'Nuttin' for Christmas' is actually quite somethin'

Courtesy of my animation buff brother, here is one last cup of Christmas cheer. It's a newly released animated short around a Christmas novelty song that I neglected to include in my previous post: Stan Freberg's immortal version of "Nuttin' For Christmas," which was originally released in 1955.

This animated version was single-handedly produced by animator Doug Compton and it's pretty brilliant. I've been listening to this song or many, many Christmases and Compton's animation closely matches what I've been picturing in my mind all this time. I like the fact that his interpretation gives the song new life and it really seems like this cartoon was meant to go with the song all along. It just took 55 years for them to come together...

Enjoy and Happy New Year!

Sketchy Santas: Best. Christmas. Site. Ever.

Who's got a beard that just won't stay?
Sketchy Santa's got a beard that just won't stay!
Who makes children run away?
Sketchy Santa makes children run away!
Beard won't stay!
Run away!
Must be Sketchy! Must be Sketchy!
Must be Sketchy Santa Claus!

Today I was pointed to the best Christmas Web site I'll probably ever see in my life. If you're on Facebook, Twitter, G-Chat or anywhere else that I have an account, I've already shared it with you and you probably passed it on to others, but it's worth re-posting here, too.

Sketchy Santas!




There's too many of them!



It's horrible, but you just can't turn away.



Is that even a Santa?!


I think the Web site's tag line sums it up quite nicely: Santas be sketchy.

Top 5 New Holiday Carols from Local Artists

One of the joys of the Christmas season is the onslaught of new Christmas music. Sometimes it's a newly discovered cover of a well-worn favorite and sometimes it's an original holiday ditty that strikes the right chords and pulls the right heart strings to earn a place in the annual yuletide rotation.

The official Christmas season is only four days old, but in this brave new world of incessant social media, I feel like my new holiday music horizons have already been expanded more than they sometimes are in an entire Christmas season.

Along those lines, the Chicago Tribune's Mark Caro is overseeing a "New Holiday Classic" contest that asked readers to write and perform original holiday songs and submit them via YouTube so that the general public could vote on them. From 110 entries, 12 finalists were chosen.

You can view all of the finalists here, but if you don't have time for that, you can check out my Top 5 below.

5. Christmas Everywhere by Elias Fey
It's country and catchy.



4. What Christmas Means by Dina Bach
Strong female voice? Check. Vibrant piano riff? Check. Heartfelt lyrics? Check.


3. Santa's Comin' Here by Dick Eastman
It's got a catchy chorus and a slight Doobie Brothers feel to it.


2. Just Can't Wait by Brad Smith
This guy's song sounds like a lost Barenaked Ladies track and he gets bonus points for using Calvin and Hobbes artwork.


1. CTA X-Mas Train by The Snow Angels
So it might not be the most musically or lyrically amazing new classic, but the fact that it's an ode to the CTA's magnificent Christmas train makes it the obvious winner of a contest looking for original Christmas carols from Chicagoans. And it's winning in the poll right now, too.


What's your favorite? Go vote for it!

Newsflash: Tweets Are Pointless!

This just in! According to a recent analysis, 40.55 percent of the tweets flooding into the Twitterverse can be classified as "pointless babble."

Those of you who have not yet hopped on the Twitter bandwagon should probably consider that before signing up. As an avid Twerp (or whatever the singular form of "Tweeple" is), I can substantiate the above statistic. In fact, I probably contribute to it more often than not.

Unfortunately, the study didn't delve into why so many tweets are riveting and timely observations such as "I'm eating a sandwich," "It's so hoooooottttt outside," and "I really didn't want to wake up this morning. Le sigh."

Fortunately, I have the answer: There simply isn't enough of you to go around.

You're not that interesting. Neither am I. And the pressure to craft engaging blog posts, G-chat statuses, Facebook statuses, and Twitter statuses only reinforces that fact. Sure, we care about what we're having for lunch, but no one else really does, at least not all the time and via six different social network notifications.

