Angels sing, are you harking?
Open Threads, full of snarking
It’s Oscar-bait season
Enough of a reason
To Overthink a winter Open Thread …
We’re getting closer to Christmas, Overthinkers! Light an Advent / Hanukkah candle and make a wish, or whatever!
In movie news, Mission Impossible: Spooky Operating Procedure opens this weekend. The Sherlock Holmes sequel opens as well, which, despite indie darlings Noomi Rapace and Jared Harris, doesn’t seem as well-received.
Also, the Golden Globe nominations were announced.
Last minute shopping this weekend? Don’t forget to check out our 2011 Holiday Gift Guide. Or, if you’re getting someone a Kindle – and you are, right? – pick up a copy of Perich’s debut novel, Too Close to Miss, already receiving excellent reviews. Tell the people you love, “Well, actually …” this season.
Do you have an Overthought gift to recommend? Or is there something we missed? Sound off in the comments, for this is your … Open Thread.
After purchasing a copy of “Too Close to Miss”, Amazon thought I might also be interested in “The Hunger Games”. Did you have anything to do with that?
I wish! Hey, if you like strong female protagonists …
Chris Hitchens, may he rest in peace.
With Christmas around the corner, it’s time for the radio stations that switched over to holiday music sometime well before Thanksgiving to be switching back to their regular formats. Honestly, I don’t know how bad it is in you all’s neck of the woods, but here the stations seemed to switch over right after Halloween. Makes me wonder if there was ever a market for Thanksgiving-themed music, or did we as a culture all agree that celebrating the one time in American history when white men and Indians didn’t try to kill one another in song was just not catchy enough?
Tim Tebow is in the news because his team happens to be winning a lot and he’s Christian (though not necessarily in that order). I notice that, for every Tebow hater, there is an equally vociferious(sic) and deranged Tebow fan out in the wide, wide internet. I think I can boil it down for those of you who sit on the fence: either Tebow is God’s gift to the quarterback posistion and not a bad influence like those thug NFL players that get caught on a regular basis, or he’s a decent running back who lucked into Florida’s national title with a bum arm and great legs, and his “holier than thou” position regarding our nation’s morality will come crashing down when he’s caught at a Holiday Inn after midnight with a stripper, an exotic menagerie of animals for bestial purposes, a dead stripper of either gender, or a mountain of cocaine, and thus be exposed as (in the immortal words of that guy on “Family Guy” who was disillusioned when it turned out that Peter couldn’t really play piano) a phony.
I personally find Tebow overrated as a quarterback (let’s see how he does versus the Patriots, who I hate but can’t deny are pretty good from time to time), and his moral stand isn’t offensive so much as it’s making me wonder just how seedy his private life may be (let’s face it, no one is that squeaky clean). But the internet and ESPN are erupting in Israeli-Palestinian death matches over the guy, and it seems to be a lot of hot air overall. Opinions, fellow overthinkers?
Do you mean Rick Perry?
http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2011/12/iowa-debate-perrytebow-107715.html
Oh, and yes, there was Christmas stuff out before Halloween here, and the music started the day after.
I have to pretend hate on Tebow because my dad is a hardcore Florida fan….but I went to Florida State.
Though I have to painfully admit he’s better than Ponder, because Minnesota still sucks.
Gab: I can’t help imagining a scenario for a movie where the rapid spread of Christmas cheer is actually the workings of an alien invasion sent to turn us all into drooling Hallmark-Channel-watching idiots while the aliens run amok. But I concede that could be construed as yet another liberal attack in the War on Christmas.
JosephFM: Minnesota made the Faustian bargain with Favre, I doubt anyone could do much with the team this year. Green Bay made the right call in pulling the trigger on that beat-up old horse.
I was talking to some Jewish folks during my niece’s birthday party this afternoon. They were mentioning that it is incredibly difficult to find Hanukkah-themed decorations, party supplies, and gifts. Target had some stuff, but it was mostly “junk”. Granted, this is Texas, where the Jewish population is less than 0.5%. But I have to say that even if the population was 15% Jewish, as a retailer I’d focus most of my attentions on the 85% that celebrate Christmas. It’s unfortunate that in our fervor to hype Christmas, we happily alienate so many people.
There’s also the fact that Hanukkah decorations and the like are entirely a product of Christmas envy, which I don’t understand at all…we Jews shouldn’t long for the further crass commercialization of our holidays, nor the inflation in importance of minor holidays that happen to coincide with those of other religions. Especially since Hannukah is a holiday about war!
And before you say anything about the oil miracle, that’s just the kid friendly version. Hannukah’s really about waging a brutal insurgency against the Seleucid Empire and winning.
Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong Il both passed away over the weekend, I say RIP to Havel (the Czech playwright who led the peaceful overthrow of the Communist government there in the “Velvet Revolution,” thus connecting the Velvet Underground to peaceful revolutions everywhere), not so much to Kim if only because he was a brutal oppressor who led North Korea down the path of starvation, deprivation, and repression.