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Actor Alec Baldwin as Santa? No, I'm not talking about his voiceover in the recently released kids' flick, Rise of the Guardians, in which he portrays North (alias Santa), an inked-up hulk with a Russian-tinged accent that perhaps reflects a childhood fascination with Rocky and Bullwinkle’s Boris Badenov. 
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No, I'm talking about a monetary gift he made recently to the Adams Memorial  Library in Central Falls, Rhode Island. The library, which was closed for several months in 2011 in the  wake of the town's bankruptcy, received an unexpected check for the sum of $5,000 from Baldwin, his second donation in 12 months. “A year ago,  Alec’s donation [of $10,000] helped us keep the doors open,” said board  President Bruce Kaplan. “This year he’s helping us expand hours of operation and  community  programming.” The library, which is staffed mainly by volunteers, serves an impoverished community where the median household income is just over $22,000. Per capita income for the city was $10,825. Nearly 26% of families were below the poverty line, including 40% of those under age 18 and 30% of those age 65 or over. In 2010, Central Falls made the national news when the entire faculty and administrative staff of Central Falls High School was fired after the teachers' union refused to accept one of the "No Child Left Behind" options for restructuring
failing schools.
    Baldwin, who in the past has garnered as much publicity for his cranky personality, public (and private) rants and tangles with the paparazzi as for his acting roles, has no personal connection to the town or the library. 
    Benevolence is definitely sexy. So the challenge is on to determine the librarian's favorite pin-up for 2013 (now that we have definitively proven that the world is not ending, at least not yet.) Mr. Gosling, the ball is in your court.
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On Friday, December 14th, a 20-year old armed with 3 semi-automatic assault weapons kills 28 people, most of whom were children.  Across the world in China, just hours before, as their school day was starting, 22 children are injured by a man wielding a knife.
    The mind seeks a rational explanation, the heart searches for something deeper as darkness settles on this traditional season of light, and the spirit remembers why the melancholy carols are the ones that truly move us.
"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked:  who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9, King James Bible)
or
"Man's  nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been know to yield to the  influence of love. You must never despair of human nature."  (Mahatma Gandhi)
or
"It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope."
(Niccolo  Machiavelli)
or
"Evil is only good perverted." (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
or
"We are all born marked for evil." (Charles Baudelaire)
 and
"Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil,  no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings." (Soren  Kierkegaard)
and
"I  have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit  still in a room." (Blaise Pascal)
and
"It  is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the  weak." (Eric Hoffer)
"Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil." (Plato)
or
"Entire  ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the  greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill  bringing-up, are far more fatal." (Plato)

"Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table."  (W.H. Auden)

