2005: Year in Review

We hope everyone had a nice Christmas and looks forward to a Happy New Year.

Instead of wasting a post while most of you remain out of the office, I threw together a “Best of” for 2005 from a post I never used at the end of the summer and planned on putting in the DVD extras for the blog.


Best story: Everybody is getting married and I’m not talking about the celebrity kind. It’s been a great experience over the summer attending weddings and learning several sets of our friends will be joining us next year at the alter. Congratulations and best of luck to everyone.

Worst Story: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Holy cow, is it me or is Cruise getting as nuts as Michael Jackson? Someone really needs to clue him in that a religion created thirty years ago by a person who writes science fiction novels should not be the foundation for people to stop requiring medical assistance. I feel this guy should be hanging out in his parents’ basement wearing his Legend of Zelda t-shirt painting figurines and talking to his Princess Leia life size cardboard cutout instead of having sex with girls half his age and babbling about being a self-proclaimed expert in psychology.


Favorite Film: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As mentioned in my previous review, I thoroughly enjoyed this vision of Tim Burton and cannot praise Johnny Depp enough for his portrayal of the wacky confectioner. I found this to be a film featuring the fun factor from start to finish and look forward to seeing it again. On a side note, I give The 40 Year Old Virgin the nod over Wedding Crashers as the better movie because WC tried to get serious for the last twenty minutes while 40 YOV saved it for the final twenty seconds.

Best TV Shows: How I Met Your Mother(CBS Mondays 8:30), The Office(NBC Tuesdays 9:30), Lost(ABC Wednesdays 9:00), and Veronica Mars(UPN, Wednesdays, 9:00): If you’ve run into me in the past few months the odds are in favor of me boring you with a forty minute presentation on how the sitcom has returned to television. And yes, I do watch Lost and tape Veronica Mars. It’s really bothered me how after the end of Seinfeld and the first five seasons of Friends people try to claim CBS’s dumb dad/hot wife lineup (Bethany’s joke) and NBC’s Will and Grace qualify as good comedy. I apologize if you enjoy this programming, but it’s poorly written and uses laugh tracks to mask bad jokes.

Worst TV Shows: Taradise(Formerly Wild on Tara) and Nick Cannon Presents: Wild ‘N Out. I have already explained how awful the Tara Reid program can be and I am not quite sure why E! recently changed it’s name aside from trying to trick people into thinking they would be watching something else. Once again, this awful theme song really needs to be heard, but please change the channel the second you see raccoon eyed Tara talking about the history of Monte Carlo. As for my second program on the list, it appears someone at MTV decided allowing Nick Cannon to hold a high school talent show every week would make for great television. There’s quite a few people out there who made everyone in their family or fraternity laugh, but if an average person can’t follow 75% of your material than it’s time to go back to making television shows for Nickelodeon.

Best song: Don’t Cha by The Pussycat Dolls. While this song will not(and should not )make an appearance at our wedding I really enjoy the beat along with the catchy chorus. I also feel for the female lead on this song because she clearly has talent, but her first taste of success involves no one knowing her name while performing in her underwear. I hope she doesn’t have some sketchy contract and will be able to have some well-deserved future success on her own.

Worst Song: Hollaback Girl by Gwen Stefani. During our party at the beginning of the summer I downloaded the unedited version of this song and ended up stopping this embarrassing excuse of creativity before it finished. It’s not that I’m morally against swearing, but this performance proves to be totally unnecessary and unacceptable. I find it amusing Stefani decided to protest attending the MTV Video Music awards because they did not ask her to sing live on stage and then proceeded to show up once she realized nobody cared.

Breakthrough Singer: Kelly Clarkson. From American Idol Champion to having men screaming her lyrics in bars without fear of embarrassment. Enough said


Have a safe New Year and we'll see you in 2006

Serving Up Some Holiday Cheer

Friday night, Bethany and I endured an icy walk out for dinner, picked up a bottle of wine, and returned home for a movie date night. We cut the lights, plugged in the tree, and popped in one of the all time classic Christmas films out there: You Got Served.