But still, we soldier forward, self-publishing our comings, goings and clever bon mots to our world of online "followers," "friends" and "buddies." Do they care? I guess it doesn't really matter. The life of these status updates is almost non-existent anyway, with Twitter and Facebook feeds taking their cue from the weather in Chicago: Don't like what you see? Just wait five minutes.

The real question is, why are we spending so much time on other people's so-called pointless babble? If you're reading this right now, I guess you don't have the answer, either...

Just so this post doesn't seem completely negative, I'll close with a sweet little video that is social networking-related, but doesn't have much to do with the above discussion. It does contain a ukulele though, and that's reason enough for you to watch it. Fair warning: The song will get rather lodged in your head.

Stephen Colbert: Dancing Catholic

I don't want this blog to devolve into my posting of videos and commenting on them, but when you find something like this, you just have to share it.

Start your Holy Week the right way--with a video of Stephen Colbert singing and dancing inanely to the old Catholic standard, "The King of Glory." This gives whole new meaning to the idea of liturgical dance. Take it away, Stephen...



I don't know where this clip came from or what it could possibly be about, but I guess it isn't new. Here's a blog post from 2007 that references the clip. Does anyone know if this was on The Colbert Report at some point?

Not that it really matters. Happy Holy Week!

One More on Twitter

I really should have included this in yesterday's post. It's more than a week old, so it's kind of made the rounds already, but, if you haven't already, watch Old Man Stewart Shake His Fist At Twitter:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Lastly, I forgot to address another strange aspect of the micro-blogging service (Micro-blogging? Someone must have invented Twitter after coming across my long-winded, mega-blogging style): It makes some celebrities accessible to their fans in a way that the impersonal fan letter never could. There are a lot of fake celebrity Twitter accounts out there, but some of them are legitimate (or have really good ghost-tweeters) and the celebrities actually respond to followers who Tweet them.

Jimmy Fallon is making this the basis of his show on some nights (The Bryan Brinkman Experiment) and soliciting ideas from fans through his Twitter account.

Rainn Wilson might Tweet with you. Shaq, too. (No guarantees that you'll understand what he's saying though...)

Now do you want to join Twitter?

New Blog Domain: writethings.net

Posting every day is turning out to be more difficult than I had anticipated, so this is admittedly kind of a cheap post, but at least my record will remain intact!

I recently purchased some hosting space from Dreamhost that I will use some day soon for the creation of my real Web site. It also came with a free domain registration, so I took the opportunity to simplify the domain of this blog.

You can now reach this site by navigating to http://www.writethings.net. Of course, I would recommend just creating a Google Reader account and subscribing to my RSS feed instead. Let the content come to you! It will change your life.

And now a completely unrelated XKCD for your enjoyment:

Make Every Site a Sight for Sore Eyes

Have you noticed that the Web is getting a little too busy? If it's not a pop-up ad, it's a strip of contextual Google ads or an animated banner ad or one of the most annoying ads on the Internet with the talking smiley faces or the "Congratulations! You've already won!" announcer. Who in their right mind would ever create a Web advertisement with audio that you can't turn off? We're all doing our best to ignore the ads as it is. Don't give us extra reasons to hate your product.

But these problems are a thing of the past. Now you can read the content you want to read without any of the visual clutter you couldn't care less about. Readability is an experimental service provided by the arc90 design firm. Through the use of a Bookmark (in Firefox) or a Favorite (in Internet Explorer), you can instantly transform any Web page into a comfortable reading experience. No ads, no images, no banners--just the text of an article or blog post.

Readability allows you to customize the style, font and margin width of the stripped-down page to ensure maximum viewing pleasure. Now that I think about it, this could serve as a fairly nice printer-friendly page, especially if you want to print something out in a larger typeface for your offline relatives.

Watch the video below for full details. Obviously my site is so well-designed and engaging that it probably wouldn't be a good page to experiment with, but I guess you could give it a try... ;-)

Yesterday's Tomorrow Today!

Thanks to my friend Julie's Tumblog, I was reminded of a wonderful site that is always good for a laugh: Modern Mechanix.

