Shiny in the Black: A "Firefly" Christmas (conclusion)

Continuing my fanfic exercise in what a Christmas-themed episode of Firefly might have been like.
part one
part two
part three

"Those aren't toys," Kaylee said. "Those are agricultural supplies for a new colony. Did you change the job while you were out?"

"Seal it back up," Mal said. "That stuff is perishable, and by breaking the seal, we've started the decay process."

The crew stood around, staring at the crate that was supposed to contain toys for the children of the orphanage on Haven but really contained farming seed and fertilizer that had supposedly been destined for Whitefall. Jayne and Book lifted the facing of the crate back into place and restored the seals. When they were done, Jayne stepped back and looked at Mal.

"Well, Mal, guess we got ourselves another hiccup."

"Yeah, looks that way." Mal muttered another curse in Chinese and then he kicked the crate for good measure.

"That won't hurt the crate," River said.

"It will hurt your foot if you do that again, though," Simon said.

"So, what now?" Jayne said. "That's it then, isn't it?"

"I don't know," Mal said. "I'm thinkin'."

Zoe cleared her throat. "Captain, you know Jonas better than any of us. How likely is he to hold this against us?"

"Worried about us having another enemy?"

"I'm running out of space on the piece of paper where I keep their names written down, sir."

"Yeah. Preacher, how did this happen?"

"I have no idea, Captain," said Book. "I double-checked the numbers. We had the right slot number in the warehouse. The only way this happens is if the warehouse workers put the crates in the wrong slots themselves."

And with that, a silence settled over the crew as they realized what had happened.

"Well, this is new," said Jayne. "Never stolen the wrong goods before."

"Yeah, this is definitely a wrinkle we haven't tried before," said Mal. "All right, I'm open to suggestions."

"Suggestions for what?" It was Wash, who had just come down from the bridge. "Everyone's looking awfully glum here."

"We stole the wrong goods, honey," Zoe said.

"Now there's something we haven't done before!" Wash said. "Now what?"

"See?" Mal said. "Took him all of two sentences to get up to speed on this."

"What do we do?" Kaylee asked. "Captain?"

"Maybe the children want to play as farmers," River offered. "They can grow their own vegetables and work the soil."

"River," Book said, "the orphanage is in the middle of a city that's a hundred miles in diameter. There's no soil except what's in the decorative flower pots."

"That sounds depressing," River said. "Children need space."

"Well, we can't solve every problem at once," Zoe said. "Captain, Jonas is gonna know that he can't open the crate without breaching the shelf-life of the goods that he thinks are in there."

"I was thinking the same thing," Mal said. "If that's the case, then Jonas has no idea that he's got a crate full of toys on his ship. Which means that he's on his way to Whitefall. He won't know anything is wrong until Patience does. Of course, knowing Patience, she'll have already tried to shoot him."

"So that's it then," said Jayne. "We ain't gotta do a gorram thing. Let them shoot each other and then we can sell this stuff to whoever takes over for Patience. Make back our coin, and then some."

Mal considered this. After a moment, Shepherd Book stepped forward.

"Captain, I know that your ship is not a democracy, but I must voice my opposition to what Jayne has suggested."

"Yeah, I thought you might," Mal said. "Wash, go get us on a course for Whitefall. Get us there fast. We want to get there before the shooting starts."

"You got it," Wash said as he headed back up the stairs. "A pilot's job is never done! Until he lands, then he's done until the next job...."

"Zoe," Mal said, "I'm gonna need your help figurin' out how to approach this one. We've got to make a switch without both Jonas and Patience deciding that I'm cheating them."

"Sounds like a challenge," Zoe said.

"Why I'm givin' it to you."

"Wait a minute!" Jayne said. "We're gonna try to get the toys back? Anybody else think that's crazy?"

Simon shrugged. "I think it's kind of shiny," he said. Kaylee grinned at him.

"Doc, I'm gonna do somethin' hurtful to you someday soon," Jayne said. "Mal, how can you even consider this?"

Mal looked at Shepherd Book. "I took a job," he said. "And even though the job's starting to bring some trouble, truth is, that's what jobs do. And there ain't a job in the 'Verse that I'm like to walk away from once I take it."

Jayne shook his head. "I can't ruttin' believe this."

"Hey, look at the bright side," Mal said. "We're goin' to Whitefall to try and do business with Patience."

"Probably be some shooting," Zoe added.

Jayne laughed harshly. "Day's gonna come when you're not gonna be able to buy me off by lettin' me shoot some folk," he said.

Mal considered that. "Well, that's gonna be an interesting day. Come on, Zoe. We need to brainstorm."

***

It took them the better part of a day to get to Whitefall, which was a pretty miserable and dusty rock way out on the fringes. Malcolm Reynolds didn't much like this world; it was run by a crusty woman named Patience who didn't tend to practice any, and who had a nasty habit of trying to shoot him. She'd succeeded once, but the last time, Mal had got the better of her. He'd done the job, and despite some unkind words as regarding his character, he'd gotten paid. But this one was going to be tricky, no doubt about that.

"OK, Mal, we're here," Wash said as Whitefall loomed before the ship. "Now what?"

"Well, Patience is a woman of habit," Mal said. "So I'm thinkin' she'll want to meet with Jonas in that same spot she chose to meet us in last time we were here. Good spot for an ambush. So we'll go there and hope we're in time to avoid some fisticuffs and general tomfoolery."

Zoe looked at Mal. "'Tomfoolery', sir?"

"What? You know I like to dust off archaic words now and then."

"Part of what makes you charming, sir."

"Thanks for sayin'. Now, if I'm Patience, I'm puttin' two snipers in the hills around that meeting spot, after we took care of the one she ahd there last time. And Jonas is gonna have his own sniper up there somewhere too. So Jayne and the Shepherd will take care of the snipers for us, and then we walk in and make everybody happy."

"Aren't we doin' an awful lot of counting on the Shepherd to shoot people on this job?" Zoe asked.

"Probably, but that book of his is nonspecific as regards kneecaps and elbows, if I remember right. Wash, same landing spot as before."

"Sure thing, Mal," Wash said. "And I've got Jonas's ship on the scanner now. They're landing as we speak, two hilltops over. Looks like we got here in time."

"It's a Christmas miracle, Captain," Zoe said.

Mal rolled his eyes. "Now don't you start," he said. "Let's go get ready. Wash, put her down."

"Sure thing, Captain," Wash said.

Mal and Zoe walked down to the hold, where Jayne and Shepherd Book were waiting.

"Captain," Book began, "I feel I should apologize for having gotten you into this business."

"Did it with my eyes open," Mal said. "But if you're volunteering for a month of mess duty, I don't think I'll hear any objections from the rest of the crew." He glanced around at Kaylee, Simon, River, and Inara, who all just stood there placidly. "And a month it is! All right, Zoe and me have come up with what we think is a nicely nuanced plan."

Jayne grunted. "Book and I take out the snipers and cover you while you and Zoe try to talk some sense into Patience and Jonas?"

"Yeah, that's about it."

"We gotta start comin' up with plans that don't have quite as much 'if' in 'em," Jayne grumbled.

"Every time I ask you for input, your first words are 'I shoot them'."

"Yeah. Not a lot of 'if' when the other guy's got bullets in him."

"OK. Get that crate ready. And Kaylee, keep the engines warm. We may need to make a fast break for it."

"Be easier if you'd let me replace that drive inducer that I keep warning you about," Kaylee said.

"New year's comin'," said Mal.

***

The scene that confronted Mal and Zoe when they peered over the edge of the knoll above Patience's rendezvous spot was about what Mal expected: Patience sat atop her horse, while her men had Jonas at gunpoint, and Jonas's men had Patience's men at gunpoint. Everybody had everybody else at gunpoint.

"Whole lot of gunpoint," Mal muttered.

"Not too late to find a desk job, Captain," Zoe replied.

"More of us than there are of you, Jonas," Patience said. "And I've got a sniper aimin' at you right now. You're not walkin' away."

"I got a man took out your sniper," Jonas replied. "I'm not stupid, Patience. And my men are better shots than yours. Now how about you toss me the coin and we'll be on our way?"

"All I see here is a big crate," Patience said. "You might as well open her up and let us see the goods."

"Suits me fine," said Jonas. "Randy? Open it."

Keeping his hands visible at all times, Randy popped open the crate and swung it open. "Uh, Captain?" he said.

"This some kind of joke, Jonas?" Patience asked. "That don't look like seed and fertilizer to me."

"What?" Jonas turned to Randy. "What is she gorram talking about?"

"This crate, sir," Randy said. "It's full of...toys."

"Toys?"

"Toys, sir."

"Toys?!"

"This some kind of joke, Jonas?" Patience sounded annoyed. "So you're gonna dump fake goods on me after you have my money?"

Jonas looked uncomfortable.

"Do we go down now?" Zoe asked.

"Shhhh," Mal said. "Things haven't gone south enough yet."

"Patience," Jonas said. "Uhhhh...."

"I'd like to hear an explanation," Patience said. "Before I shoot you myself." She pulled out her pistol.

"Malcolm Reynolds cheated me!" Jonas said.

"Reynolds?" Patience's eyebrows went up. "What's he got to do with this?"

"Funny you should ask!" Mal called out as he rose up and sauntered over the knoll, his pistol in his hand but not aimed at anything. Zoe came behind him, her shotgun in her hand as well.

