You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch

Well, I hope you're all sitting down, because I have a shocking announcement to make: an entire 5 days before December 25th, 2006, I was essentially done with my shopping for Christmas presents. Yes, for this year, not last year. Very funny. Maybe next year I'll shoot for the December 'teens' instead of the twenties. Crazyness. Anyways, it reinforced my true love for Thanksgiving over Christmas; I hate Christmas shopping. It's always impossible to think of gifts for everyone, and that to begin with is entirely frustrating. Then you have to deal with the traffic... and the volume of people at the stores (which, generally, are completely disheveled. Or, at least by the time I'm shopping in them). It really just isn't pleasant. Remember Thanksgiving when you didn't have to deal with that? You just relaxed and had a great meal? The only big problem day at grocery stores is the day before, and only complete goofballs like my mother shop on this day every year. I'm not sure why she does this, I worked in a grocery store for years and told her when to go and she always ended up in the mayhem. To be fair, I think she and my dad went later one evening this year and avoided it. But, I digress.

Holiday cheer is truly a mythical creation. Where, exactly, can I find this holiday cheer during the month of December? The person behind the checkout counter says "Happy Holidays!" but unless that person is Will Ferrell in his elf suit, you know it's a load of horse manuere and that what he/she is really thinking is "please, just get out of here so I can go home, I've been treated like trash enough today." Everyone is impatient (I'm a very patient person, and by my observation, 0.01% of the population is at all considerate or nice if anything so much as you short them a penny goes wrong). When someone gives you a gift and says "I hope you like it" you might as well finish their sentence with "because I stood in line for three hours at Filene's for that sweater and I am NOT bringing it back." So holiday cheer is spending 24 days in utter ugliness and bitterness so that we can be nice and happy and sweet for one? May cowpies rain down on your head. Give me Thanksgiving!

I'm pretty sure that sound you hear is Santa erasing me from his "good" list and transferring me to the "grinch" list, which is a step below "bad."

Anyways, let's completely shift gears and I'll tell you a fun story about a mildly famous person emailing me. First let me take you back about two years. John Buccigross writes a column about hockey for ESPN.com. As part of his column he has something called "Shot of the Week" - which is an odd or funny looking hockey related photo, and the reader's job is to submit a funny caption and the next week he runs the best ones along with a new photo. Well, senior year of college, I emailed a few suggestions in and, to my surprise, one day Todd emailed me with a link to Buccigross' newest column. There I was! My quote and name were on ESPN.com for all to see. I thought that was pretty cool. Ok, hold that thought, and fastforward to this past week.

ESPN.com ran a feature where readers could vote on the greatest (theoretical) top line in hockey of all time. And they listed the top 50 forwards of their choosing for you to vote from. For the record, I voted for Ron Francis centering, Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. The obvious choice is to have Lemieux-Gretzky-Gordie Howe, which to no ones surprise won the voting, but I thought (despite Gretzky's ability to rack up assists with the best of them) that I would center two of the greatest scorers by a great center who could get them the puck. And Francis scored over 500 goals as it is, I believe, so that's just a good kicker. I digress. Anyways, at least 5-10 of the ESPN selections for the top 50 forwards were downright awful. For example, they listed Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin. Don't get me wrong, those guys are fantastic and could very well end up as two of the top 50 greatest of all time, but they BOTH ARE IN THEIR SECOND YEAR. You can't possibly include someone like that in this conversation. Plus there were a few other suspect names when you come to consider Cam Neely. As a Bruin fan, I was mildly disgruntled that Neely wasn't on this list and some other suspect names were. I first got into hockey at about the time he retired early due to creaky joints, unfortunately, but he was apparently a great player in his heyday and really dominated his sport and revolutionized his position, so they say. So the point of all of this is that ESPN.com released the results today, and had some of their "experts" choose their best line of all time. John Buccigross selected Neely as one of his three players and wrote that he had to cheat a little bit, which I thought was awesome. So I mozeyed over to his column a little later, and I have resumed recenly writing in for the Shot of the Week since he started it up again. This week's shot is a photo of a surprised looking Wayne Gretzky (who coaches Phoenix now). So I emailed with the following caption:

"You left Cam Neely off the list of Top 50 forwards of all time? Really?"

