No Updates Today

My plate is pretty full today, what with going to see a movie about a returning something or other. (I hope I like the part where Frodo and Sam infiltrate Mordor and enlist the aid of the native population, which are three-foot-tall fuzzy creatures armed with stones and spears, in order to deactivate the force shield that surrounds Barad-dur and prevents Aragorn and his buddy Lando from flying in on a dragon to destroy the main reactor. I also hope they pull off the scene where Frodo succeeds in turning Saruman, who turns out to be his actual father, back to the side of goodness.)

Thus, there probably won't be any more posting than this. I do plan to have some ROTK thoughts up tomorrow. I also plan to fill up space this week with some reposting of selected posts from the last year, mainly as a way of setting up some things I want to write about in 2004.

Here are a couple of links for today:

:: Al Gore Jr., busted! And because he didn't turn the headlights on. Yeesh.

:: Kevin Drum on the poll reported yesterday that seemingly reveals wide-spread support for amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage.

:: Modulatin' Steve points to some spectacular space photography. Wonderful images!

:: LLLOOONNNGGG discussion thread on Return of the King, mainly by people who are so frighteningly literate that I despair of my proto-writing career.

:: Finally, I love Christmas music. I really, truly do. The only Christmas songs I actively dislike are "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer", "All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth", the "Carol of the Bells", and whatever that horrible thing with the #$&%^!! Chipmunks is called. Yes, I actually like "The Twelve Days of Christmas", although I tend to prefer humorous rewritings of it, with the best I've ever heard being a version I only heard once, on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson some years back -- it was themed around a divorce settlement, with the song listing the things the husband is giving up. (If anyone happens to have those lyrics, I'd love to have them too!) And my favorite Christmas song is "Little Drummer Boy", with my favorite performance thereof being the 1970s kitsch version done by Bing Crosby and David Bowie.

Having noted that, a devilish MeFi thread about Christmas songs and music turns up this exhaustive, and caustically hilarious, listing of Christmas songs, and for that person in your family who would turn Christmas into a celebration of the Dark Powers of the World, there are Carols for Cthulhu!

See you all tomorrow!