 
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In an earlier post, we examined the ancient practice of Chinese footbinding and its modern manifestations within the context of shopping for prom shoes. This has become a popular post, as evidenced by a consistently high number of page visits. I will not speculate upon whether random internet explorers with feet or shoe fetishes stumble upon it while searching for other things. All I know is what my statistics tell me... and I don't think they're lying.
    So when I read about a new practice of institutional mutilation of a pedalian nature, I knew I had to comment on it.  
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    Recall the fairy tale, Cinderella, and its many
variants. The majority of these stories involve a plot twist with a glass or golden slipper or shoe. Cinderella flees the palace ball in such haste that she loses her footware on the staircase or the path. The prince discovers its and vows to wed the girl whose foot will fit. Cinder's nasty stepsisters, bent on snagging the keys to the kingdom and egged on by the cruel stepmom, go so far as to cut off parts of their toes and heels in their attempts to force their large dogs into the tiny shoe.
    Well, in an instance of life imitating art... women of a certain ilk are now taking the knife to their toes in order to fit their tootsies into modern instruments of torture known as "shoes." Yes, you read it right: elective,  i.e. cosmetic, plastic surgery for their feet.
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Since the phenomenon was first noted in 2003, women are increasingly requesting cosmetic foot procedures -- including shortening their toes, adding collagen to their heels and even completely removing their pinky toe -- in order to better fit into vertigo-inducing 4-, 5- and even 6-inch stilettos. Others opt to lop parts off in order to fit into a smaller size. Apparently, these women do not understand the biomechanical engineering marvels that are their feet: a complex network of 26 bones, 33 joints, 107 ligaments and 19 muscles that support over 100,000 pounds of pressure for every mile they traverse. Even small changes can undermine the foot's structural integrity and cause crippling pain, as anyone who has had a wart, a corn, a bunion or plantar fascitis knows all too well. Yet these women are willing to risk infection, nerve damage, foot deformities (from shifting collagen) and worse just to slip their perfectly normal feet into the abnormal shapes designed by Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo and Christian Louboutin.  And, the irony of it all is that removing a toe could completely affect a woman's balance, making her even more unstable on those super-high heels.
    Obviously most podiatrists and orthopedic surgeons disavow these practices. But as always, there are any number of them on both the East and West coasts who are convinced they are simply helping women "look and feel their best"
    This is just another one of those moments when I simply fail to understand my fellow woman.
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According to some interpretations of the Mayan calendar, the world (or at least the recording of time) will end on December 21 of this year. But according to ESPN's college football talking butts, I mean heads -- oops, analysts---it already has --when Northern Illinois University's up-by-its-bootstraps football team was selected to play against traditional powerhouse Florida State University in the Orange Bowl.  OMG, you would think it was the end of the world as we know it.  Well, I feel fine. I have no personal connection to NIU, other than my daughter is good friends with an alumnus and my other daughter attended a speech camp there and I live about 40 minutes away from the cornfields and quadrangles of DeKalb, stomping ground of the Huskies, the newly crowned Mid-American Conference football champs.
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The Huskies (12-1) polished off Kent State University this past weekend to capture their conference crown with another gritty, heads-up performance that has been their trademark for the past two seasons. As a result of the various polls (AP, Coaches, Harris, etc.), they moved up from #21 in the BCS rankings to #16, thus earning themselves a trip to Miami and bragging rights as the first MAC team to snag a bowl game berth -- and offending the sensibilities of the ESPN elite.
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What a gnashing of teeth there was that day!
David Pollack: "I don't agree with it. I don't think that they should be there."
Jesse Palmer: "I don't think they should get to go."
Kirk Herbstreit: "The fact that Northern Illinois is in the BCS for 2012 is really a sad state for college football. They dont't deserve to be in the BCS this year. Are you kidding me? No one even knew they were playing until the Toledo game two weeks ago."
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No, you idiots. The Penn State/Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky travesty was really a sad state for college football. The very fact that college football is basically a semi-pro league designed to make money for universities and that its athletes live under different rules than most of the other students who toil on campus (what other high school seniors already know they are admitted to X college in August before their non-athlete pals have even submitted their college applications???) -- that's a really sad state.
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A Cinderella team like NIU making the Orange Bowl is something to celebrate. Okay, so their coach has already moved on to supposedly bigger and better things. That's just another challenge for them to rise above. Seems to me ESPN needs a visit from the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future to remember the hopes and dreams of the little guys, the 99% who are sweating it out and putting in the work and hoping that it will all pay off with a break, just one break.  Hey, it's just football, guys. Lie back and enjoy it.
I am not one to watch the bowl games. But I think I will be tuned in on this New Year's Day. And for everyone who roots for the underdogs, wherever they may be:
shout it with me: 
"I am NIU."
"We are all Huskies now!"
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The first Honorary Scrooge of the Month Award goes to Sony/ATV Music for blocking a parody of Michael Jackson's 1983 hit "Beat It" from appearing on YouTube. Local high school students who frequent Lansdowne Public
Library (in Pennsylvania) and serve on its Teen Advisory Board wrote and produced “Read It,” a delightful take-off aimed at inspiring other teens and tweens to just pick up a book or e-reader and take the reading plunge. However, on November 19, just three days after the video made its debut during the dedication of  the library’s Ronnie Hawkins Resource Room, they discovered that the performance had been blocked on YouTube by Sony, which administers the copyrights for Jackson's music. As you can imagine, the teens were crushed that all their hard work was going to go unseen.
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After a week of intense lobbying of Sony executives and the executor of Michael Jackson's estate by the video’s editor, Abbe Klebanoff, head of public services for the library, the corporation finally relented and acknowledged the video's parody/educational purposes under the Fair Use Act.  The video has been restored to YouTube. Who knows, perhaps the fat cat corporate types were visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past and woke up remembering what it was like to young and excited about creating something... or maybe the ghost of the king of pop himself paid them a call.  Below you can see what all the fuss was about. 
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In honor of the 90th anniversary of the birthday of Charles Schulz (1922-2000), creator of the immortal "Peanuts" comic strip, father of Linus, Lucy, Charlie Brown, Sally, Schroeder and, of course, the beagle Snoopy, we explore the Tao of Peanuts.
Lucy: Why do you think we're put here on earth Charlie Brown?
Charlie Brown: To make others happy.
Lucy: I don't think I'm making anyone very happy. Of course nobody's making ME very happy either. SOMEBODY'S NOT DOING HIS JOB!
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Lucy's doing her job! (courtesy Schulz treasury)

Charlie Brown: What can you do when you don't fit in? What can you do when life seems to be passing you by?
Lucy: Follow me. I want to show you something. (They get to the top of a hill.) See the horizon over there? See how big this world is? See how much room there is for everybody? Have you ever seen any other worlds?
Charlie Brown: No.
Lucy: As far as you know, this is the only world there is, right?
Charlie Brown: Right.
Lucy: There are no other worlds for you to live in, right?
Charlie Brown: Right.
Lucy: You were born to live in this world, right? 
Charlie Brown: Right.
Lucy: WELL LIVE IN IT THEN! Five cents please.
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Advice for the neurotic (courtesy Schulz treasury)

