Theme Week, Part Plastic Rings With Gold-Colored Paint

Tips For The Holidays Week!  Things that "Make A Great Gift" usually don't


That's unfortunate.  Now I don't know what to get you.  


That's okay.  It's the thought that counts.


I'm imaginary.  I'm nothing but a thought. 


I can see how that would make things more difficult.  Anyway...around this time of year, every commercial on every type of medium is advertizing things that "Make A Great Gift."  From "The Clapper" to Chia Pets, anything ever made by Ronco, Lottery Tickets, funeral pre-arrangements (sadly, I'm not making that one up), or a good old-fashioned iPod-Compatible Toilet Paper Dispenser.  As a general rule of thumb around the holiday season, if a commercial tells you that something makes a great gift, it's lying.


And that concludes our holiday fun-filled Theme Week.  We hope you've enjoyed this silliness enough to want a whole new year of it, starting in 2012.  Jeremy will be on vacation until the New Year, so go ahead and set your reminders to come back Tuesday January 3rd for more of this...well...whatever it is we do here. 

Theme Week, Part Bird With An iPhone That Has Bad Reception So He's Not Calling Anybody

Tips For The Holidays Week!  Bing Crosby can go ahead and clam up

It just wouldn't be Christmas if it wasn't white.  Or were you referring to Silver Bells?

Nope...all about the White Christmas thing.  Snow sucks.  It's pretty much the worst thing ever.  It's cold, slippery, forces you to go out into the cold and snow to shovel it, makes driving a pain, makes dealing with other people's stupid driving a bigger pain, and makes everything a completely white monotone.  It's boring!  The mind boggles when I think that there are actually people out there who say they love snow.  

So here's my idea for Christmas every year...and for some reason it never seems to work out quite the way I'd hoped.  It can snow once on Dec 23 or 24th...after everybody has traveled to wherever it is they're going to spend Christmas and has purchased a week's supply of ham, then stay cold enough for the snow to remain on the ground (but be plowed off the roads) until after Christmas, then it's time for Spring.  All that flaky white crap can just disappear and make way for summer.  Who's with me?

Theme Week, Part La Poule

Tips For The Holidays Week!  Nobody actually likes Egg Nog.  Nobody

I think you're mistaken there, Jeremy.  Lots of people drink egg nog this time of year. 

Then perhaps you'd like to explain why the spell checker on the Blag here doesn't like the word "Nog."  It thinks that's a misspelling...but that's entirely beside the point and something I just made up while typing this.  

The more important thing to note here is that if I were to offer you a beverage consisting of warm milk, raw eggs and sugar, you'd look at me like I had two heads, politely decline, and possibly become a little squeamish.  I wouldn't blame you.  But apparently, if you make a 50/50 mixture of this mixture and rum, you have a fun holiday-themed party favorite.  

Why?

Because the true spirit of the holiday season, like most other Americanized holidays, is to get drunk.  It also includes cinnamon, which we also like during holidays...although that's entirely more confusing.  Whenever Americans take over celebration of a holiday, be it Christmas, New Year's, 4th of July (Though admittedly, we didn't exactly borrow that holiday from another country), St. Patrick's Day, Cinco de Mayo (We have absolutely no reason to be celebrating that), Labor day, Haloween (After you turn 18), Thanksgiving...we change the spirit of the holiday from whatever it was intended to be into an excuse to get faced.  It's what we do.  Egg nog is no different.  There is no reason in creation why anybody would drink this stuff...and without booze, nobody would...but once you spike it, everyone drinks up. 

Theme Week, Part Turtle Dove

Tips For The Holidays Week!  Set expectations:  Despite what the commercials say, nobody is getting a Lexus from me

But I think I really deserve one.

Well, that's your opinion.  The simple fact of the matter is, I'm not going to be buying a Lexus for myself or anybody I know, so don't get your hopes too far up.  This goes for just about everything in the Holiday season...don't expect absolute perfection out of the entire ordeal.  

It's a mess.  

Presents are tough to find, and there's only so many of them out there, so you may double-up on a present with somebody else and the giftee will end up with two of them.  Oh well.  The tree may lose a couple needles and your carpet won't be perfect.  These things happen.  The family cat is all but guaranteed to take a dump right around the time the entire family has gathered around to sing Christmas Carols.  Oops.  The aforementioned carols are going to be horrifically off-key.  Deal with it.  One of the stockings hung by the chimney with care may catch fire.  What are you going to do?  The place mats on the dining room table may be a little wrinkled.  Nobody will actually be bothered by this. 

