Myron tagged me so here goes. 3 things I want and three things I don't want for Christmas.

I've decided to forego squandering my wishes on impossible concepts like 3-day work weeks and world peace and will instead focus on the narrowly personal, which seems more reasonable and obtainable. Besides, if I'm happy, then I'm better poised to fix all the world's problems, which I already know how to solve.

thing 1 - I'd like shoes from John Fluevog. [always a safe bet with me]
thing 2 - I'd like a bauble from Yossi Harari's collection *drool mode on*
thing 3 - I'd like some flowers & a bottle of Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame.

thing 1 - I don't want something boring
thing 2 - I don't want any fruity-smelling fragrance
thing 3 - I don't want something someone didn't want to give me

OK. It's Christmas eve and almost 1pm. I've got some wrapping to do for niece and nephew, and some rum cakes to rustle up, so I'd best get cracking. I had a photo I was going to post here, but my photo file has disappeared from the desktop, and I can't find it anywhere, so imagine a fabulous photo snapped by yours truly.

Happy Christmas, everyone!

OK, by popular demand, here is my Christmas tree replete with home-grown monster green treeskirt with pink marabou trim. What a mess, eh? At least it makes ME happy. [In case anyone missed it before, this is a recycled discount store gum rack spray painted red & green and donning now its gay apparel - that's recycling!]

We took niece and nephew to see the Nutcracker last night, and they had a good time. Niece is 9 and nephew is 4, and we thought he might not be into it, but he sat and watched with rapt attention. At points I thought he was enjoying it more than niece, who seemed in danger of drifting off occasionally.

Nephew is taking drum lessons, so he likes making noise, and really got into the applause portions of the program, clapping with increasing gusto every time. It was funny.

We left the music hall and drove through downtown on Jackson street, then back up Commerce street making the U around Neiman-Marcus and back down Main street so they could see all the Christmas lights. Frank insisted we listen to The Gorillaz, so we kicked out the jams while digging the Christmas lights. It was too late at that point, but we vowed to come back downtown soon at night and take a carriage ride.

Then we went through Burger Street at about 10:45 and went home, eating our burgers while watching Meerkat Manor. Astonishingly, I was the first to conk out. Sitting in my pimp chair and dozing, husband woke me up to tell me I should go to bed, and I agreed.

I'm making a few more pieces of jewelry, but other than that and a few small things, I have ALL my Christmas shopping yet to do. There has been simply no time in recent weeks and it's been all I could do to keep up with pressing commitments.

Ah the world of procrastination: that's the life for me. At least I don't have to run out and buy a tree every year. And I never have to water it or hoover up pine needles. No muss, no fuss. And no actual tree to get in the way of all my commercial decorations!

Happy Christmas, everybody!

does he or doesn't he?

I got a giggle out of this one.

I had a great time at work today. I was fixing goodie bags for the residents' Christmas gift, and my fellow hypo-manic friend, Erin, popped by and helped me. She is often afraid to come by my office because when we get together, we get sucked into a conversational tractor beam and it's very hard to break free.

Erin rides dressage and I think most people in her family are horsey-set farm-dwellers. When she married her husband, he moved from Boston to Texas and of course spent a lot of time with Erin's family. Somewhere along the way, he casually mentioned that he'd always wanted a goat.

Erin said "never say something like that around my family, because they will GET you a goat." Sure enough, one day someone brought him a baby goat, of which he is exceedingly fond.

She said if they are not neutered, boy goats start emitting an eye-watering musk when they mature, and the time came that Corky needed to be rendered a eunuch. Apparently the whole thing of neutering farmish animals is a very casual affair, and Erin insisted that Corky be taken to a proper vet and administered some sort of sedative during the ordeal. After all, Corky was a pet, and not some mere anonymous beast of the field.

Nope. Country vet showed up and had Erin's husband hold the crying goat down as he stopped the family line right in its tracks. Erin had flung herself on the bed and put a pillow over her head singing the national anthem in hopes of not hearing the goat. Apparently she still heard the cries of distress.