"Reynolds!" shouted both Patience and Jonas at the same time. Both also pointed their pistols at him, at the same time.

"Well there we go," Mal said. "Two criminals suddenly united in purpose. Warms the heart, eh, Zoe?"

"Sure does, sir."

"Mal, I'll shoot you where you stand," Patience said.

"And I'll shoot you again before you hit the ground," Jonas said.

"Sure," Mal said. "But then you wouldn't hear the explanation and my counter-proposal."

"Explanation?" Jonas roared. "You switched the crates and took the good stuff! What were you going to do, let me get shot and then sell Patience the real goods?"

Mal thought. "Huh. Zoe, that might have worked."

"Surprised you didn't think of it, sir."

"I gotta be goin' soft in my old age."

"Happens to the best of us, sir."

"Jonas, we didn't switch a gorram thing. The warehouse workers screwed up. Those crates were in the wrong spots. We took what we thought was our crate, but it was really yours. And you got ours, thinkin' it was really yours. Kind of an irony, ain't it?"

Patience rolled her eyes. "Right now I'm wondering which of you is the less competent one," she said.

"Well, that would be him," Mal said. "No offense, Jonas, but at least we discovered the problem and we're here to make it right. Now here's our proposal. We take our crate and go on our way. You get your crate, which we stashed about a mile away from here. Then you two finish your business and everybody goes away happy. Or we go away happy and you shoot each other. Whatever you prefer."

"Or I just take all the goods and keep my coin," Patience said. "Mal, you're still not very bright. Neither are you, Jonas. You may have taken out one of my snipers, but I put two up there."

"Yeah, Patience," Mal said. "As to that, we took out Jonas's sniper who took out your sniper. And then we took out your other sniper. So now the only two snipers up there are mine. And they're good, believe me. Aren't they, Zoe?"

"The best, sir."

"Yup. So, Jonas, we'll take this crate now. Yours is a mile that way." He pointed. "No reason for anybody to get shot."

"You takin' my hauler too, Mal?"

Mal shrugged. "I suppose we can leave it behind once we get our goods back on my ship. As a good-will gesture and all."

"Or we can come with you and make sure we get it back," Jonas said.

Mal shrugged. "Or that," he conceded. "We just want our goods."

"A bunch of toys?" Jonas shook his head. "What are you up to, Reynolds?"

"I'm doin' a job," Mal said. "Why does everybody keep asking me that?" He turned to Patience. "Give him the coin, Patience, and go get your box and keep running your little world. Nobody needs to get shot here. It's Christmas."

Patience blinked. "It's what?"

"Never mind. Just get out of here."

Patience sighed. "Every time you show up on this world I end up losing money," Patience said as she tossed a sack of coin to Jonas. "That crate ain't there and I'm puttin' a bounty on you, Mal."

"Yeah, well, I've got a track record here, Patience," Mal said. "I get you the goods and then I get paid. The way a transaction's supposed to be. You're the one likes shootin' people and tryin' to get out of paying, so I'd just as soon you rode off with your men and stopped disparaging me."

Patience laughed. "Fine, Mal, have it your way. But if you don't mind some advice, you need to stop expecting transactions to run the way they're supposed to. That's why you're still flying around in a rustbucket." She gestured to her men, who stood down, and then they rode off.

"She only says that because she can't fly in a ship for ten minutes without puking," Zoe said.

"Yeah, well, let's get this stuff back to Serenity. We've still got a job to do. Jonas, if you would?"

Jonas sighed. "You heard him, men. Let's go. Least we can with him saving our bacon on this one."

Jonas's men grumbled but obeyed. Mal spoke into the mouthpiece on the wire he wore under his coat. "Jayne? Preacher? You can come down now. We're all good here."

"How'd you know where to find us, anyway?" Jonas asked.

"Dealt with Patience before," Mal replied. "Let's move."

"Did you really leave her goods a mile away?"

"Yup."

Jonas shook his head. "You could've kept them, sold them someplace else. Made double profit."

"Thought of that," Mal said. "But I need to be able to do business. No need to make an enemy out of Patience until I have to."

They moved the crate of toys back to Serenity, whereupon Jonas ordered his men to start back to their own ship. Mal ordered his crew to get the ship ready for departure, and then he went outside with Jonas.

"Well, Mal," Jonas said, "it was a pleasure, as always. Now, if that's all--"

"Not quite," Mal said. "I'll be taking the coin that Patience gave you."

Jonas blinked. "What?"

"You heard me," Mal said. "You took coin from me that wasn't yours to take. And despite that, I still came here and saved your gorram hide. Way I see it, you owe me. Let's square up right now. Get it over with."

Jonas stared at him. Mal sighed.

"Jonas, you really want to see what a good draw I am? And what a good shot?"

Jonas sighed and pulled the bag of coin from his jacket pocket and flipped it to Mal. "Every time I wonder how it is you stay in business, you pull something like this out of your hat."

"Not much of a secret," Mal said. "I don't set my sights too high. I just keep flyin'."

"Yeah. Well, do me a favor and don't tell anyone you took my coin from me."

"As far as I'm concerned, it was a payment offered in good will."

Jonas nodded. "Yeah, call it that. But stay away from me for a while, would you?" He lit a cigar and went to join his men. Mal turned and went aboard the ship.

"OK, Wash, let's fly. We need to be in Haven's air within twelve hours."

"We can just make it," Wash replied over the loudspeaker.

Serenity lifted off.

***

Eleven and one half hours later, they were flying toward Haven. Mal came up to the bridge, where Wash was looking at a scanner.

"So?" Mal asked. "What's the new problem?"

Wash blinked. "I didn't call you!"

"I know, but we're due for the next problem with this job. What is it?"

Wash pointed to the scanner. "Alliance ship in orbit. They haven't scanned us yet, and maybe they won't, but if they do--"

"They might board us," Mal said. "Then again, they might not. They're in stationary orbit?"

"Uh-huh," Wash said. "Right above the part of town where our Shepherd's orphanage is."

Mal muttered several curses in Chinese.

"That's what I said," Wash replied.

"All right. Let me think." Mal thought. And then he pressed the intercom button. "Would everybody please report to the hold? You too, Inara. I need everybody."

***

The plan was this: Mal, Zoe, and Wash would stay aboard Serenity, in stationary orbit on the other side of the planet. They would load all of the toys onto Inara's shuttle – individually, because the shuttle wasn't big enough for something the size of that crate – and then Inara would fly down to the orphanage in the middle of the night, when Shepherd Book assured them no one would notice something like a shuttle landing on the roof. Then, Jayne, Book, Simon, Kaylee, and River would take each toy individually to a child.

It wasn't one of Mal's most thought-out plans, but it was the best he could come up with on fairly short notice. Mal thought it was a decent enough plan, until Zoe said "Nice plan, sir," which was what she usually said when she thought his plans were scenarios for utter disaster. But that was the plan, and so it was that on the night before Christmas, when all through the orphanage not a child was stirring, a shuttlecraft flown by a registered Companion came down to land on the roof.

"All right, we're here," Jayne said as he grabbed an armful of toys. "Let's get this ruttin' job over with."

"Said with the true spirit of the day," Shepherd Book said. "All right, everyone follow me. And keep quiet. The whole place is asleep."

"They always knew when I was sleeping," River said. "They knew when I was awake."

"She's gonna be all right, isn't she?" Jayne asked.

"Sure," Simon said. "Isn't she always?"

Jayne shook his head as Shepherd Book led them across the roof and into the orphanage via the roof access door, which Book lockpicked open in seconds.

"Real great security here," Jayne remarked.

"It's an orphanage," Book said. "One where everybody knows there's nothing worth stealing."

They went downstairs, where they found themselves in a very large room, with bunk beds running down each side, and a child sleeping in each bed.

"All right, there are four more rooms like this," Book whispered. "Every child gets a toy."

"Right," Jayne said, and he ran off and started randomly sticking a toy on each bed.

"Jayne!" Kaylee protested. "You can't do it like that! You can't give a boy a doll!"

"Why not?" Jayne asked. "They don't like it they can trade."

"Just do it right," Kaylee said.

"What kind of toys did he play with?" Simon muttered.

In this way they went through the room, distributing a toy to each child. Somehow, miraculously, they got through all of the rooms without waking a single child, giving a toy to each one, one toy to each of three hundred children.

Except the last bed, which, when Jayne approached it, he discovered was empty. No child here, just rumpled sheets. Kid probably got up to go to the bathroom, or get a drink of water. "Huh," Jayne thought. He looked at the toy in his hand – a teddy bear – and decided that he rather liked it. He'd always wanted one when he was a kid, and never got one. And this one was real nice, with a bow around its neck and everything. So there was a toy left over. So what? Kid shoulda been there in bed. Kid's loss. He turned and headed back for the ship.

Meanwhile, River was taking her time over each gift, gently laying it on each bed, and whispering a rhyme over each child. What made it take even longer was that she was inventing each rhyme off the top of her head. Simon wondered if he should intercede, but since she was speaking in verse about things that weren't somehow grimly dark or eerily foreboding, he thought it was best to just let her go.