Now I know what you’re saying. How is a movie starring comedian Steve Harvey and pop group B2K about urban street battle dancing related to the holidays? Basically, the main group led by Elgin and David represents Christmas and how it’s the best kick ass holiday out there. Think of this team as Santa Claus, Rudolph, Frosty, and all the elves dominating all the other holidays because they get everyone all worked up months ahead of time. Plus, they have headspins. The group led by spiky haired Wade would be composed of the Easter Bunny, the Lucky Charms Leprechaun, Mother Nature, Father Time, Cupid, and the Pilgrims. They get their due and have some fantastic rhythm of their own, but the only way they can be as popular at Christmas is by stealing their moves…probably by the Dreidel. I see Steve Harvey as Mrs. Claus who has her allegiance to one of the teams, but in no way wants anything to do with dancing for money and tries to maintain the peace between the two groups. Finally, I see the drug dealer, Emerald, as a metaphor for St. Escobar, the patron saint of cocaine.

So if you’ve seen The Santa Clause or It’s a Wonderful Life one to many times I strongly recommend a hip-hop dance off to keep you in the holiday spirit.

Music For the Season

We’re plum in the middle of the only time of the year with hundreds of songs exclusively dedicated to the season. Some fall into the timeless classic genre while others remain feeble attempts by current artists to see if they can create their own holiday song to be enjoyed for years to come. Recently, certain radio stations started a tradition of only playing Christmas music and while I can appreciate this idea, I also feel the need to turn it off after 30 minutes before needing to blow my brains out.

In December 2002, I set out to develop the ultimate Christmas mix and there are many of you out there who own or have listened to my compilation. I feel everyone received it well and I realized it would be possible for me to complete a second album in 2003 with all the songs I missed. Last winter I started to collect songs for a third installment, but I really could only find enough material for half of an album so I scrapped the project in the name of quitting while I was ahead. After collecting the music for each album I reviewed my jumbled play list to try and order the songs so they flowed. Each time I wanted to open with something that would really perk up my audience when they hit play so “Merry Christmas 2002” opens with It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year by Andy Williams while the 2003 album kicks things off with What Christmas Means to Me by Stevie Wonder followed by All Alone on Christmas by Darlene Love. Personally, I prefer my second album and I definitely had a hard core personal dance off last Saturday afternoon while washing dishes by myself that had me choreographing an opening dance number through the first three rooms of our apartment. Also, while organizing music for the 2003 edition we saw Love Actually and it the took me three days to identify the name of the Darlene Love song by engaging in numerous google searches and downloads. Now that’s dedication…or obsessive compulsive psychosis.

As I began writing this post in my head, I envisioned myself railing on all songs outside of the Rudolph and Frosty genre, but I realized I enjoyed some of the music I wanted to assail. For starters, I think my all time favorite version of a holiday song would have to be the Jackson Five’s Santa Claus is Coming to Town which ironically does not appear on either of my albums because I went with the Bruce Springsteen version. I guess this would be a good time to mention there are no duplicates on either album, which happened to be a key goal of mine and a reason why I did not develop anything in 2004

So whether it’s Little Saint Nick, Jingle Bell Rock, or Baby, It’s Cold Uutside here's to a warm smile on your face when you hear it over the next week. And feel free to pass along your favorites.

Merry Christmas 2002

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year - Andy Williams
(It Must’ve Been Ol’) Santa Clause - Harry Connick
Jingle Bells – Dean Martin
Deck the Halls – Nat King Cole
Santa Claus is Coming to Town – Bruce Springsteen
Little Saint Nick – Beach Boys
Baby Please Come Home – U2
Frosty the Snowman – Burl Ives
Holly Jolly Christmas - Bing Crosby
Rockin Around the Christmas Tree- Brenda Lee
Let it Snow – Dean Martin
Baby its Cold Outside – Ray Charles
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – Judy Garland
Little Drummer Boy – Bing Crosby
Silent Night – Nat King Cole
White Christmas – Elvis Presley
Sleigh Bells – Frank Sinatra
No Place Like Home for the Holidays – Johnny Mathis
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer – Dean Martin
Jingle Bell Rock - Bobby Helms
Sleigh Ride – Garth Brooks
12 Days of Christmas – John Denver & The Muppets