(Thank you, from all of Boston, for "cheating" just a little bit)

To my great surprise, John Buccigross of all people wrote me back six hours later and said:

"I always got your back, Nathan"

YEAH. John Buccigross took the time out of hundreds of emails to write me six words. I thought that was cool. I feel like I have a hockey buddy now at ESPN.com.

Well, happy holidays everyone. No, really... I mean it!

Short random thought post

It seems incredible to me the amount of name overlap in professional sports. For instance, tonight Adrian Peterson scored a TD for the Bears. At last check, he's about to leave Oklahoma for the NFL too. The name Dee Brown comes to mind. Played a few years with the Celtics and some other teams, then apparently went back to school at Illinois and came to the NBA again. Apparently took a few years to play baseball with the Kansas City Royals too. Jason Williams has appeared in two forms in the NBA, and also seems to find time to play hockey. There may not seem to be a LOT of examples, but consider the sample size of the population at whole (there are roughly 450 pro basketball players, 700-800 baseball players, 1600 football players, 600 hockey players, etc out of an american population of what, 300 million? And factoring in international numbers... you get the point). Though perhaps if you consider the seemingly strange result to the famous birthday probability problem, that shows that by a class size of only 23 people, you have about a 50% chance that two students have the same birthday, maybe it isn't that odd after all. But sure seems it. (By the way, I'm obviously not counting father son combos like Ken Griffey, Ken Griffey Jr.) Luckily, we have not had to revisit the Michal Grosek era.

My boss is in San Francisco this week. If you think I am overworking myself in the meantime, you'd be wrong.

Great article on ESPN.com right now about pink sports clothes/jerseys. One of my huge pet peeves. I've always contended that anyone who wears pink sports clothes are not actually fans. They're probably the giggly type that just roots for a team because it's cool, but doesn't know any players, how the game is played, and spends far more time getting drunk on $8 beers than actually watching the game. I dare you to tell me I'm wrong.

Silly Caucasian girl likes to play with Samurai swords

I will persevere tonight, no matter what it takes. Number of times post re-written from this point on as result of computer freeze: 1

It's been a long time, friends. Let's go over some of the happenings in the last month, shall we?

--- The Red Sox posted the largest bid for the Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka about three weeks ago ($51.1 million), which brings up a number of points (for those less sports inclined, they basically bought his rights for that amount because he played in Japan and wasn't a free agent, but his team "posted" him... so now they still have to sign him to a contract and pay him millions more. That bid goes to his Japanese team, who probably reacted like Publishers Clearing House showed up at the door...) anyways, the points:

1) That's an awful lot of money for the RIGHTS to a player. It actually makes me sick. $51.1 million? Can you imagine being the teams that bid $32 million and $38 million and lost out? The Yankees clearly went mad when they bid $25 million on another Japanese pitcher projected to be a #3 or 4 starter. But when you think about it, how cool would that be to say you were bought for $51 million? Like if Woods Hole bid $51 million to take me away from Lamont? I'd rather have the money, but that's an ego booster if I ever saw one.

2) The next day, the Boston Globe started a poll to nickname the guy. What is with having to have a nickname for everyone? And why can't we just let it happen naturally? If the guy is good, he'll pick up a nickname somewhere a year or two down the road, ok? Instead, the Globe started throwing around stupid things like "Dice-man" and "D-Mat" - which brings up another point of: let's stop with the first letter of your first name, two to three letters of your last name nickname. We've got A-Rod, J-Lo, K-Rod, even K-Fed for crying out loud. If D-Mat sticks, I'm going to legally change my name and in the coming weeks the Herald will print something like "Boston Globe burned down by arsonist N-Roll"