Also meanwhile, Kaylee found herself wondering if it was really fair to try to pigeonhole these kids into girl toys and boy toys. After all, her toys had been wrenches and hammers and drivers and blast drills and parts from a hundred different ship engines, and look how she'd turned out! Nothin' to be ashamed of. It was a fine life, even if once in a while she wanted something a little more than engine parts and dirty overalls.

Also meanwhile, Inara saw that the orphanage's one lone security guard had had his curiosity piqued by some strange noises, and he came shuffling up the stairs to find a shuttle sitting on his roof. He was about to blow an alarm whistle when she came down and silenced him with a look and a flash of leg. It always worked, especially with young men like this. Barely old enough to grow a beard. Staring at her as though he'd just seen an angel. Sad world, Haven, she thought. No wonder Companions almost never come here.

"Is there a girl you like?" she asked him.

He managed to nod.

She removed a ruby brooch from her robe and handed it to him. He gulped.

"Give this to her," she said. "And say nothing of me tonight."

He managed to nod, again. A major accomplishment, that. And so she sent him on his way, knowing that this would be their little secret, forever. Inara could keep secrets, and what would he say? Would he talk of the beautiful woman in the spaceship on his roof? No. Of course not. She smiled.

Finally meanwhile, Shepherd Book went all the way to the lowest level of the orphanage, where the oldest kids were. These kids were in the worst shape, the ones most likely to end up in something a bit worst than Mal's line of work, the ones most likely to end up on the wrong end of someone's gun or floating dead through the Black. He had little hope that a toy, just one toy, would be enough to budge more than maybe one or two of them off the trajectory their lives had them on, but lots of miracles had started from smaller stuff than a single toy. He laid each one on a bed, and tried not to linger too much over the one particular bed, the one over there on the left. On his way back up to the roof, he paused at the door to the headmaster's apartment. He wondered if he might say hello, under other circumstances. Or if he might rather go in there with a gun instead of a bible. He lingered there only a moment and then returned to the roof.

"Are we all here?"

"We're just waiting on Jayne," said Simon.

"Where is he?!"

At that moment, Jayne was muttering, "Where's the gorram stairs around here?" He'd gotten lost. It was a bigger orphanage than he'd though, and now he had no idea how to get back up to the roof. But he had to get up there, fast; the night was getting old and people would be getting up soon. He rushed around, all over the place, looking behind every door, until he found the stairs up. "'Bout time," he said. And then he stopped, because there was an eight-year-old girl looking at him.

"Uhhh...hi there," he said. "You should be in bed, youngster."

"I couldn't sleep," said the girl. "I have bad dreams. I wanted a drink of water."

"Well, you got your drink, so back to bed."

"You're not from here," the girl said. "Are you here to steal things?"

"No," Jayne said. "Not this time, anyway. Maybe tomorrow, haven't figured out the next job yet. Don't know. Gotta keep moving." But he didn't move. That girl just stood there, looking at him. All big-eyed, with her tangled hair and bedrobe that wasn't filthy but had seen better days anyway.... "I think your eyes are stuck," he said. "I gotta go."

"Bye," she said. And she stood there watching as he went halfway up the stairs, where he stopped.

"Aww, gorram it," he said as he turned back and came back down. "This is for you." He handed her the teddy bear. "Hold onto it tight when you sleep. Might help with them dreams. I got a preacher friend who says this is Christmas, so...have a ruttin' happy Christmas." And then he went up the stairs, practically running up them, to get away from the girl with the big eyes.

"That all the toys?" he asked when he got on board the shuttle.

"There were about twenty or so left over," said Simon. "I left those in a playroom."

"We're all ready, right?" Inara called back.

"We're all here!" Book said. "Close her up and let's go home."

Inara guided the little shuttle back into the air, and up into the sky toward the planet's other side, where Serenity lay in orbit.

"What took you so long, Jayne?" Kaylee asked.

"Got lost," Jayne said. "And...there was a little girl. Don't worry, I gave her a toy."

River pointed at his shirt, his red shirt. "A man with a beard wearing red came in the night to give her a present," she said. "Just like the old stories!"

Jayne stared at her. "What is she ruttin' talkin' about?"

"Nothing," said Book.

When they arrived on Serenity, Mal was there, waiting.

"Nice work," he said.

"Thank you, Captain," said Shepherd Book. "I appreciate it."

"I did a job," Mal said. "Soon as that tree gets dry and starts dropping those sharp needles all over my mess--"

"I'll have it down, sir."

Mal nodded and headed for his bunk. "Nice work, everyone," he called out. "Zoe, wake me when we get to Persephone."

***

A few weeks later they'd done another job, and they all had a little extra money. Not a lot, but some. So they all decided to exchange gifts. Mal wasn't sure whose idea it was, or if it even was anyone's idea, but it seemed to happen anyway.

Zoe gave her dear husband Wash that stegosaurus figurine he'd wanted. Wash gave his beloved wife Zoe a brand new leather vest.

Shepherd Book gave Simon an old copy of a very old anatomy book, a 'classic text' on the subject, from Old Earth. Simon gave River a rose made out of glass, with gold leaf on the petals; she commented on the fact that it had thorns. River gave the Shepherd a new Bible, which she promised him she would leave 'uncorrected'.

Kaylee gave Jayne a new carrying case for Vera, his favorite gun; Jayne gave Inara a robe that she knew she would look stunning in but would never ever ever wear in front of Jayne. And Inara gave Kaylee a new engine stabilizer and one of her own robes.

And Mal? He got what he always wanted. He got to keep flying.

The End
Merry Ruttin' Christmas
and a Happy Gorram New Year!!!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

I do not believe that any Bible verse has ever, or shall ever, be given a finer reading than this one, delivered by a child actor named Christopher Shea, who was only seven years old when he did the voice of Linus Van Pelt in A Charlie Brown Christmas.



I'm saddened to learn that Mr. Shea died in 2010, but I truly believe that his voice work as Linus in several of the earliest Peanuts specials is as iconic as anything any actor has ever done.

And with that, we arrive, at last, at Christmas itself. May all of you enjoy the most blessed of Christmases! (The final act of Shiny in the Black: A "Firefly" Christmas will appear sometime later today.)

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Walter Cronkite and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir tell the story of the 1914 impromptu Christmas truce between British and German troops on a cold battlefield in World War I. This is one of the saddest, most remarkable tales of our species.

Shiny in the Black: A "Firefly" Christmas (part three)

Continuing my fanfic exercise in what a Christmas-themed episode of Firefly might have been like.
part one
part two
"Weapons on the ground!" the voice shouted. "Now!"

"Do it," Mal said. He shot a look at Jayne, whose expression of disgust tended to be indistinguishable from his expression of being about to lose his temper. Slowly, Mal, Zoe and Jayne all laid their guns on the floor.

"Put that package on the floor too, preacher," said the voice.

Book put the crate down.

"All right, face the crates."

They complied.

"Put your hands on your head."

They complied.

"Stand on your left feet and recite the first stanza the Alliance anthem!"

Mal glanced at Zoe. "Uh, what?"

Now the voice burst out in laughter. "All right, turn 'em off," he said. The floodlights all shut off, and the light returned to the dim of the warehouse overhead lamps. Mal turned toward the source of the voice to see a stocky man dressed in old army fatigues approaching. The man was bald except for long, stringy hairs that hung from the back of his head; he had a thick mustache and three days' growth of beard. He gave Mal a gap-toothed grin as he put his hands on his hips.

"Ahh, Mal, what am I gonna do with you?"

Mal and the others glanced around at the 'lawmen', and saw that they weren't lawmen at all. They were a motley bunch of thieves. Not unlike themselves.

"Jonas," Mal said. "Fancy meeting you here. I never figured you to be on Ariel. Kind of a rich world for your tastes, isn't it?"

"Gotta go where the money is, my boy," the man named Jonas said as he lit a cigar and took a few puffs. "'Sides, ain't planning on being here long. I'm guessing you weren't either."

"Not really," Mal agreed. "Can we put our hands down? I don't tend to find this posture conducive to friendly chat."

"Ain't so sure we're being friendly," Jonas said. "But sure, let your hands down. Don't make a move toward those weapons, though."

"Of course not," said Mal. "After all, we're just bein' friendly."

"I suppose we are," Jonas replied as Mal and his people lowered their hands. "So, Mal, what are you doing here?"

"Same as you," Mal said. "Doin' a job."

"And what would be the nature of that job?"

"Well, we're purchasing the contents of this crate right here and going with them to a...client on Haven. Easy enough."

"Sounds easy. Haven's a piss-poor world...wait, did you say you were purchasing the goods?"

Mal shrugged. "Yeah, we're doin' it the honest way this time. Wanted to see what that was like."

"Really. Honest. Dumpin' a box of coin here and taking the box? That's a new version of honest. Sounds to me like you've found a way of stealin' that ends up costin' you money."

"Yeah," Mal said, shooting a look at Shepherd Book, "I guess we didn't really work all the kinks out."

"Well, Mal, I can't let you have this box. See, we need it, too. I'm doing a job, myself, and there's a cantankerous old woman out on Whitefall that could use some of what's in that box."

"Whitefall?" Mal laughed. "You're planning on doing business with Patience?"

"Sure. Why not?"

"Oh, no reason," Mal said. "Just make sure you plan for her to try to shoot you."

"Nah," Jonas said. "Patience and me go way back. I was the one who told her that she should shoot you if she got the chance."

