I got the Wii for Christmas. It was a torturous month, because I'd witnessed no less than 25,000,000 Wii systems on sale at the Toys 'R' Us across the street from where I work (this particular TRU had hosted one of the bigger launch events, so they had more Wiis than they could sell — even after raising the maximum per-person purchase to three systems). I had money in my wallet and the damn thing was right there for the taking, but since I knew it was already coming my way for Christmas, buying myself one was strictly forbidden.
I've owned systems and have played video games consistently throughout my life, but really, I fell off the wagon during the 16-bit era and never came back. It wasn't that video games were above or below me — I was just the type of person who, for whatever reason, enjoyed other kinds of couch-side timewasters more than video games. But the Wii? I don't know. Something sparked. Maybe it was the alluring gimmickry, or the promises of a new Smash Bruddas game. Maybe it was because I loved those sproingy sounds the "ii" in "Wii" made in the commercials. I'm not really sure, but this was the first time in forever that I could look a video game system straight in the eye and tell it that I'd be spending more time with it than any living creature on the planet. I knew I'd get along with the Wii, and my first week with it was no disappointment.
Since I'm a dumbshit when it comes to video games and their progressing technologies and their whistling bells, I have to admit that I was absolutely smitten with all of the little, stupid things you can do with this system. I got the new Zelda game, but I've barely touched it. I've been too focused on making goofy avatars, seeing what different websites look like stretched out on a big television, and waiting five minutes for the weather channel to load just so I can confirm that what the real Weather Channel told me a minute before turning the system on was correct.
And that's pretty much what I want to cover with this post — the little things. Not because you don't already know about them, but because I can't help but think that these little things exist in such a still-burgeoning environment that, for all intents, we're just months away from however they exist now being just a memory. That's a garbly sentence, but this is what happens during those rare occasions when I choose to write articles on my laptop from a sleepy recliner rather than a wake-centric desk. So comfortable! [more]
Earlier tonight, I had to attend a birthday party for a five-year-old on the woman's side of the family. Usually, I'd come up with some form of faux flu to get out of going to such a thing, but tonight was special: His birthday party was being held at Chuck E. Cheese's.
This Chuck E. Cheese's has stood tall in my city for over a decade, but I'd never gone into it until tonight. Actually, I don't think I've ever been to Chuck E. Cheese's before tonight. The closest I came was this place called "Razzmatazz" over in Jersey, which had the same kind of audio-animatronic stageshow, but with a far larger arcade and an all-around surreal floorplan. (Picture a well-lit Lazer Tag arena filled with pizza and video games — that was Razzmatazz.) So, while I wasn't unwise to the ways of such places, I admit to being pretty excited to see Chuck in action for the very first time. Despite this probably being one of the smaller establishments in the chain, the rat did not disappoint.
The stageshow was creepy and hilarious, and just about completely ignored by every kid in the place. I spent an hour or so reading various Chuck E. Cheese's fansites (they exist!) when I got home, and from what I'm gathering, the animatronic bands are being phased out of many of the restaurants, because they are CREEPY, and because kids are just 100% more interested in playing various games of chance than watching electronic nightmares sing showtune spoofs.
Tonight, Chuck and friends were all singing Christmas songs, complete with corresponding videos playing on old, grainy televisions mounted on nearby walls. Regardless of the kids' apathy, I couldn't help but appreciate the sights I was seeing, because if nothing else, these were not sights a person gets to see everyday. I was particularly interested in the purple dude in the middle, at least in part because his "instrument" looked like a spaceship. I took him as nothing more than a McDonald's Grimace ripoff at first, but now that I've done my homework, I know that he's in fact "Mr. Munch," a storied showman who's gone through seventeen names, roles and voice levels before settling in as the band's resident jive soul bro.
Pizza is the standard at all Chuck E. Cheese's, but it's not the kind of pizza you'd order on a Friday night from Uncle Tom's down the street. Hell, it's not even like the pizza you'd get from a Domino's or Pizza Hut. I'm hesitant to call it "bad," but calling it "good" is contingent on liking Chef Boyardee-esque tomato sauce mixed with cheese that seems to serve a purpose more along the lines of Thompson's Water Seal than a flavorful additive. This isn't to say that it's not edible pizza, because it is. In fact, because the pie slices are cut so small, you can eat about twenty of them before feeling like you've done anything wrong at all. There was also a salad bar, but for me, salad bars and rooms swelling with sneezing children rarely mix. I stuck with the pizza, and now the pizza is stuck in me. [more]
Well, another Christmas season has come and gone, and what's left now is that familiar combination of good memories, misplaced guilt and a couple of other indiscernible feelings that I'm not exactly sure what to do with. The only downside to putting so much stock into the holidays is some weird form of alien jetlag when it's all over with. Luckily, we get plenty of new toys to help us cope with life-as-usual.
