Year: 2013

Tim Murphy asks, “If President Barack Obama wanted to take down Santa Claus, how would he do it?”:

Targeting Santa while he’s on his rounds sounds good in theory. NORAD already purports to track Santa’s progress on its website, owing to a typo in a 1955 Sears advertisement that accidentally broadcasted a secret government phone line to the general public. And the NSA is well-equipped to spy on Santa’s kingdom. Arctic Fiber, a Canadian company, is laying a new fiber-optic cable underneath the North Pole that will link Tokyo and London, to get a leg up on high-frequency stock market trading, but it could also give the US government’s super-secret (until recently) data-collection programs the lowdown on what’s going on at the workshop.

But the United States has never successfully shot down a ballistic missile, which doesn’t inspire confidence in its chances at taking down Santa, whose packed schedule requires him to travel at pace somewhere between ridiculous and ludicrous speed. Norwegian physicist Knut Jørgen Røed Oedegaar argues that Claus is equipped with an ion shield, which prevents him from being torn apart by gravitational forces and protects him from being incinerated (by fireplaces, atmospheric reentry, or missiles). Also, he travels between dimensions.

From “Clearances” by Seamus Heaney:

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives —
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

Please consider supporting the work of the Poetry Society of America here.

(From Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 © 1998 by Seamus Heaney. Used by kind permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)

Unlike Kyle, Marc Tracy is just fine with being Jewish on Christmas:

December 25 is one of my favorite days of the year. I don’t have to work. I eat a fun ethnic meal (the cliché is true: It’s sometimes Chinese). I see a movie. And I celebrate my own heritage: Being Jewish on Christmas is like having one’s Jewishness traced in bright, red-and-green ink.

Part of my love for Christmas is based on the same aesthetics that everyone else likes about the holiday. The seasonal/pagan elements are undeniably beguiling: I cherish the culmination of fall, the smell of pine, and the snow; and even I cannot help but associate them with Christmas. I love the songs—many of which, anyway, were composed by Jews. I enjoy glad tidings as much as the next person, whatever their theological origin. On Christmas Day, the streets are pretty, and empty, and when I find myself in the suburbs, parking is a breeze. (Closed businesses are only a minor inconvenience, I’ve found, and anyway Starbucks tend to be open until 4 p.m.)

Christmas is, in other words, a fête for the Jews, too.

The Moore Award is given “for divisive, bitter and intemperate left-wing rhetoric.” Health And Wellness Publisher Maria Rodale, with 45.3% of the vote, is currently ahead for this remark:

Yes, Syria has undoubtedly used chemical weapons on its own people. Maybe it was the government; maybe it was the opposition; maybe you [President Obama] know for sure. But here’s what I know for sure: We are no better. We have been using chemical weapons on our own children – and ourselves – for decades, the chemical weapons we use in agriculture to win the war on pests, weeds, and the false need for ever greater yields. While the effects of these “legal” chemical weapons might not be immediate and direct, they are no less deadly. … We’ve been trying to tell you for years that chemical companies like Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, DuPont, Bayer Crops Sciences, and others are poisoning our children and our environment with your support and even, it seems, your encouragement. Just because their bodies aren’t lined up wrapped in sheets on the front pages of the newspapers around the world doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Less than three points behind, is Mike Malloy, who was nominated for this:

This guy, this Limbaugh, this is one of the most vile human beings ever to live! If Limbaugh had the power, he would open gas chambers! If Limbaugh had the power, he would line people up against the wall and execute them! If Limbaugh had the power, he would destroy children because he can’t have any! The only thing he sees in children is sex partners! This is a sick, degenerate, evil man!

Who is more intemperate? You decide! To vote for the other awards, use the links below.

Click here to vote for the 2013 Malkin Award!

Click here to vote for the 2013 Dick Morris Award!

Click here to vote for the 2013 Poseur Alert!

Click here to vote for the 2013 Yglesias Award!

Click here to vote for the 2013 Hewitt Award!

Click here to vote for the 2013 Hathos Alert!

Click here to vote for the Chart Of The Year!

Click here to vote for the Cool Ad Of The Year!

Click here to vote for the Face Of The Year!

Click here to vote for the Mental Health Break Of The Year!

Click here to vote for the Window View Of The Year!

