Item: With 2006 upon us - two hours away, in fact -  it's probably best to take a look back at 2005 and those who passed on beyond the veil who had a profound effect upon all our lives. They're listed in chronological order, and I've included links to their Wikipedia entry, where applicable:

January:

• Will Eisner, January 3rd, age 87. Respected US comic book creator and pioneering graphic novelist. Most noted for creating The Spirit, and throughout his career fought for creator's rights and promoting the comic book industry as more than just "funny books."
   

• Rose Mary Woods, January 22nd, age 87. Richard Nixon's White House secretary and key Watergate figure. It was Woods who controlled the footpedal that activated the dictaphone recorder that the infamous "18 Minute Gap" was found on. Whether her footwork was deliberate or accidental was never fully determined, although the claimed to her deathbed that it was *not* deliberate nor part of any conspiracy to cover up the actions of Nixon and the "Plumbers' Squad."
   

• Johnny Carson, January 23rd, age 79. Longest running host of NBC's The Tonight Show, and probable cause of - if not virtual witness to - at least 40% of the conceptions that occurred between the hours of 10:30pm and Midnight Central Time between 1962 and 1992.
   

• Nick McDonald, January 27th, age 76. The Dallas police officer who arrested Lee Harvey Oswald after the JFK assassination, and appeared on numerous documentaries detailing the events of the arrest. Quite possibly the only official involved in the assassination who was never accused of being part of the "conspiracies" and/or the "cover-ups."
   

• Ivan Noble, January 31st, age 37. Noted BBC journalist who kept a tragic, but inspiring running blog on the Beeb's website during his fight against a terminal brain tumor. The Beeb stillhas the blogs online, and anyone with any sort of cancer should read them.

February:

• Max Schmeling, February 2nd, age 99. Most noted as the German world heavyweight boxing champion who took on Joe Louis twice and got his ass whipped on the second bout, much to the chagrin of one Adolf Hitler, a former painter of limited talent who invented WWII. Unknown to most of his detractors until recent years, Schmeling was later revealed to have been an unwilling propaganda pawn of the Nazi Party, and not only was drafted into the German Army as punishment for losing to an "inferior schwartzer", but actually sent on deliberate suicide missions in hopes of getting killed painfully. To his credit, he came back each and every time, much again to Hitler's chagrin.
   

• George Herman, February 8th, age 85. Noted journalist and moderator of CBS' Face the Nation for 15 years. Most famous for being the first reporter to break the story of the Watergate breakin and the arrest of the "Plumber's Squad."
   

• Robert Kearns, February 9th, age 77. Noted for being the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, something any of us who drive around in light mists can appreciate.
• Samuel W. Alderson, February 11th, age 90. The man who invented the crash test dummy, to whom without question a lot of people owe their lives to.
   
• Jack L. Chalker, February 11th, age 60. Award-winning American science fiction writer, most noted for his Well of Souls series.
   
• Dan O'Herlihy, February 17th, age 85. Irish-born film actor with dozens of credits, most notably for his role of General Black in the original Fail-Safe, and that of Dr. Ravashol on the original Battlestar Galactica series.
   
• Hunter S. Thompson, February 20th, age 67. The Father of Gonzo Journalism, the inspiration for Ambassador Duke, and author of such classics as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. And yes, he did get his wish for his ashes to be shot out of a cannon.
   
• Sandra Dee, February 20th, age 62. American actress first known as a role model for young women to retain their virginous virtues until marriage, then later ridiculed as social morals changed. Especially noted for ridicule in Grease.
   
• Jef Raskin, February 26th, age 61. The man who took Xerox castoff technology and reworked it into the Apple Macintosh. Just so you know Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak don't totally share the blame.

March:

• Peter Malkin, March 1st, age 77. The Israeli Mossad agent who captured Nazi war criminal and "Final Solution" architect Adolf Eichmann.
   
• Akira Yoshizawa, March 17th, age 94. The Japanese Origami master credited for taking the art of paper folding and making it an internationally-accepted art technique that wasn't relegated to old Zen Buddhists and geriatrics.
   
• Andre Norton, March 17th, age 93. Highly admired, respected, and deservedly award-winning science fiction and fantasy author. Andre, unbeknown to a lot of people - many of whom had actually read her works - was actually a woman, and had adopted a male pen name in order to break into the Sci-Fi writing business in the mid-30's; a time when women didn't write Sci-Fi unless you were Mary Shelley, and according to the publishersShelley didn't write Sci-Fi, she wrote "gothic horror." Go figure.
   
• John De Lorean, March 25th, age 80. US car designer and manufacturer whose eponymous aluminum-body sports car with gullwing doors became synonymous with cocaine smuggling and time travel. The designer and his factory are long gone, but the cars still live on as a cottage industry has sprung up making DeLorean replacement parts and conversion kits to turn them into copies of the one used in the Back to the Future films.
   
• Paul Henning, March 25th, age 93. The TV producer & creator who gave us the Beverly Hillbillies, the seminal series that kicked off a whole slew of spinoffs set in a fictionalized rural hayseed America that was really too close to the truth for most civilized Americans to accept. And yet audiences tuned in to high ratings to watch one joke for nine years.
   
• Johnnie Cochran, March 29th, age 67. The lawyer who gained fame *and* infamy for successfully defending O.J. Simpson. Most noted quote: "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit." Most famous defense tactic, however, was the one used on his appearance on South Park, which involved the issue of whether Wookies lived on Endor or not.
   
• Terri Schiavo, March 31st, age 41. The persistent vegetative state patient who became the poster child for various "Right-To-Life" groups over whether or not she should be allowed to die rather than remain on life support. Autopsy later showed that the brain damage that had caused her condition had, in fact, destroyed the areas of the brain that are scientifically proven to be directly associated with memory, personality and cognitive thought.

April:

• Jack Keller, April 2nd, age 68. Songwriter who wrote the theme to Bewitched, one of the 60's most recognizable theme songs. Believe it or not, there's lyrics to the music, but I won't include a link here because all the lyrics sites contain trojans. No. Really.
   
• Pope John Paul II, April 2nd, age 84. The former Karol Wojtyła was the first Roman Catholic Pope from a Communist country - Poland - whose crusading for peace and religious freedoms became a rallying point for the peaceful overthrow of Poland's Soviet-backed puppet government that had oppressed the country and its people since the end of WWII. He was considered by most Papal scholars as one of the more influential men to occupy the Holy See, and without question one of the most popular Popes in recorded history. Not the least of which due to his willingness to at least examine new ideas and arguments in favor of changing church doctrines to fit more modern social mores.
   
• Debralee Scott, April 5th, age 52. Actress best known for her roles on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Angie, and frequent appearances on The Match Game. However, she was really best known for a one-shot role on Welcome Back, Kotter as the "girl who does!" Rosalie "Hotzi" Totzi.
   
• John Fred, April 15th, age 63.1960s pop singer, who with is Playboy Band, released the one-hit wonder  Judy in Disguise in 1967, which knocked the Beatles "Hello, Goodbye" off the #1 spot on the charts the first week it was released. Fred was also known for turning down an appearance on Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" because he had to play a basketball game skedded on the same day
   
• Mason Adams, April 26th, age 86. American actor most noted for his "grandfatherly" role in commercials for Smucker's jams and jellies, and highly respected by space historians for his accurate portrayal of Sen. Clinton Anderson,  who chaired the  US Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences during the investigation into the Apollo 1 fire and was instrumental in keeping it from turning into a witch hunt at the hands of luddite Senator Walter Mondale.

May:

• Charlie Muse, May 5th, age 87. A Pittsburgh Pirates executive who, in response to far too many beanballs, became the creator of the modern baseball batting helmet. Every boy of summer owes this man a great debt of thanks.
   
• Herb Sargent, May 6th, age 81. Television comedy writer most noted for setting the tone and direction for the Weekend Update segments on Saturday Night Live. The fact that this segment is the only one that's survived all 30+ seasons of the show's overextended life is a living testament to his talent and his work.
   
• Frank Gorshin, May 17th, age 71. American actor and impressionist best known for his role as the Riddler in the 1960's Batman TV series. He was also nominated for an Emmy for his role as Bele on the Star Trek TOS episode, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, an episode that for years was considered one of TOS's worst episodes until Gorshin urged fans to ignore the lowered production values of the 3rd season and look at the message of the episode. Since then, it's been considered one of Star Trek's finest works. Of course, the blooper where Bele breaks into a Jimmy Cagney "you dirty raaat" impression didn't hurt either!
   
• Henry Corden, May 19th, age 85. Canadian-American voice actor who became voice of Fred Flintstone for more than two decades following the death of his predecessor, Alan Reed, in 1977. Actually, he'd been voicing Fred for a bit longer than that, providing Fred's singing voice from 1960 onward. When Reed passed on, Corden became the logical choice to replace him.
   
• Howard Morris, May 21st, age 85. American character actor whose performance as Ernest T. Bass on the Andy Griffith Show immortalized him with TV audiences for the rest of his life. And this despite the fact that Ernest T. only appeared on a total of five episodes.
   
• Thurl Ravenscroft, May 22nd, age 91. American singer and voice actor who was most famous for the voice of Tony the Tiger and for the song You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch from How The Grinch Stole Christmas. He was, without question, GrrrrrEAT!
   
• Eddie Albert, May 26th, age 99. Well-known American actor, most famous for the role of Oliver Wendell Douglass on Green Acres. Spent his later years as a world-renown humanitarian who, unlike most actors and media personalities, raised funds to help because it was the right thing to do and not for personal glory and/or media accolade and exposure.

June:

• Dana Elcar, June 8th, age 77. American actor with numerous roles throughout his career, most notable of which were that of Pete Thornton on "MacGyver", Col. Thomas Lard on "Baa Baa Black Sheep", and a minor but pivotal role in bringing Dimitri Moisevitch to life in 2010. He was also one of a very small group of American actors - including Natalie Wood and Brian Keith who were fluent Russian speakers.
   
• Ed Bishop, June 8th, age 72. American actor who found greater fame over in Englandland, first as the voice of Captain Blue on Gerry Anderson's Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. He also had a bit role as an American Astronaut in Mouse on the Moon, then a minor role in Anderson's Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, and an even shorter cameo role as the Aries 1B captain on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. But his most famous role was that of Commander Ed Straker on Anderson's UFO series, the precursor to Space: 1999.
   
• Kathi Norris, June 15th, age 86. Kathi hosted one of the first TV talk shows, with the misfortune of having been aired on the ill-fated Dumont TV Network. She gained a brief 15 minutes of infamy as the mother of Koo Stark, the soft-porn actress who for a brief period was the shagging parter of Englandland's Prince Andrew.
   
• J.J. "Jake" Pickle, June 18th, age 92. Texas Representative who became renown as a champion for the rights of the elderly. While in the House, Pickle rose through the ranks to become the third ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee. He played a key role in passing major Social Security reform legislation in 1983 to save the system from insolvency. The reforms increased the payroll tax rate, slowly increased the full benefit retirement age to 67 and taxed some of the benefits. He considered this legislation his greatest accomplishment. A close friend of my family since my Grandfather catered his first campaign fundraisers, and my sponsor for my NROTC scholarship, his loss was felt personally.
   
• Jack Kilby, June 20th, age 81. The inventor of the integrated circuit and Nobel prize winner for physics. Working with germanium, he freed computing and electronics from the "Tyranny of numbers" and made solid-state electronics a reality. The fact that you're reading this now on your computer owes pretty much everything in its guts to Jack's pioneering work.
   
• Bernard Adolph Schriever, June 20th, age 94. A retired US General regarded by military and space historians as the father and architect of the United States Air Force space and ballistic missile programs. Ever the one to charge forward and achieve his goal, at the age of 86 he married 50's proto-pop singer Joni James, who he'd been a fan of during his military days. Sa-LUTE!
   
• Frederick G. Dutton, June 25th, age 82, advisor to John F. Kennedy and later campaign manager for his brother, Bobby. However, if there's one thing he's given real credit for is coming up with the concept of Earth Day. Yep, thanks to Fred Dutton, hippies have their own holiday.
   
• John Fiedler, June 25th, age 80. Celebrated American actor who achieved the pig's share of his fame for two specific roles. The most famous of which was for providing the animated voice of Piglet in the Walt Disney adaptations of Winnie The Pooh. Fielder was, in fact, the last of the original Pooh voice cast to die. The other role was that of Mr. Hengist, the attorney from Rigel IV who wound up being the nonliving host for the entity known as Redjak on the Star Trek TOS episode Wolf in the Fold. Fielder had at one time been approached to appear on Next Generation to reprise the role, but reportedly declined due to ill health at the time.
   
• Shelby Foote, June 27th, age 88. US historian whose balanced narrative accounts of the events of the War Betwixt the States won him high praise from scholars on both sides of the Yankee-Confederate line, as well as a spot on Ken Burns documentary of the war for PBS that both immortalized him and made him a visible celebrity for the remainder of his life.

July:

• Luther Vandross, July 1st, age 54. The man behind The Crests R&B classic Sixteen Candles, this soulful crooner was responsible for a lot of women getting wet at the sound of his voice, and a lot of guys getting laid shortly after. A long career working with a lot of talented people, so check the Wiki entry for all the details.
   
• Norm Prescott, July 2nd, age 78. Co-founder of Filmation animation studios with business partner Lou Schiemer. Filmation was responsible for numerous low-quality but highly successful animated kids shows, including the various Archie shows, Fat Albert, Star Trek Animated Series, and, of course, the kid-friendly reimaging of Mattel's internally shelved Conan line of toys into He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Ironically, Prescott's death was not exactly greeted with sadness by many of those who worked for Filmation, as many stories of the company's "screwing over" its employees surfaced shortly after his death.
   
• L. Patrick Gray, July 6th, age 88. Following the death of J. Edgar Hoover, Gray became  the acting Director of the FBI in 1972. Nixon had proposed Gray for the permanent role, but thanks to leaks by "Deep Throat" Mark Feld, it was revealed that Gray had destroyed certain Watergate documents on orders from White House Counsel John Dean. Gray withdrew his resignation, and fought the allegations of wrongdoing for the rest of the 70's until pardoned by Ronald Reagan in 1980. During all this time, Gray had suspected Felt of being the infamous informant, "Deep Throat", something that was confirmed just a month before his death by Felt's revelation that he was, in fact, the one who blew the whistle on Watergate.
   
• Byron Preiss, July 9th, age 52. An American writer/editor/publisher who was always looking for the "next cutting edge" in publication technology and methodology. While not exactly the inventor of the "Graphic Novel" concept, he was mainly responsible for getting the format accepted by the rest of the comic book industry in the late 70's. He was also responsible for promoting the audiobook format - for which he won a Grammy in the 80's for an audiobook on Gandhi - and the concepts that led to the iBook format.
   
• Meimei, July 12th, age 36. The world's oldest captive panda passed away at the Guilin City Zoo in the Guangxi region of the Evil Communist Empire of China, where she had been living for the past 20 years. She was loaned out several times for breeding programs, and produced a couple of cubs before her fertility wore out.
   
• Edward Heath July 17th, age 89. Heath was the former Prime Minister of Englandland from 1970 to 1974, and is the same "Mr. Heath" that the Beatles complained about in their song Taxman. His administration reads like a major clusterfuck, so to save blogspace on an already booklength entry, I'll refer you to the Wiki writeup.
   
• William Westmoreland, July 19th, age 91. The  US Army General who commanded American military operations in the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1968, then Army Chief of Staff from 1968 to 1972. A frequent targed of See-BS journalist Mike Wallace, Westmoreland to his death he defended his policies and military decisions in Vietnam, and argued what many have argued since the fall of Saigon: no matter whether or not the war should have ever been started, US politicians sabotaged the war effort and we failed to provide the South Vietnamese the support we promised them. To his credit, his postwar analyses successfully proved that his Viet Cong adversary, Vo Nguyen Giap. was in no way, shape or form a "military genius", as such a leader does not waste his troops by conducting suicide guerilla tactics in a large-scale front.
   
• Jim Aparo, July 19th, age 72. One of the greatest and most expedient comic book artists in history, Jim helped take Batman out of the "Camp" style brought on by the TV show and set a style that has remained a seminal influence on the character and his settings to this day. Jim was also associated with setting the styles for the Phantom Stranger and a revamped The Spectre that current artists still refer to for inspiration some two decades after he quit drawing both characters. His talent and his professionalism were of the type that the current crop of perpetually late artists should take as an example of how to do your job.
   
• James Doohan, July 20th, age 85. Ironically passing away on the anniversary of the first manned landing on the Moon, Jimmy was a Canadian actor whose greatest role was that of Cmdr. Montgomery Scott, chief engineer of the USS Enterprise on Star Trek TOS and its six movies. Jimmy made a second career out of convention appearances, and actually became a far more wanted guest than the show's more egotistical star, William Shatner. Provided Space-X's Falcon 1 makes it off the launch pad, a sample of Jimmy's ashes will be lofted into orbit, symbolically giving the man who inspired millions of engineers, scientists and astronauts to pursue their chosen careers a visit to the space he previously only visited through special effects.
   
• Dr. Shirley Thomas, July 21st, age 85. A USC professor, Hollywood producer and Space historian who became one of the earliest, most vocal promoters of the American manned space efforts. Thomas authored fifteen books, including her eight volume series on astronauts Men of Space between 1960 and 1968. She also organized and chaired the Woman's Space Symposia from 1962-1973, and lead the charge to get a stamp issued to honor Theodore von Karman in 1992.
   
• Bruce Bolt, July 21st, age 75. Scientist and earthquake expert who basically rewrote the books on seismology. A lot of what we know about earthquakes comes from the research Bruce did on the 1906 Los Angeles earthquake, even proving that the epicenter was in a different place than previously determined.
   
• Myron Floren, July 23rd, age 85. The longtime accordionist/bandleader on The Lawrence Welk Show, Floren managed to give the accursed instrument the level of credibility that Weird Al Yankovic and the raper of journalists, Judy Tenutab managed to damage to the point of some politicians receiving demands from their constituents to pass laws to make accordion playing illega. Floren was a frequent special guest at the New Braunsfels Wurstfests, as well as other polka-friendly events for the remainder of his life.
   
• Pat McCormick, July 29th, age 78. Beloved American comedy actor with roles too numerous to completely list, and writer for just about as many shows as he performed in, including Get Smart and Under the Rainbow. If I had to pick out one standout role for Pat, it had to be that of Big Enos Burdette in the three Smokey and the Bandit flicks - possibly the only saving grace along with Paul Williams as Little Enos in the debacles that were the latter two sequels.

August:

• King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, August 1st, age 82 or 84, depending on which history you choose to believe. One of Saudi Arabia's most liberal rulers, despite backing Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran War, he later realized the danger Saddam placed the Middle East in following Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, and allowed US-led Coalition troops to stage Gulf War I from Saudi airbases. Due to failing health and a stroke in 1995, his half-brother, Abdullah, served as de facto regent of the kingdom and Crown Prince, and succeeded Fahd as monarch upon his death.
   
