Getting ready for my family’s rescheduled Christmas tomorrow, I ran into a problem: we don’t have a Christmas tree in the apartment, and the only working holiday lights here are the nine artificial candles on my mom’s menorah. So, what does a Christmas-lights fanatic do in such a situation? He improvises:

Yes, that is an image of a Christmas tree on our television screen — this image, in fact, of Becky’s and my outdoor tree, displayed from this website using our newly installed WebTV system — and yes, those are real presents underneath the virtual tree. :)

The aforementioned menorah is on top of the TV, as you can see, with my dad’s as-yet-unopened Hanukkah gifts next to it. And of course, there are plenty of stuffed animals looking on, as with any major Loomer-Loy family event. In fact, there are at least a dozen more stuffies not visible in the picture, also participating in the festivities.

The setup is actually quite nice… surprisingly Christmasy.

Merry Christmas! :)

UPDATE: I forgot to make note of the Christmas stocking hanging from the TV antenna. Like I said… improvisation. :) “The stockings were hung by the TV with care…”

This is a family website… but, hehe.

The Arizona Cardinals (4-12) clinched a playoff spot Sunday… for the Green Bay Packers.

A miracle fourth-and-25 play as time expired gave Arizona a 18-17 win over Minnesota, eliminating the Vikings from the playoffs and handing their spot to Green Bay.

This undoubtedly infuriated countless winter-only Arizonans from Minnesota, while simultaneously delighting countless winter-only Arizonans from Wisconsin. :)

I just RSVPed for the D.C.-area USC alumni club’s Rose Bowl viewing party at the Ballston Common Mall in Arlington. Woohoo! Fight on Trojans! Fight on crazy drunken Trojan alums! :)

We have settled upon tomorrow, Dec. 29, as our family “Christmas.” We’ll empty stockings and open presents in the morning, here at the apartment in New York. Should be fun.

Breaking with tradition by moving holidays around has itself become something of a family tradition in recent years. Last year we held Christmas on New Year’s because I was in Hawaii on Dec. 25; we have “moved” Mother’s Day and Father’s Day several times because of scheduling conflicts (Father’s Day, in particular, tends to fall near Becky’s birthday, so I have tended to be in Buffalo for it); and last month my family celebrated Thanksgiving on Friday the 28th because my mom was working in New York on Thursday the 27th.

This year, I was Arizona on Dec. 25 and I will be in Washington on Jan. 1, so therefore, Christmas Day is tomorrow. Heh.

UPDATE: It looks like we may move Christmas up to this evening. My left ear has been hurting like a b*tch all day, and we are considering opening presents here in NYC shortly and then driving home to Newington tonight, so it will be easier to go to a doctor tomorrow if my earache hasn’t subsided. So perhaps Christmas will be Dec. 28.

ANOTHER UPDATE: My ear is feeling better (knock on wood), so we have decided to stay the night here after all, and have Christmas tomorrow morning as originally planned. Click here for pictures.

I’ve been lax in posting about the Iranian earthquake that has killed thousands upon thousands of people in the city of Bam, which is, of course, an awful human tragedy (the death toll, not my lack of posts). InstaPundit has a bunch of links related to the catastrophe, including ways to help.

I wonder whether, in some unforseen way, this earthquake will lead to any changes in Iran’s volatile political climate. I’m not predicting, I’m just wondering. History is, after all, littered with instances where natural events triggered political and/or cultural changes. Only time will tell, I suppose.

May God/Allah bless and protect the victims of this calamity.

This is about right. Heh. (From here, via here.)

Currently on AOL’s welcome screen, one of the rotating top items is an AOL Shopping feature on the “Top Tech Toys Of the Season.” But there’s a problem (and I’m not talking about the improper capitalization of the word “of”). Beneath the veneer of new, up-to-date hipness, we quickly learn that AOL doesn’t have a clue: the headline and link are accompanied by a photo of Sprint PCS’s once-upon-a-time prototype, the Samsung 8500 — my old phone, emphasis on “old.”

This might have been one of the “top tech toys” of the 2001 or 2002 season, but this is 2003, going on 2004, people. Sprint’s new prototype is my new phone (does this pattern make me prototypical?), the Sanyo 8100 camera-phone. The Samsung 8500 has been relegated to the dust-bin of technological obsolescence; it’s not even listed on Sprint’s “all phones” page anymore.

Worse, the 8500 isn’t even for sale on AOL’s pages! Click on “wireless,” then view all Samsung brand products, and you find that … it’s not there. So what this tells us is, whoever is updating AOL’s welcome page is not only clueless about technology, but they’re not even looking at the pages they’re linking to!