"Well that was nice of you," Mal said. "She got the chance. Twice. I'm still here, still flyin'. Counts for somethin'."

"Yeah, I guess it does. But I can't let you take this box, coin or no. You see, Mal--"

"Hey, Captain!" It was one of Jonas's men. Jonas rolled his eyes.

"What is it, Randy? I'm trying to be threatening here, and you're interrupting."

"I know, Cap, but this ain't the box we're here for."

"What?"

"Look!" The wiry man named Randy held out a PDA for Jonas to look at. "See, that's the number of the box we want. It's the next one over. That one."

"Really?"

"Yeah. That one's got the farming seed and fertilizer in it. See, the one we want is in slot number 29-94-77. This slot is number 29-94-75."

"Oh," said Jonas.

"Well, this changes things a bit, doesn't it?" Mal said.

"I think it does, Captain," said Zoe.

"You see, Jonas, there's no need to make this deal confrontational. Instead of goin' that way, we can go another. We're not even here for the same crate. We'll take what we want, you'll take what you want, and everybody's happy."

"Seriously, Mal? You're after this crate? What's in it?"

"I don't think that really matters," said Mal. "Haven's not a big farming world, so you can bet I'm not looking for farming seed and fertilizer. Let's just take what we all want and be done with it."

Jonas kept his gun aimed at Mal as he considered things. Then he nodded at the Shepherd.

"Sure, Mal, we can do that. But I want the coin, too."

Mal shrugged. "Give it to him, Preacher," he said.

"Really?" asked Book.

"Yeah, really," Mal said. "Plan was to leave the coin here anyway. But if you're gonna take the coin, least you could do is have your boys load our crate onto our hauler for us."

"I suppose I could do that," Jonas said. His men grumbled, but he hissed them quiet. "A friendly gesture, right?"

"Yeah," Mal said. "If we promise not to shoot you, can we pick up our guns now?"

"Sure," Jonas said. "But we'll still be coverin' you until this is done."

"I figured," Mal replied as he picked up his pistol. The others followed suit.

"How'd you get in here, anyway?" Jonas asked.

"Door was open."

"Well, I suppose you can thank me for that," Jonas replied. "Paid the guards to leave it open and make themselves scarce. All right, boys, you heard the man. Let's get these boxes loaded! Remember, this one here goes with them, that one down there goes with us. With the Shepherd's coin."

Book handed the box of coin to one of Jonas's men, four of whom turned to the work of loading both crates while Jonas and Randy kept their pistols aimed at Mal and his people.

"Somethin' here ain't right," Jayne said. "We're gonna get screwed on this deal."

"Well, Jayne, the screwing was built into the deal, so at least we're not surprised by it." Mal shook his head. "This is a weird damn job, though."

"Nah," Jayne replied. "There's still some way this is gonna go south. You watch. Always happens to us."

Mal rolled his eyes. "Not all our jobs end in disaster," he said.

"Name one," Jayne said.

"Well, there was--"

"You ended up drunk and with a con-woman pretending to be your wife."

"Yeah, but it was good up to then."

After about ten minutes, they were all outside and both crates were loaded onto their respective haulers.

"Well, Mal," said Jonas, "I'd prefer if you'd drive off first. And try to stay out of my way in the future."

"Pleasure doin' business as always, Jonas," Mal said. "But I wouldn't mind pointin' out that just because we were in the same place, doesn't mean I was in your way."

"Even so. I don't want to get your luck on me, Reynolds. You have a history of taking on work that doesn't leave you much of a profit. One day you're gonna realize that 'Just keep flying' isn't a great strategy for life."

"Thanks for the wisdom, Jonas. Got some for you, too."

"Yeah? What's that?"

"Patience is gonna try to shoot you."

Jonas grinned. "Let her try." He gestured with his pistol, sending Mal and his people off.

"I'm tellin' you, this is gonna be a bad deal for everybody," Jayne said as they neared Serenity.

"Calm down, Jayne. Your opinion is noted."

Mal drove the hauler back onto the ship's cargo hold, and Kaylee closed the hatch behind them. Simon and River were there waiting; Wash was on the bridge, and he called down on the intercom.

"Captain?" Wash said. "I'm ready to lift."

"What are you waiting for!" Mal responded. The ship shifted beneath their feet as the engines roared and Serenity lifted off. Book and Jayne were offloading the crate from the hauler and securing it.

"You see, everybody?" Mal said as he took off his overcoat and tossed it at the foot of the stairs. "Nice, simple job. No big worries, no big fuss. We're out some coin, sure, but we've got a big crate full of nice, shiny toys that will make all the children in an orphanage on Haven happy."

"Everything went all right?" said Simon. "No hiccups?"

"One little hiccup," Mal said. "But it didn't amount to much."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that, Captain," said Shepherd Book.

"What?"

"Hey Mal," Jayne said. "We got a problem."

Mal glanced at Zoe. They walked aft, to where Book and Jayne were both staring at the crate, which Book had opened. Zoe took one look and let out a string of expletives in Chinese. Mal did the same, only with a string of completely different expletives in Chinese.

The crate was full of farm seed and fertilizer. They had the wrong crate.

End Part Three
Conclusion

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

No video this time, just the wonderful genius of Randall Munroe and xkcd.



Of course, with typical xkcd brilliance, you must click to the original and read the mouseover text. What made me happy about this comic is that, as a philosophy major in college, I got the joke!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Vintage cartoons are the order of the day:

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

If you could pick a single person in the entire world to gift with one perfect present, who is the person and what is the present?

Shiny in the Black: A "Firefly" Christmas (part two)

Continuing my fanfic exercise in what a Christmas-themed episode of Firefly might have been like.
part one

Wash put Serenity down on the landing pad, nice and gentle. So nice and gentle that Zoe complimented him on it.

"You're getting' more gentle all the time, honey," Zoe said. "You have such a gift for handling sensitive equipment."

"Thanks for sayin' so, my love," Wash replied. "But I could always use more practice--"

"All right, enough of that, you two." Mal came up onto the bridge, fully dressed in his usual brown shirt, brown pants, brown belt, brown holster, brown boots, and probably brown socks too, if one could see them underneath all of that. "Wash, you keep the ship warmed and ready to lift if some part of this job goes south. Zoe, you're coming along."

"I figured, sir."

"Captain," Wash said, "is it really necessary to have contingency plans for this job? We're actually conducting an honest transaction for once."

"Yeah," Mal said. "For once. We don't get a whole lot of practice with this kind of thing, so who knows what might go wrong. You and Kaylee keep the ship ready. River and the Doc will keep you company. Zoe, you'll be with Jayne, the Shepherd, and me."

"What's Inara doing?"

"Well, I think she's still on her shuttle, writing long entries in her diary about how much she hates me right now."

Zoe knew what that meant. "You told her no clients."

"We ain't got time. Why am I always the bad guy on this?"

"Oh, I couldn't begin to venture a guess, Captain," Zoe said. "Let's go."

Mal and Zoe began to exit the bridge.

"Zoe?" Wash called out.

"Yes, love?"

"You're going to buy toys," Wash said. "I could use a new stegosaurus for the collection."

"I'll see what I can do."

The Captain and Zoe left then, and Wash reached into the small footlocker next to his seat and pulled out a handful of his dinosaur figurines.

In the cargo hold, Shepherd Book and Jayne had the cargo hauler ready to go.

"Jayne," Book said, "do you really need that many guns?"

"Preacher, are you carryin' that Bible of yours right now?"

"Good point."

They lifted a crate containing coin up onto the back of the hauler as Mal and Zoe arrived and descended the criss-crossing stairs down to their level.

"Awful lot of coin to be givin' up," Mal said.

"A purchase of good will is never a bad purchase," said Book.

"You get that from that Bible of yours?"

"No, it just came to me," Book replied. "A preacher can't live on the words of one book alone."

"All right," Mal said. "Let's go. Kaylee, open her up."

"Be careful, Captain," Kaylee said as she opened the ship's cargo door and lowered the ramp. Mal, Jayne, Zoe and Book drove off in the hauler. Then Kaylee closed the ship back up. She turned away from the control and nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw that River was standing there, unblinking, just inches away.

"River! You scared me!"

"Would you like me to teach you a song?" River asked.

Kaylee blinked. "Uhhh...sure, honey. I'd love to learn a song."

"It goes like this. 'On the first day of Christmas, the operatives brought to me....'"

"Uh, River?" Kaylee interrupted. "Is this one of those creepy songs you learned while you were captive at...that place?"

"Yes," River said. "I guess I should learn some new songs myself."

"Yeah," Kaylee said. "That would be great."

***

Mal drove the hauler through a warehouse district of Ariel's main city. Unlike the shiny, wealthy area they had visited a few months earlier – to steal some medicine – this area was much darker and dingier. Every planet, no matter how rich, had parts like this, Mal had long since learned. No one was rich enough to banish dirt and grime forever.

"You know where this warehouse is, right, Book?" Mal asked.

"I've got the address right here," Book said, holding up an electronic data organizer. "And the crate number of the merchandise we're getting. It'll be in and out."

Jayne growled. "Every time one of you people says we'll be in and out, I go through half my ammo. I haven't had an in and out job since--"

"Jayne, I'm sure that's fascinating," Mal cut in. "But just in case it ain't, why don't you hold it to yourself?"