• Joseph Rogers, August 7th, age 81. USAF Colonel and aviator who still holds the World Single Engine Speed Record of 1,525 mph. Rogers set this mark in an F-106 Delta Dart in 1959. Some controversy existed over whether Rogers had set the record in the primary plane, #56-0459, or the backup plane, #56-0467. Rogers himself set the record straight some years later by explaining that 0459 had suffered a malfunction, and that 0467 was used to set the record. However, 0459 was listed in the record books due to a clerical error, and that 0467 had been lost in a mishap not long after the record was set. Mox nix when you get down to it, because the record stands regardless of which Delta Dart he flew.
   
• Peter Jennings, August 7th, age 67. Canadian-born correspondent who spent almost two decades as the news anchor of the ABC Evening News. Jennings took ABC's nightly news broadcasts to higher ratings the likes of which were never seen by any of his predecessors, including the duo of Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith. However, much of those ratings came at the sacrifice of journalistic integrity and the concepts of fair and balanced reporting. One of the more notorious examples was his on-air arguments in favor of proposals for a Palestinian state due to his personal romantic relationship with Hanan Ashwari, a one-time spokeswoman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Calls for his dismissal were outright rejected by ABC News Director Roone Arledge, nor did Jennings bother to apologize for his crossing the line between reporting and personal gain.
  
  Possibly the most despicable example of this was in 1995, ten years to the day before his death, when ABC aired a news special hosted by Jennings where it was argued that the US was responsible for the Pacific War with Japan, and that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were totally deplorable and used more as a vengeance and power expression tool for Harry Truman's advisors than merely as a way to end the war sooner and lessen the loss of lives on both side. Jennings came under an incredible amount of fire from Veterans groups and historians for the special's revisionism, especially the way it obviously catered to the then-current administration of the National Air and Space Museum, who were presenting those exact same arguments in a special exhibit featuring the Enola Gay, which was being restored for permanent display after several decades of poor storage and neglect.
  
  Needless to say, for every single one who mourned him, there were at least one who did not, if not just slightly more.
   
• Philip J. Klass, August 9th, age 85. Noted aviation journalist, he became best known as a leading debunker of UFOs, arguing especially against the extraterrestrial hypothesis and drawing the ire and hatred of MUFON morons all over the world. In his efforts to provide a more logical, concerted effort to combat the various UFO hoaxes and scams, Klass became a founding fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). While MUFON morons celebrated his death, his organization and its works survive him and continue the struggle against the psychotic and the bogus claims that hamper the real efforts to detect extraterrestrial life.
   
• Esther Wong, August 17th, age 88. New York club owner turned promoter who wound up becoming the "Godmother of Punk Rock". Quite a number of punk acts got their start performing at Madame Wong's clubs in NY and Santa Monica, and she became a legend that club owners in the Austin punk scene wanted to emulate but dared not out of pure respect. Even more than CBGB's, Esther's clubs showed that punk *was* the cure to the disease of Disco.
   
• Robert A. Moog, August 21st, age 71. The man who made electronic music first more than just a Theremin, then finally affordable, Bob Moog - rhymes with "Vogue" - was the  inventor and pioneer responsible for what we now call the Synthesizer. Where before the only way you could reproduce multiple instruments on the same keyboard was with a lovable but cludgy solution called the Mellotron, Bob's synthesizer used pure electronics to reproduce the waveforms that would form notes based on the instruments they originated from. Bob Moog converted his Theremin company to producing synthesizers, and the rest is music history!
  
  Shortly after Bob's death, it was proposed in his honor that the word Moog become the ANSI standard unit for expressing volts per octave. This term is used in reference to the exponentially-scaled voltage controlled oscillators found in analog synthesizers. The symbol is "Mg". One Moog (1 Mg) means one volt per octave (1V/oct), which is the most common standard. Other scaling factors have been used, such as the 1.2 Moog scale of Buchla synthesizers and the Minimoog Voyager's 0.98 Mg scaling. Notre that this has about a twelve-magnitude greater chance of becoming accepted than Micro$oft's attempts in the 80's to have the Mickey accepted as a unit of mouse measurement vs accuracy.
   
• Brock Peters, August 23rd, age 78. The stentorian-voiced actor best known for his role as the falsely accused Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird. He also portrayed Admiral Cartright in the fourth and six Star Trek movies, and as Benjamin Sisko's father on Deep Space Nine. Peters also was cast in a role-reversal of sorts as he played Chief Opposer Solon on an episode of the original Battlestar Galactica, prosecuting a falsely accused Starbuck of murder.
   
• George Szekeres and Esther Szekeres, August 28th, ages 95 and 94, respectively. The husband and wife team of Hungarian mathematicians were part of a group that included Paul Erdős and Paul Turán, who met over interesting mathematical problems. In 1933, Esther proposed a combinatorial problem to the group that came to be known as the Happy Ending problem, because it led to her marriage with George in 1937. For the rest of their lives, the two promoted mathematics to students old and young, right up to their passing within a half hour of one another. Truly, if there were more love stories like this in science, they'd never find any slackers to flip McWormburgers again.

September:

• Bob Denver, September 2nd, age 70. Beloved and sometimes parodied American actor who achieved immortality through two specific roles. The first of these was that of Maynard G. Krebs on the 1959-1963 TV series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, a role that firmly established in the American cultural psyche just what a "beatnik" was all about. But the role he became far more immortalized for was, of course, that of "Willy Gilligan" on the television series Gilligan's Island. So long, Li'l buddy!
   
• William Rehnquist, September 3rd, age 80. Up to the day he died, the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The Wiki writeup is pretty fairly balanced, so I'll refer you to that one and its associated links.
   
• Lewis Platt, September 10th, age 64. Former Hewlett Packard CEO, considered the last one the company had who possessed both the drive *and* the clues how to run the company successfully. Considering how Carly Fiorina totally fucked the company up, it's easy to see how many at H-P have come to this conclusion about Platt.
   
• Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, September 10th, age 81. One of the influential greats in blues and jazz, his guitar style influenced many other blues guitarists such as Albert Collins, Guitar Slim, and Johnny "Guitar" Watson. Frank Zappa named Brown as his all-time favorite guitarist.
   
• Hermann Bondi, September 14th, age 85. Noted mathematician & cosmologist, best known as a co-advocate with Tommy Gold & Fred Hoyle of the Steady-State Theory of of how the Universe came into being. Bondi, Gold & Hoyle were at the top of the heap in the field of cosmology until the discovery of cosmic background radiation, which was the basis for the Big Bang Theory, which blew a hole into the Steady-State Theory so wide that the only way it remained stable was the fact that it had sunk to the bottom and is now eternally resting there.
   
• Robert Wise, September 14th, age 91. Acclaimed film director and occasional cameo actor, best known for five specific films: Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Andromeda Strain, The Hindenburg, and the first controversial Star Trek film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The latter Wise had long considered unfinished due to time constraints imposed by the insane circumstances surrounding the film's production, but was able to oversee a director's cut of the film for DVD release prior to his death. While not correcting flaws in the basic story, this revised and "fixed" version still wound up being far superior to the original version, and far closer to Wise's original vision.
   
• Gordon Gould, September 16th, age 85. The accredited inventor of laser technology in 1957, Gould came up with the idea and the name at around the same time as Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes completed their independent work on 'optical masers'. This began a long protracted series of legal battles and ownership claims that culminated in 1977 with Gould's being awarded the patent rights for optically-pumped laser amplifiers, which are the kind of lasers one finds in pointers, grocery scanners and CD players.
   
• Donn Clendenon, September 17th, age 70, American Major League baseball player attributed as being the key player around which the 1969 New York Mets went from being a shit team to winning the 1969 World Series as the "Miracle Mets". Proof that one good player can make a difference when the rest of the team can't pull together.
   
• Simon Wiesenthal, September 20th, age 96. Austrian Holocaust survivor and renown Nazi war criminal hunter. A long career dedicated to justice and vengeance, I strongly urge that you read the Wiki entry to get the history, and watch The Boys from Brazil to get a very accurate grasp on the dedication and fervor that Wiesenthal possessed.
   
• Joseph Smagorinsky, September 21st, age 81. A Princeton meteorologist and mathematician, he was a major pioneer in the use of mathematical modeling as a weather forecasting tool. Smagorinsky also founded the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and helped develop the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, a doctoral program in the Department of Geosciences that collaborates closely with the GFDL. Much of his work has helped meteorologists improve their forecasting accuracy beyond expectations, which means now when the smarmy poofter on the TV tells you it's going to rain tomorrow, there's about a 50% better chance that he'll be right than if he'd told you this ten years ago.
   
• Harry Heltzer, September 21st, age 94. A former CEO of 3M, Heltzer's main contribution to humanity was the development of Scotchlite™ Reflective Sheeting, which is the basis for every single reflective highway sign, marker and guardrail. He made night driving a whole lot safer, and saved a lot of lives in the process.
   
• Tommy Bond, September 28th, age 79. While he was best known visibly for playing Butch in the Our Gang/Little Rascals shorts in the 30s and 40's, vocally he was immortalized by providing the voice of Owl Jolson in the Merrie Melodies short I Love To Singa. That song wound up burned into a new generation of cartoon watchers when it became the song Eric Cartman is forced to sing after an alien anal probe has been implanted in his rear end by Grey Aliens.
   
• Don Adams, September 28th, age 82. Would you believe an American actor, comedian and voice artist? Would you believe the man who brought Agent Maxwell Smart, Inspector Gadget, and Tennessee Tuxedo to immortality? You better believe you'd believe it.
   
• Jerry Juhl, September 28th, age 67. Writer and puppetteer for the Muppets. Juhl started out as one of Jim Henson's earliest recruits for Sam & Friends, an association with the Henson organization that lasted for the rest of his life. He moved from muppetry to writing, and wrote, co-wrote and/or produced many of the shows and movies Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Fozzie and the rest of the Muppets starred in over the years. Even Statler and Waldorf are in tears over this loss, kids.
   
• Leo Sternbach, September 28th, age 97. An Austrian-native chemist who was the creator of the pill that became immortalized as Mother's Little Helper. Yes, Sternbach was the creator of diazepam, better known to harassed mothers everywhere as Valium, the drug that saved many a marriage - and probably a few lives by quelling domestic quarrels beforehand - during its heyday from 1968 to 1984. Sternbach is also credited with other similar mood-controllers such as chlordiazepoxide (Librium), flurazepam (Dalmane), nitrazepam (Mogadon), clonazepam (Klonopin), and trimethaphan (Arfonad). Far out, man.
   
• Richard Dunn, September 28th, age 77. Noted Astronomer and former director of the  US National Solar Observatory. Dr. Dunn's was highly regarded for his landmark contribution to solar astronomy: the design and development of the 108-meter-tall (356-foot) Vacuum Tower Telescope. When put into service in October 1969 by the U.S. Air Force, the telescope revolutionized the capabilities of solar telescopes. The innovative design employs a vertical vacuum tube - more than half of it underground - with its instrument platform attached so it rotates with the telescope tube as it tracks the Sun during the day. By evacuating the telescope and by careful control of the telescope environment at the telescope entrance, Dunn eliminated many image deterioration effects. The success of his new vacuum telescope concept is best measured by its implementation in several major solar telescope constructed since then. Dr. Dunn's follow-up work on this technique laid the groundwork for the new adaptive optics technologies that are used to compensate for atmospheric blurring in ground-based telescopes.
   
• Sig Frohlich, September 30th, age 95. Sig was a bit-part actor for much of his long career in Hollywood, playing messengers, waiters, callboys, clerks and soldiers, rarely earning even a flicker of recognition from viewers over 50 years. He played a mutineer in Clark Gable's version of Mutiny on the Bounty, and an air traffic controller in the classic It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World! But the role he was most famous for was that of the last winged monkey in The Wizard of Oz; in  fact, he was the one who delivered Toto to the Wicked Witch of the West. A clear reminder to aspiring actors that sometimes even bit parts become as important as the leads.

October:

• Robert Hanson, October 1st, age 85. The last-surviving crew-member of the Memphis Belle. No, it wasn't just a WWII propaganda film *or* a Hollywood blockbuster 50 years later, kids. The Belle and her crew were for real, and we thank them for their sacrifices.
   
• Nipsey Russell, October 2nd, age 80. Beloved African-American comedian, poet and actor, who became most famous for his game show appearances on Match Game, To Tell the Truth, and Rhyme & Reason. It was on the game shows where his skills as a poet and satirist became almost a Hollywood legend, and where he also earned a reputation as being one of the few game show guests who took the game seriously; a dogma reportedly the result of being rather disgusted after watching Paul Lynde drunkenly destroy one too many taping sessions during his "Middle Square" tenure on Hollywood Squares.
   
• Alastair G. W. Cameron, October 3rd, age 80. American astrophysicist who revolutionized lunar geology - or selenology - by developing the Giant Impact Theory of Lunar Creation. Also known as the Big Whack theory, it postulates that the Earth-Moon system formed as a result of a collision between a young Earth and a Mars-sized body sometimes called Theia that shared the same orbit but not the same orbital velocity as Earth, and eventually "whacked" into the proto-Earth. The resulting impact threw up debris high enough to coalesce into the Moon.
  
  On a side note, a related hypothesis put forth by OM argues that the source of the Lunar Mascons may be the result of inconsistencies in the lunar core and subsurface caused by non-homogeneity between Earth and Theia materials - essentially there was not enough core melting and layer separation as the chunks of both planets condensed into the Moon, much in the same way you get lumps when you mix a dissolvable powder into a cold liquid.
   
• John van Hengel, October 5th, age 83. Humanitarian and food bank pioneer. Most renown as the founder of America's Second Harvest, the nation's largest food rescue organization.
   
• Charles Rocket, October 7th, age 56. American actor best known for getting fired from Saturday Night Live for saying the word "fuck" on live TV at the end of a show featuring a parody of the Who Shot JR? plotline on the then-popular TV soap-drama Dallas. He continued as an actor, with roles on Dances with Wolves and Star Trek: Voyager.
   
• Lt Cdr Andy Chalmers, October 13th, age 84. British submarine commander whose brilliant career was highlighted during his tour as first lieutenant of the submarine Venturer, which sank two German U-boats and prevented the export of heavy water and rocket plans to Japan in WWII. He was manning the periscope of the Venturer when he spotted both U-boats, and was credited with the kill.
   
• Eugene "Porky" Lee, October 16th, age 71. American child actor on the Our Gang/Little Rascals shorts in the 1930s. Contrary to popular mythology, it was Porky and not Buckwheat who originated the phrase "Otay".
   
• Elmer Dresslar, Jr., October 16th, age 80. American voice actor whose baritone voice was immortalized as that of the Jolly Green Giant.
   
• John F. Muth, October 23rd, age 75. American economist known as "the father of the rational expectations revolution in economics", primarily due to his article "Rational Expectations and the Theory of Price Movements". Muth's basic theory can be best stated as "expectations, since they are informed predictions of future events, are essentially the same as the predictions of the relevant economic theory. At the risk of confusing this purely descriptive hypothesis with a pronouncement as to what firms ought to do, we call such expectations rational."
   
• Rosa Parks, October 24th, age 92. Became the rallying symbol for the African-American Civil Rights movement in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, AB to a white passenger and move to the back of the bus. While her refusal was, as Cedric The Entertainer put it, one that was based more on the fact that she was tired and just didn't want to get up out of her seat after having finally gotten comfortable no matter what color the guy wanting her seat was, Parks didn't just sit on her laurels. For the rest of her life she wasn't just a figurehead, but a leader in her own right for the Civil Rights movement, earning every single bit of praise she garnered.
   
• Eugene K. Bird, October 28th, age 79, longtime Spandau guard of deputy Nazi Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess. Bird was the warden of Spandau Prison - and in effect Hess' chief guard - from 1964 to 1972. During this time, he secretly interviewed Hess for a book he was writing - something that was against policy as Hess was to be held in solitary confinement for the rest of his life as per the judgment at the Nuremberg trials. Bird was relieved of command, and in 1974 published a book of his conversations with Hess which caused many to question the treatment Hess was receiving; many felt it was too lenient while an equal number felt it was too harsh, with the latter surprisingly consisting of many Holocaust survivors. When Hess was found dead in his cell of an apparent suicide in 1987, Bird became a major proponent of the theory that he was actually murdered by his warders acting on orders from the Soviet Union.
   
• Richard Smalley, October 28th, age 62. Nobel Prize-winning chemist accredited as being the co-discoverer of buckminsterfullerenes - more commonly known as Buckeyballs - with Robert Curl and Harold Kroto. He spent his last years working on the processes of producing Carbon Nanotubes, and developed the high-pressure carbon monoxide (HiPco) method of producing large batches of high-quality nanotubes at reasonably affordable cost.
   
• Lloyd Bochner, October 29th, age 81. Canadian character actor, best known for several roles, the most famous of which was that of the scientist attempting to decipher an alien text in the classic Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man". He also was fondly remembered as the "Space Nazi Commandant" Leiter in several episodes of the original Battlestar Galactica.
   
• William O. Baker, October 31st, age 90. Scientist and former Bell Labs president. In addition to working for Bell Labs during its most pioneering decades, Dr. Baker also served as an advisor to most of the US Presidents in the second half of the twentieth century, and helped introduce the technology of information gathering to the intelligence community during the Cold War. In 1959, at the request of President Eisenhower, Dr. Baker developed the plan for the establishment of the Defense Communications Agency, which was eventually implemented in 1961 under President Kennedy. He served as a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) during the formative years of NASA and Project Mercury.

November:

• Michael Piller, November 1st, age 57. Television screenwriter and producer who co-helmed many of the "Next Generation" Star Trek series. Among his major contributions to Next Generation was the two-part Best of Both Worlds, considered by critics and Trekkers alike as the best of TNG's seven seasons of episodes. Pillar's departure to produce The Dead Zone series was seen as the beginning of a serious quality decline in the Trek franchise, and allowed Rick Berman and Brandon Braga to essentially neuter the franchise with Enterprise and Nemesis. Clearly, the loss of Michael Pillar was felt long before his passing.
   
• Robert E. Bush, November 8th, age 79. The youngest sailor awarded a Medal of Honor during WWII. A medical corpsman assigned to a rifle company, Bush was wounded during an attack while on patrol during the invasion of Okinawa. While administering blood to a wounded officer, Bush successfully fought off several Japanese troops with a pistol and a rifle, and managed to get the officer to safety in spite of losing one eye  and suffering from severe blood loss himself.
   
• Ruth M. Siems, November 13th, age 74. Home economist who, while working for General Foods Corp., became the inventor of Stove Top Stuffing, which has become the standard for holiday dinner embellishment since 1971.
   
