I’ve spent some time over the last few days working on the new design for Byzantium’s Shores. I set up a “test blog” to do the design-stuff, and I decided on the background graphics. The new appearance will be substantially less “dark”, with all text being in dark-type on a light background. Basically, though, the look will still be the same: I am not changing fonts at all, the format of the sidebar will remain as it is, and I’m keeping my pretty little roses. (Yes, men can like roses! Stop looking at me like that!) My current plan is to have the new look in place this Sunday, although if I get things done all the way, I may have it up tomorrow.
Wrapping paper, wrapping paper everywhere….
Much unwrapping of gifts later, and Christmas 2003 is over. (Except for the fact that some relatives’ gifts have yet to arrive, and one large gift for the kid remains hidden in a closet for reasons explained below.)
It was somewhat different for us this year, mainly because the wife came down with whatever nasty infection I had last week, just in time for the holiday. It pretty much knocked her out: the new Christmas dress she was sewing for the Daughter, intended for the Christmas Eve church services we traditionally attend, is stuck in its “just about done” phase, which is just as well since the illness was such that we didn’t even make it to the services at all. Likewise, we failed to do our traditional “drive around and gaze upon the lights” thing. And finally, the turkey we were going to roast stayed in the refrigerator, and instead I stepped up to the plate and made dinner. Three bowls of Ramen noodles wasn’t very Christmas-y, but at least I used the “Beef” flavor, because the wrapper is red.
(That bit about the Ramen noodles was a joke! I did make dinner, but give me more credit than that. I made a Pastitsio [recipe here], which is the best thing I make. And I make a lot of good things.)
Gifts for the kid included a VW Beetle for Barbies, to go along with the miniature VW Beetle I provided for her preschool party a week back wherein “Santa” gave it to her. She loves VW Beetles, mainly because we watched a couple of the “Herbie” movies last summer. Thus, every time she spies a Beetle (new or old) on the road, she starts yelling with delight about the Herbie. (She also thinks PT Cruisers are Herbies, and I’ve stopped attempting to correct her on this. Easier that way.) The only problem is that the Herbie movies aren’t nearly as well known anymore as they used to be, so when she proudly showed her new car to her friends and told her it was a Herbie, they had no idea what she was on about. That’s what happens when you raise your kids on obscure stuff. (I can only imagine Darth Swank‘s kids’ friends saying, “Who is Belldandy?”)
Let’s see, what else…there were three new books for her Leap Pad; a Playmobil Viking boat that came with two Vikings (with helmets, a dagger, a shield, and a battle axe!) and actually floats (she insisted on taking a bath immediately because of this); a Lite Brite (which excited the wife to no end, since she never owned one herself); a few jigsaw puzzles; a pair of kids’ binoculars; a few books (including one that I just realized I forgot to give her); a beading set; and quite the assortment of candy (to go along with the caramel corn, English toffee, and sesame-butter cookies that I had already made). Not a bad haul, I must say. (The gift in the closet is an electric keyboard, which we’re saving for when the wife’s headache-inducing cold has gone away.)
Our practice is to set aside the two or three most “spectacular” gifts to put out before she rises Christmas morning; those are from Santa. Everything else we open Christmas Eve, and we make it known that everything that night is either from us or from relatives. Thus we keep the whole Santa-thing going while we also emphasize the idea of Christmas as a time to show devotion to family, among other things.
For the wife, I got mildly creative this year. I got a round, flat basket that is lined with red-and-green plaid cloth, and this I filled with four books, five special packets of flavored coffee, a small box of those hazelnut Rocher candies (if you like hazelnut and chocolate, these things are miraculous), and a DVD set of the second season of Mad About You, which was our favorite show when we were dating/engaged/first married. (The early seasons were the best — the show should have ended with the birth of Paul and Jamie’s kid, though. The last season was something of a train wreck.)
For me? Not important really. I got a few lovely things, including something handmade by the wife which she managed to make right under my nose. But I was more happy to watch everyone else open their things. I know a lot of people get overly annoyed with the gift-giving aspect of Christmas, and I do sympathize with the relentless commercialization. I’ve tried in the last couple of years to veer away from “pretty stuff” to things that will be enjoyed more slowly and deeply — there’s probably some kind of Thoreau-ish impulse at work here — like a handful of books with coffee to read them with, bundled in a pretty basket. I’m tired of those idiotic reports on the TV news where some reporter goes to the mall and quizzes people on what they’re planning to spend this year, and the doubled annoyance that such reports this year were invariably coupled with hand-wringing about the economy in general, thus sending a tacit message: “If the economy doesn’t get going and unemployment stays high, it’s your fault because you didn’t fill your house and the houses of others with an appropriate amount of stuff!”
Yes, I’m troubled by robotic gift-giving, and I’m troubled by the all-too-easily-embraced attitude of “Keeping up with the Joneses” that can take root at Christmastime. But just one sincere “Oh, wow!” from someone as they realize what’s inside the wrapping paper makes a lot of that disquiet go away. And a chorus of Oh, wow!s from a kid? Well, that just about makes it all go away.
Until, of course, I have to clean up the $&%*#!! wrapping paper and boxes and those #&$*#($#@!!!! twist-ties that toy companies use to fasten everything to the package these days, of course. But hey, it’s not all bad: this year I remembered to buy two eight-packs of AA batteries before Christmas. I’m getting better at this.
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Merry Christmas
To all my readers, new and old and not yet found: may your Christmas be filled with peace, love, and good cheer!
“Noel: Christmas Eve 1913”, by Robert Bridges (1844-1930).
A frosty Christmas Eve when the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone where westward falls the hill,
And from many a village in the water’d valley
Distant music reach’d me peals of bells aringing:
The constellated sounds ran sprinkling on earth’s floor
As the dark vault above with stars was spangled o’er.