I played her the I wanna goat for Christmas mp3, and she was delighted and couldn't wait to play it for her husband.

Anyway, seeing her made the day great - we laughed and laughed. It's funny, because we start talking and chase rabbits all over the universe, and every time I've seen her, later on I remember at least a dozen sentences or stories I never finished because we were suddenly off on some completely different subject. I suspect we seem strange to other people, but to us, we are refreshingly normal.

Pachelbel Canon Fodder

Well, the one that sent me 'round the bend was Pomp & Circumstance, but Pachelbel can get stuck in my head and bounce around for days. I laughed and laughed at this guy. Enjoy.

5 Favorite Christmas Songs

My friend Kim over at Something to Say tagged me with a meme a while back, but I wanted to wait to post my response until I could give audio aids to demonstrate my ardor for the subject. The second on my list, I wanna Goat for Christmas, was one I had to track down and post on my own bolt listing. I suspect this 45 may have been vacuum sealed for the last 46 years, because it was remarkably devoid of snaps, crackles and pops. Anyway, I'm pleased it transferred to mp3 as well as it did.

OK. I love a lot of traditional Christmas music, and I love some more contemporary oddities. It's always hard for me to pin down favorites when it comes to music, but I keep coming back to a couple of these in my mind year after year. Two you most likely have never heard, and I hope you will click on the links, particularly the goat song, since I've tracked down the original vinyl and taken the trouble to post the little devil on bolt. Cheers!

Not in order of preference:

Blue Xmas by Miles Davis. This one is rather bah-humbug-ish , but it's a bit funny and definitely out there. You'll probably recognize vocalist ____ from the schoolhouse rock series - he sang several of those you would recognize

I wanna goat for Christmas by The Wilder Brothers, 1959. The oddball in me who is so besotted with David Sedaris is the same oddball who is so besotted with this song. LOVE it. Love the crap, the stuffing, the business out of it. My kind of holiday music.

Millionaire's Holiday by Combustible Edison. The video here at Youtube is mildly amusing and features a creature of dubious extraction who goes by the name Formica Dinette. Still, the song's a real humdinger. Me likee.

Go Tell It on the Mountain as sung by Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman or any other proper diva. I don't think I need to explain this one.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - So much Christmas music is over-sweet and will lull one into a diabetic coma. This song sounds very Dickens era, and I love the minor key that never gives the sappy, no-brainer All-American happy ending of justfying on a major chord. In fact, despite having "merry" in the title, it sounds rather grim. Good for you - in a tough old world, stick to your dour, severe roots, baby.

Discomboobulated...

At the recent fancy-dress wedding of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, Courtney Love appeared as the Queen of Hearts. WTF is going on with that implant? Ladies - if you're going to corset up, best to do a dry run when fitting and make sure your lady bits don't get so squoze up so much that other guests can read "Dow-Corning" and the serial number off your prosthetics, m'kay? Ew. It kinda looks like a little butt on there or sumpthin. It's a pity, because otherwise, I think this is about the best and healthiest I've seen her in a photograph, even looking semi-trashed.

Here are a few beads I made this weekend. I was rather pleased with the big bead, which is about the size of a quarter. Although I've acid etched a lot of beads, this was my first attempt at applying a resist on clear dots to keep them glossy while the rest of the bead goes matte as the surface is eaten away. I used a contrasting color nail lacquer to coat the dots. The cool thing is the different finish makes the dots look like they are glowing.

I thought you might like to see what goes into making one of these beads. I'm always talking about "silvered ivory" and here you can get some sense of what that process involves. The ivory rod at the top is the core glass of all these beads shown. With the stone-looking beads, I made the core roughly the size I wanted the finished bead to be, and then wrapped on scrolls of the two twisted stringers you see here. The greenish one is two Moretti glass (from Italy, a soft soda glass that melts at roughly 1700 F) colors called Sage and Avocado. To make the other stringer, I took a rod of ivory and put about 1.5" stripe on one side of cobalt blue transparent and on the other side of the ivory I put an equal stripe of cranberry transparent, cobbed another ivory rod on the other side of the tip and then twisted as I pulled the molten mass into a stringer about the size of a pencil lead.

