)

*Baylor University should rename itself Balrog University, in honor of the evil creature from The Lord of the Rings.  Furthermore, “Baylor” sounds like “baleful”, and a balrog is nothing if not baleful.  Indeed, “baleful” is one of those early Dungeons & Dragons-type words, like “ilk” and “denizen”, calling to mind the game’s very early days, when the name “balrog” was given to a Dungeons & Dragons monster, before it had to be renamed for copyright reasons.  

it is even rumored that if you say “baleful Balrog” five times, the ghost of E. Gary Gygax will appear to award you 100,000 experience points, and/or exile you to the Slaad-Infested realm of Limbo.

First Impression Part Two

It dawns on me that the premise of my last post, that one never gets a second chance to make a first impression, is contradicted by the title of the song “Karn Evil #9: 1st Impression—Part 2”.

  Despite having been a fan of ELP for decades, I did not realize until I researched this blog post that the full name of the band is officially spelled out using an ampersand, as “Emerson, Lake & Palmer”.

Should Emerson, Lake & Palmer have used a serial comma?

Is a serial comma even possible with an ampersand?

Words of Wisdom IV

You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

You do, however, get a first chance to make a second impression. 

Daytime Moon

Weeks ago I took this picture on one of the occasions when the moon is visible during the day.

Upon zooming, one can see the high level of detail that can be obtained with modern cameras, with not only maria but individual craters clearly visible in the picture.

We constantly hear in the media about supermoons, the phenomenon in which the moon appears slightly (though not, in my experience, noticeably) larger than normal.  And sometimes we hear about the various seasonally-named full moons, like the Pink Moon.  But we never hear about the daytime moon, which to me is much stranger.  

When I see the moon suspended in the daytime sky, I feel as if I am on some alien planet where I don’t belong. 

But then, I usually feel like that anyway.  

The Local Noodle Restaurant

Tonight I happened to walk by the local noodle restaurant.  It was filled with teenagers.  When I was that age, my peers didn’t go to noodle restaurants.  When I was that age, though, I don’t think that noodle restaurants existed.  I imagine that for the teen demographic a noodle restaurant fulfills the two major requirements, which are that it is cheap, and that it gives them an opportunity to get away from their parents.

Whenever I see a group of young people, I can’t help thinking that I’m still one of them, or at least not far enough away from that time that I couldn’t fit in with them.  I want to approach and address them thus: “Greetings, teenagers!  I am one of you!  I belong among you!  Guns N’ Roses rocks!!  I can’t wait to watch Dana Carvey and Mike Myers on Saturday Night Live tonight!!  I have a computer that I use for word processing and video games, because those are the only possible uses for a personal computer!!  My phone is hooked into a wall!!!”

And then I come to my senses and remember that I am well over 800 years old.  Now I’m just left sitting here, wondering what happened to all that time.  And I guess that everyone is left just sitting here, wondering what happened to all that time, unless you’re one of the teenagers sitting in the noodle restaurant eating noodles.  

The Great Unknowns

Another month has passed, and I am still not in a blogging mood, and still more in a hibernation mood.  

To give me a post for the month I’m putting up two unfocused pictures that I discovered among my recently taken digital photographs.  I don’t know what I was trying to take a picture of in either case, and I suspect that I may have taken both by accident. 

I would be interested to know, however, what that brown object in the center of the first shot is.

January 2019

I suppose that it’s time to put something up in order to keep up my one-post-per-month rule.  I haven’t felt like blogging.  Maybe I’m still tired from all the blogging that I did in the fall.  And, at this point in the year, shouldn’t we all be hibernating?

It seems like only a few weeks ago when I was writing about how strange it was to be starting 2018.  Now 2018 is gone, and so is 1/12 of 2019.  

Anyway, here’s a picture from a few weeks ago.  It’s rare that I take a picture where the world is yellow and orange.  I find that mostly the world is nothing but grey and blue.