Majorly English

The only thing more reliable than a blog going silent for a prolonged period of time is the repeated attempts to get it up and running again on a consistent basis.  We’re entering Stage 2 of that process for what feels like the 7th or 8th time.  But I’m no longer lazy, so that might help.

There is an advertisement.  It is horrible.

YouTube – UroClub New Commercial.

SportingNews.com – The Sporting Blog.

Let me paint a picture for you.

Let’s say you’re married to a woman.  Prior to getting married to said human, she had a brief fling with a truly fascinating and bizarre individual. He quite literally fell from the sky into her life, he wore the strangest clothes, spoke of incomprehensible things, but at the same time was endlessly compelling.  It was as if he came from another plane of existence, including the incredible music he played.

Oh, and he also was instrumental in getting you to build up the courage to not only win over this girl you’ve pined for, but also stand up to your demons and assert yourself as a man.  And then he disappeared, forever.  Seriously, he attended your school for just a week, nobody ever met his parents, and then he disappeared from the town without a trace, never to be heard from again.

Would you name your second son after him?  Because that’s what happened to Marty McFly.

This, right here? That erases your name, Marty. Or it should, at least.

Simply put, there is no rational explanation for how Marty McFly could leave 1985 for 1955, spend a week there intimately involved with his own parents, and then return to a brand new 1985 where he’s got a sweet pickup truck and still be named Marty.

To head off the inevitable complaint: I know that everybody called him Calvin Klein in 1955.  However, Marty distinctly points out to Loraine that his friends call him Marty, a piece of information she then proceeds to ignore completely.  They totally gloss over the point, and somebody needs to speak out.  I’m on to you, Zemeckis.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Sure, he could still be named Marty!  After all, this mysterious character named Marty was instrumental in bringing them together, so it’s easy to see why they would want to use the name as an homage. Those McFly kids wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for this bizarre, purple-underwear’d hero.

Excellent point, and that builds a very strong case for why Marty’s older brother, Dave, should be named Marty.  If you’re going to pay homage to this Futuristic Cupid, you’d name your first son after him, wouldn’t you?  There’s no rational explanation for deciding to preserve that testament for the second son, right?

The new and improved 1985 has the Biff/George relationship turned on its head, a thinner Loraine, a successful older brother, and tons of new furniture.  But no new name?  Come on.

I know there’s a lot of logical leaps and bounds in any time travel story — for example, the fading picture gimmick is fundamentally misguided, as Marty should have blinked out of existence the instant he messed with the timeline — but at least they make an effort to address the ebbs and flows of the space-time continuum.

When you last heard from us before Christmas reared its pine-covered head, Santa was beating the bejeezus out of Jesus Christ, the Host of Hosts with the Mosts, in our in-depth study of “Kringle v. Christ” songs on a typical adult contemporary radio station in the month of December.

Jesus had managed to claw back from a deep, dark hole at the beginning of the month over the period of a few weeks, but Week 3 of December saw Santa smack the His Holiness right back down that hole with a whole heap of Holly Jolly Christmases.  The “X” seemed here to stay on “X-Mas.”

As we geared up the family hybrid roadster on Dec. 19 to head out and do a grand East Coast Tour of both sets of families, we hopped in the car to battle the traffic equipped with the finest of scientific data collection and analytical tools: a pen found between the passenger seat cushions and the back of a Ticketmaster envelope.

With Jesus on the ropes, we inched along the Interstate as our eardrums were relentlessly enticed with tunes of adulation directed towards the dude with the beard, not hte swaddling clothes.  We ended up hearing 13 Santa songs to 4 Jesus songs, for a ratio of a little over 3:1.

The next time we spent enough time in the car to gather enough data was on the 22nd, where it only got worse.  12 Santa songs versus only 3 for the Infant Incarnate, for a 4:1 ratio.  For you English majors out there, that’s a bigger ratio than previously; Santa was only getting stronger.

Of course, we should do well to not count out the guy who coined the phrase “come back from the dead.”  This baby wasn’t quite done kicking.  On a brief roundabout on Dec. 23, Jesus showed some sparks of life,  scoring three songs to just a single Santa soliloquoy.

