Flinging holiday snow

In case you were unaware, many warriors feverishly defended Christmas this year from godless and other-godful rabble rousers. As they have succeeded advancing the calendar to this fateful day, what will they do with it? What does “Christmas spirit” look like? Will they lead by example through their wishes of unity and forgiveness, or take sardonic swipes at dissenters?

Stacy Campfield can’t pass by a chance to reprobate his “Democrat friends [sic],” wishing them a “gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice” (that’s for you, Steve!). One of the six meats chimes in with Christmas wishes on behalf of “the spiritually neurotic Jew, the athiest [sic], the Methodist and the rest” (though this neurotic Jew is busy defending Chanukah). Terry Frank recycles last year’s message of small-government-Jesus (Newsflash: Jesus supports tax cuts!)

Fortunately, there are those bloggers who recall the true meaning of the holidays: mass commercialism, nostalgia, mixed messages about grown men’s laps, and, of course, dogs with antlers.

Thesaurus: valuable blogging tool

The colorful language of bloggers:

It’s easy to dismiss this dedication to a hermeneutic of fear as passe

[Phil Wilson]

And from bliblical to “sumthin’-”secular:

socially engineer the views of an aggrieved ecosecular fascist minority

[Six Meat Buffet]

Though sometimes the perfect word is hard to find:

more of the same tedious, dull, dreary, mind-numbing, tiresome, lackluster, monotonous stuff

[Marketing Monster]

And lastly, the most colorful phrase of the day:

The leather clad wannabees that have stuffed you into their codpiece

[Whitescreek Journal]

Cotton to the cornucopia of colorful cacophony!

Morning Mishmash

Ever play a silly game where each person successively adds a sentence to a story? Here is my blog version this morning. Take 16 random blog entries, pull a sentence from each, and piece them together. This morning’s experiment:

You can’t casually hand a man a sack of hard candy and expect successful tossing! The notion would strike them as silly. Please go and say hello to my friend, the Stewman. It seems his chocolate business is running smoothly. (An attractive addition to your holiday baking). I was assigned the task of identifying the “special gifts” my colleagues and I had promised to distribute at a dinner. Do you ask the recipient what they want? The gift that keeps on costing. The current savings rate for US citizens is below zero. I’m mightily pissed about this. That’s going to foment even more resentment. And it is a disaster. Will Al Gore blame that on your car’s tailpipe, too? (He has a little trouble keeping a good, consistent distance from the microphone.) I feel a little narcissistic writing this.

So, not all experiments are successful. Anyway, go read them in context.

Kindergarten politics

By the time we became teens, most of us developed simple heuristics to classify the trustworthiness of our peers. Those who shared secrets with others were gossips. Those who kept confidences were trustworthy. We all probably remember those kids in a third category who would proclaim to anyone within earshot that they “know something you don’t know,” making sure that we recognized how special they were because of their proprietary knowledge. I classified those as immature, insecure ninnies who I eventually learned to ignore.

By the way, Stacy Campfield knows something we don’t know.