Newington’s resurgent girls basketball team improved to 5-0 by defeating the host team of the Plainville Holiday Tournament, 41-32 yesterday. The Indians will play Hall in the championship game Saturday at 7:00 PM.

Meanwhile, the boys basketball team improved to 4-0 with a 65-50 win over town-next-door rival Wethersfield; the wrestling team also improved to 4-0 by beating Portland, 45-28; and the ice hockey team improved to 5-1 by winning the Nutmeg Classic Hockey Tournament with a 7-6 win over Ludlow (Mass.). So it was a good day all around for NHS sports.

On the drive down from Connecticut to New York yesterday, my dad struck up a conversation at a rest stop with a guy wearing a Howard Dean button. My dad, himself a Lieberman supporter, may not have had too much in common with this gentleman politically, but they had a pleasant conversation in which they agreed that Dr. Dean is a) very smart; and b) not very “likeable.”

I agree, Dean’s lack of likability is a problem. But I’ve noticed another, even more obvious problem: the man doesn’t know how to smile. Witness the picture on the front page of today’s New York Times:

I had a similar problem when I was about 8 or 9 years old; in my school pictures from those years, I look like I’m gritting my teeth and then opening my mouth, rather than actually smiling. However, I never attempted to run for president when I was 8 or 9 years old, so this was less of a problem for me than it is for Dr. Dean.

It will be interesting to see if Dean’s political braintrust can manage to teach their candidate this rather important campaign-trail skill. In the mean time, it’s fun to think about photo-ops following joint press conferences between President Dean and various foreign dignitaries. Imagine Jacques Chirac with his smarmy, self-satisifed, I’m-a-giant-weasel smile, standing next to Howard Dean baring his teeth like some sort of bizarre wolf. The mental picture is rather amusing.

Andrew Sullivan has a good year-in-review essay at the back of this week’s issue of Time magazine — and I’m not just saying it’s good because it begins and ends with a Lord of the Rings analogy (though that certainly helps). :)

James Poniewozik’s 2003 wrap-up article is also worth reading. He argues, essentially, that this was the year when the cultural “mainstream” ceased to exist (and that “in some ways the mainstream is now itself a niche” — case in point, Clay Aiken). Excerpt:

Of course, no sooner had the printing press been invented than some pundit was probably bemoaning how people, individually consuming those newfangled “books,” would lose the community spirit engendered by Passion plays and witch burnings. And it’s worth remembering that mass culture was a 20th century anomaly. …

Increasingly, the events that most deeply, if briefly, unite that floating mainstream are deaths: Johnny Cash, Bob Hope, Katharine Hepburn. The intensity of response to the passing of John Ritter, a likable actor from a campy ’70s sitcom, seemed to surprise even his fans. In a culture with few common cultural referents, the past is what we share the most. …. When old stars pass, they take with them a piece of a time when we weren’t so niched and subdivided by the market and our own choices. To make the metaphor a little homier, the pop-culture mainstream is a family that used to get together for dinner once a week but now does so only at weddings (or dating-show finales, anyway)–and funerals.

This is an interesting point, too:

In fact, it was easier for a work to provoke discussion if no one saw it. Possibly the most debated works of 2003 were The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson’s unfinished movie about the Crucifixion; The Reagans, a TV biopic that no one outside CBS saw before the network canceled it under protest; and Daniel Libeskind’s World Trade Center rebuilding design, which spent most of the year on the redrawing board.

I’m sure you can pick apart Poniewozik’s arguments and find various inconsistencies and instances of b.s. in there (though I’m too lazy to do so at the moment), but overall, I think he’s got some good points.

Oh, I like this excerpt too:

And in Iraq, unlike Vietnam, there was no Walter Cronkite to speak for the great middle. Ratings for cable news shot up, while big-network newscasts stayed level or even dropped. Some viewers’ media choices became a kind of political secret handshake. Pro-war, you watched Fox News, learned that the war was a rout and disdained the liberal big media. Antiwar, you watched BBC News � or al-Jazeera on satellite � learned that the war was a quagmire and disdained the jingoistic big media. Pox on both your houses, you watched Jon Stewart.

Or you voted none of the above. What network did the most people watch the night the ground war began? NBC. While ABC and the Fox network went with war news, the Peacock had the sense, bravery and civic responsibility to air … “Friends.”

Heh. Read the whole thing, as they say.

Oh, by the way, in case you were wondering, the title of this post is a rather random reference to a Makem & Clancy song. (Hi Dad.)