Also of course, you don’t achieve a career of visiting every house in the world in a single evening while hoisting a giant heavy bag on shoulders that are aged by a couple of hundred years by just rolling over at the first sign of adversity.  On Christmas Eve, just before loading up the sleigh with all sorts of XBox 360s and Bratzeses for good little girls and boys, Santa laid a bowlful of jelly-sized whooping on Jesus to the tune of 7:1, the biggest disparity we had recorded all month.

BUT, in typical dramatic fashion, come Christmas morn, once Jesus metaphorically actually existed as a human being, he came back with a vengeance, actually topping Santa by a healthy margin of 8 songs to 5.  Nicely done, Lord and Savior.

Oh, and for those of you that doubt the scientific methods employed in this study (I’m looking at you, NASA), feast your eyes on this:

You see that? It's SCIENCE.

Yes, a chart, full of numbers and lines and axes.  We’ll be submitting this research to Jingle, the quarterly journal of Yuletide Research.

And stay tuned for next holiday season, when we’ll be returning to the airwaves, discovered pens and receipt backs in hand, to analyze how many songs on the radio are being sung by people who have actually produced music in the last decade, or may, in fact, still be alive.

This image may look endearing, but what you can't see is that Santa is walking our infant Lord and savior towards the end of a pier.

First off, my apologies for the delay in presenting this weekend’s findings.  There’s some excuse to be had about elves or Cousin Eddie or something that I can’t be bothered to dig up at the moment.  But fear not, the results are in!

For some quick background to those of you that just stumbled here searching for God-knows-what, we’ve been conducting some serious scientific research over the last few weeks to determine the exact breakdown of “Santa songs” versus “Jesus songs” an adult contemporary station decides to broadcast once it goes 24/7 holiday music for the month of December.  The first two weeks of our findings can be seen here and here.

Well, our hypothesis (that the overabundance of Santa songs v. Jesus songs declines, perhaps even reverses as we cast aside our consumerism for reflective meditation as the holiday nears.  Or something like that.) looked to be progressing slowly but surely over the first two weeks.  Week 1 showed a ratio of about 5 Santa songs for every Jesus song, and by Week 2, that ratio had shrunk to 3.8:1 (that’s right, decimals.  You can practically smell the science!).

Well, bad news for you spiritualists out there.  Week 3 of our research indicated that the big man had managed to heave his obese frame higher up the mountain, as the ratio climbed to 4:1.  Yes, it’s only a .2 degree change, but time is rapidly running out for our infant savior.  He’s going to need a miracle at this point to assume dominance by Christmas!

Santa, in inflatable balloon form, patiently waits for the infant Savior to fall asleep. Then he strikes.

As we said last week on this fine blog, we’re taking a long, hard, pseudoscientific look into how contemporary radio stations play up the holiday spirit with their 24/7 Christmas music bonanza.  Do they hit us straight in our mushy spiritual hearts, or do they instead appeal to all of our fanciful dreams about the sweet swag Santa is going to bring us when he drops his fat butt down our chimney in the middle of the night?

For a quick recap of the experiment:  The Lovely Wife ™ and I will be listening to a decent-sized sample of music being played by our local radio station — basically however long it takes us to run our errands on the weekend.  Each Christmas song we hear we’ll place in one of two categories:  Santa or Jesus.  Basically, if the song refers to the actual birth of Jesus Christ in a manger and whatnot, it’s Jesus.  If it instead talks about Santa, or instead just discusses the abstract feel-goodiness of the holiday season, it’s a Santa song.

Last week, we determined that the ratio of Santa to Jesus songs was roughly 5:1 — our Lord and Savior was getting smacked around by a bearded geriatric.

This week, though, Jesus began the long, arduous climb back up to competing with the Fat Man.  By our count, we heard 13 Santa songs,  but 5 Jesus songs, for a ratio that is decidedly less than 5:1!

*breaks out calculator, has second thoughts about liberal arts degree*

In fact, that’s a 3.8:1 ratio, so Jesus, in one week, has regained a decent bit of ground.  Of course, if he’s going to overtake the Benevolent Gift-Giver by the time he’s actually born, he’s going to have to pick up the slack, but hey, it’s a start.  He’s just a fetus, cut him some slack.

Some interesting bits to share, though:  While there were some rock solid Jesus Song staples like O Holy Night and Joy to the World, there was also The Little Drummer Boy, which on its face seems like it should be a Santa song; it’s a song about a little kid messing around with a drum.  Of course, listening to the lyrics indicate that it’s actually about a little boy playing a drum for Baby Jesus, which of course is just the thing a baby needs shortly after being born; plenty of ear-ringing percussive performances.

