What Everyone Wants for Christmas

h/t: Wil Wheaton

Christmas Is for Family

I am hosting a Christmas Eve dinner for my brother and sister, her boyfriend and three boys. I, like a good host, have spent a fair amount of time and money planning the dinner. We're having appetizers featuring a variety of cheeses, meats and vegetables. For dinner, an Italian pork roast, spaghetti carbonara, roasted sweet potatoes and other vegetables, bread, wine, and beer. I have back-up pizzas for the kids just in case they don't cotton to the dinner I've prepared.

Just got a call from my brother. Now, in a lot of families, or civilizations, this call would be related to what he might be able to bring over for dinner (pie? wine?). Instead, he's calling to find out when dinner is (still at 5!) and to inform me that that's unfortunate, as some of his friends are trying to set him up with a "hot girl" and he's supposed to be at a bar at that time to meet her. He's thinking either he'll head to the bar before dinner or maybe duck out quickly afterward.

Tomorrow, when he has a nice meal and receives $100+ worth of presents from me while giving me only more excuses as to why he is unable to pay me back the money he owes me, I will remind myself that but for the Grace of, and that I would not trade places with him for a minute, so I'll be me and he can be him and we'll all do our best to get along just fine.

It Ain't Easy

Not being one for a whole lot of personal reflection in the season of personal reflection (I am fat. I am aware that I am fat. I obsess on this in the belief that it is my only flaw), I imagine that my holiday season offerings will most consist of references to other bits of fun that are keeping me having a nice time. I pass them on to you with love.

I always enjoy the AV Club's Least Essential Albums of the Year. Many, many people spend a decent portion of their lives telling me of my shit taste in music, but at least I can appreciate what's crap!

Vanilla Ice, Vanilla Ice Is Back!: Hip Hop Classics
As one of the first, and worst, white rappers, Vanilla Ice nearly smothered the art form in its crib, and since then, he’s spent much of his career attempting to finish the job. Ice Is Back: Hip-Hop Classics features the nth comeback attempt by the now 41-year-old Rob Van Winkle, and it’s far and away the most unforgivable thing he’s ever done, far surpassing other crimes against humanity like Cool As Ice, “Ninja Rap,” and Hard To Swallow. This time out, he does wretched covers of classic rap songs, including “You Gots To Chill,” “Insane In The Brain,” and in an extended middle finger to the entirety of black culture, “Fight The Power” and “Buffalo Soldier.” Although it claims to be produced by someone named Adam Hamilton, Vanilla Ice Is Back! features beats and sounds straight out of a karaoke machine, and as if to absolutely cement the dismal amateurishness of it all, the retro-ish cover looks like it was incompetently Photoshopped by a friend of Van Winkle’s who works at a copy shop. It’s irony from someone who doesn’t get irony.

Winter GMM Flyer

This looks better on some browsers than it does on others. You get the gist.

I would really like Photoshop lessons for Christmas.

Got a Date With a Bird?

Between a House marathon on the USA (USA! USA! USA!) network and a full day of cooking, this might be my only chance to wish you all happy Turkey Day.

So, Happy Thanksgiving!

On the menu:

Turkey: Brined overnight in a salt, brown sugar, lemons, oranges, herbs and allspice berries. Covered liberally in oil, salt and pepper. Roasted @ 500 for half-an-hour, about 2.5 hours or so at 350 after that.

Dressing: New recipe. Dried cornbread and white bread, with Italian sausage and apples. Onions and celery, natch. Got some homemade stock I cooked last week for the moist. 350 for half-an-hour with Tom, then 425 to crisp once the bird vacates the cook box.

Roasted vegetables: Sweet potatoes, carrots, cippolini onions, sweet peppers. Covered liberally in olive oil, salt, pepper, cumin, and paprika. 350 degrees for 1/2 an hour with the turkey, 425 to finish them off once the bird takes a rest.

