2020: The Year In Review

Do I need to say that 2020 was an awful year? Must I? Let’s watch a Carl Sagan video before I get to my annual review of the first post of each month. This is not the “Pale Blue Dot” video I was looking for. I went through my blog archives, I went through myContinue reading “2020: The Year In Review”

Hope Christmas Gets You To Me

I slept poorly last night. For some reason, I couldn’t get comfortable. I tossed. I turned. I had a headache; migraine or dehydration, I couldn’t tell. I yanked the sheets off the bed and, at one point, tossed off blankets, later having to recover them because I was cold. I know it’s a bad ideaContinue reading “Hope Christmas Gets You To Me”

A Beatle-esque “Happy Xmas”

No, the Beatles did not perform “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” But this video by a French Beatles tribute band, the Rabeats, gives one an idea of what the song would have been like as a Beatles song. I like the idea of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” but two things about the song bug me. First,Continue reading “A Beatle-esque “Happy Xmas””

The Christmas Truce of 1914

It has taken me the better part of six years to find the audio for this program, and last night I finally did. On Christmas Eve 2014, BBC Radio 2 broadcast All Is Calm, a program on the Christmas Truce of 1914, narrated by Sir John Hurt. Hurt, while in treatment for pancreatic cancer, participatedContinue reading “The Christmas Truce of 1914”

Christmas on Mars

This version of “Silent Night” performed on the theremin is magnificent. It also puts 1950s sci-fi B-movies in mind — not unlike Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, a long-time holiday favorite of mine — and so I wrote a new verse for “Silent Night”… Silent night, holy night.Mars attacks with laser light.Saucers flying through theContinue reading “Christmas on Mars”

And Then There Were Peanuts

Ten childhood friends, now estranged in adulthood, are invited to a weekend retreat on a secluded island.  A cryptic poem and a message hint that each of these friends harbor personal and professional secrets and that soon they will each die in an elaborate revenge plot.  These friends — these peanuts — may not makeContinue reading “And Then There Were Peanuts”