Top Ten Worst Christmas Songs

If you go out anywhere, you have undoubtedly been subject to more than your fair share of Christmas songs.  Everyone seems to play Christmas songs for the month prior to Christmas.  Everyone.  Most songs are mediocre, some are good, a lot are bad.  Here are my ten worst Christmas songs in no particular order.

  1. Do They Know it’s Christmas – Band Aid 1984 – What do you get when you get 80’s rockers to make a really condescending song with crappy synth and strange bells.  Yes, that’s exactly what Africans who don’t celebrate Christmas want, to know it’s Christmas.
  2. Wonderful Christmas Time – Paul McCartney – Acid.  That is the only excuse I can think of for poor Paul.  He must have been tripping on acid.  Simply wanting to blow my brains out after listening to this song.
  3. Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer – Elmo & Patsy – Ok, I will admit to liking this filth as a child.  And it does have a certain charm to it.  But egads, this did not age well at all.  I mostly want to scratch my ears out when this song comes on.
  4. I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas – Gayla Peevey – Again, at least it’s a clever song.  Clever does not equate to good, though.  My cousin is sure to inflict this abortion of a song upon us every Christmas Eve.  She secretly hates us all.  Or, I guess, not so secretly.
  5. Last Christmas – Wham! – Entry number two for George Michael. He was also in Band Aid 1984.  If you need further proof that he hates Christmas, you must also disbelieve evolution.  All the proof is there, you just need to open your eyes.
  6. Dominic the Italian Christmas Donkey – Lou Monte – It’s not racist because it’s sung by an Italian.  This song validates every Jersey Shore stereotype.  No, the two have nothing to do with each other, but this song is bad enough to denigrate an entire nationality.
  7. I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus – Jimmy Boyd – Ignore the fact that this is a pretty creepy song in general.  Ok, that’s really hard to ignore.  Let’s just assume that Santa is actually the kid’s dad.  The kid doesn’t seem terribly surprised that mommy is kissing someone else, just that it’s Santa Claus.  Maybe the kid should ask for a paternity test for Christmas.  And the voice!  Ugh, the voice!
  8. Christmas Shoes – Newsong – I’m pretty sure this song is about a grifter child getting a mark to buy him a new pair of Michael Jordans.  Prepared speech, dying mom, all the signs are there.  But let’s assume momma is dying.  This song is Christian mercy at its best.  Buy a kid a useless pair of shoes to make yourself feel better instead of inquiring more about what is wrong with momma.  If the kid’s poor, momma probably just needs a visit to the doctor.  You’re probably against universal healthcare too, aren’t you?
  9. All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth – Melissa Lynn – All I want for Christmas is to never hear this song again.
  10. I Wish it Could be Christmas Everyday – Wizzard – This has to be a joke.  If your goal, Wizzard, was to make people never want to celebrate Christmas again, mission accomplished.  Paul McCartney may have been on acid when he crated Wonderful Christmas Time, but these guys must have been mixing multiple drugs to come up with this abomination.  And whoever allowed their children in the same room as Wizzard must really be bad parents.

Why Does It Feel So Good When Someone Touches You?

No, not in THAT way.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  Well, that way too, but stay focused here.

Have you ever given yourself a neck massage or head massage or a foot massage?  It feels pretty good.  It’s a decent way to work out tension and loosen up.  But when someone else does it, it feels amazing!  There is something in our DNA that requires us to seek out physical contact.

And it’s not just humans.  Anyone that  has a pet knows that animals are the same.  I could pet my cat for hours and she will just sit and purr all day long.  And when I’m not petting her, she can often be found plopped down next to me with her back against my leg and literally straddling my arm.

The mere act of physical contact has been proven to lessen pain and reduce stress in most individuals.  I think that’s why so many people think that things like chiropractic work even though there has been tons of studies that it doesn’t work any better than placebo.  The needles do nothing.  There was a study that I can’t find the link for now that had half the people get normal chiropractic therapy and the other half someone pretending to put needles in random areas of the body and the results were exactly the same!  The human contact and social interaction with an individual willing to listen to your problems performs the miracles.