"Sure, Mal," Jayne said. "I'll just sit here and be quiet as usual while you and Zoe tell each other the same stories over and over again. Hey, can I hear that one about that time you both got your asses kicked by the Alliance? I love that one."

"Captain," Mal said, pointing to himself. "First mate," he said, pointing to Zoe. "Gun for hire." He pointed to Jayne.

"Thank you for clearing us up on the chain of command, Captain," said Shepherd Book. "But we appear to have reached the warehouse."

"All right." Mal brought the hauler to a stop near an entrance. "Standard procedure. Zoe, you'll get us in. Then, Jayne, you're in first, followed by me, then the Shepherd, and Zoe, you bring up the rear. We're going to try and find this crate, get it, and be done with it before anyone knows were here."

"In and out, Captain?" Zoe said.

"In and out," Mal agreed.

"Not usually our thing," Zoe said as she walked to the door.

"See, Mal?" Jayne said. "This is what I'm talkin' about."

"Well Jayne, that's six hours since I last regretted hirin' you." Mal smiled. "I think that's a new record for you, ain't it? Hey Zoe, you got that door open yet?"

"Think so, sir," Zoe said as she pressed a button that made the large bay door swing open. "Pretty easy, too."

"Huh," said Mal.

"Anybody else thinkin' that was a little too easy?" Jayne put in.

Mal shrugged. "Well, we've got guns, so if we get into some local color, we can make our way out."

"There might be armed guards inside," Book pointed out.

"Cold feet, Shepherd?" Mal said. "This was your idea. But we're here, and I'm not in the habit of runnin' away at the first sign of something unexpected, especially if that unexpected thing is something that actually makes my life a little easier. Like an unlocked door. Shepherd, grab the coin. Jayne?"

Book picked up the crate of coin, and Jayne came forward and led them inside.

The warehouse was, pretty much, like every other warehouse in the 'Verse. There's only so much you can do, really, to dress up hundreds of stacks of thousands of cargo crates in an enormous, cavernous room.

"Well, would you look at that," Jayne said. "A warehouse. We don't see these too often."

"Sure, Jayne."

"I mean, yeah, we go into our share of storehouses, stockpiles, armories...there was that one depository we knocked over that one time...and before I joined you people, there was that distribution center job...but not a lot of warehouses."

"Jayne," Mal said, "are you trying to get on my gorram nerves?"

"Just commentin' on the unique nature of this job, Mal."

"Shut it, Jayne," Zoe said. "Preacher, you got the crate number?"

Book consulted a slip of paper. "It's 29-94-75."

Mal looked at the manifest markings emblazoned on the side of several nearby crates, and determined which way they needed to go. "This way," he said, and with Jayne in the lead and Zoe in the rear, they made their way down the corridor created by line upon line of stacked crates.

It didn't take long to find it. The crate was pretty large, taller than Mal by about two feet, and about eight feet long and six feet across. Mal shone his flashlight on the crate and read the number. "This is it," he said. "29-94-75. No other markings."

"There wouldn't be," Book said. "The number is all they need."

"Yeah, I know how shipping works," Mal said. "All right, here it is. Now we just gotta get it out of here."

"That crate's a little big for me to haul out on my back," Jayne said. "Of all the gorram--"

Zoe cleared her throat. "I think that's the solution to our problem, Captain," she said. She pointed to an open area about thirty feet away, where two forklifts stood silent.

"There it is, then," Mal said. "Easy. Jayne, you'll drive the lift. We'll get the goods back out to our hauler, get back to the ship, before anyone knows we were here. No problem. See, I told you! Easy job."

At that moment six floodlights turned on, three from each side, all trained on Mal and his crew.

"Malcolm Reynolds!" a voice boomed out from the darkness behind the floodlights. "Malcolm Reynolds, you are bound by law to stand down."

Jayne muttered something in Chinese.

"In and out, right, Captain?" Zoe said.

All Mal could do was raise his hands and nod for the others to do the same.

End Part Two
Part Three

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

As a shout-out to one of my very favorite people in all Blogistan, Sheila O'Malley, here is the great Mr. Presley.



(It suddenly occurs to me that, with the constant playing of Christmas music this time of year, I almost never hear this song. If it's Elvis at Christmas, it's "Blue Christmas". Which isn't a bad thing in itself, but Ye Gods, I hate it when artists with wonderful bodies of work get reduced by pop culture to just one or two things.)

On second thought, let's not go to Minas Tirith. It is a silly place.

You know, folks, as much as I love overalls, and as much as I love The Lord of the Rings, I would never have thought to do this. And I'm thinking...yeah, that might be just a bit too far, even for me.

Shiny in the Black: A "Firefly" Christmas (part one)

I feel a little bit dirty doing this...but only a little bit. I have no idea, had Firefly lived, if there ever would have been a Christmas-themed episode. Maybe, maybe not. But I got to thinking recently, that if Firefly actually had lived, and if it actually had done a Christmas-themed episode, what on Earth would a Firefly Christmas-themed episode even look like?

Well, at the risk of committing an act of fanfic...I like to think that such an episode would look a little bit like this.

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
There's no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can't take the sky from me...

Captain Malcolm Reynolds was usually the first one to exit his bunk in the morning, which, coupled with the fact that he was also usually the last one to retire to his bunk at night, went a long way to making him the way he was. Even on mornings like this one, when the night before he and the rest of his crew had been up abnormally late celebrating a score on Persephone, he was up before anyone else, no matter how much his head throbbed and the metallic taste of too much bad whiskey filled his mouth. But on this morning, as he climbed up the ladder to the hallway and shuffled toward the mess, he slowly realized that he wasn't the first one up this time. Someone was in the mess already, and they were singing. Mal could make out the words – "God rest ye, merry gentlemen..." -- and he inwardly sighed. On a typical day, Mal needed at least three cups of green tea before he was ready to deal with Shepherd Book. Today he figured to need six cups before he felt ready to talk to anyone.

"Ah! Good morning, Captain! There's water on the stove, just off the boil, if you're looking for tea." The Shepherd beamed.

"Yeah," Mal said. "I'll get to the tea in just a moment, Shepherd, but just now I'm a bit flummoxed as to why there's a tree in the corner of my mess."

"Oh, that," said the Shepherd. "I hoped you wouldn't mind. Just a little something I picked up before we left Persephone yesterday."

"I didn't notice you bringing a tree on board?"

"Yes, I was worried about how to sneak it onto the ship, when I realized that God had provided me a perfect way to get it past your eyes."

"And that was...."

"You and Jayne were ripping drunk. Zoe and Wash and the Doctor carried you on board. You weren't noticing anything last night."

"I wasn't that drunk!"

"Maybe, Captain, but you got out of bed and came all the way to the mess wearing your gun, your slippers, and a pair of women's underwear."

"Oh." Mal staggered over to the stove. "I think I'm gonna have that tea now, while you explain why there's a gorram tree on my gorram boat."

"There's no need for language, Captain." The Shepherd folded his hands in front of his chest, in that prayerful stance that Mal hated. Of course, Book well knew that the Captain hated it when he took that tone, which is why he did it so much more often now. Mal just grunted as he fumbled in the cupboard for his favorite mug and the tea leaves.

"Hand me the kitchen robe," Mal said.

"Certainly." Book opened another cupboard and pulled out a bundle of cloth, which he tossed to the Captain. This was the 'kitchen robe', a bathrobe that Mal kept stashed in the mess just for situations like this. He put on the robe as his tea steeped, and just in time, too, because that's when Zoe and Wash arrived. Zoe looked all cleaned up and ready to go, as did Wash, even if no one could tell because Wash generally looked all cattawumpus, with his unbuttoned shirt over a tank top, shorts, and sandals.

"Well, this is very nice," Zoe said. "Care to let us know what you're wearing underneath the kitchen robe, sir?"

"I do not," said Mal. "And you can stop laughing. We've all had mornings like this."

"Not laughing, sir."

"You laugh on the inside," Mal countered.

"It's true, honey," said Wash. "You do. I, on the other hand, plan to laugh joyously out loud at our Captain and his self-induced plight."

"I hold my liquor better than you," Mal said.

"I never get much chance to develop my skills in that regard," Wash replied, "seeing as how somebody's gotta be sober enough to fly the ship. Speaking of which, do we have a destination, Captain?"

"Can I drink my tea first before I think about business?"

"Certainly, sir."

Shepherd Book took a step forward. "I actually have a few thoughts as to that--"

"Ooooh, pretty!" And with that, everyone turned to greet Kaylee, who had just arrived in the mess as well, wearing a freshly cleaned pair of overalls over a shirt with little red hearts all over it. "I didn't know we could grow trees on board!"

"We can't grow trees on board," Mal said. "This here is a flight of fancy by the good Shepherd, who I'm sure will be explaining himself momentarily."

"Well, I like it," said Kaylee. "It's shiny."

"It's not shiny yet, actually," said Book. "It will be, after we decorate it."

"Decorating?" Mal said. "A tree?"

"Yes sir," said Book.

"So just the fact that there's a tree on my boat isn't even the strangest part of this whole business?"

"It's not strange, Captain," said Book. "It's a tradition."

"Preacher, you got any notion as to how many weird things people do are explained by casual use of the word 'tradition'?" Mal sipped his tea. "That explains a lot of your whole 'Shepherding' job, you know."