The cool thing about these colors is they are highly reactive with ivory - ivory is much more fun than white because the oxides in that glass make for a very unpredictable finish, which is more exciting than the expected. OK. Yes, I'm pathetic and very easily thrilled. Ivory goes bananas with turquoise blue (it makes little black rims around the blue bits) and other fun stuff I'll show you some other time.)

Anyway, after I doodled these stringers onto the core ivory beads, I wrapped a leaf of fine silver (.999 as opposed to the .925 purity of sterling) onto the bead burnishing it with a graphite marver to ensure all-around contact, and melted it in, causing further reactions with the oxides in the colored stringer and the ivory. On one of the smaller beads, if you click on the picture to enlarge it you can see how this silver has turned into something of a dusting of minute silver balls. I love the way the silvered beads have a stone-like appearance, and now they are etched, they feel like smooth rocks, too. Neat.

Finally, I daubed a series of ivory dots onto the bead and then did a cobalt transparent nubbin. I love nippled beads - the texture is fun, and the form is pleasing.

The other bead is a core of ivory encased in clear transparent, and then spiraled with the avocado/sage stringer. I then put ivory dots around to give the clear green more dimension.

These actually look much better in person, though I am far from a master beadmaker. My beads are just a means to an end, and I make them solely to have something to my taste to swag on my jewelry. They are a means to an end, but they amuse me mightily, and the keep me off the streets. Somewhat.

Let's see if it works on its own post - blogger photo is being so cantankerous today.

And Bob's your uncle! It finally worked.

Sunday I went to a little get-together at my boss' house. She hosts a cookie party every Christmas and everyone rates the cookies and votes on a favorite from the prize-winning recipes published in the local paper every year. My top 2 picks for the cookies were what everyone else rated lowest. Poo.

Then I left and couldn't scare up my folks on the phone, so I just went driving around snapping photos, and oh, what a good night it was for that! I took photos of a huge wreck on I-35 - the trailer of a big rig was accordioned and splayed across the highway, blocking traffic utterly. I stopped at an overlook point and snapped away. I may not do anything with those images, but it was interesting.

I got some spectacular night time shots downtown with long exposure in both B&W and color, and I finally got images of the Neiman-Marcus windows which are always a big part of the season around here. Apparenly this year's theme was gold, and in this image, the dresser enshrouded in gold leaf is a Heywood-Wakefield which is a very distinctive and very collectable mid-century modern furniture manufacturer. In another tableau, the mannequins are standing by a Philipe Starck Louis chair that has been gold-leafed. I'd love the cast-offs from their window props. Good stuff.

The mannequin on the right looked kind of Angie Dickinson-esque, and the one on the left reminded me of Marilyn. What was cool was I noticed that the inside of the window caught the reflection of Marilyn and that it echoed back again through the mirror on top of the dresser. Thought you'd like to have a gander.

Sometimes it's just great to drive around and see where your wheels take you. I ended up in one parking lot at the West end of town where I had a moment of chest-bursting civic pride: the sole green glass bottle to be seen on the pavement was Perrier. Ah, bless!

I love this crazy town!

For some reason, blogger is not letting me post that photo of the NM window display - I'll try again later in the day on Monday. meh.

I have a glossy addiction and I take a (probably unhealthy) number of magazines, including some interior design publications. I don't read much of the text - it's more a design direction I sort of keep my finger on, as it is of interest to me, and I mostly just skim through them once, each.

This has been a slow-dawning realization, but something is really bugging me these days.

Tonight when flipping through the new House & Garden, I saw a circa 1940s photo of Walt Disney. I paused and wondered why Walt Disney would be in an ad in a decor magazine in 2006. Well, I'm glad I asked me that. It appears that the furniture manufacturer Drexel Heritage is going to unleash on the consuming public a collection of furniture in 2007 called the Walt Disney Signature Collection. Turns out this furniture was "inspired" by Disney.

This brought to mind the ad campaign that Thomasville furniture began in 2003 for Bogart™ of which they say: Like the screenstar himself, Bogart™ from Thomasville is cosmopolitan but never pretentious.