This is the 2006 Christmas Fallout thread, where everyone gathers around the fireplace one last time to trade stories of celebrations completed, and more importantly, gifts received. While coming from such a large family means having to spend a mint on gifts, it also means that I get a lot of gifts. I consider that a fair trade. Here's this year's haul!
NINTENDO WII CONSOLE w/ ALL THAT JAZZ
I finally fired this baby up today, and it's making me all sorts of things. Happy and excited are in the forefront, but I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't a little frustrated that I haven't mastered the controls yet. That said, even the "cheap" in-pack Wii Sports game is tons of fun. I don't care how "easy" it is — I could play that bowling game all day long. Getting the Wii provided the first instance in a very long time when I was actually giddy over video games. Even now, with the Wii in the living room and me in here, I can't help feeling like I'm in the wrong room. [more]
The Advent Calendar has been updated for Christmas Eve. I'll edit this post when it's been updated for Christmas. In other words, no new posts until after Christmas, so…MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Well, here we are. Christmas weekend. Last SNT of the holiday season. First off, thanks to everyone who helped make this place a festive December stop. Doing the Advent Calendar's been a real blast this year, thanks largely in part to having had some serious time off from work this month, which was also a blast. That makes two blasts. Your unwavering holiday spirit within all the comments threads and surveys helped me keep mine even though it's like friggin' summertime outside right now, and that's a blast, too. Three blasts. Lots of blasts. Twelve blasts of Christmas.
I've been doing this site long enough to know that traffic usually dips hardcore on Christmas Eve and Christmas, so for those of you about to take off for an extended weekend of Yuletide Yuleness, I wish you the hap hap happiest Christmas you ever did have. I think that something most of us here have in common is the neverending belief that this should be and will forever be the most important time of year, no matter how much things change, no matter how old we get and no matter how much "real life" wants us to treat it like any other regular smattering of days off. And while we may no longer be able to spend weeks on end forging Christmas wish lists and renegotiating our entire schedule to make sure we catch every last snowy special on television, we do what we can, when we can, and we're happier for it.
Tomorrow, my family will gather together and eat fourteen courses of fish and pasta, gab, drink and open presents, just as it has done for decades upon decades. At points, I'll be a pig in shit. At other points, I'll ask myself, "Is this really it?" But, when it's all over and I'm going through those post-holiday blues as January draws near, I'll reflect upon December and know that most of this year's top drawer memories happened in that month — not in March, not in July, and not even in October.
So crank up the jukebox while it's still chic to do so, drink some eggnog before it becomes old hat, and find your favorite DVDs that end on a shot of Santa's sleigh silhouetted in a night sky. Don't put off now what can be done next Christmas; a year is a long fucking time to wait.
Speaking of eggnog, yours truly has never actually tasted the stuff…until this morning. I don't have any real good excuse for this, because eggnog has always fascinated me. I guess the problem is that I've read enough eggnog recipes to know that its ingredients shock and appall me, but God damn it, the 2006 season needs its hallmark, and where nothing else will take the podium, I guess it's going to have to be me drinking eggnog for the very first time.
After adding enough cinnamon to mask even a cup full of a horse shit, I took a tentative sip and…hey now, it really isn't that bad! Kind of like liquid cake! We don't have any brandy in the house, but now I'm really itching to try the stuff the proper way, which is to say, the way by which I will become twice as gregarious and red-nosed.
To those who graciously fed my greed by buying me stuff from Amazon, please keep an eye out for thank you cards in the mail. (This assumes that what you sent me came with a return address, and most did.) They probably won't arrive until after Christmas, or maybe not at all if the post office questions my very terrorist-like handwriting. I'll hold off on saying more until we get to the Christmas Fallout post.
Today marks an incredible mission for me: I need to get a few Advent Calendar entries in the can, yip yip, lest I get to the point where I'm only "up to date" on Christmas Eve and have to pull a "I'm not writing the finale until after Christmas, so there" kind of deal. This should be fun. Each Advent entry is the product of between 125-200 shots taken (seriously), so I expect my camera to die and for someone to have to buy me that from Amazon, too.