Snoopy: My life has no purpose. My life has no direction, no aim, no meaning. And yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out! What am I doing right?
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The original happy dance (courtesy Schulz treasury)

Linus: What would you say you want most out of life, Charlie Brown? To be happy? 
Charlie Brown: Oh, no. I don't expect that. I really don't. I just don't want to be unhappy!
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The once and future philosophers (courtesy of Schulz treasury)

Charlie Brown: I've developed a new philosophy. I only dread one day at a time!
Linus: I don't like to face problems head on. I think the best way to solve problems is to avoid them. This is a distinct philosophy of mine. No problem can be so complicated that it can't be run away from!
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It's that time of year when the mailbox is chock full of retail catalogs attempting to sell, sell, sell and one begins to wonder how the Postal Service could possibly be $15 billion in the red with all this glossy paper crisscrossing the country and landing on my countertop.  There's a Land's End here and a Signals there, here an LLBean, there a Grandinroad, and then, there's the grand-daddy of them all, billed as "America's Longest Running Catalog," Hammacher Schlemmer, "offering the Best, the Only and the Unexpected for 164 years" (according to the cover) -- or, as it's known around my house, "the catalog with things you never knew existed, that you don't really need, at prices you really can't afford." This is the type of catalog where every item is preceded by the definite article "the" -- as in "The Glow in the Dark Driver Ejecting Bumpercrafts" or "The Best Electric Wine Opener." (I kid you not.)
    The latest edition of the catalog came over the transom with a  strange gadget pictured on the cover, something that looks like a cross between  a unicycle and a droideka destroyer droid from Star Wars: The Phantom  Menace.
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Guess which one is "The Folding Electric Mini-Farthing" and explain why you would need one.

Unfolded, "The Folding Electric Mini-Farthing" still has much in common with the other two, since encountering any of them could very possibly lead to an excruciatingly painful injury, if not a sudden death.
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Going, going... gone

Moving on from unsafe transportation you really don't need, we have the "and why exactly do I need this?" toy: The 50 Foot Snowball Launcher.
According to the catalog copywriter:
"This toy blaster makes and launches softball-sized snowballs up to 50 feet, allowing rapid, long-range assaults during neighborhood snowball confrontations Simply place snow in the forming chamber and close the lid.  It packs three perfectly spherical snowballs. To blast your mark, place one snowball in the muzzle, aim the launcher, and pull back the slingshot mechanism..."
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I know what you're thinkin'. Did he fire 3 shots or only 2?

And then there are the oxymorons:
"The Healthiest Deep Fryer," which purportedly uses only one tablespoon of oil and "The Filterless Air Purifier," which uses "billions of harmless electrons that attach to air impurities and convert them to negatively charged ions," and "The Healthiest Potato Chip Maker."
And then there are the WTFs:
"The Powered Pumice Stone," and "The Remote Controlled Tarantula" and "The Thinning Hair Boar Bristle Brush" and "The Pain Relieving Neuromuscular Stimulator System."  And I am only on page 21 of 88!
And if you are so gullible as to purchase "The Hands Free Hair Rejuvenator"
(pictured at left, below) at $699.95 a pop, I have some property that used to lie along the Jersey Shore to sell you!
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Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you! (Rick Moranis, Ghostbusters)

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Hostess Brands, Inc., maker of the iconic U.S. snack Twinkies announced Friday that, rather than try to settle with its striking factory workers, it is going out of business. Founded in 1930 in Chicago, the company, in recent years, found itself fighting a losing battle on multiple fronts, as alternative snacks multiplied and many Americans  at least attempted to adopt healthier eating habits.
    Yet who can ever really let go of that yellow cake riddled with greasy goodness and those strange little holes on the bottom and that fluffy filling, made of who knows what?  Probably better that we didn't know what it was made of!
Here's an appropriate requiem for a taste of my childhood...
Larry Groce, “Junk Food Junkie”
“I open that door so slowly, take a peek up north and south, 
then I pull out a Hostess Twinkie, and I pop it in my mouth...”
“I'm afraid someday they'll  find me just stretched out on my bed,
 With a handful of Pringles potato chips and a Ding Dong by my head!”
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Zingers, Cupcakes and Twinkies! Oh My!!!

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Disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich has traded his job in the kitchen at the federal prison in suburban Denver for a gig in the joint's library.  Blago, who is serving a 14-year sentence for felony corruption conviction was apparently bored out of his mind as a scullery maid washing pots and pans.  According to his former lawyer, Blago has also been trying to stave off boredom by reading biographies of former presidents.  Perhaps dreaming of what might have been...
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The new 'do becomes him; but I don't think I'd trust him to not steal the books...

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