"Traditions become traditions because they mean something to people," Book said. "You've got some traditions yourself, Captain."

"Name one."

"For one, your finding of an Alliance-friendly bar every year on Unification Day. And also your overindulgence every time we get a little more money for a job than you'd planned." He smiled. "At least this tradition doesn't involve a headache and the burning of another set of clothes."

"Yeah, well, I'll be taking that explanation now, if you don't mind."

"Certainly, Captain. It all began on--"

He was interrupted by a loud burst of raspy Chinese as Jayne Cobb staggered into the mess. "Smells like a ruttin' forest in here," Jayne said when he'd finished cursing in Chinese."I hate forests. They remind me of my grandmother."

This, as did many things Jayne said, made everyone stop talking and stare at him.

"What? Oh, I suppose you all think that forests are nice places filled with happy little creatures. Like one of Kaylee's storybooks."

"I don't read 'storybooks'," Kaylee protested. "I'm not a child, Jayne. I'm an engineer and I'm a woman with all the needs of a woman, like—"

"Stop! Please!" Mal burst out. "You know I don't want to hear about that, Kaylee."

"Sorry, Captain."

"Wash, can you just get us in the air, please?"

"I wanted to hear about this tree first," Wash said. "I mean, since you haven't given us a destination yet for our next job and all."

More silence, until Zoe cleared her throat.

"By any chance, Captain, did you think to line us up a new job when we finished the old one?"

Mal shrugged. "I had other things on my mind last night," he said.

"I'll say," said the newest arrival into the mess. "Although I don't think he was exactly thinking with his mind last night." It was Inara, who looked typically resplendent in her kimono-like morning robe. "Was she memorable, Mal?"

"Well, she--"

"You don't remember her, do you?"

"You know, I think we've all got off the main topic here, which is why there's a gorram tree on my boat!"

"Well, Captain," said Book, "as I tried to start explaining--"

"A Christmas tree," said yet someone else. Tensions went up as the voice of the ever-enigmatic River Tam cut through. "We had a Christmas tree at the institute. The men there said there would be presents. That was before they started the mental probes."

River stood there in the doorway, with her brother, Simon the good doctor, standing behind her.

"River?" Simon said. "Do you remember something?"

"I remember everything," River said. "I just choose when to talk about it."

"So," Simon said, "you know what the tree is?"

"I just said so," River replied. "It's a Christmas tree. But it's naked. It needs decorations to make it shiny."

"Ah," said Book. "You see, Kaylee? That's what I was getting at. We'll decorate it."

"With what?" Kaylee asked.

"Oh, all sorts of things," said Book. "Ornaments made of painted glass. Little lights. Popcorn that we put on strings. And I even have a figurine of an angel for the very top of the tree."

Jayne cleared his throat. "Anybody else here havin' a hard time figurin' out who's crazier here, the Shepherd or the Doc's sister?"

"I don't think it sounds crazy," said Kaylee. "I think it sounds nice."

"It kind of does," said Wash. Noticing Zoe giving him a skeptical glance, he went on, "What? I've been saying for years that this boat could use some more color on it."

"My boat's got all the color it needs," said Mal. "Look, people, next person other than the Shepherd who talks is on mess patrol for a month. Shepherd, explain this. You've got until I finish my cup of tea, and if your explanation ain't convincing, you're the one on mess patrol."

"A hard bargain as always, Captain," said Book. "It's an Old Earth tradition. The Bible tells us that one day, God decided to come into the world in the form of an infant, so he could save his people. Ever since then, believers have celebrated that night by doing things like exchanging gifts, and bringing trees into their homes to decorate. That's what I'm doing here."

"Shepherd," Mal said, "didn't I once tell you that God ain't welcome on the Serenity?"

"You did, Captain. But it's my belief that God is here, whether you consider him welcome or not."

"Well, be that as it may, you've brought a tree onto my ship without asking me."

"Would you have said 'yes'?"

"No, but that ain't the point. I like to be asked anyway. It's my ship."

"I just thought...it might be a source of pleasure for us," Book said. "You don't have to believe to celebrate."

"You said somethin' about exchangin' gifts," Jayne said. "What's that?"

"Well," Book said, "we could each randomly select a member of the crew and get that person a gift." He noticed the scowl on Mal's face. "Or not."

"We should," Kaylee said. "We don't do enough nice things for one another."

"I let you all stay on board," Mal said. "That's nice of me."

"And your hospitality is known throughout the 'Verse," Inara said. "That's why so many people flock to us to give us money."

"Yeah," Mal said, "I'm a loving man. But as to the money thing, you said something about a job, preacher? You got a lead for us?"

"I do," said Book. "Of a sort."

"Of a sort? The paying sort?"

"Not as such, no."

"Then what is it?"

"There's an orphanage on Haven," Book said.

"Lot of orphanages on Haven," Jayne pointed out.

"Yes, but as it happens, I know this orphanage particularly well." Book looked like he was remembering something...but then he snapped back to the moment. "I would simply like for us to take some of our recently abundant bounty – not all of which was obtained through means the authorities would entirely smile upon – and use it to purchase supplies for the orphanage. We would then deliver said items to the orphanage in time for an upcoming festival."

"Supplies?" Mal asked.

Book nodded. "Food, clothing, and...toys."

"Toys?" Mal repeated.

Jayne frowned. "And we're doin' this in exchange for what?"

Book just smiled.

"No way," Jayne said. "No way, uh-uh. No way I'm givin' some of my ruttin' money to some bunch of orphans. Ain't my fault they ain't got no home. Let 'em grow up, find work, and make an honest livin'."

"Is anyone besides me," Simon said, "unusually touched by Jayne's newfound belief in making an honest living?"

"Shut up, Doc," Jayne said. "Least I ain't hidin' behind a slip of a girl."

"No," River said. "You hide behind a gun that you gave a girl's name."

Jayne's only response to that was a grumbled growl.

"Let me get this straight, preacher," Mal said. "You want us to spend some of the money we've fought and scrimped for and use it to give stuff to children? And you want us to do this on a time frame of...what?"

"Three days, Captain."

"Three days. And we're doing all this with no reward for us?"

"Not all rewards come in the form of money, Captain."

"The ones that keep this boat in the air do," Mal said.

"Come on, Captain!" Kaylee said. "I, for one, would like to do a job for once that don't make me feel like I need a shower after."

"Maybe we put it to a vote of the crew?" Simon offered.

Mal glared at him. "My ship ain't a democracy," he said. "But...Jayne?"

"Can't decide, Mal," he said. "Normally I'd be against this sort of stuff, but I'm thinkin' that if we don't do it, Kaylee here'll be complaining about it for months. Might well be worth doin' to keep her quiet."

"Thanks, Jayne," Kaylee said. "But really, it'll feel good. Don't you all want to feel good about something for once? I mean, feel good about something other than stealin' from the Alliance?"

"There's other things to feel good about?" Jayne asked.

Mal turned to his second in command for help. "Zoe?"

"I don't know, Captain," Zoe replied. "Normally I'm siding with you, but right now, I find myself a bit swayed by Kaylee's youthful exuberance."

"I can't believe I'm even considering this," Mal said.

Shepherd Book put a hand on Mal's shoulder. "I think that maybe some part of you is seeking redemption," Book said.

Mal glared at him.

"Not really helping your cause there, preacher," Zoe said.

Book removed his hand.

"If we do this," Mal said, "I've got some conditions. Kaylee, you are not allowed to badger me for an optional ship's part for one month. Shepherd, you will do all cooking and mess duty for the same month. Jayne, one word that this job makes me soft, and I'm shooting you out the airlock."

"What about me, Captain?" Inara asked, purposely blinking her beautiful eyelashes as she did so.

"Uh...I'll think of something," Mal said. "All right, Shepherd, where are we going first?"

"To buy some toys," Book said. "Which means a trip to Ariel."

"Wash, you heard the man. Let's get in the air. I'm gonna go clean up. Can't believe I'm doing this...." And with that, Mal left the mess to return to his bunk. Wash and Zoe headed for the bridge, and Kaylee left for the engine room. River gave Shepherd Book a look of reproach.

"You didn't tell him the part about the elfin-man dressed in red who flies through the sky to give the children their presents," she said.

"On the whole," Book replied, "I figured it best to leave that part out of it."

"Yeah," Simon said. "That was...probably wise."

Minutes later, Serenity lifted off and flew away from Persephone and toward Ariel.

End Part One
Part Two

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

There's little doubt that the work of classical music most closely and obviously associated with Christmas is Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker. I've long loved the music of this glorious score, and one of my fondest memories of my musical performing life -- now long over -- is our yearly Christmas concerts with the college symphony, at which we always played the Suite that Tchaikovksy edited down from the complete ballet. This is one of a relatively few pieces of music that is so strongly associated in my mind with a certain time and place that when I hear it, I am transported back to there and then. I close my eyes and envision Dr. Janice Wade, conducting away, and yelling at us at the very end of the "Waltz of the Flowers" when we would invariably try to ritardando in the last couple of bars, a ritardando that was not in the score. Oh well. You're not a real orchestral musician until you piss off your conductor.