• Donald Watson, November 16th, age 95. British founder of the Vegan Society, a vegetarian diet methodology turned pseudoreligion and rallying point for freaks, hippies and other radical perverts searching for a cause once Vietnam ended. Contrary to popular myth, Watson did not choke to death on a piece of broccoli. Alas.
   
• Ralph Edwards, November 16th, age 92. The man who made the phrase This Is Your Life one of the most beloved *and* feared in American culture during the 50's and 60's. He was also the creator of Truth or Consequences, as well as the co-creator of The People's Court, a show that changed the face of afternoon syndicated TV from one dominated by reruns and kids' shows to what would become a wave of "reality" shows.
   
• Alfred Anderson, November 21st, age 109. The last living Scottish World War I veteran, oldest living man in Scotland and last survivor of the 1914 Christmas truce. Anderson was a proponent in later years of the theory that actions by both German and French military leaders following the truce to prevent its occurrence actually lengthened the war by reinforcing the stalemate and damaged troop cohesion and morale within the ranks - the latter of which the generals felt was the primary reason "Christmas Truces" should not be allowed in the first place.
   
• Pat Morita, November 24th, age 73. Asian-American character actor, most famous to audiences for two specific roles that, arguably, were the same character with different motivations. The first of which was that of Matsuo "Arnold" Takahashi, proprietor of Arnold's Drive-In on Happy Days. However, the role he was most famous for was that of the sensei and karate teacher Kesuke Miyagi who taught young "Daniel-san" Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid. Morita was nominated for both an Oscar and a Golden Globe award for this role.
   
• Gopal Vinayak Godse, November 26th, age 86. Last surviving conspirator in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. This is the guy who's never really portrayed in the Ben Kingsley biopic, but sort of grouped along with his conspirator brothers into one unnamed assassin. Unrepentant to the end, Godse defended the actions of himself and his brothers as justified "by Gandhi's betrayal of India by appeasing the Muslims and sectioning off regions of India for them into East and West Pakistan."
   
• Stan Berenstain, November 26th, age 82. Award-winning children's book author who, with his wife Jan, and with the patronage of Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, created the popular Berenstain Bears series of books. This year's teddy bears' picnic was a wake this time around, what with Piglet's voice silenced as well...
   
• Marc Lawrence, November 28th, age 95. Noted TV and film character actor, most famous for his roles as a take-no-shit, "feed'im to the fishes" gangster portrayer. Although blacklisted during the 50's Hollywood Witch Hunts, Lawrence managed to revive his career in the US with his dead-on gangster roles, and eventually became immortalized in an episode of Deep Space Nine playing - what else? - a gangster in a holodeck simulation gone wrong.
   
• Wendie Jo Sperber, November 29th, age 47. American actress best known for her overweight aggressive jealous bitch roles, especially as Tom Hanks sister-in-law in Bachelor Party. Yeah, the one who beat the crap out of the cops *and* her husband after the hotel gets raided, all while being handcuffed.
   
• Robert E. "Bob" Brown, November 29th, age 78. American ethnomusicologist, credited with coining the term World Music. Most influential in the study, understanding and preservation of music based on cultural identity, especially that which had not been influenced by Western and/or American pop culture. Not to be confused with the "fusion" work made popular by Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon in the 80's and 90's.
   
• Herbert L. Strock, November 30th, age 87. B-movie director responsible for Michael Landon's debut film, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. He later found success in TV with several hit series, including Highway Patrol, Sky King, Sea Hunt and Maverick.

December:

• Jack Colvin, December 1st, age 73. American actor with a lengthy list of credits, but with one that for four years placed him in the public eye as Jack McGee, the investigative reporter who pursued Bill Bixby and his greenskinned alter-ego, Lou Ferigno, on the late-70's Incredible Hulk TV series.
   

• William P. Lawrence, December 2nd, age 75. Retired US Navy Vice Admiral whose major claim to fame was being the first to fly at Mach 2. He later spent six years as a "guest" of the scumbag Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. However, in recent years it has been revealed that Lawrence was one of the final candidates for Project Mercury, but was released just prior to final selection due to a slight heart murmur having been detected, and the program requirements having been pared down from 12 Astronauts to 7. Had Lawrence made the program as he deserved, he would have never been shot down.
   

• Richard Pryor, December 15th, age 65. One of the greatest African-American comedians ever, and was responsible for opening the doors that allowed the ribald, racial humor of the likes of Redd Foxx to escape the nightclubs and record albums and be embraced by the mainstream media. As I stated in a previous OMBlog obit, Lenny Bruce may have pushed the envelope by saying "cocksucker" and "fuck" on stage and getting busted for it, Rich showed us that not only could you get away with it, it was socially acceptable *especially* if it pissed off those with a corncob stuck up their ass!
   

• Eugene McCarthy, December 15th, age 89. Former Democratic US Senator from Minnesota (1959-1971). Most known and/or despised for his 1968 Presidential bid, a campaign that wound up fracturing the Democratic Party at the 1968 National Convention in Chicago in such a way that the party has never fully recovered, nor has been able to produce a candidate for the Oval Office who was either competent (Carter) or of sound moral fiber (Clinton). I've already written a long obit for Gene in a previous OMBlog entry for this month, so feel free to see just what a jerk he was, and how he damaged our country far more than any Sh'Ithead terrorist could with a loaded 737.
   

• William Proxmire, December 15th, age 90. Former Democratic US Senator from Wisconsin (1957 - 1989) and heir apparent to Communist witch-hunter "Tail Gunner" Joe McCarthy. A despised foe of NASA and Space Exploration, he was the self-appointed giver of the Golden Fleece Awards for what he considered wasteful government spending. For space historians and supporters of America's manifest destiny in space, his demise was looked upon as an early Chrisnukkah present. A further denouement of this particular moron will be forthcoming over on the Sci.Space.History Support Site.
   

• Walter Haut, December 15th, age 83. Retired US Army lieutenant, most known as the "central figure" in the Roswell UFO "incident" in 1947. Haut was the Roswell AAF base public information officer who wrote the infamous press release from Col. William Blanchard, claiming the Army Air Corps had retrieved a "crashed UFO" in a field near the base. He later recanted the story, and then recanted the recant, and up until his death gave variations of the story to anyone asking about the incident. As with anything related to Roswell, what answers you get seems to depend on what time of day you ask the questions.
   

• Jack Anderson, December 17th, age 83. Anderson was a more than a journalist, he was a crusader against corruption. To be honest, when it came to investigative journalism and blowing the lids of secret government ops, Woodward & Bernstein weren't a pimple on Jack Anderson's ass. He won the1972 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his investigation on secret American policy decision-making between the United States and Pakistan during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, but that wasn't what really got the Nixon Administration pissed at him. During that tumultuous period, Anderson had gone after FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover over apparent ties to the Mafia, Watergate, the John F. Kennedy assassination, the search for fugitive ex-Nazi Germany officials in South America, and the Savings and Loan scandal. The ruckus he raised caused Hoover to launch several investigations into Anderson's life in hopes of busting him for something and silencing him. As FBI records showed, they found nothing, and for some reason Hoover was, in this case, above forging evidence.
  
  However, after Hoover's death, Anderson found a new target: Nixon and Watergate. After the break-in and the "Dirty Tricks" were being exposed by Woodward & Burnstein, Anderson took up his own crusade against Nixon, and subsequently became the target of a Mafia-style hit ordered in the White House. Nixon, as it turns out, had long been pissed at Anderson, blaming him for Nixon's loss of the 1960 presidential election due to fallout over an election-eve story about a secret loan from Howard Hughes to Nixon's brother, Donald. White House "plumbers" G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt admitted under oath they plotted to poison Anderson on orders from a top aide to the President. The two claimed they met with an unnamed CIA operative to discuss the possibilities, including drugging Anderson with LSD, poisoning his aspirin bottle, or staging a fatal mugging. Luckily for Anderson, the conspirators were never ordered to proceed, and the was plot officially aborted when the plotters were arrested as a result of the Watergate break-in.
  
  Among other scoops, Anderson discovered one of many CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro - the "poisoned pen" attempt - and has also been credited for breaking the Iran-Contra affair, though he has said the scoop was spiked because he had become too close to President Ronald Reagan.
  
  Unlike most other "investigative journalists", Anderson's crusades were for truth and justice, and not for personal gain and glory. His ethics were not only of the caliber that should be taught today, they should be mandated. Had Peter Jennings or Dan Rather had one iota of Anderson's integrity, their debacles over the years would have been relegated to "norts spews" flubs.
  
   
• Michael Vale, December 24th, age 83, American actor whose primary claim to fame and endearment came from his appearances in over 1,300 commercials as the sleepy doughnut maker for Dunkin' Donuts from 1982 to 1997.
   
• Vincent Schiavelli, December 26th, age 57. One of the most recognized American character actors of the latter quarter of the 20th century, primarily famous for his roles in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Ghost, as well as starring in a Next Generation first season episode as a holographic arms dealer in The Arsenal of Freedom.
   
• John Diebold, December 26th, age 79. Pioneering American computer engineer who developed, implemented and promoted the use of programmable electronic systems in banking and commerce. His early works became the basics for what we now take for granted - computer networking between banks. This allowed for the creation of branch offices as it allowed instant updating of account transaction information and records, and in its ultimate extension made possible the ATM. When you grab that stack of $20 dollar bills out of the money machine, say a silent prayer of thanks for John's efforts, eh?
   
• Julian "Bud" Blake, December 26th, age 87. American Cartoonist, creator of the much-loved but somewhat underrated comic strip Tiger. If you have to place where Tiger was in the scheme of things, he was to Calvin & Hobbes what Linus Van Pelt was to Dennis the Menace.
   
• Rona Jaffe, December 30th, age 74. American novelist best known for Mazes and Monsters, the novel that branded all Dungeons & Dragons players as suicidal schitsophrenics. Not that she was that far from the truth, alas...

That's it for this year. See you next time. Until then, here's a Wikilink:

And hey, if you're in Texas or Oklahoma, do us a favor and don't blow up any fireworks this year. Leave the wildfires in California where they belong....

Item: For those of you complaining about the links being in a really dark shade of blue, I fixed that finally. Seems some style code I'd imported a while back contained a link color value that I'd missed. The way the code was formatted in HTML sort of hid the snippet, and it actually took me a while to realize what was overriding the <BODY> values. Mea culprit, but at least some of you can find something else to whine about. Especially Lord M1kr0n, Marcella, SirMaxALot, and ByteMyte, the latter of whom can byte my big fat OM behind.

Item: From the "Botched CDs for coasters is passe" department: Is your CD/DVD burner reliable enough so that you haven't made any coasters lately? Check out these coasters, then. They're cut from old Printed Circuit Boards, and actually look quite neat. Of course, something this goofy has to come from Thinkgeek. Each set of six goes for $19.99, and apparently you won't find two identical coasters in each set, much less between two sets. Wonder how many are made from dead ASUS mobos?

And on that note, we'll end our broadcast day with a Wikilink:

They wrote "Backstabbers" back in the 70's, which is probably the best anthem for corporate cubical politics, natch...

Item: From the "Really Oddball Bulk Purchases" department: Ever wonder what an eighth of a ton of Silly Putty would look like? Well, Clay Bavor, Associate Product Manager for Google, wondered that very same thing. Unlike the vast majority of us, Clay's got lots of money made off of Google, and can afford to blow a rather large chunk of change to find out just what that much Silly putty would look like. Which explains the picture to the right, natch. Of course, this picture also explains what happened when Clay put the whole bulk purchase in a single pile to see what it would look like. Once chunks are stuck together, Silly Putty tends to stay that way. And 250lbs of it wound up sticking to itself almost a magnitude stronger than those small globs we get out of those eggs from the dime store. Needless to say, Clay and quite a few of his fellow Google employees spent

the better part of the day trying to dissect the now hopelessly self-adhered mass. As Clay put it: We tried everything: very strong people (didn't work), scissors (stabbing worked, slicing didn't), 28-gauge steel wire (broke), 22-gauge steel wire (broke), 16-gauge steel wire (too thick), and twisting and breaking (worked well for "smaller" pieces -- under five pounds, that is.) After about two hours of struggle, Clay and everyone who helped out was finally able to walk away with a giant piece of Silly Putty. Which begs the next question of what *do* you do with a big heaping chunk of the stuff? Well, some are reportedly giving it to friends as  holiday gifts, while others are using for grip exercisers - I've actually had friends get this prescribed by a physician following being released from a cast, but we never were told it was just plain old Silly Putty in a different, more medical color! They're also using big huge chunks to play basketball, although they claim the rebounds are tough.. And - yes, you've guessed correctly - imprint entire newspaper pages. Geez. And I thought buying Pez refills in bulk was goofy... Rant: You know, I remember when I first started at that Big Computer Company with the Little Name, we'd get to play with goofy shit like large chunks of Silly Putty. And then they decided to hire all those stuffed shirt bastards from IBM, who turned the company from a fun place to work at into a corporate shithole. Lesson number one: If they've been fired from IBM, and they were in management, don't hire them. Let them work at Taco Bell or McDonalds where they're more qualified to be fuckups. And if you are stupid enough to hire idiots like that, don't let them convince you to change one iota of how the company is run. Especially if it's got anything to do with how much fun your employees have. You'll only wind up fucking yourself and the people who trust you over. Ah well, they'll get theirs in the end. Bank on it.

Item: Hey, speaking of Google, JohnTheMax, TIcon, T3RR0TH, and ILoveLacy all passed this rather interesting use for the search engine that everyone loves to hack with. Apparently it's a totally foolproof way to bypass any sort of illegal site access and/or proxy site blocking your dickwad of a sysadmin and/or your HR department may have implemented.

The hack is pretty simple, kids. First, take a look at this URL:

http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=www.forbiddensite.com

What this URL is doing is taking "www.forbiddensite.com" and using Google's Translate feature to convert a page that's already in English into English. Since no IT *or* HR department in their right minds(*) would block Google, this method of accessing sites that they don't want you to access is virtually foolproof.

(*) Yeah, I know, I know - who says the fat sexless cows running the vast majority of HR departments are in their right minds?

Now, let's face it - surfing porn, wares and hack/crack sites at work is pretty tactless. But some IT and HR departments have sites like eBay, Yahoo, and Hotmail blocked because they don't want you using their resources for fun and profit. Nor do they want you catching up on the latest video news clips that CNN and M$NBC provide over streaming video. Some of these unpatriotic morons even block the streaming feeds from NASA mission coverage! Well, this hack allows you to regain control of your corporate internet access to use as *you* see fit, and not what someone who's dissatisfied with being dumb, fat, sexless and stuck in a boring desk job *thinks* is "correct". This is a great way to salute their efforts with the middle finger of your choice!

Item: Hey, I finally got quoted by Boing Boing! Yesterday, they ran a piece on someone complaining about how a complete DVD set of The New Yorker was a bitch and a half to use because it required frequent disk swaps and couldn't be used on a hard drive to speed things up. I came across this back in '98 when National Geographic released their entire run on CD - a 30+ disk set - that had the same exact problems as the New Wanker set. I e-mailed a quick comment about my experiences, and related how easy it was to get Computer City to take the set back: simply put, they'd had several dozen geriatrics and scholars who were all members of the National Geographic Society raising unmitigated hell over how hard it was to use the set that the corporate office simply told the store managers to refund without question. It was probably the only time I've gotten such a refund on faulty software without having to raise my voice or my blood pressure!

Anyway, the Boing Boing blog entry is here. Enjoy!

Item: From the "Crimstoppers Textbook For Dummies" department: According to a Reuters report, a businessman in Germany had his camera stolen from a restaurant he was eating at - one of those cases of forgetting it at the table and it not being there when you go back, natch Anyway, after looking and buying a replacement on eBay he found one just like the one that had been stolen. In fact, it was *exactly* like the purloined photometer. In fact fact, it *was* the same exact camera. Same serial number, even. Yes, he'd wound up buying his own camera back off of eBay.

The icing on the cake was when it became apparent the eBay seller was a local one, and didn't live too far from the restaurant where the camera had been lost. The local Police are now questioning eBay vendor who, according to a police statement, “claims he got the camera at a flea market, but was also offering other cameras on the Internet“ You know, there's a place in Mexico called "The Thieves' Market", where legend/tradition has it that if something gets stolen from you, you can always buy it back in the Thieves Market. This story - along with all the other stolen product stories of late(*) - makes one wonder if eBay is the 21st Century descendent of this place... (*) Earlier this year, the FBI busted some dope for stealing Lego sets from Toys'R'Us and selling the rebagged parts as "bulk Legos" on eBay and making significant profit. Turns out some Legos I bought back in '98 for that Dell Case Project I never got to finish I think were actually bought from this guy. Go figure...

Ok, enough shitting around for today. Here's the Wikilink for the day. And please, don't try to copy the link off the monitory with that pink glob you're currently bouncing off the wall:

And to think that Dow Corning 3179 Dilatant Compound would become such a hit...

Item: I'm currently stuck at home for the third day straight, thanks to the ECM module in my Expo deciding to go on the fritz a couple of weeks ago, and rental cars are too expensive this time of year. I've discovered this is apparently the one common chronic problem with that particular Mitsubishi model, and when it goes it's a major nightmare finding a replacement one. New ones are suspect because the problem has to do with a deteriorating capacitor - seal fails, electrolytes leak all over circuit board, board shorts out as if an Alien had bled on it - and factory issued boards that have been sitting on the shelf for more than 10 years have about a 80% chance of being bad immediately out of the box. The two we managed to find here in town were exactly that - one of them, in fact, had the PCB totally corroded through by the electrolytes, and had probably been in that condition for at least 5 or 6 years!

As it stands now, the only way to get the thing fixed is to either a) find one in a junkyard that's still at least good for now, or b) have the bad ECM rebuilt with higher-quality caps. b) wound up being the option because the caps just simply failed and didn't have time to leak before we found the problem. However, the place that does the repair doesn't take the old one and swap you with a rebuilt ECM - they don't have enough of them in stock to do this - so they take yours and send it back to you when it's been rebuilt and checked out. Supposedly the rebuilt ECM will be arriving tomorrow, but they sent it UPS Ground of all things. And at this time of year, UPS Ground tends to be about 1/3 the speed of Snail Mail.

So anyway, if I get grumpier than normal, you know why, and it ain't post-Chrisnukkah depression...

Item: ILuvLaci sends me this late addition to the list of oddball USB devices. It's a USB Microscope, and it's not quite as useless as you might think. In fact, it's probably something every scientists with a laptop should get for field use. Totally powered off the USB port, it provides up to 200x magnification of anything you put under the lense, and allows you to grab screen shots. Having done microphotography in high school using my old Fujica ST-605N, a tripod, and some precarious positioning of the camera lens in front of the scope's eyepiece in order to get photos for a term paper and freak out this one science teacher who'd never had anyone do that before, I would have given my left nut for this capability back then. Yeah, the right nut would have gone for a GUI word processor and at least a 300 DPI inkjet, but that was 1979, and I'm digressing...

