Christmas

In honor of the upcoming holidays and Eugene's current inundation of snow:

And one of my other favorite holiday songs.

Anyone have a good solstice tune?

I thought if you got a lump of coal in your stocking, then it meant you'd been bad.

Even if you are down with "clean coal," (and don't care about that whole pesky mountaintop mining thing) the Clean Coal Carolers is just Christmas gone all wrong.

But go ahead, check it out. Put clothing on the lumps of coal, choose a cheerful Christmas background, then wait to hear the little floating lumps of coal sing holiday favorites like "Frosty the Coalman" and "Deck the Halls (with clean coal)."

UPDATE

They've pulled the plug on the singing lumps of coal, but you can still check out their bad songs at treehugger.com as well as some lyrical responses by the folks at treehugger and at itsgettinghotinhere.org

First, The NYT made me laugh as I read the one-sentence descriptions of books on the best-seller lists (I *know* there's an intern who will be Very Happy when she reads that yes, people read her sentences ... and find them amusing), my favorite being

DESTINY KILLS, by Keri Arthur. (Dell Spectra, $6.99). A woman and a man with superhuman powers flee dangerous killers from Scotland.

Och, aye, bairns! Gang aft agly! (Or something like that.)

OK, admittedly, Trainspotting's language is intimidating, but if one has superhuman powers, should one have to flee "dangerous killers from Scotland"?

That was from an old NYT Book Review, by the way. Today's top description, or rather top mass-market paperback, is "THE DARKEST EVENING OF THE YEAR, by Dean Koontz. (Bantam, $7.99.) A woman who rescues golden retrievers is shadowed by an evil stranger."

I bet the doggies do some doggie saving business, don't you?

The most noticeable phenomenon on the mass-market list comes in a whopping dose of vampire comedy/mysteries by Charlaine Harris, with six, count 'em, six books on the 20-book list. That's not even counting #19, Kerrelyn Sparks' All I Want for Christmas Is a Vampire, all of which leads me to kind of lose my faith in human intelligence. (Because the front page of the paper apparently isn't painful enough to cause that to happen.)

Anyway, the real reason I began this post was the Correction section of "Weddings/Celebrations," which, yes, I read because I want to see teh gays getting married, and by the way, could the august paper possibly feature some female same-sex couples sometime, please? Or do women just not get married?

ANYWAY anyway, here are the correx:

A report last Sunday about the marriage of Anne-Cecilie Engell and Rob Speyer misspelled one of two names she uses as her hyphenated middle name. She is Lisbet Bastrup-Birk Engell, not Bastrub-Birk.

The Vows column last Sunday, about the marriage of Gillian Laub and Tahl Raz, reversed a phrase that the couple borrowed from the 1998 film "Shakespeare in Love" and used in their vows. It should have read, "come ruin or rapture," not "come rapture or ruin."

Let me get the first one, er, straight: The woman's name is Anne-Cecilie Lisbet Bastrup-Birk Engell?

Or, delicious thought, did the paper screw up again, and will it have to issue a correction next week saying, "A correction last Sunday about the marriage of Anne-Cecilie Engell and Rob Speyer contained an incorrect first name for Ms. Engell. She is Anne-Cecilie Bastrup-Birk Engell, not Lisbet Bastrup-Birk Engell"?

And the second one, well. Hee. I guess it's more euphonious, or it sounds more luck-inducing, to end on the upward trend of rapture.

Snotty Newspaper Moment: Guess what? This kind of stuff is only possible with the print edition. Online, I would never have seen these things out of the corner of my eye (or in the center, as it so happens with the best-seller lists).

So off, amusedly, to sleep.