(A ritardando is when the music slows down, either briefly or a gradual slowing to a new tempo. The last bars of the "Waltz of the Flowers" scream out instinctively for a ritard, and some conductors do indeed employ one on that basis -- the music seems to inherently call for it. Problem is, Tchaikovsky did not indicate one in the score, and just as many conductors, if not more, nowadays take the view that if the composer wants a given musical effect they will darned well write it, and if they didn't, then one is to ignore all the 'instinctive' stuff and just play the piece as written. Now, when I was a going concern as a musician, I tended to fall into the latter camp, with certain exceptions. A musical effect here and there that might not be written in the score is OK with me, but I had another conductor who would casually make wholesale cuts in pieces we were playing, a practice which infuriated me then and still bugs me now. Take liberties with the tempi, if you must, but damned well play all the notes the composer wrote!)

Here, then, are the composite parts of the Nutcracker suite. (These are not all taken from the same production of the ballet. It's a mix-and-match.) Incidentally, another reason I loved playing this piece is that it has a lot of neat stuff for the trumpets to do. Many musicians judge a work on the basis of how it treats their particular instrument, so the Nutcracker suite was A-OK in my book. But from my trumpet playing perspective, an all-Mozart program? Fuhgeddaboudit!

OK, enough of that. The music:

"Miniature Overture":



Marche:



Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy:



Trepak (Russian Dance)



Arabian Dance:



Chinese Dance:



Dance of the Reed Flutes:



The Waltz of the Flowers:

A Very Public Service Message

This week being the week of Christmas and all, and thus being a week when Real Life (tm) makes things insanely hectic, blogging will likely be lighter than usual, and usual features here might be late or not appear at all. Sorry, but bear with, folks! No hiatus, but updates will be a bit more sporadic than usual.

(As for Saturday Centus, I'm going to take a break on it until the new year. Must focus! Focus!!!)

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

This Christmas tribute to Calvin and Hobbes was making the rounds of Facebookland and the Twitterverse over the weekend, and now I bring it to the increasingly forgotten old-world nation of Blogistan.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Cats make everything better. Even Christmas. Well, maybe. Actually, if you met our cats, you might well wonder if any of the pro-cat propaganda out there was founded in any sort of reality whatsoever...but I digress.

I could SWEAR there was a Muppet named Elwood.

A couple weeks ago, in one single weekend, The Wife and I watched not one but two movies (along with The Daughter for one of them) with the following plot: guy finds out that an important piece of real estate from his past is about to be sold, so he decides to help preserve the important plot of land by getting his old group of cohorts back together for the first time in years and putting on a show. The first movie was The Blues Brothers. The second was The Muppets. Talk about nothing new under the sun – "Hey, let's put on a show!" is an old chestnut of a plot. It's all about the people putting on the show, and the show itself.

The Blues Brothers is something I'd completely forgotten about, to be honest. I hadn't seen it in many years, and that was in a bowdlerized TBS-for-teevee edition. I honestly remembered very little about it other than the music and the "get the band back together" plot. But then, there's really not a whole lot to it outside of those things. So, let's compare and contrast the two films:

Primary Motivation

In The Blues Brothers, the Catholic orphanage that Jake and Elwood Blues grew up in is about to be sold unless the City can be paid by a certain date. Jake and Elwood learn this from the terrifying nun who raised them; this woman is so scary that when she retreats into her office after the meeting is over, she seems to move without walking. Scary. It's oddly endearing, though, that the Blues Brothers want to save this unpleasant looking place, and decide to do so after they have a religious epiphany – their "mission from God", pronounced gaaahhd -- when they accidentally find themselves at a service in a black church where the music is led by a pastor who looks and sounds an awful lot like James Brown.

The Muppets, on the other hand, has the fabled Muppet Theater, which hasn't hosted a show in years, about to be sold to an oil man. Boo hiss, evil oil men! Here I think The Muppets missed an opportunity. The evil oil man should have been played by either Larry Hagman or Patrick Duffy. In The Muppets, the scene where the good guys learn of the dastardly plan to sell their beloved theater is pretty prosaic – in fact, it was really the only time in the movie that I felt the plot's gears a-grindin' away – but at least it's over quickly.

Transportation

In The Blues Brothers, we have the Bluesmobile, an old police car that Elwood has purchased and which seems virtually indestructible throughout the entire movie, no matter how many times Elwood drives it with the gas fully floored or how many object it hits – well, until the very end, after it reaches its final destination, when, in one of the film's best sight-gags, the car falls apart as soon as Jake and Elwood get out. It's hard not to love that old car, though, and it does bring back certain memories to see all the cars in this film, those old 1970s barge-like vehicles that dominated the roadways. At one point, Elwood gets gas and then says to Jake, "We've got a hundred miles to go and a full tank of gas. We'll make it!" Wow, how things were when a hundred miles constituted quite a journey on a single tank of gas!

As for The Muppets, the car itself isn't terribly special, but it does boast a couple of nifty abilities: traveling by map (in which case a long journey is shorted by superimposing it on a map that traces the course with a red line, not unlike the Indiana Jones flicks), and traveling by montage (in which case a montage of scenes whips us through the journey). These abilities are actually mentioned by the characters – "Let's travel by map!" -- which is a delightful thing to do because The Muppet Show was always breaking the fourth wall.

The Bad Guys


Here I definitely have to give the edge to The Blues Brothers. In The Muppets, we have your standard evil businessman, who plans to buy the building, raze it, and drill for oil. Nothing terribly original here, even if I'm totally sympathetic to the depiction of the businessman as an evil shill. (Suck it, FOX News.)

The Blues Brothers, on the other hand, has Jake and Elwood incurring the wrath of an entire motley crew of oddballs throughout the entire film, sometimes without even being aware of it. They get cops after them, naturally (driving your car into and through the entire length of a shopping mall will do that). They get a country band after them after they steal their gig. They get a crowd of neo-Nazis after them after they drive right through their demonstration, forcing them all to jump off the bridge they've been blocking. And for some reason, there's an insane woman tracking them, making frequent unsuccessful attempts to kill them in spectacular fashion. Interestingly, the 'villain' behind the original threat to the building that they are trying to save isn't much of a villain at all. It's a faceless government agency that doesn't care at all about the building, as long as it gets paid, either by the current tenant or the next one.

The Gang

Here, The Muppets has a built-in advantage, because we already know the gang. In The Blues Brothers, we have to meet each individual band member and learn something about them. But this also leads to a lot of great stuff, as this is how a lot of the film's musical numbers end up taking place, including one very memorable one with Aretha Franklin (who is not in the band).

This leads to...

Guest stars

The Blues Brothers is loaded with bit parts filled by great blues musicians, right up to cameos by Ray Charles and Cab Calloway. The Muppets doesn't include any big names within the group, but there are guest cameos along the way, which is a lot of fun. I wondered if some of these cameos are going to seem a lot less fresh in a few years, when some of these folks are less famous, and that will probably happen, but then, it happened with The Muppet Show too. When we watch the old shows on DVD, I have to explain to The Daughter who people like Joel Grey and Sandy Duncan are.

One particular cameo appearance by a Currently Famous Person in The Muppets filled me with glee, but I won't reveal which one, for those who haven't seen it. I had no idea he was in the movie, though, until he appeared.

The Music

Both films are wonderful in this regard. The Blues Brothers is loaded with magnificent, wonderful blues music. The Muppets has some new songs that are good enough, but it also throws in a gorgeous performance of "The Rainbow Connection" and ends with...yeah, I shouldn't spoil that, either. The end credits number of The Muppets is so good, though, that I didn't even pay attention to the credits at all. I wonder if that frustrates the people whose names appear onscreen at that point?

I'm not actually keeping score, here. But both movies are so clearly cut from some of the same cloth, even though one is full of raunchy, violent humor and the other is, well, the Muppets, that I couldn't help but think of each one while watching the other.

On The Muppets specifically, I greatly appreciated the movie's general tone more than anything else. I like irony and dark humor as much as anyone (I also watched Inglourious Basterds recently, with great relish), but the Muppets' approach has been gentle humor all along. Which isn't to say that they don't occasionally make jokes that bite, but when they do, the jokes are usually clever enough that you don't even notice the bite. One of my favorite sight-gags in the film comes when Kermit and Miss Piggy are talking for the first time in years. They are walking the streets of Paris, having a heart-to-heart...but Kermit is wearing a black turtleneck. That cracked me up.

I've seen other reviews of The Muppets that take the film to task for the paint-by-numbers romance between Jason Segel and Amy Adams; it's the typical "girl wants guy to pay more attention to her than to the other thing that has consumed his passions for years" tale, really an old chestnut of a story. But I think that the film makes that storyline seem so stale that I have to think it's on purpose, as if to provide a contrast that makes the world of the Muppets seem more real than it actually is. The first scene involves a song-and-dance number with Jason Segel leading his entire town in a "Isn't it happy to be alive!" kind of peppy tune, but as soon as he departs the screen, the entire cast remains onscreen to slump down in a "Thank God that's over" kind of moment. The movie is winking at the audience. Ditto the fact that the movie gives us a Kermit the Frog who hasn't performed in years, and yet when he turns up in the movie, he's not bitter or angry at all. He's just stopped performing. Why? I certainly didn't care...but I've seen other reviews that point this out as a 'flaw' in the film. But come on, folks – do we really need to delve into the existential quandaries of a Muppet frog? I find it quite interesting that when we get to the now-reclusive Kermit, he's just chosen to be reclusive, that's all. He's not your washed-up act trying to fight off the memories of past glory by drinking too much.