The other wild thing is that in addition to the screen grabs, there's also an option to make videos or time-lapse movies. One of the slowest things to painfully observe is an amoeba going through either cell division or protein encirclement, and the time-lapse feature would make either easier than setting the VCR. The kit has the following specifications and accessories: Take snapshots, video, and time-lapse movies 3 magnification levels - 10X, 60X, and 200X Super-brite LED lighting for bright top and bottom illumination Video playback at 15 frames/sec Resolution of 640×480 Software works with Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP Handheld mode allows for expanded viewing possibilities Comes with: Microscope, USB cable, Stand, Specimen Jars, Sample Slide, Tweezers, Eye Dropper, Slide Clip, and Software CD-ROM As you probably guessed, Thinkgeek - has these for $79.99, which is half of what I paid for my first 200x microscope in 1975! No doubt someone could jockey around with an off-the-shelf 2X extender lens and jump this to a 400X with very little difficulties save for probably voiding the warranty if you have to cut into the case. But what the frack? Until we get the USB Electron Microscope, this'll probably meet most people's scientific needs

Item: My old pal from college, 4Q2, sends this late stocking stuffer. It's billed as a MyMicrobot. What it basically is, kids, is a desktop knick-knack for those interested in micro and nanoscale manufacturing. It's a small "robot" inaction figure that's about 500 microns in size, with some features as small as 10 microns(*). Each "robot" comes in a space age 3.5" plastic case with an integrated low power magnifier lens so those of you who don't have coke bottle glasses like me can actually see the damn things.

* For those of you in our home audience, an average human hair is about 150 microns in diameter. Which is about three times the thickness of Storey Musgrave's hairs.

Of course, the reason I've put "robot" in quotes is that they're totally non-functional. They're simply little works of art created using the same processes used in the manufacture of micro-fluidic bio-sensors, capillary electrophoresis chips, and electro-statically actuated resonant amplitude grating structures. In other words, it's a commercial gimmick application of those same "lookee at what we can do when we're drinking on the job!" tricks we see IBM, MIT, CalTech and other research labs show off with their nanotech demonstrations. This ain't quite nano, but it's small enough to still make your average Joe Punchclock go "oooh!"

There's five different Microbots in all, and you can get these direct from the manufacturer for about $10.00 each. Note that Thinkgeek has these for the same price, but claims its a closeout item. As always, if I can't save by going to a retailer, I'll always go directly to the manufacturer, natch. 4Q2 claims he's got all five, and while they're probably rather stupid to most of us with intelligence, he says it keeps the idiots in the cubes around him entertained enough to keep their minds off of trying to involve him in their office political games. Guess sometimes you have to throw pearls before swine...

Item: From the "VHS vs. Betamax - The Next Generation" department: The whole war over the next-gen DVD standards heats up next month as the first Blu-Ray DVD burner capanble of 2X speeds is slated to ship in January. The Pioneer BDR-101A is the first drive capable to record on to 25GB BD-R/RE discs at 2X speed and read BD-ROM discs at 2x. According to Pioneer, it supports burn media in sizes of 25GB BD- DVD+R DL (2.4X), DVD-R DL (2.0X), DVD±R (8X), and DVD±RW (4X).

However, what *might* be the "screw that idea" point for this drive is that it doesn't support reading or writing CD-R, CD-RW and DVD-RAM media. And that's what's at the heart of the whole Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD format war. While Blu-Ray disks store more data, the HD drives are backwards compatible with the older CD media. Now, while for guys like me who've learned that you always have a CD and/or a DVD drive to go with your burner, as it makes dubbing from one disk and/or media size to another that much easier, this really isn't that big a deal. What's at stake is the same sort of screwing over that Betamax owners got when Sony gave in and conceded the home VCR war to the VHS standard. Even though Beta was superior in quality, Sony bogarted the licensing on the decks and the media(*), and consumers naturally flocked to the cheaper solution. Granted, Sony won the commercial broadcasting war hands down, and only the advent of the FCC mandates on Digital TV finally forced the broadcast industry to switch from Beta-1 to DV decks, but the lesson is still a valid one. (*) Astute OMBloggers will recall this was the same sort of corporate greed that killed the TI-99-4A back in the mid-80's. Superior hardware at the time - and the only home computer that you could buy bubble memory for! - was crippled by TI refusing to license out the firmware cart specs and demanding that all software be licensed through TI and a rather exorbitant royalty paid in order to get their software burned on TI-manufactured firmware carts. What good is a computer that promises fast boot & program load times if there's no software in those carts? Anyway, at Blog time, Pioneer still hadn't officially announced an MSRP, but industry insiders have predicted that Pioneer will no doubt nail early adopters with a price around $500.00 or above. We'll see,

And on *that* note, I'll close out this OMBlog with what Wiki currently as to say on this latest standards war:

"But gee, Bulwinkle! That trick *never* works!"

"I know, Rocky! And we'll have to do this again ten years from now, too!"

Item: Had a little free time yesterday, so I decided to add a new effect to the Photoshop Tutorials. This one takes a blank image and creates a crinkled tissue paper effect. Great for those of you who're tired of wrapping your virtual Chrisnukkah gifts in silver and gold foil effects! In theory, I should be able to tweak this so it creates satin sheets, which means the next time I update the Tutorials I'll see about figuring this one out and see if it actually works.

Item: From the "How Grassy Was My Knoll" department: Checked my e-mail for the first time since Chrisnukkah Eve, and what do I find? Not Chrisnukkah Greetings, nor even Viagra Spam, but this one, sole letter from Man Without A Kilt:

Interesting, to say the least. I sort of suspected something like this had happened to cause the JFK Reloaded website to essentially shut itself down. Granted, the competition over who could get the closest shots to what Oswald supposedly achieved under the Single Bullet Theory, but as I've pointed out on the JFKaos pages, playing around with the sequence of events reveals a lot more about what could have happened that day had the Lone Nutter decided to throw his survival out the window and *really* cut loose.

Item: On that note, since you can't buy JFK Reloaded anymore,  and Traffic isn't supporting it *period*, the only way you can get ahold of a copy is to go to Home of the Underdogs. The actual game can be found here, but the site is loaded with tons of old, practically *ancient* games, either for download or with links to where they can be found. Note that a lot of them won't play worth a frack on the newer systems - either they run infinitely too fast because they're based on CPU speed and not system clock time, or do direct hardware calls to the video and/or sound card that NT or XP won't allow even when compatibility is allowed - but they could give you a reason to drag that old 386DX out of the garage and let the spiders find another dark case to set up as a home.

As for how I feel about sites that provide downloads of "orphanware" and/or "abandonware", I personally think there's AbZero wrong with it, so long as you're not charging for access in any way, shape or form. Once a company abandons a perfectly good product - either because they've come up with something new that won't work on your older machine, or the company's no longer in business - then all bets are off. In other words, if you toss a perfectly good toilet in the dump because you don't like the color, or tow your old car to a junkyard because it doesn't run anymore and I just so happen to know how to make it run again, or go out of business and sell off all your products in a Going-Out-Of-Business As-Is Sale, or even declare your product obsolete and no longer supportable, period, once you've relinquished your responsibility as an owner and/or manufacturer and/or retailer you can't say jack shit about what anyone else does with the product so long as nobody else is making a direct profit from it.

Yeah, some frackheaded bottom feeder - read: lawyer - will no doubt claim I'm "wrong", and downloading "orphanware" is stealing, but to date the few cases that have gone to court have either a) been dropped by the plaintiff shortly after initial arguments where the judge asks "and is the product supported, or the company currently in business?", or settled out of court with the plaintiff paying the legal costs just to hush the whole thing up before it gets blown all out of proportion. The latter is why Micro$oft doesn't go after anyone pirating anything older than Windows ME these days. Although, it could be argued that anyone using ME, much less having bought that shit, should have been prosecuted for being a danger to themselves...

Speaking of being a danger to themselves, I'll close out this OMBlog with what Wiki currently as to say on the subject:

Be advised: some of what's said is most likely just bluster to keep the lawyer scum from filing suit against wikipedia.org for "promoting piracy." And you thought only the Scametologists pulled that trick when the truth hurts them too badly...

Otay, I got a few minutes for some last-minute OMBlogging before Santa comes into phaser range, and I've got some Chrisnukkah cheer of sorts to share. But first, a quick note on something that happened a few days ago that I haven't had time to comment about until now:

Obit: From the "Ding-Dong! The WItch Is Dead!" department: God has Satan, NASA had William Proxmire. On December 15th, the former Senator from Wisconsin, and the heir-apparent to "Tail Gunner" Joe McCarthy, passed away at the age of 90 from complications stemming from Alzheimer's. While I'll be saving the real obit for my next Apollo-Soyuz Test Project page update - coming really soon now, y'hear? - I do have *this* official comment on the Senator's demise that you can quote me on:

"'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This Senator is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rots in peace! If he hadn't been nailed to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' Senate Infernal in the deepest depths of Hell, wrapped in a burning bathrobe of Golden Fleece!! THIS IS AN EX-SENATOR!!!"

Yeah, if you haven't guessed already, I'm *not* shedding any tears for Proxmire. Every time I think about those cancelled Moon landings, and those grand visions of space stations and colonies on Mars, all cancelled thanks to Proxmire's devious machinations while on Capitol Hill, I give thanks that he's no longer around to steal the breathing air from those infinitely more deserving.

Item: Speaking of our national defense, I forgot to mention that NORAD is once again tracking Santa Claus as he makes his once-a-year rounds. They've been doing this for 50 years now, starting back when NORAD was CONAD, and Sears printed an ad that accidentally misprinted a number to call Santa that was actually a direct line to CONAD's HMFIC at the time, Colonel Harry Shoup. Since then, the Air Farce has rolled with the gag, and annually tracked Santa and his sleigh as they traverse across the world bringing presents for all the good little girls and boys!

This year, the Air Farce went all-out with Flash animations and multilingual support. Note that Chinese, North Korean, Russian *and* the various Iraqi, Persian, Arabic and African dialects aren't supported. But seeing as how they don't believe in Santa anyway, there's obviously no reason they'd be surfing to this site to begin with. On the other hand, it's probably better that they don't surf there, because the little heathen bastards will no doubt use the tracking data to try and shoot Old Saint Nick down with a Rudolph-seeking Stinger or two.

On a side note, as I'm posting this, they've got video of Santa flying past the VAB at Cape Canaveral, with the Shuttle Discovery rolling out of the hangar on its crawler. The only problem is that there's still foam on the PAL ramp. God/Yahweh/Roddenberry knows that'll give that dickhead Jeffrey Bell more NASA-news to whine about to keep his mind off the anthrax whipple Santa's leaving him in his stocking...

Item: From the "You know, this insane story will one day be made into a movie" department: Seems there's a dispute between the eight nations that have a border that extends to or is connected to the Arctic Circle. The dispute? Each of them claims to be the One True Home of - you guessed it - Santa Claus.

The eight nations laying claim to territorial rights to Santa's Workshop are, according to a Reuters News Service story - are Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Canada, the United States and the Former Evil Soviet Empire of Russia. The whole thing apparently started when Reuters sent queries c/o "Santa Claus" to each of the postal services for the nations in question, simply asking "Where do you live?'" Of the eight, the only reply was received from Iceland.

"Let's all be good and kind to each other," Santa replied in Icelandic, and provided a link to Santa Claus Iceland, an "official site" promoting Santa and his works, as well as laying claim to being St. Nick's home nation "from time immemorial Santa Claus has lived at Dimmuborgir," a remote area of northern Iceland. This sole reply, aided by the efficiency of a Nordic postal service and Santa's helpers, might give Iceland the edge in a battle over traditions, hearts and - most importantly - tourist dollars with the other seven nations claiming Santa as their own.

While all eight nations claim to have Santa's home securely within their borders, despite Iceland's "official" claim, Finland still attracts about 500,000 visitors a year to Rovaniemi on the Arctic Circle, where tourists can visit a real-live, pot-bellied, white-bearded, red-clad Santa. In addition, Finland is also the one place where authentic reindeer originate from - a fact that Laplanders claim is "proof positive" of the validity of their claim to Santa hailing from Finland. A fact that Russians - especially Siberians - dispute as Reindeer are also densely native to that region.

At the same time, it's believed that Norway - where yes, they have reindeer too - only makes their claims so as not to be upstaged by their neighbors. On the other hand, the Danes apparently have plans of their own - hostile takeover plans, natch. According to reports from Copenhagen - where many believe Santa lives in the Danish territory of Greenland - last year plans were announced that the Danish government would claim the North Pole as part of Danish territory, hence making Santa a Dane by annexation. Yeah, go figure.

And there's another monkey wrench to throw in this mess as well: the issue of *which* North Pole Santa lives at is currently in dispute as well. Does he live at the Physical North Pole, as determined by lines of Longitude that converge at the rotational poles - or by the Magnetic North Pole, as determined by this supermassive deposit of lodestone that currently resides deep under the crust that Canada sits on. In the case of the former, that's pretty much a constant, but according to scientists that lodestone deposit is actually moving around. In fact, it's predicted that if it continues to move in the direction it's going, within the next century or so it'll be located somewhere under northern Russia. Which probably explains why the Russians have recently begun claiming that Santa's red suit isn't a coincidence, and the Canucks have been rather quiet about their claims of having taxation rights on Santa's Workshop.

As for believers here at home, while no real claim on the North Pole has ever been made by the United States - probably because NATO and the Warsaw Pact don't need the additional hassles - many Americans treat Santa as a "True-Blue American" even though his official citizenship is listed as being a denizen of the North Pole. Of course, if sheer economics are the determiner, it's pretty much accepted that the US gets the greatest share of the North Pole's GNP each Christmas Eve. Which probably means that Americans really won't give a frap where Santa hails from, so long as the presents arrive on time.

What's ironic about all this is that no matter who owns the North Pole, the legend and existence of Santa Claus is actually based on the life and deeds of the real St. Nicholas, who became the Patron Saint of Children and lived in - of all places - what we now know as Turkey, way back in the third century A.D. Of course, considering the geopolitical and religious instability of the region, it comes as no surprise that Santa packed up the whole business, elves and all, and moved to the North Pole. Especially when you take into account the number of Turks who get the frack out of Turkey and emigrate to the West each year.

Either way, regardless of which nation winds up finally laying claim to Santa, one thing's for certain: whoever tries to levy property taxes on the Workshop and/or employment taxes on the elves is going to find something far more hazardous than coal in their stockings...

Item: Speaking of that Apollo 8 Genesis reading from the last OMBlog entry, quite a few of you have sent this link to what's supposed to be a better version than the one NASA has online. However, this one is hosted by Spaceflight Now, and like far too many "news" sites they want $$$ to view stuff they got for free from sources that we already paid for. In any case, it's there if you've got cash to spare, but to be totally honest if you want to spend the dough on anything related to Apollo 8 - or any other space mission, for that matter - I suggest going over to Spacecraft Films and buy one of their excellent DVD sets. The Apollo 8 set is only $45.00, and well worth the price.

In any case, it's time to close out OMBlog for another evening. You kids all have a merry Chrisnukkah, and here's an additional Wikilink to put sugarplums dancing in your head instead of those porn chicks whose JPGs you've been downloading while reading this blog:

Speaking of whom, I hear sleigh bells in the sky right about now. Phasers locked and loaded...

Item: From the "Holy Shit! It's time to PANIC!" department: If you're reading this, and you haven't done your Chrisnukkah shopping yet, you have somewhere between 18 to 20 hours to do so. This, of course, depends on when your favorite stores decide to close up shop and send their employees home for one day of rest before coming back on Monday for the post-holiday sales orgy.

Of course, there's always a contingency plan, and Sally Brown probably summed it up best:

"If it seems too complicated, make it easy on yourself: just send money. How about tens and twenties?"

No matter how you slice it, money is essentially the Universal Holiday Gift. Nobody will *ever* turn down money for a gift, so if you a) don't have time to shop, and/or b) just haven't got a clue what to get someone as a gift, then money is the best way to dig yourself out of a hole. Granted, it sort of reduces the chances that your Significant Whatever will buy that fuzzy lingerie you wanted her to wear the next time you decided to run a stress test on the bedsprings, but it also reduces the chances to damn near AbZero that you'll buy something that'll piss them off to no end.

And besides, there's one other really *good* justification for giving money: if they get money on Chrisnukkah, they obviously can't spend it until the next day, when everything gets marked down, which means they'll get more bang out of their buck!

Seriously, the US needs to print $25.00 bills featuring Santa Claus, and $75.00 ones featuring Rudolph...

Item: Hey, speaking of quotes from A Charlie Brown Christmas, I had someone ask me yesterday whether or not the various phobias Lucy asks Charlie Brown whether or not he's got'em really truly exist. So, as a public service to all OMBlog readers, here's the phobias and their definitions:

• Hypengyophobia: The Fear of Responsibility. No. Really.  In fact, there's a site or three dedicated to treating this disorder, and you can check out one here.
   
• Ailurophasia: Supposedly the Fear of Cats. However, not even Wikipedia had an entry for it. I called a cat lover friend of mine just to see what she had to say, and she referred me to a vet, who in turn referred me to *another* vet whose wife was a shrink, and both of them said "well, its supposed to be the fear of cats, but none of our dictionaries have it listed for some reason." Until I hear otherwise, I'll stick with Sparky's usage and roll with it.
   
• Climacaphobia: Supposedly the Fear of Staircases, but this was another one that didn't have an actual online definition that could be used as a reference. It was, however, quoted by William R. Brody, President of Johns Hopkins University in a speech he made last April, so I supposed that -could- be used as a reference. On the other hand, what exactly is the definition of a "staircase" in this regard? Does this mean that the person afflicted can't use stairs at all, or are we looking at some specific claustrophobia variant? And for that matter, does their fear extend to even *hearing* about stairs? If so, better not let'em read about Winnie the Pooh and his experience with bump-bump-bumping down the funny stairs...
   
• Thalassophobia: This is the Fear of the Ocean, and I found quite a few references to it via Google. What's interesting about this particular phobia is the way Lucy pronounces it. Virtually everyone above the age of 12 who hears the word for the first time thinks Lucy has instead said "Phallisaphobia". Yep, that's Fear of the Male Penis, which surprises the hell out of me as to how that tongue-twist managed to get past the See-BS censors.
   
• Gephyrobia: This is supposedly the Fear of Crossing Bridges. However, Google either brings up quotes from ACBC or makes reference to some sort of dungeon .WAD for Halo. Of course, it could also mean the fear of all things related to anyone named "Jeff" or "Geoff", so who knows?
   
• Pantophobia: The Fear of Everything. That's it. Really.

Ok, so now you know the *real* story Paul Harvey was too senile to tell you...

