The Sporadic Curmudgeon

For your reading pleasure, as if you didn’t already have enough reason to loathe me, here’s some of the Holiday-themed crapola I’ve scribbled over the years. The last two are the only surviving examples of a particularly nasty personal tradition: for about a decade I wrote a horrible Christmas story every year. I finally stopped because of lack of energy and a strong instinct for self-preservation. If I ever find a copy of the rest, I’ll put them up.

Bad Haiku V (2005)

Sleigh Ride to Oblivion (2004)

Ten Rarely-Shown Holiday TV Specials (1998)

The Heartwarming Christmas Quiz (1997)

Zombies of the North Pole (1993)

Santa Agonistes (1992)

1. Squishin’s-brand Pocket Grub

2. Music-box rectal thermometer

3. Shut Yer Stupid Yap! game for couples

4. Holiday-themed crocheted spittoon cozy

5. Chunk-style lip gloss

6. The Littlest Cadaver autopsy kit

7. Insulated toaster fork

8. Desktop magma fountain

9. Drop-Dead Gorgeous fashion tourniquets

10. Lavender-scented hair tallow

11. Orifice tweezers

12. Half-crazy straws

13. Squirreling iron

14. Honey, That’s Delicious! spray-on gag suppressant

15. CSI: Miami DVD boxed sets

There’s degrees of chemical dependency: you’ve got your I-swear-I-can-quit-anytime-I-like user, your garden-variety addict, your hard-core crackhead. And then there’s this guy, who stole a car and stopped to smoke crack during the police chase. Twice.

With police on their way, he abandoned the car and ran off on foot, reports the Connecticut Post.

After climbing over a fence, he stopped to smoke crack before running off again, officers say.

He headed off through the local seaport, and went to stand on a boat - where he had another crack break.

The man was still on the boat smoking crack when officers apprehended him.

I’ve got to hand it to him, that’s a level of dedication to an addiction that verges on the admirable.

It’s a little-known and oddly charming fact that people in the Catalonia region of Spain hide a small porcelain figure of a shitting peasant in their Nativity scenes. The character, known as El Caganer (according to the linked article it means “the great defecator” — wasn’t that a Platters song?), has been a feature of the local Christmas celebration for centuries.

During the holiday season, pastry shops around Catalonia sell sweets shaped like feces, and on Christmas Eve Catalan children beat a hollow log, called the tio, packed with holiday gifts, singing a song that urges it to defecate presents out the other end.

These traditions, in the case of the caganer dating back as far as the 17th century, come from an agricultural society where defecation was associated with fertility and health.

The Wikipedia article on the caganer, however, claims that this comforting explanation is, well, full of shit. The real reason is probably the simplest: it’s pretty danged funny to hide a little guy taking a crap in the Nativity scene.

It is one of life’s most cruel ironies that we men reach our physical and sexual peak precisely when we’re least likely to be able to take advantage of it: during our teens, when we are generally unattractive, smelly, and deeply, profoundly stupid. How stupid are teenage males, you ask? Here’s a good example.

A young UK man at a party doused his sleeping friend’s back with lighter fluid and lit him on fire as a joke. He then freaked out when his friend was engulfed in flames and ran out of the room.

Allan Cobain, defending, said there was nothing malicious in Wallwork’s behaviour. It was a foolish prank which had gone disastrously wrong.

Disastrously wrong? Let’s see… hosing down his friend with Char-Lite, check. Igniting his friend with a cigarette lighter, check. Friend becomes agonized screaming fireball, check.

I don’t know, seems like it went pretty much as one would expect. Ah, to be young and have no concept of causality…

chili con carne
elevator accident
so undignified

I’m working on a secret animation project and was scrounging around the internet archives looking for some suitably cheesy incidental music, when I ran across a little ditty recorded in 1928 by The Midnight Ramblers with Billy Murray entitled I Faw Down An’ Go Boom.

Say, I thought to myself… that sounds awfully familiar. And then I flashed on the Warner Brothers cartoon from the 1940s featuring Tweety Bird as an Air Raid Warden in World War II torturing a couple of cats patterned after Abbot and Costello. And what was the main gag line throughout? “I tawt I taw a puddy tat… he faw down go BOOM!”

And another piece of the cultural jigsaw gets slipped into place. Maybe I’ll inaugurate a new section here on Atomic Deathray: Mysterious Connections.

Oh, don’t bother listening to the song I linked to unless you really like obnoxious corny novelty songs from the twenties. Me? I’ll stick with good ol’ Cab Calloway.

After 2,500 miles, the better part of two weeks and a couple of ungodly-expensive two-dollar cokes at McDonald’s, we escaped Las Vegas and arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina late Thursday night. I’m finally online (obviously), and will be back to my usual pissing and moaning about everything in sight within a few days.

Until then, and apropos of nothing more than me having the Beatles’ Here Comes The Sun stuck in my head since Oklahoma, here’s an amazing video of solar plasma streaming along the magnetic fields surrounding a large group of sunspots. (Large file, but well worth the wait.) It was photographed in ultraviolet light by the TRACE spacecraft.