I’m sure that it has something to do with endorphins being released from contact or some such neurological cause, but does it really matter?  It feels good and it makes others feel good (when consentual).  So reach out and consentually touch some today!

Ahhh, Nothing To Do For Two Whole Weeks

Besides familial commitments and a party or two, I have absolutely nothing to do for two weeks.  It’s a good feeling.  Not that my life can, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered difficult, but I cannot describe how much I’ve been looking forward to this.

Everyone should have two weeks a year of doing absolutely nothing.  Not vacation.  Just nothing.  What would you fill the time with?  Me?  I plan on a little merry making, a little reading, a little gaming, and a whole lot of vegetating.

Blog post in which I complain about going stir crazy in five…four…three…two…one.

What Is Your Historical Tax Rate

I have been waiting for someone to come up with this for a long time now.  Finally, here it is!  You can enter in your current salary and see what percent you would pay in taxes for every year between 1913 and 2012.

There are a few things I would like to point out.  First, look at how much higher the tax rates for top earners has been historically.  During those vastly higher times, there were major economic booms.  This is really all the evidence you need to expose the lies of those that say we need lower taxes on the highest earners in order to grow the economy.  There is no correlation between taxes on high earners and economic growth.  None.

Second, the tax rates in 1982 look very attractive.  This is the year that Ronald Reagan cut taxes.  Yet Republicans can’t even get behind a Democratic proposal that makes tax rates even lower than that for high income earners and much higher than that for low income earners.  Republicans today are determined to inflict as much pain on the lowest earners as possible.  All in the name of Shared Sacrifice.

Well, It’s Not The Apocalypse…

But it could mean the end of John Boehner’s Speaker gig.  That is, it would normally mean the end of Boehner’s rein as Speaker if the House Republicans weren’t so crazy.  How crazy are they?  This crazy.

Boehner brings up for a vote a proposal that keeps taxes at the levels they are now for anyone making under one million dollars a year; 99% of the population.  Then he quickly has to pull it back because he doesn’t have enough support in his own party to pass it.

House Republicans basically rejected a proposal to keep taxes exactly the same on 321 million Americans.  What’s laughable about this is it was really more of a symbolic vote more than anything serious.  The proposal had a zero percent chance of passing the Senate.  This was Boehner’s gambit to say to America, “See? Look how we’re attempting to work with Democrats and how unreasonable they’re being!”  And it failed miserably.

In any other political system in the world, this would mean the end of Boehner’s leadership position.  Republicans, however, will probably stick with him, though, because no one else is stupid enough to take the post.  There will eventually be a bill that contains tax increases for high income families.  That bill will pass.  No one wants to be Speaker when that happens.

Not that I consider myself an expert on political processes or internal party dynamics, but I pay attention much more than your average human and this stuff is absolutely crazy.  We have had the Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate trying maneuvers to make Democrats look bad and both have failed miserably.  One by his own misreading of the situation and the other by his own party.

There is only one word to describe the Republican party right now and that is shambles.  That’s normally a word used exclusively for Democrats.  Let’s see if the Democrats can take advantage of it.

Who Wants To Reduce Gun Homicides?

Do you want to reduce gun homicides?  Sure, we all do!  There are some really easy steps we can make to accomplish this.

First and foremost among these steps would be to repeal drug laws.

Oh, you mean THOSE gun homicides!  Those mostly affect people who are not nearly as white as me.  Can we get back to talking about preventing white people from getting killed by guns?

Dripping sarcasm aside, repealing drug laws and regulating and taxing their sale would solve a whole lot of our social ills.  Not only will it likely drastically lower the homicide rate, it will also raise governmental income while reducing incredibly costly governmental spending on drug interdiction.