Leeks: Five slices of bacon, let 'em render. Remove bacon, add four leeks that have been cut into 1/2 inch pieces, washed and separated. Salt, pepper, maybe a little fennel and caraway seed. Let those leeks cook down until soft.

Green beans: Washed, blanched, ice bathed ahead of time. Hot pan with olive oil (would use butter, but guests have allergies), beans in the pan, tossed to coat. Lots of garlic, salt, pepper, and a squeeze or two of the meyer lemon.

Gravy: Classic 1 tablespoon to 1 tablespoon to 1 cup formula. Again, would use butter for my fat, but will fall back on turkey fat/olive oil, flour, and then more of that stock I made last week. I might throw in some drippings, but it's kind of a pain in the arse. You have 20 minutes to make gravy while the turkey rests and there's almost no way for the fat to separate from the drippings in that time and to make the gravy. But whaddya going to do?

Guest are responsible for bread, cran, wine and pie. AB made some chocolate mousse. We should be having a rocking time. Wish you could all be here.

That's Five Rs, If You're Counting

I am late coming to this, but it is too good to pass up comment on. An editorial in the WSJ actually tries to link the "War on Christmas" to the collapse of the stock market.

What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.

Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas."

This, in and of itself, is pretty freaking hilarious, but I actually found the opening much better. Despite a persistent belief in the wonders of the free market, Daniel Herringer argues that many Americans have lost 50% of their wealth through no fault of their own! It seems that poor people, people who have not the morality required for home ownership committed fraud on their loan applications on such an epic scale as to bankrupt innocent investors who were merely trying to make a moral buck on those loans.

How the financial markets fell so far so fast will occupy economic seers for years. The path to 50% wealth reductions and the death of Wall Street was paved with good intentions, notably the notion that all should own a house, even if that required giving away the house to untutored borrowers with low-to-no-interest loans.

This good intention set off history's largest chain of moral hazard. The great unraveling began sometime between 2005 and 2007, when borrowers, lenders and securitizer shamans all found themselves operating in a zero-gravity environment, aloft on moral hazard.

Perhaps it requires the perspective of someone who has lost absolutely nothing (knock, knock) in this great market collapse to say this, but if you lost half of your wealth because of the collapse of an immoral system, doesn't that mean that approximately 50% of your wealth was built on that very immoral system? Weren't you trying to cash in on the crazy morality-free frenzy that the entire capitalist system immoral system was built on?

Let's not even get started with personal responsibility and restraint, as those have nothing to do with the investor, only the investee. Once the paperwork on the 401(k) is signed, all personal responsibility and restraint is at an end.

Even though I haven't lost anything (knock, knock), I have friends who have, so if it helps them get some money back, I wish you all a Merry Christmas. Especially you non-Christians, you need it most of all.

Happy May Day

As May Day is all about putting aside competition to march in solidarity with your brothers and sisters, I thought I'd share a story with you that captures that spirit.

From Brian Meehan at the Oregonian

Gary Frederick thought he had seen everything in 40 years at Central Washington University. He'd coached baseball and women's basketball for 11 years, been an assistant on the football team for 17 and athletic director for 18.

Last weekend, he learned he was wrong.

In the top of the second inning as his Wildcats played host to Western Oregon University in Ellensburg, Wash., something happened that spoke to the beauty of athletics. It came in the form of a home run that no one in attendance will forget.

"Never in my life had I seen anything like it," said Frederick, 70, in his 14th season as softball coach.

"It was just unbelievable."

Central entered Saturday's doubleheader one game behind Western Oregon in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference race. At stake was a bid to the NCAA's Division II playoffs. Western won the first game 8-1, extending its winning streak to 10 games. Central desperately needed the second game to keep its postseason hopes alive.

Western Oregon's 5-foot-2-inch right fielder came up to bat with two runners on base in the second inning. Sara Tucholsky's game was off to a rough start. A group of about eight guys sitting behind the right field fence had been heckling her.

"They were giving me a pretty hard time," said Tucholsky, a Forest Grove High School graduate. "They were just being boys, trying to get in my head."