Today also marks that special time of year when my brain explodes because it's finally processing that I'll never get to write about all the Christmas stuff I picked up in time for, you know, Christmas. It's with that fear that I'm going to borrow a relic from Thanksgiving and provide you with a CORNUCOPIA (!!!) of Christmas crap — five different items that make me wanna hum "Silver Bells" while doodling wreaths on the bare walls in furniture catalogs. Let's start with…hmmm…let's start with mistletoe.
REAL MISTLETOE IN A BAG: One of the tree yards we hit over the weekend sold these. They're pretty neat. The clump of mistletoe with faux berries comes polybagged with a bunch of mistletoe factoids printed on the back of the package. Whereas I once only considered mistletoe as some happenstance excuse to tongue the nearest body, now I know that it's in fact an ancient symbol of whatever the fuck, and that Druids that lived during prehistoric times thought it was sacred shit planted by the gods. No, really. The pack-back blurb lost me at the second paragraph, though. That's what happens when you start your second paragraphs with, "It all started with a goddess called Frigga." Frigga please.
The plant is preserved, meaning its dead but will never look any more dead than it looks right now — and it don't look too dead. Brittle as hell, though. The fake berries cheapen the whole deal, and I'm wondering why they couldn't just preserve berries too. Maybe berries are harder to preserve? Can anyone tell me? Are berries unpreservable?
CHRISTMAS STORY LEG LAMP: A friend bought me this for Christmas, evidently because he wanted to stay my friend through good times and through bad. I've very foolishly never bothered to pick one of these up before; they've been produced and sold through the toy wizards at NECA for a few years now. My friend wasn't a good enough friend to spend the $200+ on a full-sized leg lamp (I don't have any friends that good enough), but this tabletop variety is just aces. It's my minor award.
Everything is just as it should be. Aside from the normal lightbulb that screws into the normal lightbulb spot, there's a smaller bulb hidden in the electric sex that provides the leg with its own illumination. The shade is top notch, with all the right colors and frills, and the thing even has that same weird slant as the one seen in A Christmas Story. I always end up with a few Christmas decorations that become year-round decorations — this is one of them. It will shine the pages of my late night books well into August. Then the bulbs will blow out and I'll never remember to buy them again because who the hell remembers to pick up 40 watt lightbulbs? [more]
Christmas draws near, and yesterday, I took advantage of me-being-on-vacation-oh-hooray to go do some last minute shopping. The Internet took care of most of my gift-buying this year, and it's certainly the easier option, but I kinda feel like I have to go shopping out somewhere at least once during the holiday season. You know…go to a mall, see a crappy Santa, drop a buck in a Salvation Army spittoon…it's all part of the process.
I did that yesterday, and quickly remembered why online shopping is so attractive to me in the first place. I wouldn't say that I'm totally agoraphobic, but I would say that shopping alone tends to give me shingles. My mind wanders to the worst and stupidest places. Like, I'm at the Woodbridge Mall in Jersey, and one of my contact lenses started acting up. Nothing major, but I spent a good hour staring at the floor because I was positive that it looked like I was crying. So there I was, bumping into people and poles all over the mall, all because I didn't want people to think I was some guy in a long black coat sobbing his way through the fucking Woodbridge Mall, ALONE. I'm sure these are everyday trials for everyday people, but this sort of thing seems to happen to me very often. Me mudda never loved me.
Oh well. All part of the holiday tradition. Another part of the holiday tradition is the Christmas tree, so, how about that segue?
Over the weekend, we went to a couple of different "tree yards." Where I live, the places where one can buy a Christmas tree are mighty eclectic. Some of the "stores" are converted garden centers. Others are legit backyards modified for a Yuletide purpose. I even saw one guy operating out of what I swear was a construction site experiencing downtime. Every tree was held upright by cinderblocks, and there were big giant saws everywhere.
I'm pretty particular about my tree. I don't want it too big, but I don't want one of those baby trees that come in silver pots with recipes for rosemary chicken — WAIT THAT'S NOT A CHRISTMAS TREE, IT'S A ROSEMARY BUSH CUT LIKE ONE! I don't mind if the tree is misshapen or whatever, because that's kind of Charlie Browny, but I hate that sort of bluish hue a lot of trees seem to have nowadays. If I wanted a blue tree, I'd go to Toys 'R' Us and spend ten bucks on the pre-decorated one that comes with all of the Power Rangers ornaments.
We hit a few places and found nothing, but on a final run (one of those runs where you actually drive home, stay in the car and say "FUCK IT I'M GOING BACK OUT!"), we hit the goldmine. Incredibly enough, it was at the same nursery that hosted that Halloween Playland thing back in October. [more]
Saturday, December 30th, 2006
Posted by Matt @ 6:19 pm [Link] [164 Comments]