On the other side of the spectrum, this week’s Santa Songs also brought us the 80’s celebr-o-tastic Do They Know It’s Christmas?, wherein several people who passed for celebrities during the 80’s, a time when Boy George was considered not a maniac, decided to care about Africa enough to throw a few lyrics into the really, really famous pot.  Not really about Santa, but certainly not about Jesus.

So there you have it, folks.  After getting knocked down hard by Santa the first week, Jesus is closing the gap, but can he do it fast enough?  Stay Tuned!

An eternal struggle.

Being that we have finally surpassed Thanksgiving and people don’t have to pretend to be ignoring it anymore, Christmas Spirit ™ is in full swing, whether you like it or not.  Suck it up, Jews, Muslims, and atheists.

In recent years, the true vanguard of the holiday season has been the radio airwaves.  Desperate to find a way to attract viewers besides farting on air and mysogynism, many stations (especially the “contemporary adult” ones that find a way to work Sarah MacLaughlin into an hourly rotation) have been turning to exclusively Christmas coverage through the month of December.  With the streets getting icey and filling with hyperactive mothers desperate to snag the last copy of Guitar Hero, the public has apparently decided that they want wall-to-wall ululations about Christmas and all the glories therein.

But Christmas, especially in the modern era, has been embroiled in a battle to the death between its traditional Christian roots and the secular consumerism that gets kids up at the break of dawn willingly once a year.  How does that play out on the airwaves?  Well, the Lovely Wife ™ and I have set out to discover just that.

Hypothesis

As we get closer to Christmas, the “Santa” songs (more contemporary, wholly secular, warmly gift-centric) that dominate the airwaves at first begin to diminish as the “Jesus” songs (typically traditional songs about the actual birth of the baby in the manger) become the dominant media.

Rationale

While the first December days will yield airwaves dominated by Santa songs, as consumers work up the courage to head out to the malls, ignore the omnipresent foreigners pushing some sort of lotion at kiosks, and purchase the latest and greatest in plush robotic Elmo technology, radio stations will begin to cater to our more contemplative, dare I say spiritual side as the actual holiday nears, and begin playing more Jesus songs.

Materials & Methods

We will listen to at least 10 songs each Sunday on a single “adult contemporary” radio station each Sunday, and file each song we hear under “Santa” or “Jesus.”

Results

After Week 1, the Santa songs, as predicted, are kicking some major Savior butt.  Listening to roughly 10 songs on the hour-long commute back into the city after the Thanksgiving holiday yielded a 5:1 ratio of Santa to Jesus, and that ratio came with us being quite generous.  The Jesus songs we heard were the reggae classic “Mary’s Boy Child” and a synth-tastic rendition of the “Hallelujah Chorus” by the God-forsaken Mannheim Steamroller — hardly Gregorian chant.

Stay tuned to this block for Week 2 of the Santa v. Jesus Challenge.

Over the last few months, I wish I could tell you I was off doing something exciting like shark hunting or day trading, but in reality I’ve just been working and going to school, two totally lame, relatively responsible things to occupy my time.  That doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten about you, baker’s dozen or so of people who still check in periodicially to see if I’ve emerged from whatever cave I’ve disappeared into.  No, this blogging game is one I can’t give up that easily, so I’m back in it.  So what have I missed?

• Sarah Palin was nominated as John McCain’s Vice President.  There is no joke here I can tell that hasn’t been told already.  Except that she is an afterlife soothsayer.  Try to stay on her good side, lest she forever cast you down into the firey pit of gnashing teeth and whatnot.
• The economy, after a series of terrible missteps and a break-up with Lehman Brothers, has locked itself in its bedroom and won’t come out, not even for the super special dinner we made — it’s favorite, $700 billion dollars.  Buy oil.
• I got a Twitter feed (also linked in the sidebar), bringing me, by most estimates, to at least Web 2.4.
• Mark Wahlberg talked to some animals.
• That’s it.  Stay tuned for more posts later in the day.

• 

  Jim Cramer in four weeks.

tonight at Mile High Stadium in front of 75,000 people, but I do know that somebody, somewhere, will make a “fish and loaves” reference.

"I brought snapper!"