At the plate, Tucholsky concentrated on ignoring the wise guys. She took strike one. And then the senior did something she had never done before -- even in batting practice. The career .153 hitter smashed the next pitch over the center field fence for an apparent three-run home run.

The exuberant former high school point guard sprinted to first. As she reached the bag, she looked up to watch the ball clear the fence and missed first base. Six feet past the bag, she stopped abruptly to return and touch it. But something gave in her right knee; she collapsed on the base path.

"I was in a lot of pain," she told The Oregonian on Tuesday. "Our first-base coach was telling me I had to crawl back to first base. 'I can't touch you,' she said, 'or you'll be out. I can't help you.' "

Tucholsky, to the horror of teammates and spectators, crawled through the dirt and the pain back to first.

Western coach Pam Knox rushed onto the field and talked to the umpires near the pitcher's mound. The umpires said Knox could place a substitute runner at first. Tucholsky would be credited with a single and two RBIs, but her home run would be erased.

"The umpires said a player cannot be assisted by their team around the bases," Knox said. "But it is her only home run in four years. She is going to kill me if we sub and take it away. But at same time I was concerned for her. I didn't know what to do. . . .

"That is when Mallory stepped in."

Mallory Holtman is the greatest softball player in Central Washington history. Normally when the conference's all-time home run leader steps up to the plate, Pam Knox and other conference coaches grimace.

But on senior day, the first baseman volunteered a simple, selfless solution to her opponents' dilemma: What if the Central Washington players carried Tucholsky around the bases?

The umpires said nothing in the rule book precluded help from the opposition. Holtman asked her teammate junior shortstop and honors program student Liz Wallace of Florence, Mont., to lend a hand. The teammates walked over and picked up Tucholsky and resumed the home-run walk, pausing at each base to allow Tucholsky to touch the bag with her uninjured leg.

"We started laughing when we touched second base," Holtman said. "I said, 'I wonder what this must look like to other people.' "

Holtman got her answer when they arrived at home plate. She looked up and saw the entire Western Oregon team in tears.

"My whole team was crying," Tucholsky said. "Everybody in the stands was crying. My coach was crying. It touched a lot of people."

Even the hecklers in right field quieted for a half-inning before resuming their tirade at the outfielder who replaced Tucholsky.

Western Oregon won the game 4-2 and extinguished Central Washington's playoff hopes.

Afterward, Central coach Frederick said he received a clarification from the umpiring supervisor, who said NCAA rules allow a substitute to run for a player who is injured after a home run. The clarification, however, could not diminish he glory of Holtman's and Wallace's gesture. Holtman downplayed her role, which her coach said is typical of the White Salmon, Wash. native.

"In the end, it is not about winning and losing so much," Holtman said. "It was about this girl. She hit it over the fence and was in pain and she deserved a home run. . . .

"This is a huge experience I will take away. We are not going to remember if we won or lost, we are going to remember this kind of stuff that shows the character of our team. It is the best group of girls I've played with. I came up with the idea, but any girl on the team would have done it."

Tucholsky went to the doctor Tuesday. Her knee was still swollen; her trainer suspects she tore her anterior cruciate ligament. She will be in the dugout this weekend when Western Oregon attempts to cement an NCAA berth with games against Seattle and Western Washington.

Tucholsky will graduate this spring as a business major with a minor in health. She plans to continue her studies at Portland State and pursue a career in the health field. But she will never forget the generosity of her opponents in her final collegiate game.

"Those girls did something awesome to help me get my first home run," she said. "It makes you look at athletes in a different way. It is not always all about winning but rather helping someone in a situation like that."

Holtman knows something of knee injuries. On May 8, she is scheduled to have arthroscopic surgery on both knees, which have pained her all season. On June 7, she will graduate with a degree in business. She intends to study sports administration in graduate school at Central Washington.

Holtman believes sports has made her a better person.

She wants to give back.

Mallory Holtman plans to do that by becoming a coach.