Item: As most of you know, I'm not much into the Bibble-thumper act, with the "while sister Eustace passes the plate, have some fire-and-brimstone!" sermons and all that. However, after reading my Top Ten Plus Two list of Chrisnukkah specials, JacyAngel sent me a link to this sermon from Dr. Brent C. Leathers of the Church Of The Living Spirit out in Mesa, Arizona. I gotta admit it was as worth reading for the inspiration as listening to Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders read from Genesis(*) during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968.

(*) The Bible version, you dips. Not the Art Rock group that used to be worth a shit. Jeez...

Of course, his sermon begs the question as to what he thinks of Trey & Matt's South Park Chrisnukkah specials...

Item: Speaking of that Apollo 8 Genesis reading, I suppose I should touch on that one for a minute. For those of you OMBlog readers who weren't alive when Apollo 8 became the first manned mission to orbit the Moon - and there's more of you every damned day it seems - possibly the most chaotic and socially devastating year in US history since the War Betwixt the States came to a soul-searching, inspiring end on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968. That was the evening astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders did a live TV broadcast from lunar orbit. While they sent back some slightly overexposed and blurred pictures of the Earth and the lunar surface, with apropos commentary about what the views meant to themselves on a personal outlook, they closed out the broadcast by taking turns reading from the the first page or so of the Book of Genesis:

There was something transcendent about that particular reading. Probably more than any other set of passages in the various versions of the Bible, Genesis is the one that stands out as possibly the only one that has gained acceptance on both sides of the Religion vs. Science debates. Regardless of whether the design was intelligent or random chance(*), the passage pretty much nails the Big Bang theory right on the head. Which again, is most likely why everyone except total nutcases like Madeline Murray O'Hare interpreted the reading for what it was intended: a wake-up call reminding not just Vietnam-era Americans but the entire *world* that there's something more to life than just blowing each other up over ideologies that don't work anyway. Considering just how fucked up 1968 was - RFK & MLK's assasinations, Vietnam, Star Trek getting moved to late-nite Fridays, etc - what the Apollo 8 crew did was, without exaggeration, save 1968.

(*) OM Corollary to Einstein's Theory on God: It's not that God doesn't play dice with the Universe, it's that he doesn't shoot craps. In actuality, the fact that we have laws of physics is sufficient evidence to prove that God really plays D&D on a cosmic scale, and actually uses a DM's chart to apply the apropos modifiers whenever he has to roll a D4 to get a hit that normally requires a D6 or D12.

Anyway, if you've never seen and/or heard Frank, Jim and Bill's reading of Genesis, here's a few links that'll help you out. I strongly urge you to share this with your kids, because it's really inspiring once you explain to them how it all came about:

• Apollo 8 Christmas Eve Broadcast: This is NASA's short page on the Genesis reading.

• The Actual Reading, in Quickslime format, alas. It's also a bit small...

• M$NBC story on "The genesis of Apollo 8’s ‘earthrise’".

• Wikipedia's entry on Apollo 8.

• PBS Documentary on the Flight

Anyway, time for me to hit the sack. Just in case I don't get time to do an OMBlog entry for tomorrow, I'll wish each and every one of you a very merry, happy, festive, and above all else, *safe* Chrisnukkah. Which means I'd better leave you a Wikilink in your stocking or you won't leave milk & cookies out for me when I come sliding down your cable modem:

Oh, and I prefer a shot of Bailey's or St. Brendan's with my milk, and *no* fucking oatmeal raisin cookies, either....

Item: Brief blog entry for today, as I'm about to head down to Houstopolis to visit the Battleship Texas for the first time in a few years now. Really interested in seeing just what sort of improvements they've made to this floating lady of an exhibit, considering that they've been doing a *lot* of work according to most reports. I'll have plenty of photos, because I'm taking the Rebel with me with about six empty carts to fill.

Item: On a side note, while waiting for the engine in the car to warm up following a cold night, I took the liberty of finally uploading my Sci-Space.History Support Site. It's still a work in progress, but at least the latest version of the ASTP page is back up. I'll be adding the other pages as time permits, as well as doing some tweaking of the ASTP page - yes, that means cleaner, higher-res images. Woo.

Whoops. Gotta split. Just enough time for a Wikilink:

Sink mine, and I'll show you how the "Operation Crossroads" rule variant for that game works. Especially the "Shot BAKER" rule...

Item: Ok, you now have about eight or nine shopping days before Chrisnukkah, and some of you are probably still shitting bricks about what gifts to buy your loved ones. Luckily for you, I've added a few more items to this year's OM's Chrisnukkah Unique Gift Idea List. Go break out the credit cards and start shopping:

Remember that Cardboard PC Case I blogged about a while back? Well, now there's a pair of speakers to go with it. No. Really. MUJI - one of those minimalist furniture and knick-knack manufacturers who keep the shelves in places like IKEA full of trendy junk - has come up with a set of portable cardboard speakers that fold up flat and can be stored in a plastic pouch when not in use. Despite the cheap

appearance, these are fully functional, full range hi-eff drivers mounted in a collapsible non-corrugated cardboard casing. Approximately 3.5″ square, these speakers can be folded back up and stored in their shipping pouch. Just pop them open, plug them into any audio device with a headphone jack, and you're ready to go. MoMAstore has these in stock for $42.00 a pair, although if you're a member of the store - whatever the fuck *that* entails - you can save a few bucks. I expect these to be followed by a cardboard keyboard, joystick, mouse and monitor case within the next few months...

Ok, as we all know, CDs and DVDs make better coasters than they do Frisbees, especially when they're dead. However, a company called FlyaDISC has come up with a way to give those disks a bit more of an aerodynamic lift than they normally possess. The contraption is called - duh - the "FlyaDISC", and essentially is a merger between those "Ring Frisbees" and a CD/DVD disk. It gives the basic disk shape that aerodynamic edge that a real Frisbee has, and lets it sail through the air farther and a bit safer - and anyone who's ever been hit edge-on by a dead

CD someone just tossed in angst will know how dangerous these things can be! While you can purchase these directly from the company, they prefer to deal with extremely large bulk purchases - read: bands with demo CDs that can afford to give the damn things away as a promotional gimmick before everyone downloads their music for free - you can buy them in lots of 10 from CDFlyerStore for under $2.00 USD a pop. Get 10 and stuff some stockings, especially if you're burning bootleg CDs for Chrisnukkah gifts this year like everyone else is!

One of the things that kept me from getting a cell phone for the past decade-plus - besides the threat of brain cancer - is that the damn things are so small that even most flip phones just do not stretch from mouth to ear like a normal wired phone does. Which is why this gadget caught my eye, and I may just buy one of the damn things if none of you will buy one for me. It's the Pokia Mobile Handset, and it's exactly what it looks like. It's an authentic replica of the good old indestructable bakelite handset that Ma Bell developed almost three-quarters of a century ago. Granted, it's too damn big to fit in most pockets, but it's perfect for when you're at the office or at home, and the only phone you've got is the dinky-assed cellular one.

They're not exactly cheap - I Want One Of Those! sells them for about $50.00 USD, but they also sell adapters for most of the phone designs on the market. If you're looking for a fashion statement/protest that'll fuck with everyone's minds, this is the perfect Chrisnukkah gift for anyone with a cell phone! On a side note, Pokia is now called Hulger. Go figure.

I've got time for one more gift idea, and lucky for you kids its yet another oddball device for the bad old Useless Serial Bus. This one, however, just might be worth purchasing, especially if you're into dipping your snacks in melted cheese or chocolate. As you can guess, it's a USB-powered Fondue Set. Called the Fundue, it uses the standard USB 2.0 port for power - which means all it can melt is chocolate and Velveeta - but adheres to the one-of-these-days 3.0 standard, which will reportedly give a lot more power to devices hooked up to such a port.

Now you know why computer manufacturers are so gung-ho on getting the CPU power drain lower and lower. Go figure. Anyway, the Fundue comes with the following parts and accessories: 1 Fundue™ pot with blue LED regulated heating element 1 Fundue™ base, with Oil-Guard™ technology, LCD screen and control panel 1 Blue FireGlow USB device Cable 6 Fundue™ Forks with included monitor attachments Auto-power off mode for decreased loss of life risk LCD screen displays current temperature. Included CD Software allows you to use your Fundue™ LCD screen to optionally scroll MP3 ID3 tags when you listen to music at your computer. Recipe booklet Thinkgeek - which appears to be the global clearinghouse for stupid USB gimmics - has these for $29.99, which is a bit lower than a lot of the electric fondue pots on the market around this time of year.

Ok, that's eight more gift ideas. again, if time permits,  I'll see if I can't come up with a few more last-minute ideas for you late shoppers. In the meantime, here's a Wikilink to tide you over:

Oddly enough, there's people out there who don't know what the origin of the Pluto Platter was all about, much less why the damn thing flies...

Item: Otay, as promised, here's my Top Ten List of Chrisnukkah TV Specials, Plus Two:

#1 - A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

Thanks to ABC - who now have the airing rights to this show - for providing this screen cap of the frame just before the cast starts singing "Hark, The Herald Angels Sing!"

When trying to determine which special was #1 on my list, A Charlie Brown Christmas was an absolute no-brainer. Four decades later, the story still has 100% relevancy to the Christmas season and its meaning. When Charlie Brown complains about the overwhelming materialism that permeates the Christmas season and not being able to understand what the holiday is truly about, Lucy suggests that he get more involved so as to develop a better appreciation of it all. He become director of the school Christmas play, but winds up meeting resistance from the rest of the Peanuts gang who are more into the material side of things. When an attempt to restore the proper mood with a forlorn little Christmas tree falls quicker than the tree's pine needles, Charlie Brown needs Linus' help to learn what the real meaning of Christmas is. To think See-BS almost didn't air it because it for some really dumb reasons. ACBS wasn't like the other cartoons they'd bought over the years. It had a jazz soundtrack instead of a more Disneyeque "kiddey jingle" one, and they didn't even use professional voice actors, opting to use real kids for the voices. And to top that off, it had a preachy message from the Bible - one the censors almost clipped. But to his credit and our thanks, Charles "Sparky" Schultz insisted that the show remain as-is, or he'd take it somewhere else. Shows you what network programmers really knew in those days, because not only did ACBS hook in a whopping 49% of the total estimated viewing audience, it wound up running for four decades. In fact, its popularity has made it one of the two Chrisnukkah TV specials that at least 90% of those born since the Kennedy Assassination has seen at least once. When you look at the facts, the longevity of ACBS can really be attributed to two facts about the show: It's truer to the actual Peanuts comic strip circa 1965 than most of the specials that came later, save for It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown, and the no-longer-politically-correct Charlie Brown's All-Stars. The characterizations were dead-on, and they stayed almost perfectly the same throughout the next 35 years the strip ran before Charles "Sparky" Schultz passed away in 2000.   Most importantly, the message expressed in the special was plain, simple, and to the point. As Linus expressed it best, Christmas isn't about Santa Claus and Ho-Ho-Ho and presents to pretty girls, it's all about this: "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not, for behold, I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you this day is born in the City of Bethlehem, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; you shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel, a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace, good will toward men'". That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown." And it still is. Amen. - - - Trivia Note: In the opening scene on the skating pond, Snoopy grabs Linus' blanket and uses it to drag both Linus and Charlie Brown until he spins them around and tosses them off into the air. Charlie Brown slides across the ice and through the snow until he hits a tree, at which time the snow falls off the branches and reveals the show's opening title credit. However, after the third showing of the special in 1967, viewers never got to see where Linus landed. That's because those first three seasons the show's sole sponsor was Coca-Cola, and Linus slams into a Coke billboard letting everyone know who's footing the bill. After 1967, Coca-Cola dropped the sponsorship - read: dumb move probably attributed to their imbibing in the illegal version of the original formula - and Dolly Madison pastries picked up the tab as well as securing the rights to use Peanuts characters in their ad campaigns. And yeah, that's why the end song fades out so badly when the credits end. They clipped off a final word from the sponsor, which was a "Season's Greetings from your local Coca-Cola Bottler!" message. Trivia Note: The spiky haired kid and the two twins who have no speaking roles are "5", "3" and "4" respectively - or is that "4" and "3"? Either way, they were in the strip around 1964 when Sparky wrote "5" in as a parody of a then-recent news story of a guy who was trying to legally change his name to a number. "5's" parents were, as you probably guessed, "1" and "2", and their last name was their Zip Code, which had only been around for a year or so when they appeared in the strip. Trivia Note: This had to happen: You can now buy an authentic plastic replica of Charlie Brown's Pathetic Christmas Tree. It's only about $25.00, but for those of us who don't have families to share that tree with, this makes a perfect ornamental piece to note the holidays. And with a little love and a faded blue blanket, who knows what'll happen?

#2 - How The Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)

Not a screen cap from the show, but a giclee print Chuck Jones did before he passed away, and looked better than the rest of the screen caps I found for the show. Enjoy!

This is the other Chrisnukkah special that 90% of the viewing audience has seen at least once, and comes in at #2 for one reason and one reason alone: A Charlie Brown Christmas beat it to the boob toob by a year. Other than that, for quality and content, they're dead even on both with regards to superiority. The story's a basic "Scrooge" variant. The Grinch, due to having a heart two sizes too small, can't allow love and happiness into his...well, his heart. As a result, he hates the happiest time of the year - Christmas, duh! - with a passion. He vows to "Stop Christmas from coming!" by any means necessary. In this case, the necessary means involves dressing up like Santa and stealing every single material possession that's related to Christmas from the Whos down in Whoville. Much to his surprise, he learns that Christmas can't be stopped, because it's more than just a day to party your ass off and get a bunch of free stuff. The message that Chuck Jones and Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel is essentially the same as what Sparky Schultz was saying, only with a different, almost "Christ-free" packaging. Christmas, regardless of what the origin of the holiday is, ain't about ribbons, tags, packages, boxes, or bags. It's about sharing the love for your family and your neighbors with your family and your neighbors. The gifts - and even the Messiah - aren't necessary to understanding the holiday or its message. Yeah, I know - 99.9% of the kids say that's bullshit. But, as with booze, sex and drugs, they'll understand it all when they get older. - - - Trivia Note: As OMBlog readers will remember, the most famous song in the special, "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch!" was sung by Thurl Ravenscroft, who passed away earlier this year. Ravenscroft was arguably more famous - or, at least more longfully employed - as the voice of Tony the Tiger. Trivia Note: The song the Whos sing around the tree, while catchy, also has the annoying problem of being somewhat unintelligible at times due to the choral accompaniments being a little off-key, just like real kids and real adults tend to be. This has led to a lot of "misheard lyrics", including some complaints that the last verse ends with "Join the Ku Klux Klan", while thousands of viewers over the years have written See-BS asking for the translation, thinking the lyrics were in Latin. Trivia Note: Here's one you probably never noticed: after the Grinch's heart goes "three sizes two large", his pupils change from red to blue.

#3 - Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)

Screen cap courtesy of TVParty. Thanks, Billy!.

This one is the first Chrisnukkah special I can remember watching, and I watched it when it premiered in 1964. I remember it's original sponsor was General Electric, which is why it was a special presentation of the "General Electric Fantasy Hour", and, IIRC, aired at a really oddball time slot on a Sunday late afternoon - about an hour before normal network programming. The reason that sticks out is that we were living in Houstopolis in those days, and Mom was rushing to get me back to the house so I wouldn't miss this much-hyped show after we'd spent the day visiting Gramma. The original showing also had a lot of commercials for GE appliances, all demonstrated by the same stop-motion animation that the pre-eponymous Rankin-Bass Productions - then called Videocraft International - used for the special itself. This show actually has two messages, one "in yo face!", the other a bit more subliminal. First off, it's an adaptation and severe fleshing out of the Johnny Marks song he wrote for the late, lamented Montgomery Ward department store chain some three decades earlier - one that Marks himself had a hand in writing with Romeo Muller. When you peel back all the Christmas wrappings and trappings, you find it's a parable about how bad bigotry and ostracization is. Ironically, a *lot* of people miss this point until you suggest that they replace the phrase "red-nosed reindeer" with your favorite racial or social epithet. It hits home especially when they try this with Clarisse's father's emphatic denouement of Rudolph by standing fast that "no doe of mine is going to be seen with a red-nosed reindeer!" The second, more hidden message, is that Christmas *is* about the presents, and getting the kids their toys is almost important enough to risk everything to see they make it under the trees. One would have thought that sort of message would have been more apropos for a Ward's ad than a TV special. Go figure. On a side note, I've always felt that this show deserved a "next generation" sequel, where Clarisse and Rudolph have a buck of their own, one whose nose doesn't just glow, it emits a laser beam of incredible power that, instead of making him the subject of ridicule as his pop's nose did to Rudolph, makes him more feared than the Abominable Snowmonster ever was when he had a full set of teeth. But then again, I could see Marvel Comics suing whoever made such a sequel, claiming it was a rip-off of the core concept behind The X-Men. - - - Trivia Note: There's a sleighload of trivia on this show, and my pal Billy Ingram has three pages dedicated to this special over on TVParty. Go there now, but be prepared to spend a few days surfing this site, because it's got a *lot* to read about the Golden Days of Television that's worth the read! Trivia Note: Ok, there is *one* bit of trivia that has always caught my eye in the 41 years since I first saw this special, and that's the fact that Hermie, the misfit dentist elf, is the only elf who does *not* have pointed ears. There's a Spock analogy here, Jim...

#4 - Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962)

Thanks to SatanClaus666 for the screen cap!.

Out of all the specials in my list, this one was the first to air. Sponsored solely by Timex in its first few airings - with the obligatory VO intro *and* commercials by John Cameron Swayze - this first aired in 1962, although I don't remember seeing it until 1965 while visiting Gramma - hey she lived in Baytown, and it was only about an hour drive, so Mom visited a lot! Anyway, it's the same Dickens' classic with a Magoo twist to it; mean old miser gets a severe eye-opener by three ghosts who show him just how much pain his miserly attitude has caused not only himself, but those around him. Especially those who actually care for him. No matter how you slice it, Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol is possibly the finest work UPA ever did with the Magoo character, and possibly one of the most entertaining *and* kid-friendly versions of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Again, the message is the same one that Dickens tried to hammer home to an Englandland whose working classes were being horked over by the industrialist bourgeoisie(*): Those who fail to care for their fellow man - especially at Christmas - are as doomed spiritually as those they're dooming physically unless they mend their ways pretty fucking quick. (*) Someone slap me! I'm sounding like a goddamn communist! - - - Trivia Note: There's always been this theory that Dickens intended Scrooge to be Jewish, and that his epiphany not only allowed him to accept the Christmas season, but Christ himself as his savior. It's probably for the best that the story never turned out that way, because one Shylock stereotype is enough. Trivia Note: While UPA took some liberties with Dickens' story, there's one major deviation that's worth noting, and that's when the Ghost of Christmas Present arrives before the Ghost of Christmas Past. It doesn't change the outcome of the story, but it's an interesting twist for those who've read and/or seen the dozens of adaptations over the years. Trivia Note: One other deviation that did *not* make it on screen was a brief scene at the end, where Scrooge, having accepted Christmas and love into his heart, looks up at the sky and thanks Jacob Marley for helping him save himself. Scrooge then realizes that while he's saved, Jacob is still damned. This lasts for about a second as we see a jubilant Marley's ghost rise from the ground, sans chains, and ascends towards the heavens as Scrooge & the Cratchets wave goodbye to Marley as the curtain closes. It's a change that *should* have been added, as most fans of the story have long felt that Marley should have been redeemed as well as Scrooge.