Merry Christmas 2003

What Christmas Means to Me - Stevie Wonder
All Alone on Christmas - Darlene Love
God Bless Ye Merry Gentlemen – Bare Naked Ladies with Sarah McLachlan
The Chipmunk Song
It’s Beginning to look a lot like Christmas – Dean Martin
Santa Baby – Eartha Kitt
Blue Christmas – Elvis Presley
Up on the Housetop - Bing Crosby
Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire – Nat King Cole
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus – Brenda Lee
Do You Hear What I Hear – Vince Gill
The First Noel – Vanessa Williams
Hark the Herald Angels Sing – Frank Sinatra & Dean Martin
Joy to the World – Nat King Cole
Feliz Navidad – Jose Feliciano
Jolly Old St. Nicolas – Disney Kids
I Don’t Want a lot for Christmas – Mariah Carey
So This is Christmas – John Lennon
Christmas Wrapping – The Waitresses
The Chanukah Song – Adam Sandler
Christmastime is Near – Horatio Sanz, Jimmy Fallon, Chris Kattan, and Tracy Morgan

Deck the Halls

With the tree standing proudly in our bay window as the sweet smell of pine waifs through the apartment it’s time to humiliate it by dressing it up like RuPaul on New Year’s Eve. Now we have a little tradition between the two of us where each Christmas we’ve been buying ornaments for our future holiday seasons together, but four years doesn’t get you much bling to impress your neighbors. Plus we don’t have any lights. In a situation such like this there’s only one thing to do and that’s to head to my favorite French superstore, Target.

The first item on the agenda is the aforementioned lighting matter and while my parents usually go with the colored lights, Bethany’s in favor of the white variety. In recent years, I’ve been sold on the this option so it’s not a problem, but then we must decide what kind of lights to purchase and boy (and girl) we must choose between several features. Size? Shape? Blinking? Number? In circumstances such as this I like to fall back on one key option to help with my pick: What’s on sale. And that’s the story how we ended up with three strands of the non-blinking snowball shaped white lights.


Next up we decided to buy some of those colored glass balls as filler for our tree. Personally, I’m a big fan of the character ornament and I think my favorite would have to be a Santa Claus in a Hawaiian shirt lounging on a beach Bethany gave me last year. Of course these ornaments each cost $10 and I’m not going to drop $200 to make our tree look fashionable so we’re settling for the reasonably priced option while we boost up our collection. Once again, the varieties never end as we have all kinds of colors, sizes and shapes to choose from. Is there really anyone out there who wants to decorate an entire tree in purple? The best I can come up with would be 1980’s cartoon villains the Purple Pied Man (Strawberry Shortcake) and Skeletor (He-Man), but they don’t strike me as the holiday type. Plus, I think they were both Jewish. It also doesn’t help that one of the stock boys decided to have an early Christmas meltdown and smashed half of the balls in each box of the variety we liked and chose to leave them on the shelf. After a good fifteen minutes, we picked out some red, gold, and silver ornaments and headed home.

All right, so we’re back at the holiday homestead and it’s time to string some lights on the tree. Seven minutes later I have just completed wrapping two sets around the tree and we decide to turn them on to see if we will need the third box when I realize I’ve connected the lights by the plugs in the middle of the tree. Bravo to me and my genius handiwork, but we do some rearranging and use the last string of lights to make it all work out successfully. We hang the ornaments without any further incidents and now have a nice Christmas tree to keep us company for the next month in our living room. If you’re in the neighborhood feel free to stop by and have a look.

Oh, Christmas Tree

The day after the initial snow of the season Bethany and I decided to trek out to the ol Home Depot to buy our first Christmas tree together. There’s a large amount of pressure for this project because you only get one first tree and if it’s a Charlie Brown piece of garbage that’s all we’ll remember for the rest of our lives. We arrived at the outdoor lot bundled up in our hats and mittens to find a good amount of prospective clients for our bay window. The problem turned out to be that Le Depot pre-wraps all their firs so you can only really judge height and a bunch of smushed up branches. We solved this dilemma by holding up seven or eight tree before realizing we had no idea if any of them had good form and selected one about seven feet tall.