That whole water off a duck's back thing applies very much to the Christmas season, so go ahead and relax.  Things will go right, and things will go wrong...just like any other time of year.  The important thing is to set your expectations properly so that two of you don't buy the same person the same color Lexus. 


One other thing that Jeremy would like to note.  In case you're wondering (and he always has), Turtle Doves are not only not indigenous to North America (so good luck getting them for your true love), but they have absolutely nothing to do with turtles...ninja or otherwise.  The name is derived from the Latin "Turtur," meaning "Dove." 

Theme Week, Part Partridge (Tree Sold Separately)

Tips For The Holidays Week!  Walk slowly when stringing lights on a tree, lest you will get dizzy and fall over

 Happy Holidays from Jeremy Is In The Office!  This week, we present a variety of helpful tips for surviving and maybe even enjoying the upcoming holiday season.  

First of all, I'd like to get this out of the way.  Despite Rick Perry's nonsensical war on non-religion, I like saying "Happy Holidays" around this time of year not because it's more inclusive of religions, but because it's inclusive of more holidays.  There's more going on around this time than Christmas, so instead of only hoping people enjoy a merry Christmas, they should enjoy New Years, and Kwanzaa, and Chanukah, and Saturnalia, and the Winter Solstice, and whatever the heck else they want.  Have at it, everybody!  Celebrate it all.  According to the Mayans, we only have about one year left, so grab all the gusto you can.   So don't get all offended if I say "Happy Holidays"...especially if you're one of the people at work who I won't see until at least 2 of these holidays have passed. 

Now, on to the festivities! 

One of the most iconic symbols of the Christmas season is the Christmas Tree.  They're bright and festive, the real ones smell like Pine Sol, the fake ones smell like the attic, and they all drop enough needles and junk in your living room to last the whole year.  Seriously...I found a pine cone off of mine in August this year.  

They're also ridiculous.

Based on a pagan ritual, Christmas trees are pointy, had to get just right, messy, and great for exercising the family pet.  Because of all these factors, they can be a source of stress around an otherwise joyous season.  So, one helpful tip to help yourself along is to go slowly when stringing up the lights.  If you're like me, you've never in your life seen a tree and said, "That thing has too many lights."  My current tree has 700 lights.  That's over 90 lights per foot of tree, and that doesn't even factor in that there's no tree in the first foot off the ground.  Needless to say, you can just about see this thing from the moon, and I'm okay with this.  The problem that is caused by this "More Power" lighting system is the need to walk around the tree many many times in order to string up this ludicrous quantity of lights.  It's akin to putting your head on the end of a baseball bat and spinning around.  You get dizzy...and should you go too quickly, you could very well trip over a poorly-placed piano or box or bookshelf or all of the above and fall over.  Gravity hurts sometimes, so go ahead and take my advice.  Pace yourself...Christmas comes but once a year, so you should have plenty of time. 

ECHO!!!

A clean office is a weird office

 I understand it's also the sign of a sick mind.  Why your desk is usually a bit of a wreck is beyond me.

My office is an orderly form of chaos.  It all makes sense in a Jeremy sort of way.  

So why is it so different now?

Well, in today's Tale Of Whimsy, today is the big Office Move.  It's really quite exciting.  Everybody packs up all their crap into boxes and/or dumpsters then starts milling about the building while jaunty calliope music plays over the P.A. system.  When the music stops, whatever office you're standing in becomes yours and anyone left without one gets fired.  

At least that's how I think it should work.  

In reality, somebody decided that everyone needed to be completely rearranged and that as a company, we hadn't throw out enough trash in the last 5 years, so they orchestrated a grand plan to move every last person who works here to move to a new office.  So, 250,000 boxes and one weekend later, everyone's in a new home and only 3 days of productivity are lost.  In my personal case, my carreer boils down to 3 boxes, a laptop bag, and a coffee mug.  But, I get a shiny new office, and get to throw out about 50 pounds of crap from my desk drawers.  

In the meantime, my office now feels very empty and strangely uncluttered.  I'll get to start making my new mess on monday.  

Speaking of making messes on monday, Jeremy's starting a Holiday Theme Week, so be sure to join us for a whole week's worth of nonsense!