#5 - Mr. Hankey The Christmas Poo (1997)

I capped this off the actual episode. Analog to digital can be noisy, natch...

This classic episode of South Park mimics the popular culture phenomenon of the Christmas Special, and preceded The Narrator Who Ruined Christmas by four years (see below). And by "mimic", I really mean "tears the genre a new asshole and makes it beg for more *and* deeper." Like most Christmas specials, this episode looks at the real meaning behind the holiday. Unlike the others, this one makes a major stab at the societal cancer we currently call Political Correctness, in which Kyle's "Big Fat Jew Bitch" of a Mom almost destroys Christmas by demanding that the school play become non-denominational, while Kyle goes through a nervous breakdown because only he can see Mr. Hankey, a magical piece fecal matter that represents the Spirit of Christmas. In the end Mr. Hankey proves to be real and not a figment of Kyle's shattered psyche, and Christmas for South Park is saved. Not that any town that employs a banal hack like Philip Glass to write a Christmas play *deserves* to be saved, regardless of the holiday... Anyway, as most SP fans know, this wasn't the first time Trey Parker & Matt Stone have taken a stab at Christmas. In fact, they've done a Christmas episode seven out of nine seasons, and of course we can't forget the two shorts they did before the series got greenlighted that took the holiday by the balls and squeezed really tightly. But this episode was the best one, and was really the first one that had the entire audience by their balls as well. The day after it aired, people everywhere were singing "Mr. Hankey The Christmas Poo," especially in their offices where it could be heard by anyone listening over the phone, and kids in school were drawing pictures of Mr. Hankey instead of Santa Claus bringing everyone presents. If any one episode can take credit for putting South Park in the public eye for good, it was this one. - - - Trivia Note: Some Big Name Companies with 400lb man-hating dyke gorillas staffing their HR departments actually sent out memos promising to fire anyone caught singing the song while at work, claiming it was "offensive" and "violated their co-workers' civil rights." But then again, HR departments exist to make the workplace a deplorable environment, so this reaction and oppression came as no surprise. Nor did the coal in their stockings, or their discovery that, while the offices were closed, someone took a big shit in their chair *and* pissed all over it.

#6 - Santa Claus is Coming To Town (1970)

No, I didn't have a screen cap from the show. Bite me.

The story of Santa Claus has been told so many times over the past century or two that he actually has more real names and origin stories than Batman's villains have screwball gimmicks. However, by the time Rankin-Bass decided to do this special, nobody had really sat down and put an origin to film. At least, not one that made any half-assed sense. Which is probably why Romeo Muller - who also wrote the script for the seminal Rankin-Bass special, Rudolph - scrapped pretty much all the previous mythos and guesses, and took the story of Kris Kringle back to the basics. However, those basics - Santa Claus... AKA "Kris Kringle". Lives at the North Pole with his wife. Has a workshop. Build toys with a bunch of elves. Rides a sled through the air pulled by (originally) eight reindeer. Travels the world on Christmas Eve. Slides down the chimney to leave the stockings mounted on the fireplace mantle stuffed with toys. ...needed an explanation, which is where Muller threw out the bathwater and gave the baby a shower and a fresh change of diapers. Santa begins his life as an orphan left on the doorstep of a family of toymaker elves by the name of Kringle, and he grows up to become an expert toymaker in the family tradition. However, because possession of toys in the land has been outlawed by the child and fun-hating Burgermeister Meisterburger(*), the Kringles are unable to do anything with their toys except toss them in a pile out back. The rest of the special is an exercise in civil disobedience in a way that even Gandhi would have gotten a kick out of, as Kris keeps developing methods for getting the toys to the kids. And somewhere along the way he manages to pick up a stunning redhead who, despite starting out as a snotty bitch, obviously winds up being off-screen one hell of a cook. (*) Seriously, I've always wondered if Peter Gabriel had seen this show before he wrote Moribund the Burgermeister for his first solo album. As with Rudolph, amazingly enough, the hidden message that Christmas is all about the presents is still evident. However, it's wrapped inside a *real* hidden message that's a powerful one: kids *need* and *deserve* to be allowed to play and BE children without interference from government officials who claim to be acting for the kids' best interests. Considering that KidVid was being neutered by government pressure, the message was very apropos for the times. And still is. - - - Trivia Note: Robie Lester - who provided the surprisingly serious but seductive voice of the future Mrs. Jessica Kringle, passed away earlier this year. While her credit list was small, it was by no means without significance: She sang the opening song for Walt Disney's original Disneyland self-hype series. Trivia Note: This is arguably the one time Mickey Rooney played *any* character where you didn't immediately think "There goes Andy Hardy". He was a perfect choice for the voice role, natch!

#7 - The Narrator That Ruined Christmas (2001)

Screen cap courtesy of Curious Pictures. Good job, guys!

Q: What would happen if the narrator from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer refused to go on with the annual telling of the story? A: You'd have a narrator who fucking damn near ruined Christmas. Duh. A visually-accurate parody of the original Rankin/Bass classic, this was a five-minute short  written by Robert Smigel ("Triumph the Insult Comic Dog," "TV Funhouse"), along with contributions from Michael Gordon, Louis CK, Stephen Colbert, and Michelle Saks Smigel. It first aired on NBC's Saturday Night Live in December, 2001, only two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As one could probably guess, the story deals with Burl Ives' character of Sam the Snowman, who winds up being emotionally distraught and depressed over 9/11 and all the subsequent paranoia. He eseentially says "screw it!", refuses to narrate Rudolph, and retires to his igloo where, after a pizza and beer binge he passes out on the toilet while reading the newspaper. All in front of the television audience, natch. After some harassment by Rudolph, Hermie, and two kids from the home audience, Sam takes the entire bunch down to Ground Zero to see if he can use his celebrity status to "help out" with the efforts. In the end, Santa himself has come down to the GZ to bitch slap Sam back to reality after Sam goes ballistic after his offers to "cheer up the workers" has been refused in favor of Jerry Stiller - "My left nut's more famous than Jerry Stiller!" - by reminding Sam that the world does *not* revolve around him, and if he really wanted to help he'd quit being a douche bag and do his job of narrating. Of course, there's a great twist ending, but I won't spoil it here. And while SNL doesn't air the clip anymore, you can actually see it online thanks to animators' studio, Curious Pictures. It's a rather high-res version in Quickslime, but it's worth the download time even if you're only on ISDN. - - - Trivia Note: Contrary to popular belief, this short was done using the same stop-motion techniques used by Rankin/Bass for the majority of their specials. However, as the motion tends to be a bit smoother than the original works - some of which was actually recycled and used in the short, especially the scenes of the winter storm blowing the eskimos and elves away, and Santa arguing with the missus - quite a number of people were convinced it was made using computer-generated imagery. Nothing could be farther from the case, which is probably why it works so well!

#8 - Pinky & The Brain Christmas Special (1995)

Screen cap courtesy of some WB Fan Site

I have to admit, I'm not that much of a fan of either the Brain or Pinky. It's not that the show sucked, it's that when it was a hot property I wasn't that into the modern slate of TV animation. Ten years later, I'm a lot older and a bit wiser, and while I'm still not that big a P&TB fan, this one special did have me laughing despite the telegraphed ending. In a nutshell, to implement Brain's latest attempt to - you guessed it - take over the world, he and Pinky travel to the North Pole to sabotage Santa's Workshop into producing "Noodle Noggin" dolls. The dolls contain a device that will hypnotize anyone receiving them as a gift(*) into letting Brain - again, you guessed it - take over the world. More than any other of Brain's schemes, this one comes the closest to working, and actually succeeds in Brain taking over the world. (*) Despite showing people and races all over the world getting these dolls on Christmas morning, the writers gloss over the usual glossover point all Christmas specials tend to gloss over: what about those who don't celebrate either Christmas, Hanukah or Kwanzaa and don't exchange presents? I suspect that had Brain's plan succeeded, he'd still have to figure out how to get the "Noodle Noggin" dolls incorporated into the Month of Ramadan or some Hindu or Buddhist rite. But then again, grousing over these glossing-overs lies the Way of the Grinch, and green isn't my color... That is, until he reads a letter to Santa that Pinky failed to deliver, which leads to the ending that you could see coming a mile off the second Pinky started writing the letter. I honestly won't spoil the ending for those who haven't seen it, but it makes the show worth the annual watch. - - - Trivia Note: No trivia on this one, alas. Shows you how much attention I really pay to this show...

#9 - Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire (1989)

Screen cap courtesy of DumDumDugan. Spaceeba, man!

Forget the crudely-drawn "squigglevision" shorts that aired on the Tracey Ullman Show, kids. This is the Simpsons episode that set the tone and look for almost 20 years of insanity. Many of the core mythos of the one show FOX airs that's worth a shit were established with this episode: Mihouse, Ned Flanders, Homer's donut habits, Duff Beer, C. Montgomery Burns, Smithers, Patty & Selma, Moe, Barney Grampa and, of course, Santa's Little Helper. It's the last one that's the McGuffin for this special, as if the name wasn't a clue. It's Christmas time, but in what will become typical Simpson's fashion, events take a turn or two for the worse. First, Mr. Burns cancels the Christmas bonuses that Homer had expected to help with present purchases, while  Bart gets a tattoo at the mall that requires all the money the family had already saved for presents to have it removed. Homer then tries earning money by playing Santa at the mall, but after all the deductions - including suit rental - he winds up with a whopping $13.00.    Homer: Thirteen bucks?  Hey, wait a minute.    Clerk: That's right.  $120 gross, less Social Security...    Homer: Yeah.    Clerk: ... less unemployment insurance ...    Homer: But...    Clerk: ... less Santa training...    Homer: Santa training?    Clerk: ... less costume purchase...    Homer: Wait a minute...    Clerk: ... less beard rental...    Homer: But...    Clerk: ... less Christmas Club.    Homer: But...    Clerk: See you next year.  [closes the window] After a suggestion by Barney, Homer and Bart then tries betting on the local dog races, hoping for the traditional Christmas miracle by betting on a dog - you guessed it: Santa's Little Helper - whose odds are 99-to-1. But, as you've come to expect from the Simpsons, the dog they place the $13 on comes in dead last. However, in the usual Christmas twist, the dog proves loving so Homer brings the now homeless mutt home, and everyone has a Merry Christmas after all. Ho! Ho! D'Oh! Indeed! - - - Trivia Note: This special was not originally intended to be the series' opening episode. Production problems caused the show's original premier delayed until late December, at which time it was decided to run the Christmas episode for the series' opener. Trivia Note: The premise of Homer's deductions from his Santa check was reportedly based on a CNN news story about how some professional Santa companies essentially rape first-year Santas on their pay in much the same way Homer gets fleeced. The justification apparently is that attrition in the Santa industry is so high that the companies do what they can to make a buck back on the training and suit supply. However, what they tend to either fail to tell their rookies is that in the fine print, not only does it allow them to collect these fees, if they come back the next year most of the fees - save for the suit rental - are waived because they've already been trained. The notion here is that if they like playing Santa enough to ignore how their wallets are getting emptied, then they'll continue to be good Santas. Go figure.

#10 - The Homecoming (1971)

Promo photo from the Series and not the Special courtesy of The Walton's Website. Thanks anyway, Ralph!

The only live-action show in the list, and it's the one that went over so well in the ratings that See-BS rushed a regular series into production, and the movie wasn't even intended to be a pilot. Earl Hamner's semi-autobiographical tale  the early 1930s, right smack in the middle of the "Great"(*) Depression, and the little Waltons down in Waltonville - I mean, up on Walton's Mountain, right smack in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia - are about to celebrate Christmas as best as possible. In an attempt to at least *try* to make ends meet, patriarch John Walton has taken a job in a not-so-nearby town. However, this requires long bus rides to and from work, and when he tries to come home on Christmas Eve the Blue Ridge gets hit with some excessive snowfall that starts blocking the roads. When John hasn't showed for hours, and reports come in of a bus flipping over and killing several passengers, Ma Walton sends eldest son John-Boy out to find him. From there, it's one short rural adventure after another until the spirit-lifting ending. (*) The Depression was about as "Great" as the War Betwixt The States was "Civil". Besides being a fair ratings hit for its run, the impact The Waltons had on the American Culture experience was two-fold: It gave the older generation a chance to relive aspects of those days of the Depression that they might actually want to remember, while giving those born long after WWII pulled the nation out of its slump the opportunity to see a reasonable recreation of how shitty things were. Or, to put it in the words of TV critics at the time, "it made poor white trash 'Hee-Haw'(*) programming respectable."   At the same time, the "extended family" aspects became a fertile source of satire and ridicule in a culture that had evolved into the "nuclear" family concept of two parents and 2.5 kids. For good or bad, this underrated show still has its impact on society, and this special is still timeless almost 35 years after it first aired. (*) Shortly before this special aired, See-BS had cancelled an entire genre of programming, including The Beverley Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Green Acers, Mayberry RFD, and the Country *and* Western comedy-variety-music show, Hee-Haw, following critics lambasting all the shows for being too "hayseed" for normal viewers' tastes. These same critics ignored the fact that all of these shows were in the top 20 in the Nielsens, and most of them had been there for years. And yeah, this familiar - and often ridiculed - closing exchange was part of the special: Elizabeth: Good night, John Boy. John-Boy: Good night, Elizabeth. Good night, Daddy. John: Good night, Son. Good night, Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen: Good night, Daddy. Good night, Mama. Olivia: Good night, Mary Ellen. Good night, Jim Bob. Jim Bob: Good night, Mama. Good night, Erin. Erin: Good night, Jim Bob. Good night, Ben. Ben: Good night, Erin. Good night, everybody. Good night, Chet. Good night, David, and Good night for NBC News... - - - Trivia Note: For the series, all of the extended Walton family were retained from the special, with three notable exceptions: Olivia Walton: Played to excellence by Patricia Neal, despite still having difficulties from her stroke she suffered after appearing In Harm's Way. Her health, though vastly improved, was reportedly still not up to handling the stress of a regular series, and declined the role on the series. She was replaced by Michael Learned, who brought a more youthful aspect to the role.   John Walton: Played by Andrew Duggan in the special, he was replaced by Ralph Waite at the insistence of See-BS execs who felt that a younger husband for a now-younger Olivia would be more acceptable to viewing audiences.   Grampa Walton: Played by Edgar Bergen in the special, sans Charlie McCarthy. Originally okayed by See-BS, Bergen declined the series role due to his health not being up to the rigors of a regular series - a concern that his replacement, Will Geer, would find was not unwarranted.

#11 - Opus & Bill - A Wish for Wings That Work (1991)

Once upon a time, there was this cartoon strip called Bloom County. Like Doonesbury, it was chock-full of political satire and stabs at life in general and specific. Unlike Garry Trudeau's strip, Berkeley Breathed populated his with both humans and anthropomorphic creatures, which gave the strip a wider range of viewpoints than Trudeau's "no funny animals, ever!"(*) rule would allow. Although accused of being a Doonesbury rip-off, Bloom County nevertheless achieved circulation rates strong enough to be considered a peer, if not a rival. (*) There was one "exception" to this rule, and that was Zonker's abilty to have conversations with his plants. However, Trudeau has gone on record that this wasn't exactly an exception, as it was more the result of Zonker's drug use than plants actually being able to talk. Weasel-mode=ON, natch. Sadly, Breathed pulled what we now call a "Woz"(*): he took a ultralight up for a spin and didn't exactly land it properly. During this time, he sort of went a little goofy, and began actually *believing* the "rip-off" claims of the more vehement Doonesbury fans. As a result, he shut down Bloom County and took its two most popular characters, Opus the Penguin and Bill the Cat, and threw them into a new realm called Outland. (*) After Apple Founder Steve Wozniak, who augered his private plane and wound up never being 100% alright in the head afterwards. Almost immediately, Breathed was accused of trying to rip-off another famous strip - George Herriman's Krazy Kat - based on the really ersatz and ultra-abstract backgrounds that were strikingly reminiscent of Herriman's work. However, what worked for Krazy, Ignatz and Offisa Poppy 50 years earlier, failed with readers who arguably were more used to hallucinatory visions in the post-hippie era. After a few years, Breathed ended Outland, claming he was ending it before it lost its popularity, unaware that it already had lost a great majority of it due to the sheer abstractive nature of the strip. While the strip was still riding on the popularity of its predecessor, Breathed produced a Christmas special for See-BS featuring Opus and Bill. Opus, it seems, has always felt somewhat inadequate by being "aerodynamically impaired" - read: he's a penguin, and therefore incapable of flight. During the course of the special, he and Bill attempt to circumvent the problem despite the negative attitudes and interference from the other denizens of Outland. One of these efforts is to write a letter to Santa Claus, begging for - who didn't see this coming? - wings that work. However, when Santa crashes his sleigh in a nearby lake on Christmas Eve, Opus learns a valuable lesson about appreciating the worth of his natural abilities, while everyone else in the Outland learn to appreciate those who want to better themselves and do what they can to help instead of ridicule. It's a different Christmas message of a sort that Breathed weaves with this one, but one that's still rather familiar. The same message is inherent in the story of Rudolph, but the hidden message that it's "all about the presents" is shamelessly absent. Which is why the story is far more refreshing and entertaining than Outland was during its entire run. Had the strip been this good, more people would have accepted it over Bloom County. In 2003, spurred by a new love affair with using Adobe Photoshop to create and color comic strips, Breathed has brought Opus back to the funny pages with a Sunday-only eponymous strip. The humor is a bit closer to Bloom County, thankfully, but it still leaves one wishing for a daily strip. - - - Trivia Note: This wasn't the first time Opus was animated for TV. He showed up in a low-budget commercial using limited animation to advertise Breathed's first collection of Bloom County strips in trade paperback form. Trivia Note: I actually met Breathed once while I was working at the Deadly Texan back in 1984. He'd dropped by to drop off a signed copy of one of his books for one of my editors, and we exchanged pleasantries. I told him how much I appreciated his strip, he told me how much he appreciated that my restaurant reviews didn't pull any punches. I got the impression from the tone off that statement that I may have saved him from eating somewhere that wasn't worth eating at. In retrospect, I should have probably written a couple of articles on how ultralights should be banned...