It's unbelievable that these articles and ads are not Photoshopped in any way, but actually ran in the 1930s and 1940s. It looks like the service described above was a veritable Match.com of yester-year. "No man is any good without a woman?" I'm not sure who this add is more insulting toward--the "anxious" and desperate women or the single men who aren't "any good."

Almost every post on this blog is a winner. Even the less-funny entries provide an insightful look into how people thought science and technology would progress. This leads to the age-old debate: Were people dumber back then? Or just more willing to get carried away by their curiosity? I tend to think it's the latter. Everyone is so sardonic and jaded today (myself included) that I don't think we're even willing to entertain the ideas that seemed plausible to the folks who wrote these articles. After all, some of these things were way ahead of their time! Cordless phone, anyone?

A few others:
If You Want the Ladies to Like You, Clip This Coupon

For Fun-Loving Executives

License Tag in Miniature Identifies Auto Keys

If you find other good ones, share 'em in the comments!

Get Your Game On With Groupon

I always forget that the vastness of the Internets is a great place to look for deals on stuff. Saving a few bucks can be as easy as Googling "[Online store of choice] coupon code."

But sometimes you want to get a deal that you didn't even know you could get. That's what's great about sites like Woot that offer phenomenal daily deals on stuff-you-don't-really-need-but-sure-would-like-to-have-at-that-price. How about a daily deal on a random Chicago excursion, sporting event, show or restaurant? Sound good? Check out Groupon.

The premise is simple, but potentially awesome:

"1. Each day we feature something cool to do in Chicago at a huge discount.
2. You only get the discount if enough people join that day - so invite your
friends!
3. Check back the next day for another awesome Groupon"

While I have little to no interest in today's deal on $5 tickets to the Golden Gloves Boxing Tournament, I'm encouraged to see that enough people signed up to make the discount a reality. I look forward to the deals that will soon be filling my inbox on a daily basis and you should, too!

My 100th Post!

It took me about a year and a half to get here, but today is an historic day. Write Things Worth Reading, a self-publishing experiment that began on a whim when I was bored in the summer of 2007, has finally reached triple digits.

Thanks to anyone who actually reads this and everyone who has commented on my posts. The main reason I do this is because I like to write, and this happens to be the perfect outlet for that. It's a lot more fun when people are reading and responding though, and given the dearth of blogs on the Internets, I appreciate the fact that anyone actually cares what I'm writing about.

And sorry the URL is so long and clunky. I should have thought that out a little more at the beginning. Fortunately, my friend Bret likes to make fun of me and has provided an alternative. You can now access this site from a much shorter URL--www.fingeratrophy.com. Very funny, Bret. I hope it was worth the cost of a domain name.

Well, I promised myself I wouldn't cry, so I think I'll just end this post right here.

"Man, it's been quite a ride." (Watch the video below to give this quote some context.)

No Facebook For Lent: I'm Getting Smarter Already

The verdict is in from British scientists: Increased Facebook use is giving you a "baby brain." Quoth the Tribune:

Baroness Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, warned that the instant feedback and impersonal communication offered by social networking sites could drive human brains and behavior in negative directions.

"As a consequence, the mid-21st Century mind might almost be infantilized, characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize and a shaky sense of identity," Greenfield said Feb. 12.

Looks like my 40-day hiatus is coming just in time! I've previously discussed the issue of the Internet making us lazy readers and decreasing our attention spans, but I guess I haven't considered Facebook's level of culpability for turning my brain to mush. It's ironic that the study would find Facebook to shake a user's sense of identity. Maybe that stems from frequently changing your profile picture. If so, I'm in trouble.

Instant feedback? Yes. Impersonal communication? Sometimes. But I would argue that the seemingly mindless back-and-forth of photo comments, wall posts and status updates is simultaneously meaningless, entertaining and wit-sharpening (if done correctly). It also allows me to communicate--however briefly--with people who are no longer in my immediate social circle. I like that and wouldn't want to lose it.

On the other hand, "baby brain" aspect of Facebook is what compels me to sacrifice it for 40 days. My need to stay connected with far away friends is not served by the hours I spend every week reading the status updates and perusing the photos of people I hardly know. That's got to stop, before I start craving nap time and apple juice more than I already do.