--- This reminds me of a funny story: I'm taking an intro chem class for free (basically) since I work for Columbia, and a few weeks back we spent a day talking about environmental chemistry. The TA's were teaching that day because our professor got whisked away to San Fran, which was actually quite pleasant, because they had a good sense of humor but were nearly as capable as the professor herself. Anyways, at one point they were talking about greenhouse gas sources like cars, industry, cow-plop and other organic matter and asked for other suggestion from the class... one person said forest fires, ok fine... one person said landfills, which is what they were going for (decomposition of organics)... then this one kid goes "Arson." If you aren't humored by my story at this point, let's just move on ---

3) Finally, one thing that always drives me crazy is the amount of advertising everywhere, and I find the way teams are now selling the naming rights to stadiums quite unfortunate. There should be some rational, reasonable limit to the advertising. Teams pick up probably $20 million a year in some cases, so how can you really blame them, but would you rather go to Jack Murphy Stadium, or Petco Park? Shea Stadium or CitiField? Mile High Stadium or Invesco Field? Same for college football bowl games. The Mieneke Car Care Bowl? The Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl? Soon we'll have the Orange Bowl presented by Apple Computers. That won't work because it would be like... oh nevermind.

--- On to other things. I watched a little more than half of the Da Vinci Code movie before it spazzed out. Is there anything worse than watching half of a movie you're enjoying? Especially a mystery? Especially when you just found out who "The Teacher" was? Going with the book is always better than the movie theory, I think I'll have to read the book because the movie was going along pretty well. Other things I don't like to stop in the middle of: board games, leaving a sporting event early, learning to play "One Jump Ahead" from Aladdin on the piano and learn the second half when I get the first half down. My mother can back me up on that last point.

--- I heard christmas music for the first time on the day BEFORE Thanksgiving. I hope that program director was fired. As many of you know I'm not particularly fond of christmas music, but I have identified two songs that I like: Carol of the Bells as performed by the Trans Siberian Orchestra, and the Little Drummer Boy. I always really liked that song for some reason.

--- Turns out MySpace is actually good for something. I was able to track down an old friend.

--- Drove by Framingham High School because the construction is about done, I think. It's still big and ugly, but different, which is kind of weird.

--- On movies: - The music in Kill Bill vol. 1 is fantastic. Did you know that the bald crazy 88 fighter in the first movie and Pai Mei in the second movie are played by the same person? That was almost as shocking as finding out Bigfoot from the Neil Diamond/Bigfoot SNL sketch was played by The Rock - Click was a good movie. I really feel that Adam Sandlers movies have matured so that they aren't just dumb and funny, but have better points or stories and are still very funny - Pride and Prejudice wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. That it had Keira Knightly probably didn't hurt - Cars was pretty good too

--- Rob brought something up in his blog that I was thinking about just the other day - the act of tipping at a restaurant. I usually calculate about 15% of the bill and give a little more. If the service is REALLY good, I'll be happy to give more. If it's really BAD, I really don't feel bad giving less. But here's the real point: why are we paying the waiter/waitress' wages on top of buying our meal? Shouldn't the restaurant be responsible for paying them? How do they get away with paying them only something like $2.50/hr and making the customer pay the wages? Plus, they only make an amount porportional what you order. There is little difference bringing me a grilled cheese or bringing me a filet mignon, am I wrong? Why should I pay so much more for you to bring me a filet mignon? When I'm president, I'm going to ban tipping and make the restaurants pay the servers normal wages. I am not belittling a server's job or trying to rip them off, simply shift where that money is coming from.

Ok, that will keep you busy for a while. And I made it to the end! Until next time.

12/8 additions:
- Silly me, I forgot one other christmas song. Elton John's "Step into Christmas"
- Rob, good point, it seems that it's more like hiding the wage into the tipping process instead of flat out putting it in the price. Which is effective, because if you added $3-5 onto everything, who would buy a $13 hamburger? But then, if I spend $4 on some meat at the grocery store, aren't I technically helping to pay the wages of those employees too?

Paper Jam?!? What the $*&$ is that?

I swear I was going to post tonight, but I hate my computer now with the fires of 10,000 suns and can't bring myself to rewrite the post. And if you think this is the first time I've failed in this manner, well you don't know my computer and you'd be oh-so-wrong.