I don’t mean to make this sound like a panacea for all our problems.  Drug addiction is a serious issue.  Repealing some drug laws will likely lead to an immediate increase in drug addiction cases in the short term.  But if that is the price we pay for saving lives, it seems worth it for me.

Using drugs is an individual choice. (I don’t actually believe this in most cases, but it’s a belief popularly held by most people.)  The taking of a life is an act that removes individual choice.  By repealing drug laws we would be reducing the instances of forced removal of choice by increasing the freedom of choice.

The Most Gorgeous Space Picture of 2012

Given that Saturn is farther from the sun than us, we don’t really get the opportunity to see what it looks like from the other side.  You know, with the sun in the background?  Unless, that is, we happen to send a spacecraft to Saturn.  Then you get pictures like this.  You want to click that link.  Then you want to click to get the large version of the picture.  Yowza!

Being able to get breathtakingly gorgeous pictures from spacecraft is a valuable side benefit to space exploration.  It humanizes the experience in ways that hard scientific study can’t.  But hard scientific study is the real mission of all those crafts we shoot up into the heavens.  Every time you look at one of these pictures, you should be reminded of it.  Pictures of the universe are being beamed back to Earth from hundreds of thousands of miles away but it’s only a microcosm of the information that these vehicles are relaying.  The rest is simply data to help us figure out how the universe works.  You know, science.  And it’s in danger of being drastically cut.  More the shame to us if we allow that to happen.

Book Review: Reamde

Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Neal Stephenson’s “Reamde” is a globe spanning adventure filled with fascinating characters and gobs of general mayhem.  If you like Stephenson’s other books, you are sure to enjoy this one as well.  It contains MMORPGs, Russian mobsters, Chinese hackers, global jihadists, MI6 agents, CIA operatives, and the highly eclectic Forthrast family.  It is intended for immature audiences.

Continue reading →

Pickup Lines That Would Never Work

“How about we go back to my place and I help you prevent breast cancer?”

Courtesy of a new study that claims that squeezing breasts can help prevent breast cancer.  I find this study suspicious, but I don’t care if it ends up being debunked, I’m still going to use it.

The Matryoshka Doll Fantasy

One of the big arguments against taking guns away from individuals is that we need them just in case the big bad federal government comes to take away our rights.  This is a grown men playing Dungeons and Dragons fantasy, but it’s worth addressing in greater detail.

If you truly believe that the federal government may eventually come to take away your rights, the only logical solution is a well organized, well trained, well regulated state militia.

If you truly believe that the state may eventually come to take away your rights and the federal government won’t stick up for you, the only logical solution is a well organized, well trained, well regulated county militia.

If you truly believe that the county may eventually come to take away your rights and the state won’t stick up for you, the only logical solution is a well organized, well trained, well regulated town militia.

If you truly believe that the town may eventually come to take away your rights and the county won’t stick up for you, the only logical solution is a well organized, well trained, well regulated neighborhood militia.

If you truly believe that the neighborhood may eventually come to take away your rights and the town won’t stick up for you, the only logical solution is a well organized, well trained, well regulated household.
If you truly believe that your household may eventually come to take away your rights and the neighborhood won’t stick up for you, the only logical solution is a well organized, well trained, well regulated individual.

Here you are, the smallest matryoshka doll alone with all your guns.

In this fantasy world where someone is coming to take away your rights, at some point, you have to trust someone or you are going to have your rights taken away.  If you don’t trust your household to protect you, you should probably move to a different house.  If you don’t trust your neighborhood to protect you, you should probably move to a different neighborhood.  If you don’t trust your town to protect you, you should probably move to another town.  If you don’t trust your county to protect you, you should probably move to another county.  If you don’t trust your state to protect you, you should probably move to a different state.  If you don’t trust your country to protect you, you should probably move to a different planet.  Because if any bigger matryoshka doll decides to take away your rights, there is a zero percent chance of you keeping those rights.