Jingle Bells--Microwave Style

Who would even think of something like this?

The Only Christmas Playlist You'll Ever Need

I came across a great site today that seems like both a fantastic replacement for muxtape and a fantastic way to share Christmas music. I get the feeling I'm going to start using this more often. The song catalog is as deep as the Internet itself and the interface is simple.

The following is a list of 21 of my favorite Christmas carols, hand-picked for your enjoyment and sequenced for variety. Hopefully there are a few gems on this list that you've never heard before. Enjoy!

New Site Discovery: Covering the Mouse

For me, the world of RSS feeds is a vicious cycle of unread information. I'm always finding new sites that I immediately subscribe to, but every time I log into my Google Reader, I'm taunted by the bold blue 1,000+, indicating that I have an impossible amount of catching up to do.

Nevertheless, I have found another cool Web site and I thought I would share it. This one comes from my brother, my family's avowed Disney fanatic.

The site is called Covering the Mouse and it features a new cover version of a Disney musical classic on an almost daily basis, so it's great feed reading material. The best part is that you can hear the entire song, and--if you know where to look in the site's source code--you can grab the file for future enjoyment.

Not all of the tracks are fantastic and some of them--like any cover version of a popular song--are only worth hearing to satisfy your morbid curiosity or because the recordings are so rare. Covering the Mouse is definitely worth a look though, and I found a few gems while trolling the site last night:

Chim-Chim-Cher-ee
from Mary Poppins
Performed by Louis Armstrong

Under the Sea
from The Little Mermaid
Performed by The Suburban Legends

Grim Grinning Ghosts
from The Haunted Mansion
Performed by Barenaked Ladies

Barack Roll: Best Use of the Internet Ever?

I just watched what should be the most viral video in Internet history, but it somehow still only has 600,000+ views on YouTube. Prepare to be Barack Rolled. Your life may never be the same again:



For any readers of this blog who are not familiar with the Internet-fueled prank of "rickrolling," it involves providing a link to one thing, but actually linking to Rick Astley's fascinatingly horrible 1987 chart-topper "Never Gonna Give You Up" or something that involves the song.

Exhibit A: This link to hilarious Muppet bloopers!

Events can also be rickrolled, as the song will begin playing while an Astley impersonator lip syncs along to the words.

Exhibit B: A college basketball game gets rickrolled.



Combining Obama and rickrolling? Sheer genius. Watch it again! You know you want to!

Google Is Making You Stupid (Me, Too)

The latest way to rage against the Google machine is to say that everyone is now dumber for having used it.

In an article for The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr argues that the ease with which we can find information online and jump from page to page is changing the circuitry of our brains and preventing us from engaging in the "deep reading" that we used to enjoy in the pre-Google era. Carr writes:

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

And you know what? He's absolutely right. As a pathetic case in point, I didn't even read Carr's entire article, even though I'm interested in the topic and offering my own two cents on it now.

For an easier-to-read illustration of how short your reading attention span really has become, check out Michael Agger's How We Read Online. You don't read much of anything online, do you? You're scanning headlines, looking for bold text and pull quotes, and spending less than a minute on a page before a link takes you somewhere else.

When I graduated from college, I looked forward to having the free time to read quality books of my choosing and continuing my own personal education by reading. I was going to use technology to better organize the information I found online. Instead, my Google Reader has way too many feeds, making me a lazy reader. And Delicious has become my personal clearinghouse for viral YouTube videos and links to banal trivia. Things worth reading? They're few and far between.

Even this blog was meant to serve as a way for me to process my thoughts on all the brilliant and useful information that I read online or in all the books I would be reading for pleasure. But I can feel my mind being melded by Google's information overload and I can probably count on one hand the number of books I've read in the last year. At the same time, there is a long list of books that I've started reading and never finished. My online reading habits have overtaken my off-line reading habits!

It's well past time for me to turn over a new leaf, so I'm going to force myself to read something in its entirety. I just renewed my library card...now who has book suggestions?