After paying for our new friend we requested aid to tie the tree to the roof of my sexy 1990 Honda Accord and were told the attendant, John, could be found wandering the parking lot in his orange apron offering assistance to needy travelers. I immediately grew suspicious as to why someone would be wandering a parking lot in Everett because there would be a good chance they could get mugged or worse without wearing an orange apron. Sure enough we walked outside to find a family of four women trying to strap their new tree to the top of their van. Now this is where things get impressive. One of them had climbed through the sunroof in a skirt and heels so she could STAND on top of the car to help tie it down. This strikes me as a really bad idea or a way to have a terrible accident, get John fired, and possibly end up with a majority stake in Home Depot via a lawsuit. Neither of us wanted anything to do with standing on my roof because I don’t have or want a sunroof so I go searching for John. Lo and behold I find John hanging out with the gentleman who told me his buddy would be in the parking and I’m fairly certain they had a good line of vision of a WOMAN STANDING ON HER CAR. Also, John did not have on an apron because he had been sweeping which I still don’t quite understand. I think I’ll try that one in the office. I’m not wearing any pants because I’m photocopying so get off my back.

The tree’s securely held in place so we drive home and it strikes me my car’s beginning to pick up some of the nice pine aroma from above. Forget those little trees people hang from their rear view window that lose their scent in two days, I’m going to start driving around with a full spruce tied to the top of my car. And best of all it will probably start making the cars next to it smell nice as well. Who wouldn’t pay $25 each month to make their car smell fresh?

We finally pull up in front of the house and I run in to grab the camera so we can take pictures of our first tree together. It’s funny how certain things can be completely uninteresting to your friends and family, but they have strong significance for yourself. I mean come on, it’s a tree. After snapping some shots and cutting it loose I head inside to put the camera away before hauling it inside, but for some reason Bethany grabs it herself and starts carrying it in. This works for me until it gets caught on all her buttons and it can’t fit through the door so we very quickly have pine needles all over the place. A few quirky maneuvers later and we have the tree in the living room up in the stand. We need to wait a day for it to drop before we can start decorating, but it’s in the house and we now have our first naked Christmas tree.

Food for thought

One of our favorite date activities has always been going to the grocery store every other week. It’s convenient because everyone needs to have food in the house and during Bethany’s midterm/final exam periods it became a good opportunity to spend time together when we lived apart. If you’re like us you always follow the same course through the store and I feel like I’m getting away with something when I walk down an aisle the wrong way. I also think I’m wandering through a foreign country when I step into a new store because I have no clue where anything will be located. Six weeks ago I met by parents at my brother’s place and on the way home, I stopped at the Shaws in Brookline to buy our sundries for the week. It took me twenty-five minutes to find the rice, which should have been next to the canned vegetables across from the “international foods,” but instead could be found next to the salad dressing. Damn you Paul Newman and Ken’s Steakhouse!! Here are some more notes from this week’s trip

• It’s clementine season, which means that you need to buy a 350-count crate of this golf ball sized fruit instead of the 4 you plan on eating for the week. Someone really needs to get Bono on this to help with world hunger
• After hitting the produce section we turned the corner to find the local senior center appeared to be holding their weekly meeting in front of the mayonnaise. I guarantee at least eight people over the age of 65 were in a roller derby style scrum not allowing anyone to pass. As of press time I cannot tell you who won the shuffleboard match.
• What’s with the people who forget they’re not the only person buying food for the week? Today, we encountered a woman deep in a cell phone conversation who twice decided to stop short at the entrance of aisles so other customers could unexpectedly slam into her. I’m don’t what in your could be this important, but put down the Funyons and wrap it up in the car.
• I’m addicted to the port wine cheese ball and am going to try to eat the entire thing during this week’s episode of The O.C.
• Can it be explained to me why a bag of Tostitos cost $20 more than all of the other bags of chips in the store? But damn those things are tasty. I assume they’re made with crack unless you buy the lime ones because they have ecstasy.
• For the third visit in a row these two smart shoppers saved over 25% of their bill clipping coupons and reviewing the circular. Three more successful trips and we qualify for Supermarket Sweeps.