Marc Herman examines research on “re-gifting”:

[Researchers at Harvard and Stanford] focused a series of studies on “re-gifting,” or passing gifts you have received but don’t want, on to people to whom you should give a gift but can’t seem to think of anything for. Curiously, the study found that re-gifting bothered the people doing it more than it did the people who had provided the troublesome gift in the first place. “Givers believed that the act of gift-giving passed title to the gift on to receivers, such that receivers were free to decide what to do with the gift,” they wrote. “In contrast, receivers believed that givers retained some say in how their gifts were used.” …

The research focused much of its attention on “entitlement,” specifically the sense that one has control, to greater and lesser extents, over the gift. This in turn appeared to be a function of intimacy both between the gifter and giftee, and the implied intimacy of the gift itself. The researchers, who appear to be really fun people, picked various hypothetical gifts, including good ones—an iPod shuffle!—and not-so-good ones, like “Mandy Moore DVDs.” (Question: What if the iPod had Mandy Moore songs on it? This was not explored.) A big discovery revealed that re-gifting changes significantly if the gift is crafty. The sweater with a duck on it that your mom knitted for you? You’re keeping that, sorry.

When Dickens visited Massachusetts in 1842, he paid a visit to the Lowell textile mill, whose workers – and their monthly literary journal, The Lowell Offering – made quite an impression on him. Recently, literary scholars have suggested that Dickens may have even borrowed from journal for his classic “A Christmas Carol,” published 18 months after his visit:

The real emotional power of “A Christmas Carol,” and the reason we return to it year after year, is its message of redemption: in a single night, Scrooge turns his life around. Here, too, The Lowell Offering offered a precedent. In the essay “Memory and Hope,” written by a mill girl using the pen name Ellen, the narrator is visited by two spirits who offer competing visions of how she could live her life. After they’ve gone, the narrator promises to “never again covet the garland of fame,” but instead to “make myself more useful to my fellow creatures.” Scrooge makes a similarly triumphal statement at the end of “A Christmas Carol,” when he vows to become “as good a friend, as good a master, as good a man, as the old city knew.”

Despite the correspondences, not everyone agrees it’s an airtight case. A recent article about the claim on the Boston University website triggered a conversation on Dickns-L, an internet discussion board popular with Dickens scholars. One commenter posted that the inspiration for “A Christmas Carol” was simply the universally known story of Lazarus, the biblical figure raised from the dead. Another wrote that the seeds of “A Christmas Carol” could be found closer by, in a brief story inserted into “The Pickwick Papers,” which Dickens had written six years before he visited Lowell, and which the mill girls may well have read. … [Boston University professor Natalie] McKnight agrees that story played into “A Christmas Carol,” but says The Lowell Offering much more closely anticipates its tone, structure, and theme.

(Video: a reformed Scrooge, played by Michael Caine, sings in The Muppet Christmas Carol)

Erica R. Hendry tells the story of how the poinsettia – named for the US Ambassador, Joel Roberts Poinsett, who first brought the plant stateside in the 1830s – was popularized as a Christmas flower by the “unheralded Ecke family [which] has more than 500 U.S. plant patents, nearly one-fifth of them for poinsettias”:

The earliest poinsettias were sold by individual florists and merchants—including the patriarch of the family, Albert Ecke, a German immigrant—and usually as single-cut stems instead of rooted in pots. But they were hardly durable; most would last two or three days, at best. The Eckes helped transition poinsettias from ephemeral flowers to potted plants, created new shapes and introduced new colors (from shades of white and yellow to those that have names, “ice punch,” “pink peppermint” and “strawberries and cream” among them). They’re vastly different from the poinsettias Americans knew a century ago, which were actually quite “scraggly,” says Paul Ecke III, who sold the Ecke Family Ranch in 2012. …

By nature, poinsettias are at their best between November and January, which aligns perfectly with the Christian advent season. For that reason, Paul Sr. started to market the plants as “Christmas flowers.”

“They didn’t really have a holiday to go with them,” Ecke said, as lilies, for instance, are associated with Easter. The name stuck and “that was really his claim to fame,” Ecke said, as the family would go on to push poinsettias across the country; in later years, the family provided poinsettias to the White House and to a number of magazines and television shows (including The Tonight Show).

(Photo of poinsettia “tree” by Alby Headrick)