Darth Vader: From Super Villain to Comedic Powerhouse

This past weekend, I watched the original Star Wars movie for the first time in quite a while and came to a startling realization: Darth Vader has been completely neutered by pop culture.

Once a menacing and dangerous super villain who probably had fearful kids hiding their faces in 1970s movie theaters, the respiration-challenged cyborg has since become a perpetual punchline for the sardonic humorists who currently inhabit the main stage of American comedy. Not that I'm complaining or anything.


Darth's downfall is so all-encompassing that even a simple Google search yields a joke on the fifth result: Follow Darth Vader on Twitter! You would think there are enough Star Wars nerds out there with enough Internet savvy to have legitimate sites about Darth Vader's mythology and lineage show up in the top results on Google. Apparently not...

While I still love watching the original Star Wars trilogy, I must admit that the viewing experience has been somewhat altered by the new persona being grafted on to the trilogy's main villain through the power of video editing and a wicked sense of humor. It's just not easy to forget an interpretation like this:



At least Chad doesn't have to deal with this kind of humiliation.

i cant read ur txt speak

Some horrific yet predictable survey results were released this week stating that teens are allowing emoticons, text message abbreviations and other informal style errors slip into their school writing assignments. Apparently kids don't even run Spell Check nowadays.

While some argue that this is a happy occurrence that gives teachers a unique opportunity to explain the difference between formal and informal writing styles, I disagree. I think it's appalling that students would punctuate a sentence with an emoticon (much less text message abbreviations!) in a writing assignment that will be turned in for a grade.

Thus the Civil War was over. :-) The Union totally pwned the Confederacy. ROFLMAO

If you were a teen writing the sentence above, wouldn't some kind of alarm go off in your head? As my high school chemistry teacher once said to me, "I don't understand what you don't understand about this." Why would anyone think it was ever OK to use informal styles in formal writing?

I'll tell you why: Because the ease of communication brought about by texting, the Internet and other technology has made people sloppy. In fact, quick and dirty writing is strongly encouraged. In the world of IMs and text messaging, copy editors and Grammar Nazis need to check their sensibilities at the door. Everything is streamlined and instantaneous. As long as you can express the basic meaning of what you're trying to communicate, everybody's happy.

WAKE UP, PEOPLE! Don't you know that the ability to spell and correctly use commas is what separates us from the apes?!

Unfortunately, the teens who are currently defiling their high school writing assignments with smileys and abbreviations will soon be LOLing their way to colleges and law schools and careers. Will standards continue to slip? Will online and text message colloquialisms creep into the Chicago Manual of Style status quo? I certainly hope not.

But u cant say 4 sure, can u? ;-P

Ugh.

Facebook Features Reach New Frontiers of Awkward

Hello, random Facebook friend from high school that I didn't talk to then and haven't talked to since. You know what we should do? Chat online! Let's see, how can we make this happen?

I don't have your AIM screenname, and I'm not in high school or college anymore, so I'm almost never on AIM anyway.

How about G-Chat? I love G-Chat! It's AIM for grown-ups! We never talk though, so I don't have your G-Chat name because I don't have your Gmail address.

Skype? Nah, it's not like you're in France or something.

Hmm...I think we're out of options.

A mere week ago, this story would have had an unhappy, chat-free ending. Facebook to the rescue! The long-awaited introduction of Facebook chat gives you real-time access to reconnect with all the people you never thought you would talk to online. Ever. You only friended them because you were curious what they were up to, but now you're one double-click away from starting a conversation that probably can't last more than three lines.

Need to find more people from your past to chat with? Facebook can help you there, too! Just check out the new "People You May Know" sidebar. Surprise, surprise...it's all the people you purposely didn't friend or didn't know well enough to even look up on Facebook.

I love the fact that Facebook allows me to stay connected to people--good friends and random acquaintances--from various stages of my life, but I want to control the terms of that connection. Don't friend me because I show up in a list on your home page and we have a few common friends. And if we haven't communicated in more than a year, don't chat with me on Facebook just because we're both "online" at the same time.

That's what Walls are for. Happy birthday, by the way!