The 12 Days of A Capella

This is a capella group Straight No Chaser‘s version of the 12 Days of Christmas…remixed with a little 80’s flava. If you want to fast forward to the payoff, it’s all good but the real payoff starts about 1:58. You can tell because people start screaming, which is an unusual enough event at a barbershop choir event, however dapper they may look in their suits.

passed along in the help forums by Annette Fix

Christmas Giving Made Easy

Tyson Hunger Relief

No jokes here; just a simple guide to donating 100 lbs of food to the Greater Boston Food Bank, for free.

Go to this post, read it and leave a comment and Tyson Foods will donate 100 lbs of food to the food bank for each comment received. No strings, no coupons, no mailing lists.

Thanks to Beth Kanter for passing this along. I’m cross-posting this at all my blogs today and suggest you do the same.

Leslie Harpold sez Merry Zombie Christmas!

advent to ascent

So there it was.

White. Bright. Practically dewy with freshness, dated Monday, December 8 2008 (I quadruple-checked the year)(which the literal-minded will note was not even technically the case in my time zone when I encountered it) sitting there on my monitor for all the world as if it were a regular article waiting patiently to be read, with a perky, amusing author bio in the sidebar looking as normal as all get out.

TMN Contributing Writer Leslie Harpold is a writer and designer with a long list of publications she’s marred with her work. She is working on a novel and dreams alternately of an über urban or ultra rural future, as she is not one to do things by halves. After misspending her 20s in New York City, Leslie now lives in Grosse Pointe, Mich. She makes pie crust from scratch.

Only, it wasn’t.

Normal.

Leslie Harpold, you see, has been dead for exactly two years today. [thanks to Wendie for the correction; I had it at one year. Freakouts are so fresh!] I remember her death particularly, because for several years friends had been telling me how much I, the Christmas nut, would love her annual online Advent Calendar. Which I’m sure I would have, only by the time I finally clicked around to it December 14th of 2006, it was frozen at the 7th. Which date it has been frozen on ever since, because December 7th was the last full day she was alive. She was found by friends several days after her death, in part because of curiosity generated by the failure to update her famous Advent Calendar.

So, naturally, the appearance of a brand-new and highly chipper-sounding article by the aforesaid deceased, most particularly exactly two years after her death and seasonal at that, rather freaked me out.

Mind you, it’s not the first time someone has blogged from beyond the grave.

I just wish they could manage it without:

  1. freaking me out
  2. making me feel even guiltier about my work ethic.

Sarah Palin’s Christmas Special!

You just can’t keep a bad ex-candidate down. Yes, the Dan Quayle of Alaska is back, with a retro holiday special sure to bring a tear to the eye.

from Jimmy Kimmel via SeriouslyOMG

Hacked? Back!

Not exactly sure what’s been going on, but all of a sudden WordPress didn’t like my password. In fact, they refused to accept it and let me into my own blog, no matter how many times I batted the monitor and screamed.

Imagine!

In any case, whether it was a password hack or technical difficulty, either on their end or on mine, all is now back to normal except that I’m too tired to post anything meaningful today, so here are two gay Christmas trees; you tell me which is gayer:

From our Utah correspondent:

rainbow Christmas

The Rainbow Christmas Tree. All it needs is one of those spinning tree bases and the Barry Manilow Christmas Album (you may substitute Ricky Martin or anything from High School Musical if you’re of a youthfuller generation)

And this tree, spotted today up on Main Street in Vancouver:

Oops, removed! It didn’t work so good, sorry

The Pink Pine of Main Street. This was so awe-inspiring that the bus driver stopped right beside it and opened the doors so I could take a clear shot. Since I was doing bus rider surveys all up and down Main Street and the buses here don’t normally stop in the middle of a block for photo-ops, I had the attention of the entire bus. And I must say, the photo has much more detail than I thought and a lovely Seventies hypercolour flat feel to it, just freaky enough. Believe me, it was plenty freaky in real (plastic) life, especially in the early part of November.

So, after I did the picture-snapping thing I continued with the bus rider surveys and one woman was clearly bursting to talk with me. Turns out she knows the guy in the house. She told me he starts this early every year, and we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, because by early December the entire yard is a Nativity scene and the entire house is covered with lights. Now, given the neighborhood and all the fellow is probably straight, but in the way one looks at the prodigal son and thinks “some day his parents are going to realize…” I think it fair to conclude that this Christmas tree is, if not actually gay, at least significantly bi-curious. We all want to know what you bought us for Christmas, don’t we?