#12 - A Flintstone Christmas (1977)

If there's one Christmas tale that comes in third to A Christmas Carol and It's A Wonderful Life for the sheer number of variants and adaptations of the basic theme, its the one where a normal guy - usually someone playing a department store Santa for extra cash - has to fill in for the ailing real Santa lest the kids become *very* disappointed on Christmas morning. Fred Flintstone was one of those who filled in for St. Nick. *Twice* The first time was during the original run of The Flintstones in the 60's, when it aired Sunday nights on ABC. It wound up being one of the more popular episodes, and ten years after the show left the air Hanna-Barbera took the same basic story and fleshed it out into an hour-long special, and while not 100% original, it's one of the few post-60's Flintstone efforts that lives up to the original series. Christmas has come once again(*) to Bedrock, and Mr. Slate has Fred play Santa Claus for a bunch of needy orphan cave kids sponsored by Mrs. Slate's Women's Auxiliary. When Fred & Barney go home to prepare for the party, they're met with a surprise: the real Santa is lying flat on the ground out back of Fred's house! Seems he fell off of Fred's junk-covered roof, and twisted his ankle beyond use. Santa convinces Fred & Barney they have to take over his job for the night, so the kids don't have a botched Christmas morning. (*) Yeah, yeah, I know. The Stone Age predated Jesus by a million years or so, give or take a Flintstone. Just shaddap and enjoy the show! Of course, we're dealing with Fred & Barney, who without the Great Gazoo this time around, manage to screw things up. They lose a lot of their gifts in a snowstorm and have to go back to Santa's Workshop at the North Pole to pick replacements. As a result, while they manages to deliver all the presents to the world's children - which probably really didn't take that long, considering the global surface population was lower than Scrooge's wildest dreams in those days - they still wind up being late for the Slate's Christmas party. However, he still has Santa's magic bag, so he manages to deliver a shitload gifts to all the needy children, much to Slate's relief and appreciation. Santa shows up to take back his sleigh and bag, and thanks Fred & Barney for saving Christmas. However, it appears they've bungled one more time - they forgot to save gifts from Santa's Bag for their own families. As they go inside to fess up to their fuckup, they discover that Santa has already fixed the problem by delivering presents himself, and both families have a very Merry Christmas. - - - Trivia Note: The special is significant because it's the first time we see Pebbles & Bamm-Bamm at elementary school ages. Previously we either saw them as infants or as teenagers. Eventually H-B will show them getting married and dealing with parenthood. All stories are generational when you get down to it... Trivia Note: The only thing that really dates this special with regards to the "Stone Age Technology" is that Santa's Sleigh has a CB Radio of all things. Of course, CB Radio has been dead since about 1981, but in 1977 it was a big 10-4 everywhere you looked.

Anyway, all but a few of these are available on either VHS or DVD, so do some renting, grab the kids and curl up in front of the TV for some holiday special cheer. It'll do you good, honest.

Item: While we're talking Chrisnukkah specials, I've got a few quick additions to my OM's Chrisnukkah Unique Gift Idea List. Enjoy!

Just what every geek with a wallet needs: a waterproof USB drive that's the same size and shape as a credit card. The Walletex Wallet Flash is only slightly thicker than your average credit card, and comes in capacities from 64MB to 2GB.
Walletex is currently only shipping the 128MB sized cards, and retails for $29 each in quantities of 10 or more. They expect to have the larger sizes available early next year for those who need to download a lot of data on the fly.

Ok, want a toy for Chrisnukkah that can actually be dangerous? You're in luck, because I found some that actually don't involve explosives, chemicals, or even freaky sex tricks. They're Neodymium Magnets, and they're the strongest magnets this side of a Tokamak! If you known what you're doing, you can have a shitload of fun with these! Levitation experiments, gauss marble rifle demonstrations, even ferrofluid art tricks! The imagination's the limit on these puppies!

Of course, these magnets aren't your average rubber fridge magnets, and they've got some caveats you need to take note of before you emptor: The magnets listed below are very powerful, much more powerful then magnets most people have seen, and need to be handled with proper care. The magnetic fields from these magnets can affect each other from more than 12 inches away. Please note that these magnets are fragile. Even though they are coated with a tough protective nickel plating, do not allow them to snap together with their full force or they may chip, break, and possibly send small pieces of metal flying on impact. Our larger magnets can easily bruise fingers and even break finger bones as they attempt to connect together. Always wear protective eyewear or safety goggles when handling the magnets. Keep magnets away from any magnetic based storage devices such as desktop or laptop computers, hard drives, floppy disks, cassette tapes, VHS tapes, or credit cards. A distance of at least 12" should be kept between magnets and these items at all times. Keep them away from computer monitors, VCR'S and TV's, non-electronic wrist watches etc. If you or someone in your household has a PACEMAKER or another electronic surgical implant, don't even think of ordering these items. Neodymium magnets are not suitable for children to play with, and should only be handled under strict adult supervision. These Neodymium magnets are made to very demanding standards, however uses should be restricted to operating temperatures below 180° Fahrenheit (80° Celsius) or they will lose their magnetic properties. Also, they ain't exactly cheap, but they're not *that* pricey. United Nuclear sells these in various sizes, shapes and prices, and they even have them in gold plate!

Anyway, that's it for today's OMBlog. Here's a Wikilink for your stocking:

Hey, if you're gonna buy those magnets, you'd better bone up on what the hell Neodymium is, right?

Obits: Two guys passed away yesterday whose lives influenced millions during their respective careers. One for the better, the other...well, let's just say the verdict's probably going to be debated long after we're all gone.

First off, let's start with the one I'll miss. It's hard to escape the fact that Richard Pryor is no longer with us. CNN kept his obit picture on their front page for almost 12 hours, and I don't think they did that for Ronald Reagan even. And it's not that he didn't deserve the notice, either. Pryor's contribution to the American Experience that is defined by its style of humor is without question of the highest importance. While he wasn't the first comedian to use profanities, epithets and other naughty "colorful metaphors" in his act, he was the first to actually get away with it in front of large audiences. Repeatedly. And that's why he's so important to things like, say, the First Amendment. Ironically, this came directly from Pryor's official website about 10 minutes before I posted this obit. Go figure. Granted, it can be easily argued that Lenny Bruce opened the door to using words like "fuck" and "cocksucker" in live comedy performances, it was Pryor who not only stuck his foot in the door to keep the same Gestapo from slamming it in his face as they did Bruce with the obscenity trials, he essentially kicked the door off the hinges and broke it into three pieces. After Pryor showed it could be done tastefully, every stand-up comic started adding adult language to their act, knowing full well they could now be totally uninhibited in how they wanted to express their humor. Still, Pryor did it best, which is why records like Is It Something I Said?, Bicentennial Nigger and That Nigger's Crazy! still hold up as timeless classics three decades after hitting vinyl. Pryor also managed to accomplish something that Bill Cosby had previously only been able to make headway into: getting white folks and black folks to sit down and laugh together at just how fucked up their lives really are by just being black folks and white folks. However, whereas Cos used a candy-coated style - read: Fat Albert - Pryor put the differences and the similarities right in your face, and managed to make you laugh yourself silly about it. And sometimes, facing the truth about something by laughing about it is a far better way to address a situation and figure out how to deal with it when the laughter relieves the stress.
Honestly, I could go on for about three days straight going over his lengthy career. I'll leave that to others who're already doing this as I type. But there are a few points in his career that are worth special mention, and I'd be doing the brother a disservice if I didn't at least touch base on them for a minnute. First off, while I'd heard some of Pryor's early work on bootlegged cassette tapes in Junior High, the first *real* experience with just how talented Pryor was occurred back on December 13th, 1975 - almost 30 years ago, dammit! - when he hosted Saturday Night Live. It was a really big deal then because Pryor was known for having no problems using	Richard Pryor, circa 1977 Thanks for the laughs, Bro!
either racial epithets or profanities - i.e., "Nigger", "Motherfucker" or "Democrat" - no matter what forum he was speaking in front of If the FCC thinks Howard Stern is bad on radio, he couldn't hold a candle to Pryor's spontaneity, especially if it was live TV. So, to keep themselves from getting their balls handed to them by Uncle Charley - that's what we called the FCC in those days, kids - NBC tape-delayed SNL for 10 seconds, just like they do on the call-in talk shows. This gave the censors enough time to kill the audio if Pryor "slipped" and said one of those "Seven Dirty Little Words" or anything along those lines. True, those who knew how to lip read wouldn't be "protected", but in these days before closed captioning this was an accepted risk. And just so you won't be kept in suspense, no, Pryor didn't slip. However, when you consider that NBC's Standards and Practices goons allowed the "Word Association" sketch with Chevy Chase to go on-air totally uncensored...well, by the end of the show you were wondering what the fuck they thought the big deal was for the few seconds between getting up to change the channel, only to realize the censors simply were paranoid and start laughing yourself silly again over one hell of a show. Another major point about Pryor that needs to be madewas also known for an incredible talent for turning his own foibles and fuckups into some of the most humorous confessionals that even the most hardnosed holier-than-thou would find themselves hard-pressed to not grant forgiveness. While the longest one that comes to mind is the one where he details how he got arrested for shooting his car: "And the police, they don't kill cars...they kill Nig-GARS!" The best one that everyone remembers is where he ended his first concerts after his freebasing "accident" by letting everyone know that he was well aware that everyone's been talking about him by lighting a match, moving it from left to right in an up and down motion, and then quipping: "Look! There's Richard Pryor runnin' down the street!" You have to see him carry this out to see just how outrageously funny this one short bit is. Seriously. Superman meets Supernigger. It wasn't the pairing that everyone bitched about, it was the crummy plot! Pryor was the One Saving Grace of the film besides Christopher Reeve's portrayal as *the* Superman. Just like his predecessor Redd Foxx, Pryor will be missed, even if he still lives on every time someone plays one of his albums on their iPlod, or rents The Toy, Which Way Is Up?, Silver Streak, Superman III, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, Uptown Saturday Night or one of his four concert films. In fact, as I'm writing this, I've got Harlem Nights on one of my systems playing in the background. If any one film deserves to be considered Pryor's finest moment - if not his signature coda - it's this film. Three generations of ribald comedy - Foxx, Pryor and Eddie Murphy - in one package at the same time has to be enjoyed by anyone who appreciates a good movie loaded with good actors and really funny comedy. Finally, one point of irony in Pryor's passing was that, while I was in the hospital last month getting that four pound sack of marbles removed from my gut, the first joke my best friend Brian Z and I cracked about my condition was about how I'd wake up and see the EKG going "beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee", only to have it go "Beep. Beep. Beep." once I screamed in panic thinking I was dead. Yep. Just like Richard Pryor did. Again, thanks for the laughs, Rich. You will be missed, but as I said you'll live on as long as we've got your albums and films. And, of course, every time we tell the establishment that wants to "clean up" our language just how they can go fuck themselves, and what to do it with!

The other obit from yesterday isn't someone I'm sorry to see go. In fact, I fully believe that if he'd gone a *lot* sooner - say, prior to 1966 - the Democratic Party wouldn't be in the clusterfucked shape it's been since Chicago 1968. I speak - in derision, of course - of former Minnesota Senator and Presidential Candidate Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy.
It's been no secret amongst my friends - especially my political rabble-rouser ones - that the subject of McCarthy and the 1968 election has always been a sore point with me. McCarthy's stance on Vietnam divided the Democratic Party on the wrong lines at the wrong time, and the subsequent changes in leadership wound up castrating the party so significantly that it hasn't had a Presidential candidate that was worth a shit since JFK, and only one VEEP - Lloyd Bentsen - who was actually worth putting on the ballot. McCarthy's plans for Vietnam echo what some of today's Democrats call for regarding Iraq: just get the hell out and let the locals fend for themselves. And with rumblings of a reinstatement of the National Draft starting as early as 1966, the youth of America began to get a yellow streak down their back in light of
the prospects of being drafted into military service as their fathers had been in WWII and Korea; the former was an honorable war, but the latter - due in no small part to the fact that Congress and two Presidents refused to let the war be *won* as opposed to a stalemated police action - was the first war to be viewed on the home front as of questionable justification. Those getting out of High School and those in college who were of draft age were not happy about this possibility, and as a result they flocked to the *only* politician with Presidential ambitions who appeared to totally sympathize with their concerns. And he used this to his advantage, beginning in the New Hampshire primary of 1968, where antiwar protestors declared their support of McCarthy after he promised to pull all US Troops out of Vietnam if elected. From there the "hippie movement" of the college campuses - a movement founded on peace and love and not a small semblance of personal sexual gratification the following year - was transmogrified into a movement dedicated to peace at all costs, including the use of chaos and violence. But that transmogrification didn't happen right off the bat. At first, they even cleaned up their act - read: took baths, cut their hair, shaved their beards, wore suits - and put on a really professional, almost establishmental act when they canvassed for McCarthy in New Hampshire. As a result, McCarthy managed to gather 42% of the vote against the 49% incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson received. Already under fire from both sides of Congress over how Vietnam was progressing, LBJ essentially panicked and dropped out of the race despite having won the primary. He instead threw his support behind his VEEP, Hubert Humphrey, who the more conservative Democrats felt had a more rational chance of getting the US out of Vietnam without totally abandoning it to Communist takeover as McCarthy was calling for. At the same time, another mitigating factor in LBJ's decision to bail out was the sudden entry of Senator Robert F. Kennedy into the campaign. RFK, it was felt, would take away the support LBJ had inherited from those who supported him following the assassination of his predecessor, John Fitzgerald Kennedy; after all, if you had the chance to put another smiling Kennedy in office instead of some dour Texan with dumbo ears, what would the average Joe Punchclock choose to do at the polls? Faced with half the votes going to one anti-war candidate, and at least half of the other half going to the brother of his predecessor who was taking a similar outlook on the war, LBJ decided to throw in the towel. LBJ wasn't the only one whose candidacy was thrown a monkey wrench into. RFK's entry also presented the hippies with a dilemma. While McCarthy was clearly supportive of the issues facing his young supporters - read: "I Don't Wanna Be Drafted!" - RFK had his sights on more than just Vietnam. While he was against the war, unlike McCarthy he was concerned at fixing *all* of the nation's problems, and not just the war. As the primaries progressed towards the Democratic National Convention of that year, more and more of the nation's youths of voting age - or old enough to know their time is coming sooner than they think - began to turn their support towards RFK. And besides, he at least looked closer to their age than McCarthy ever did, and this was the time when the hippies were first developing the philosophy of never trusting anyone over the age of thirty, or at least looked that old. As a result of the shift in support, McCarthy lost four out of the next five primaries, including the fateful California primary. However, as McCarthy was actually considering throwing in the towel himself, RFK was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel following his victory speech. McCarthy went on with his campaign, with his youth contingent now returning to his fold, albeit not in the same numbers, nor with the same sort of zeal. In fact, RFK's assassination - combined with all the other turmoil that was splitting apart the country, especially on the college campuses - seemed to have put a more cynical twist on their political mindset. The question that RFK's death had placed before them was simple: if something happened to McCarthy, who then was going to speak for them? The question got answered at the 1968 Democratic National Convention that August, when due to the controls then in effect of the State Party machines - and in the case of Chicago, the Local machine - over the delegate selection process. Considering McCarthy an undesirable radical candidate, the backroom dealings at the convention wound up gaining Humphrey the nomination. McCarthy wound up with only 23% of the delegate vote. This naturally did not sit well with McCarthy's hippie supporters, a rather large number of whom decided to crash the Party and make their displeasure known. When Chicago police cracked down on the protests, the violence that resulted caused major fractures within the Democratic Party that could not be healed in time for the Presidential elections. And through it all, "the whole world was watching" thanks to unprecedented national network television and radio coverage. While party fracturing was nothing new - Southern Democrats had been breaking off over the issue of segregation for over a century - this was the first time the nation pretty much as a whole got to see the disintegration as it actually happened. As a result, when November came around voters essentially went with the candidate who, at the time, was the lesser of the two evils. Richard Milhouse Nixon, while not by a landslide as he would four years later, beat Humphrey by promising to get US Troops out of Vietnam only by honorable means, and by the sheer fact that when the Republicans held their own convention, viewers at home weren't instead shown scenes of total chaos with protesting hippies getting their unwashed heads bashed in by cops trying to restore the peace. Whether the nation made the correct choice will forever be up for debate, considering how Nixon's administration fared throughout his self-aborted second term. Of course, that same history shows McCarthy essentially got his wish anyway when US troops pulled out of Vietnam. However, as the old adage goes about being careful of what you wish for, by 1975 the Communists had broken the truce and wound up conquering all of Vietnam. Something that could have - and should have been prevented. But with Nixon's administration castrated over Watergate, and the general opinion of the nation fooled into believing that Vietnam was not winnable and that the US should have never gotten involved in the first place(*), sending in support for the South Vietnamese simply wasn't going to happen in fear of a backlash on the home front. (*) And this was long before all the rhetoric about the Gulf of Tonkin Incedent being faked, kids. McCarthy's association with the hippie movement didn't help his future career as a politician, as one might have expected. By 1971 he left the Senate and temporarily retired from politics, He tried several times between 1972 and 1992 to run as first a "dark horse" Democratic nominee, then as an Independent on several different Ad-Hoc political parties with about as many voters as a cable access show on basketweaving for paraplegics would have. In the end, he wound up in retirement after the 1992 election, and was pretty much abandoned by everyone dabbling in modern politics - including those of his hippies who'd gone the way of the "establishment" and entered politics the old fashioned way. If there's two things to be said about McCarthy's 1968 campaign and its effects, it's these two: It can easily be argued that McCarthy's anti-war platform caused a major schism in the Democratic Party, and set the stage for the party shedding itself of the "old guard" machine bosses(*). This resulted in reduced significance of the national convention, and by the 1976 DNC the focus on determining who to nominate switched from the "back room" decisions to actually accepting what the primaries had decided. While there is some plausible case to be made that this is simply democracy in action, it also prevented the party from nominating, much less electing, a Presidential candidate who is not only qualified for the position, but can also capture the trust of the American voters. This shift in nominating procedure specifically provided the means for James Earl Carter - inarguably the worst President of the latter half of the 20th Century, and the man who, more than disco music, made the late 1970's an era worth forgetting - to become the Democratic nominee for that year's election. An election he won solely on public backlash against Gerald Rudolph Ford having been Nixon's successor and thereby as guilty as Nixon solely by association. (*) Save for Richard Daley. They had to wait for him to die first, he was really *that* powerful even with the conservatives being weeded out. McCarthy's use of the the younger generation and its effects on the '68 DNC has had a longer-lasting effect on politics in general. As a result of the chaos that ensued at that particular convention, politicians have been *very* reluctant to specifically go after the youth vote by promising to prevent them from having to do something they don't want to do. Hence the failure for two decades for a politician to become elected by promising those voters between 18 and 21 years of age the right to drink legally again. Granted, LBJ promised that with his "Ah will not send yore boahs t'Vietnahm!" speech, but he was appealing to the parents and *not* their kids. Not that McCarthy made that distinction to his hippie supporters, but his actions essentially eliminated the possibility that any politician will resort to similar tactics in the future. Anyway, that's enough pissing on his grave for now. McCarthy's worm food, and while it's way too late for those we left behind in Vietnam, and for those whose sacrifices were made in vain, maybe now they can rest a little easier knowing he's no longer relaxing in some comfy retirement home.