Then sped my thoughts to keep that first Christmas of all
When the shepherds watching by their folds ere the dawn
Heard music in the fields and marvelling could not tell
Whether it were angels or the bright stars singing.
Now blessed be the towers that crown England so fair
That stand up strong in prayer unto God for our souls
Blessed be their founders (said I) an’ our country folk
Who are ringing for Christ in the belfries tonight
With arms lifted to clutch the rattling ropes that race
Into the dark above and the mad romping din.
But to me heard afar it was starry music
Angels’ song, comforting as the comfort of Christ
When he spake tenderley to his sorrowful flock:
The old words came to me by the riches of time
Mellow’d and transfigured as I stood on the hill
Heark’ning in the aspect of th’ eternal silence.
(posting will resume on Friday)
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Whoa….mind expanding….no drugs involved….
Via John Scalzi I see the Top Ten Astronomical Images of 2003. Check them out! (Longtime readers here will have seen some of these before. Which is why I should have more readers.)
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Nope, Ms. Dunst, I feel nothing for you at all!
I watched the trailer for Spiderman 2 the other day (as pointed out by Nefarious Neddie). Pretty good trailer, I thought: Doctor Octopus (“Doc Ock”) looks dead-on, which is good since I thought the first film didn’t get the Green Goblin quite right. Hopefully the next movie won’t peter out, and very nearly self-destruct, in the last fifteen minutes like the first one did.
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Yes, Virginia, extraordinary claims still require extraordinary evidence!
It’s not my fault!
Michael Lopez responds to my question about Lord of the Rings over on Collaboratory. I’m still stewing over my own thoughts (though I can pretty much guarantee that I don’t think the movies are superior, storytelling-wise, to the books), so go read Michael’s.
But for the record, I didn’t set any character limit! Not my fault!
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Uh, sure, Glenn.
What Glenn Reynolds seems to think is a clever utterance seems to me to be a pretty stupid one. But then, we are talking about Andrew Sullivan here.
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Thanks for the memories, Van.
This week, Van Miller will provide the play-by-play services for the Bills’ radio broadcast for the last time. He’s been doing this for 37 years, which means that he’s been doing Bills games longer than I’ve been alive. Gregg Easterbrook mentioned Miller in yesterday’s TMQ column (about two-thirds of the way down) in which he describes a particular instance of Miller’s football knowledge and prescience.
It’s hard to imagine someone else’s voice coming over the radio next season, and it’s likewise hard to imagine games without Miller’s little verbal quirks:
:: “Fasten your seatbelts!” He generally says this whenever a crucial play is about to take place, no matter which side of the ball the Bills are playing.
:: “How do ya like that!” Miller usually says this after anything sudden and unexpected happens, for good or ill. (In recent years, it’s been a lot of ill.)
:: “It’s pandemonium! It’s fan-demonium!” Yeah, this one’s cheesy as hell, but it’s also infectious as hell to here Miller shouting this old chestnut into the mike, nearly drowned out by crowd noise, whenever the Bills score.
:: There used to be a referee in the NFL named Red Cassion who, when making his announcements to the stadium crowd, would stretch the word “down” wwaayy out, like this: “Holding, offense. Ten yard penalty, repeat second dooooowwwwwnnnnn….” I once heard Cassion do this, and immediately thereafter, Van Miller says, “I don’t know how that guy gets five syllables out of ‘dooooowwwwwnnnnn.”
:: There were a few games when Doug Flutie was the Bills’ starting quarterback in which Flutie’s antics, in which he would seemingly run around with no idea whatsoever what he was doing, reduced Miller to a mere sputter. I seem to recall him recovering at one point and saying, “Well, I don’t know what Flutie did, folks, but he gained eight yards and a first down on that.”
:: Miller’s one bad habit was that he never gave the score very often. If you simply tuned the game in, planning to listen until you got the score, you could end up listening for most of an entire quarter.
:: For me, the memory of Miller shouting “The Bills have won it! The Bills have won it!” over and over, after the Bills won that comeback game against Houston in the 1992 playoffs, is as indelible in my mind as what is probably the most famous radio sports call of all time, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” Now, I watched the game on TV and thus did not hear Miller’s call as it happened, but I’ve never seen footage of that game’s end without Miller’s call dubbed over it. (The NFL Films highlight reel of that game uses Miller’s call, for example.)
The local sports radio station, WGR, once tried to see what it would have sounded like had Scott Norwood’s field goal in Super Bowl XXV been good. They did this by splicing Miller’s call from that game, right up to that kick, with Miller’s “The Bills have won it!” immediately after. It wasn’t terribly convincing…but I doubt there’s a Bills fan in this world who hasn’t imagined precisely that call. It’s too bad that in 37 years, Miller never got to shout the words, “The Bills win the Super Bowl!” into the radio mike.
(And it’s also too bad that he has to go out calling a game from Foxboro. Poor guy.)
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Good News in Buffalo
The Buffalo region finally got some good economic news yesterday: auto insurance giant Geico is going to be opening a big customer-service center here, with the number of jobs created to eventually number more than 2,000. The initial job creation will be modest — 650 or so — with the remainder to come over the next decade. But still, this is a huge deal for a region where nearly every news headline that pairs the word “Jobs” with a number refers to losses. This was a sufficiently big deal that Governor Pataki was here to make the announcement.
Now, hopefully, this will put a “spring in the step” of the people who work at plugging Buffalo for companies around the country and around the world; hopefully, success will breed success. Instead of “If we could ever get someone to come here”, maybe the attitude will shift to “OK, we got a big one, who’s next?”
Go Buffalo!