When Does Hunting Season Start?

I don’t need one of those fake light-up deer in my front yard.  I have plenty of the real ones

Yay!  Little Bambis!

Yeah, they're a real treat.  They eat my grass and my bird food, almost get hit crossing the road on a near daily basis, set off the motion detector over the garage so my light stays on all night, and crap in my yard.  They're a real treat.  

But they pull Santa's sleigh.

Holiday theme week is next week.  

Sorry...jumped the gun a little.

So yeah...deer.  Specifically those light-up ones that make their way to people's yards around the holiday season as people's lighting decorations get bigger, more elaborate, and in nearly all cases, kitschier.  You can't throw an elf without hitting somebody's inflatable Santa, snow globe, snowman (I actually saw an 18-foot inflatable snowman not long ago...dear God) or some other stupid thing.  But the light-up deer are a different sort of strange, especially in my neighborhood.  We have deer all over the place, and yet people feel the need to go out and buy deer that they have to plug in.  Here's a fun fact...I have more deer in my front yard than you do, and come Spring, I don't have to figure out how to store mine...they run off into the woods.  Mine also use significantly less electricity. 

Stringy Goodness

Why does the type of plastic wrap depend on the flavor of string cheese?

I don't think anyone else has ever realized this.

Well, I have and I'm curious.

I don't think I even realized there were different flavors of string cheese.  What's up with that?

It was a pretty new revelation to me, too.  Recently, I was in the grocery store and happened upon the cheese section.  Thinking that I haven't had string cheese in a long time, I located that section of the display, and found a whimsical variety of packages I'd never seen before.  String cheese now apparently comes in Colby-Jack, Cheddar, and the classic Mozzarella.  Yes, that's totally an Oxford comma.  

I picked up a package of Mozzarella as well as a Cheddar, partially because I was curious, and partially because Cheddar is basically awesome.  Over the time since then, I've been happily enjoying my string cheese.  Incidentally, this is poorly named (and maybe I should check the packaging, but I can't be bothered) because the Cheddar string cheese does not come apart in strings whatsoever.  The mozzarella does exactly as expected, but the Cheddar only comes in clumps.  

Anyway, what's important to note is the ease in which the cheese is obtained.  They both come in nearly identical packages, in which tubes of cheese are individually wrapped.  The wrappers are designed to come apart by pulling two flaps at the top in opposite directions, at which point the top sheet of plastic is removed, and the tube of cheese is freed from its form-fitting back wrapper.  This is great in theory, but in reality, the cheddar wrapper sucks.  It starts to split down the middle, and comes apart in pieces to the point where you have to maneuver the cheese to get it out.  I have had precisely zero structural failures with the mozzarella wrappers, but every last cheddar wrapper I've tried to open has ended in cheesey disaster, and not in a Michael Bay kind of way.  So my question to the scientific community is as follows:  What's up with that? 

It's Usually Slippery...Which Is Kinda Gross

Does anybody keep the little garbage bags they hang on your turn signal at the oil change place?

I wouldn't know.  I change my own oil.

Can you change the oil in my car?  Cheap?

 Sure can't.   

Then what good are you?

I'm a pro at making snarky comments on a Blag.  Perhaps the best alternate persona in the business.

I guess you have a point there.  

So anyway, not long ago, my car was due for an oil change, so I took it to one of those places that does that sort of thing.  They do a good job at changing the oil and topping off all the fluids and a remarkably good job of trying to talk me into unnecessary maintenance work, such as filling the tires with nitrogen instead of crummy air.  I've written about that here before, but I can't be bothered to look it up.  While they do a great job of talking to me about these extraneous services, they do a lousy job of actually getting me to pay them to do any extra work.  I want the oil changed, and that's about it.

One other service they perform is piling a bunch of crap into my car while they change the oil.  They put a sticker on the window, 2 copies of my receipt, a comment card so I can tell them how they did in exchange for a 1 in 50,000 chance at a free oil change, a couple valuable coupons for the attached convenience store, and a little plastic garbage bag that they hang on my turn signal.  After I get back into my car, the first thing I do is gather all of this junk up and dump it into the little garbage bag, which immediately gets taken off the turn signal and thrown out.  

My question to you is...does anybody actually keep a little plastic garbage bag on the turn signal in their car?