Well, I'd planned to do an OMBlog about what I think the top ten Chrisnukkah TV specials are, but it sort of got squeezed out by the obits. Someone remind me and I'll get that knocked out in the next day or so. That, and go into why I think Rome was the best series of 2005 - even better than Battlestar Galactica, surprisingly enough. Until then, here's a couple of Wikilink:

And here with all my hippie-bashing, you probably thought I'd forgotten all about those goddamn freaks that called themselves the Yippies, didn't ya? Nyah.

Item: With a little more than twelve days before Chrisnukkah, it's probably time for me to come up with something I haven't done in a while: OM's Chrisnukkah Unique Gift Idea List. I used to do this back at that Big Computer Company with a Little Name for my internal newsletter, but that sort of fell by the wayside after the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 2001. So, without further pathos, here's the resurrection of my Unique Gift Idea List.

Yeah, yeah, I know - resurrections are for Easter. Go snort the coal in your stockings...

As with any holiday - especially Christmas - chocolate always makes a great gift. Especially if you're trying to get laid under the tree. That's why this the Chocolate Fondue Fountain just might work better than a bottle of Bailey's will on a bubble-butted blonde.
Of course, if you're going to use it on a bubble-butted blonde, this contraption is thankfully simple to use. Just plug it into a wall socket, turn the switch on the right to activate the heater, let the unit heat up between 3-5 minutes, and then you can add your chocolate - dark, milk, Ghirardelli, even white - into the base of the fountain. As you'd expect, the chocolate will be pumped up through the tower and flow from the top. Then you can dip your Cheetos, fresh strawberries, marshmallows, cookies, pretzels, and anything else that's edible save for nipples - sticking nipples into this device is *not* recommended! Even if you're one of those pain freaks...
This gift can be found in some of the more esoteric mall gift stores this season, but I found it online at Find Me A Gift, AmeriMark, Digital Orange, and Shop.com. Prices range from $49.99 to $79.99, so price compare before you buy, natch.

Ok, this is what happens when you let people who grew up watching Jonny Quest design massagers. No, this isn't Dr. Tzin's spider-robot, it's a massager that you place on your head.
The Orgasmatron Trembler Orgasmic Head Massager is specifically designed to stimulate nerve endings and massage acupressure points on the scalp, temples and neck via 10 metal massage arms. The arms vibrate and send the pulses through your scalp to connect with what you hope are acupressure points. With 2 vibration speeds and a large easy grip handle, and flexible adjustable arms, the Trembler might just be the thing you need to cure those stress headaches when Vicodin isn't available.
A word of warning: this gift can only be found in Englandland, but if you need one they can be shipped to the US for the usual transatlantic shipping rape charges. I found it online at Find Me A Gift for about $30.00 USD, but again prices may vary as the Euro and/or the Pound vibrates.

What's a Chrisnukkah Gift List without something from Sharper Image? SI is to the nuvo-richesse what the Johnson Smith Catalog used to be to comic book readers - a source of things that you normally wouldn't buy unless you're totally bored and have money to blow.
This gadget is what SI calls the "World's First Truly Silent & Efficient Watch Winder", and works by mimicking the movements your hand would make that would power a self-winding wristwatch. You simply place your watch into the bezel stand and it automatically expands to hold any size watch and band, and then select one of four settings to safely wind any self-winder - especially those ancient models you can't get parts for in this digital watch era -  without over-winding it. Yeah, you're thinking the same thing I am: this is the perfect gift for the laziest guy you know. But on the other hand, I could actually see a
need for this, especially for people who *can't* walk around and/or have to leave their watches at home for an extended period of time. Remember, *anything* can be ratiionalized at Chrisnukkah time. Anyway, SI has this for either $99.95 or $149.95 - there's two entries on the website with two different prices, and there doesn't seem to be any difference between the two. Now, if someone'll come up with another novel use for this device, then the purchase can be justified as opposed to rationalized.

While I'm thinking about it, I *do* want to take a stab at Sharper Image for *these* things:
SI bills these as "Flameless Wax Candles", and what they are is standard candles with superbright white LEDs inside that provide a candlelight glow without the heat. They come in about five different shapes and sizes, but not different colors. "Beeswax" appears to be it. Sorry, but a candle without flame is like Santa Claus without a sleigh. Part of the experience of a lighting a candle is the heat and the scent - especially if the candles are scented! These things are nothing more than a waxed-over lightbulb, and really have no true charm to them. I mean, what the frack is romantic or even mood-setting about light from an
LED anyway? Imagine if they expanded the concept to fancy dinner candles, kids. Not only would Italian food never be the same, I guarantee the first time someone used them in a Menorah, Yahweh Himself would part the Heavens and we'd all be in a world of shit. Still, there's some precedence for these dumaflatches: remember those fake fireplaces they have for those of us who want to hang their stockings above the fireplace just like in A Night Before Christmas, but didn't *have* a fireplace for one reason or another? Well, these are the next evolutionary step for the concept, if you must do a Chrisnukkah rationalization on why these aren't as offensive as I perceive them. Then again, as with the fake fireplaces, you don't have to worry about the kids burning down the house with one. Go figure.

Hey, speaking of LEDs, Johnson Smith has a cute one from their website for the egotistical bastard in your life that you still manage to love beyond all others. And if that happens to be *me*, more spending power to ya.
This is exactly what you think it is: it's a Scrolling LED Belt Buckle, and for all its tackiness it's actually kind of neat. Just enter in any message up to 512 characters in length, and the text will flash across in bright red LED letters. You can also adjust the speed the message travels and the brightness of the letters, and the RAM will hold up to six messages.
Johnson Smith sells this for the really surprisingly low price of $19.99, which shows just how cheap LEDs are these days if all you want is the color red. Either way, I actually hope someone'll get me one of these for Chrisnukkah, just so I can really shock the hell out of people with some of my usual sarcastic commentary. Especially my definition of what "French" really is.

And seeing as how the season is Chrisnukkah, let's see what Hanukkah Harry has in his bag for all my friends of the Hebraic persuasion, such as my good friends David Dlugatch and RK! This is a Dreidel gift package. And while it's primarily targeted at the kids, it's got a lot of neat items that'll tempt you to abandon those old cheap Rudolph fishnet candy stockings for good! The package contains the following kosher goodies:
A box of Fun with Dreidels - a set of 5 Dreidels & special launchers to make these tops light up, bounce and just plain spin! So if you're like Stan and can't make the damn things spin worth a damn, this set is for you!   A Chanukah Velvet Art Kit -  a Velvet Art Board with 4 markers for drawing pictures of, say, David slaying Goliath with Oprah's jawbone!   A bag of Dancing Dreidels in Chocolate - I've had these before, and they're really good Peanut Butter-filled Chocolate Caramels, and the Peanut Butter is a bit more creamier than you'd find on a Reese's Peanut Butter White Chocolate Christmas Tree!   Box of Chanukah Cookies - Kosher cookies with blue & white icing, eh?   "Maccabeans" - Kosher Jelly Beans, natch!   A Bag of Chanukah Gelt. It's the same thing as those gold foil covered milk chocolate coins you find in the cheap Rudolph stockings.
Kosher Cornocopia sells this set for $29.95, which ain't half bad when you compare it to some of those candy gift sets you find in the malls. And if you just want to give someone a bag of Gelt, ChocolateGelt.Com specializes in this stuff, and can actually get it for you - you guessed it - wholesale.

Talk about a new way to blow smoke up someone's ass: The Zero Blaster is so un-gun as gun toys go that even the most overprotective Mom & Pop'll break down and buy one. They fire off smoke rings using that same supposedly non-toxic juice they use to fog up Gentlemen's Club stages so you can't see all the stretch marks that the dancer failed to hide after her third kid.

Quite a few online site sell these now, although I've seen them in the malls at places like Spencer's and the other eclectic gift stores. You can, however, order them directly from the company, Zero Toys,  for about $5-$8 less than what I've seen in the malls. Zero Toys has several models to choose from, as well as a whole shitload of other cool gimmick toys, some of which aren't even based on smoke rings!

Ok, that's ten gift ideas. If I get time later next week, I'll see if I can't come up with another ten or so, just to give some of you ideas for something special under the tree for that someone special. In the meantime, here's a pair of Wikilinks:

You know, I wonder how Cartman's game play would go if he actually understood how Dreidel is played, and what the stakes truly are....

Item: Ok, time to get a little politically incorrect and totally obnoxious now. Blame it on my running Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and A Charlie Brown Chrisnukkah in the background while I write up this edition of OMBlog, natch.

Item: First off, let's start with this story that the news services have been giving *WAY* too much airtime to. A picture paints a thousand words, but in this case all of them are bad ones...

Yup, it's the Death Row inmate we've all come to know and be bored to tears hearing the tearjerkers whine about his "plight", and as I type this California Governor Ah-Nuld is finally deciding whether or not Stanley "Tookie" Williams should be granted clemency or sent to the Death Chamber he's managed to avoid for over a quarter century.

We've heard the argument ad nauseum over the past month or so: "Tookie" - who co-founded The Crips, Los Angeles' most notorious bunch of gangbanging, dope-dealing, murdering rapist thugs - has been on Death Row since 1979 for killing four people in cold blood during a series of robberies. In all the years he's been waiting for his sentence to be carried out, he claims to have "reformed", citing a series of children's books as a prime example of how turned over his new leaf is.

Death penalty opponents have, naturally, taken his "cause" as their own, and have been bugging Ah-Nuld to commute "Tookie's" sentence to Life w/o Parole to allow him to "continue to reform and benefit society." Big name stars such as Jamie Foxx and Snoop Dogg(*) - the latter of which was a Crip himself, and you know damn well he *still* is - have also come forth on his side, and the news media has helped plaster this mess in everyone's face again, to ad nauseum levels.

(*) Snoop ain't the only one. Just lookit the number of rappers who are Crip members:

• Bad Azz - Insane Crips (Long Beach)
• CJ Mac - Rollin' 60 Nhood Crips (Los Angeles)
• Daz Dillinger - Rollin' 20 Crips (Long Beach)
• Eazy-E - Kelly Park Compton Crips (Compton)
• Goldie Loc (of Tha Eastsidaz) - Rollin' 20 Crips (Long Beach)
• Guerilla Black - Palmer Blocc Compton Crips (Compton)
• MC Eiht - Tragniew Park Compton Crips (Compton)
• MC Ren - Kelly Park Compton Crips (Compton)
• Nate Dogg - Rollin' 20 Crips (Long Beach)
• Snoop Dogg - Rollin' 20 Crips (Long Beach)
• Spider Loc - 97th Street East Coast Crips (Los Angeles)
• Tray Deee (of Tha Eastsidaz) - Insane Crips (Long Beach)
• Warren G - Rollin' 20 Crips (Long Beach)
• WC - 111 Neighborhood Crips (Los Angeles)
• Brotha Lynch Hung - 24th St. Garden Blocc Crip Gang

Rap music exists only to launder drug thug money. Word.

The one thing that everyone who's demanding that "Tookie" be granted clemency is forgetting that, no matter how reformed he may be - and I'm not holding my breath that he is by one iota - he still killed four innocent people in cold blood.

Here, let me say it again just in case you're missing the point:

*He*  *Killed* *FOUR* *Innocent* *People* *In* *COLD* *BLOOD* *!!!*

It doesn't matter whether he's discovered the cure for the common cold, or even AIDS. He committed a specific crime multiple times, and was convicted for it. He's arguably had 25 years more than he's had a right to, and 25 years more than his victims had. Besides, if he *truly* reformed, he'd have dropped the dime on all his fellow thugs in the Crips and allowed the LAPD to finally do their job right for a change. But has he? Did Nixon ever admit *he* was a crook?

Bottom Line: I say send him to the dirt nap and put him out of our misery. The sooner he's fried, hung, drugged or whatevered, the better. He's had far more than his share of borrowed time, and it's time to collect on the loan. In fact, I honestly would prefer to see Ah-Nuld call up "Tookie" in his cell and give him the news like this:

"Tookie? Remember when I said I would kill you last? I *lied*.

Item: And then there's *this* dipshit:

Kids, let's face it: the Air Marshals did *exactly* what they were supposed to do in this sort of situation. When a passenger on an airliner a) tells you he's carrying a bomb, b) goes into his coat pocket instead of assuming the position, and/or c) takes off running, that passenger's life is arguably forfeit on his own stupidity. Had I been the marshal on the plane at that moment, under those same circumstances I would have made the same call and taken him down as quickly as possible.

Now, we've heard all the whinings, especially those of his wife, that he was "mentally ill" and "needed help." If he "needed help", why wasn't he *getting* it -before- he decided to fly somewhere and act like a suicidal retard? His wife is just as much responsible for this as he was, and while she's entitled to her mourning she's really got AbZero room to bitch about what happened. If you love someone who's got a problem, sometimes you have to put your foot down and make sure they get the help they need before they hurt someone. Especially the two of you.

Bottom Line: Before you start screaming "police brutality" and all that, keep in mind that this is exactly how the Israelis have been dealing with hijackers and other nutcases for over three decades now; when was the last time an Israeli airliner was hijacked?

Gah, that's enough vehemence for tonight. Here, have a Wikilink and a smile:

And that blue bandana pattern they wear is *so* swishy...

Item: Ok, so some of you have been e-mailing me about why I haven't had anything to say about Sony's rootkit frackup. I mean, what *is* there to say that hasn't already been said? They did something they weren't supposed to, and now they're getting their head and their balls handed to them in a stir-fry bowl. I honestly can't add anything other than the following:

• Boing Boing has their Sony Rootkit Roundup, which gives a capsule summary of the whole debacle in some semblance of a chronological order: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV. I suggest those of you who aren't up to speed on just what everyone with a clue is screaming about go visit these links and find out just why Santa's putting hot nuclear death in Japanese stockings for the first time in 60 years this Chrisnukkah...
   

• Speaking of Sony and Chrisnukkah, everyone needs to add this to their e-mails, .sigs and any other correspondence you send out this holiday season:
  
                                  
  So, when your kid tells you they want a Sony product, buy one of their competitors' products instead. Unless it's a music CD that's on a Sony label, which you should bootleg just to *really* twist the knife.
   

• Finally, there's this quote from The Onion:

"This won't be the first time I got a virus from that Sarah McLachlan!"

Amen, brother.

Item: From the "Building a Better CD Trap" department: Apparently, someone's come up with a better CD blank that's supposed to dramatically reduce the chances of the surfaces getting scratched and rendering the disks unreadable.

Scratch-Less Discs are blank CDs with 20 small raised bumps - called "Aero Bumps" - situated around the outer edge of the disk. According to the manufacturer, the bumps keep the disc's bottom side from coming into contact with any surface when you toss it across your desk instead of popping it back into the jewel case or folder sleeve. After all, the more marred the surface is, the less likely the laser in the drive will be able to read the pits on the substrate, and the more likely you'll find yourself with a coaster.

In addition to the bumps, these blanks also have a thicker coating over the substrate, and a beveled edge that makes it easier to lift them off of flat surfaces without having to drag them across to the edge of the table. One caveat, tho: these things apparently have a problem with some older CD-ROM drives where, instead of a tray that pops out, they have that slot that just pops the disk in and out. Yeah, just like those Panasonic 4x drives that were dumped on the market back in 1999 for $25 a pop that jammed all the time. Well, the bumps will catch on the cleaning felt around the slot, so caveat your emptor and buy a CD-RW with a tray. 

This looks like a good idea on how to make CDs last longer, but to be totally honest from my own experience these bumps will have *AbZero* effect with regards to keeping disks owned by dancers from getting too scuffed to use. The way those gals treat their CDs is damn near criminal, and if they treated their pets that cruelly they'd be in jail quicker than a ten-dollar bill goes in a five-dollar t-back.

Item: From the "Dad knows how the Balrog felt when he stepped on the damn thing in the middle of the night!" department: I'll be damned if I can figure out why I didn't think of this back in my Dragons & Dungeons, Tunnels & Trolls and FASA Star Trek RPG days:

No. Really. Apparently there's a set of Official Rules for playing D&D with Legos used by the DM to actually build the dungeon on the fly. It's insane, yeah, but then again most people who play D&D more than two hours a month generally are.

After reading this, be advised that none of you can laugh at me and my plans to one day build a server case out of those 10,000 Legos I invested in a few years back...

Item: From the "Why didn't Pat Flannery think of this first?" department: Apparently someone's combined The Family Circus with H.P. Lovecraft's infamous Cthulu mythos:

Long-time OMBloggers - especially those who remember my This Word Just In newsletters for that Big Computer Company with a Little Name - will recall that this isn't the first time someone's taken Bill Keane's annoyingly procreative family and twisted the strip into something perverse. Once upon a time, there was the Dysfunctional Family Circus, which got away with more incest jokes in one week than most Japanese Hentai anime porn does in a year. DFC was shut down after the dorks who syndicate Keane's strip threatened to sue despite some lawyers on usenet arguing that the site was probably protected under the same sort of parody protection Weird Al enjoys.

Anyway, check out this guy's daemonic humor here. That is, before they sue his ass like they did the last guy...

Ok, time for a Wikilink before I get outta here:

This one honestly popped up at random. My karma's running over my dogma these days...

Item: Very brief entry. I am *very* hungover from last night. I don't remember too much, other than the fact that I was sober when I left despite all the drinking - I Breathalyzered at damn near *zero* - and was still sober when I got home about 5:00 this morning. However, when I got out of bed twelve hours later, I was on the floor about 30 seconds later with AbZero equilibrium. Thankfully, when I saw the infamous "silver flashes", I knew that I was simply hung over and that nothing else had gone wrong. No vomiting or anything else, just dizziness.

And a headache from Hell.

Anyway I'm off to torment myself further by taking pictures of a porn star up at Sugar's Uptown Cabaret here in about an hour. Hopefully by then the last of my vicodin will have taken effect, and I'll be able to tolerate the noise. Until then, if you decide to e-mail me, be quiet about it, because it even hurts to read.

Item: On a side note, before I get out of here, as you probably guessed the access point at Perfect 10 San Antonio wasn't working *again*. So no live remote from whatever it was I did last night. Which might be for the best.....

Wikilink time: Enjoy:

Look it up. But do so *softly*...

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