Bogey, pretentious? How's about when he appeared in The Barefoot Contessa, set in tropical climes, as the Contessa (Ava Gardner) and other rustics ran about barefoot and scantily clad, and meanwhile, Bogey sported a trench coat? Nah, he was never pretentious. But I'm chasing rabbits, aren't I?

It's so nice that a furniture company thought of ways to help you Bogart™ your joint. Like that's a bad thing.

Anyway, there's a passel of products out there sporting the likeness and/or name of dead icons to shill things created long after the death of these celebrities. Hell, call it the Casablanca collection or "Play it again, Sam," or anything else - but using the name taints the legacy of a great artist, in my opinion. I just think it's crappy.

I noticed several years ago that there's a fairly sexy line of lingerie that sports the name Marilyn Monroe. She has a wine too. Considering she was famed for not wearing underwear, it's a little odd to have a collection of undies sporting her name. And given the sad chemical nature of her demise, it seems more than a little ironic that her comely visage with her eyes at half-staff would be festooned on a bottle of an intoxicant. But that's just me--jaded cynic that I am.

Now, Raymond Burr who played Perry Mason had his own vineyard in Healdsburg California and his own wine label prior to his death some years back. His partner has continued that company, and in the case of a product a celebrity originated or endorsed in their lifetime, I have no problem with the heirs of the estate continuing in that vein.

Thomasville and Drexel Heritage are known to produce high-quality furniture, but nonetheless, I think this is an icky trend.

Oh, and speaking of semi-icky advertising - I was watching the extra footage and interviews from Top Chef on BravoTV.com, and before each clip they made me watch a 15 second ad spot for toilet paper. Well, if you eat, you HAVE to poop, so it makes sense, but it's a little too close to home to be called tasteful to advertise potty-ish-ness on a cooking program, don't you think?

Actually, the whole commercial thing is why I DVR everything - I can't get past the tremendous feeling of insult and resentment I get when I see what networks and their advertisers put out there and expect us to respond to. Well, I'm responding, but not in the way they hoped, I bet. Grrr.

That is all.
For now.

Now THIS is the way it ought to be.

Some kids in Bridgwater
Somerset [England] were observed on CC tv vandalizing the Christmas tress at town center, and the CC monitor notified police. The Police quickly reported to the scene then forced the vandals to re-decorate the trees. Sweet!

Does anyone remember the lessons of prohibition?

New York City is going to ban its restaurants from serving any foods containing the evil trans-fatty acids.

During the U.S. alcohol prohibition, booze clubs called "speak-easies"popped up all over the country. I predict the emergence of the "eat-easy." People will need a special password to get in and will have to show credentials proving they are in no way connected with the fat-police. NYC will spend millions raiding these dens of senseless fat ingestion and possibly billions prosecuting and incarcerating these fat-mad diners. Yeah, we know who the real criminals are in our society - it's clearly fat people. This will be money well-spent because we need another war on a substance as money sink-hole, since we already don't know what to do with all the excess cash we have laying around in this country. I can just see The Far Side cartoon now, with tubbies lurking around foggy alleys, comically attempting stealth as they furtively slip into darkened doorways.

Now, some British professor says that enormous clothes for fat people should have a label sewn in warning the buyer that this is a fat person's size and that they should get help. Well, hello, asshole, the fat person's clothing already has a "fat warning label" -- it's the size tag, dickweed.

I think anyone who is overweight already has a pretty clear idea that they are having a problem. A warning label on clothing would be as ridiculous as that "help" line for gambling addicts that's printed on every lottery ticket. And they don't need some rocket-surgeon academic to tell them about it - I suspect they've already noticed. What will he suggest next - that manufacturers should be prevented from making large clothing because people won't be fat if they have nothing to wear? The other idiocy of this label thing suggests that someone will grow into a size because they aspire to wear a particular garment. What a load of crap.

I think it would be a neat idea if we fixed our governments and the major societal ills we suffer instead of interfering with peoples' personal lives. But that's just me.