The Blues Brothers struck me in a similar vein. Despite the fact that it's a lot more foul-mouthed and violent, it is, in its way, as zany and comical as The Muppets, and I found that it approached its characters and its humor with warmth in a lot of the same ways. These guys have been performing musicians for quite a long time, but they're confused when they get a gig in a bar and find that the stage is secured top-to-bottom with chicken wire. "Why the chicken wire?" they wonder, only to find out the first time a rowdy patron tosses a beer in their direction. Both movies are, essentially, live-action cartoons with a lot of great music, and there really are worse things for a movie to be. Both are about getting the band back together. At the end of The Blues Brothers, we haven't seen the last time the band will play together. Will the Muppets continue to play together, though? I suppose we'll see.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Unfortunately, the embedding of the video has been disabled, so you'll have to follow the link below to see it, but here's a clip from Love Actually. What's happening here is that Harry (Alan Rickman) is buying an expensive necklace for a woman in his office. He's trying to do this quickly and quietly, because the woman is not his wife, who is shopping in the same store with him. But the jewelry counter man (Rowan Atkinson) will not be rushed with the increasingly insane gift-wrapping process.

Watch it here. It's a great comedic moment, and it's an interesting one because you're not sure who you should be rooting for here!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

In honor of the end of the Iraq war, here's John Lennon.

This isn't a very good song, but I'm using it because it is heard as source music in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Here's "Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?", by Nina (song written by John Barry).

Page One: Cosmos

I was in fourth grade when Cosmos first aired. My teacher had a poster up about it in the classroom and encouraged us to watch it. I was quite the space geek at the time, and I expected the show to be about space and nothing else, so when it actually aired, I was baffled that it was about the entire history and breadth of science from a truly cosmic perspective. I didn't understand much of the show, but I faithfully watched each episode. I remember to this day sitting in my living room, watching Carl Sagan standing on the cliffs above the sea, saying in that wonderful baritone of his, "The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be."

After three or four episodes aired, we were shopping in one of the local malls (this was when we lived in Portland, OR, so I think it was actually the Washington Square mall), when we spotted the show's companion book. It was something like $19 (hardcovers were expensive back then!), but my parents allowed me an advance of a whole bunch of weeks' allowance to buy it. So for the rest of the series's run, I'd watch and try to follow along in the book. This turned out a little more difficult than I'd expected, as the book is not a transcription of the show (and nor is the show a filming of the book). Both contain material not in the other, and in different sequences.

I was, as I said, only nine. I didn't understand much of the material. A lot of it sailed right over my head. Most of it, actually. But I could sense something big there, and even now, I remember the sense of wonder certain passages of the show and book created in me: the animation detailing the history of human evolution. The 'Cosmic Calendar'. The depiction of Johannes Kepler. Sagan's concern over nuclear weapons. The anecdote of the mathematician who asked his nine-year-old son to name the number depicted by a 1 followed by one hundred zeroes, which the kid called a "googol". (Sagan pointed out that making up names for numbers has a certain charm, especially if you happen to be nine. Which I was.) And all those poetic turns of phrase: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe." "The Martians will be us." "Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves, but to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring."

No, I didn't understand much of Cosmos. But I sensed it. (And I sure loved the pictures. Cosmos was the first truly beautiful book I ever owned. The mass-market paperback edition of the book, with only a small selection of the art in a section at the middle of the book, strikes me as a publishing error of high magnitude.)

Cosmos receded into the background of my life a bit over the rest of my school years. The show never repeated at a point where I could watch it again, and it wasn't until college that I decided to re-read the book in its entirety. This time I understood a lot more of it. During 'May Term' of my junior year of college -- 'May Term' was a four-week 'semester' that came in May, during which students took a single course -- I discovered that this little dump of a video store up on the corner actually had the entire Cosmos series on VHS. I rented them all and, more than ten years after originally watching the show, saw it again. And it deeply thrilled me, again.

I've watched Cosmos again one time since college, although I am in the midst of a re-watch again right now. I'm waiting until I'm done to blog anything about it, if even then; Cosmos is now a classic of science documentary film making, and most folks interested in such things have already seen it. I can say that as a production, it stands up beautifully; some of the science is obviously dated, but the show's overall theme of science as a candle in the dark (as Sagan would later call it in his book The Demon Haunted World) is as important and hopeful as it always was. And you know what? Over the last few years, as the Buffalo Bills have turned in one crappy season after another, I've turned to movies when I've reached a point where I no longer wanted to watch the Bills. And Cosmos is perfect viewing for turning around that "My football team just got crushed" funk. Who cares that the Bills just lost 39-2! The Cosmos awaits, man!

Carl Sagan's death continues to strike me as an awful tragedy. I'm not sure anyone is out there right now who can bring such a sense of poetry to writing about science. There's precious little science writing out there right now that shows that Sagan-esque quality of evocation of "sensawunda", and some of what's out there right now is smug in tone when it should soar.

I've read a large number of Sagan's other works -- not all of them, but a bunch. I must admit that when I tried his one novel, Contact, I did not much like it, although I greatly admired the film that was eventually made from it. I wish he'd had the opportunity to write more. As a close to this post, here's another quote of his, not from Cosmos, but from his essay "A Sunday Sermon", reprinted in the collection Broca's Brain. I've had cause to think of this quote a great deal lately.

My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the tradition sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts (as well as unable to take such a course of action) if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival. In either case, the enterprise of knowledge is consistent with both science and religion, and is essential for the welfare of the human species.

Thank you, Dr. Sagan.

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

So, the 80s Christmas anthem "Do They Know It's Christmas" (which was a fundraising song for famine in Africa). Am I a bad person that whenever I hear the song and it gets to the part where Bono screeches out the lyric "Tonight thank God it's them, instead of youuuu!", I start laughing?

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Blackmore's Night is one of my favorite bands, with their oddly endearing blend of Renaissance faire, folk, Celtic, and rock music. They came out with a Christmas album a few years back, and this is the first track.




This combines two of my favorite three Advent hymns (the third being "Angels We Have Heard On High").

Ayup.

(via)

Caption this photo!

A random opinion

I have to admit, folks, that I am entirely simpatico with the things that motivate the "Occupy" folks. I loathe the corporatization of America, the concentration of wealth at the very top of society, the notion that this concentration is a good thing that will one day lead to prosperity for everybody, the notion that increasing taxes on this crowd one penny in the hopes of making certain aspects of life easier for the rest of us somehow represents a deeply immoral encroachment upon some perverted definition of 'freedom', and all the Ayn Rand bullshit that has led to this.

What I simply don't understand is how spending week upon week camping in the middle of a city is going to somehow translate into any kind of societal change or shift in public policy. Can someone connect these dots for me, please?

(And lest anyone misread this, I'm questioning the Occupy movement's goals and strategies here, and not endorsing the rather terrifying police actions against them. I'm very much disturbed by the idea that municipal police forces are morphing into municipal armed forces.)

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

So yesterday, I received an e-mail from my mother, in which she simply told me what her favorite Christmas song is. I puzzled for some moments as to why she felt the need to tell me this.

Yes, folks, sometimes I can be just that dense.

Here is "Un flambeau, Jeanette, Isabella", sing by Diane Taraz.




Somehow, I'm not sure I've ever heard this song before...or at least, if I did, I may not have noticed it. Now I have, though. Thanks, Mom!

Presenting: The Greatest Thing On The Internet, EVER.

I have just found a thing so awesome on the Internet that...I can't even begin to describe this thing. If Shakespeare at the height of his powers had encountered this, the only soliloquy he could write singing its praises would boil down to "Yea verily, that is awesome. I beseech thee check it out, dude!"

Go forth, and go boldly.

That is all.

Sentential Links

Yeah, I've stopped numbering these. No real reason why, I just got tired of having to go back and look it up each time out. Anyway, the linkage:

:: Good evening... come on in. Why don't you get yourself some popcorn and a Coke from our stunning black-on-silver art-deco refreshment stand? (Be nice to the charming and vivacious young lady manning the counter; you'll find her attitude very different from the sullen mouth-breathers at the multiplex. She actually likes her job.) Yes, I know our modestly sized bags of corn look puny compared to those MegaTubs you're accustomed to getting at the other places, but trust me: this is all you need. (Errr...no. I mean, I'm with him all the way, except for the giant megatub of popcorn. When it comes in tubs, anyway. Nowadays, most times you get a bag.)

:: Really? Dreaming of overalls is good luck?? Dreaming of presents means you will always be showered with gifts?!? Is this pop psychology or pop mysticism?? (Yeesh, that's weird, is what that is. I don't dream of overalls, to my knowledge...hmmm....)

:: If you’ve ever said to yourself, “Enh, I’m not going to give the new revamped Dick Tracy a chance until it inexplicably includes a panel featuring a villain quoting from Men Without Hats’ 1982 smash hit ‘Safety Dance,’” then you are officially out of excuses, my friend.

:: And 24 makes interesting villains and then just stubbornly refuses to examine them or even allow them to speak. I know it’s supposed to be this Rah Rah Jack Bauer Punches People In the Soul show, but in its first seasons it was often quite deft and interesting–right up until we should actually hear the whyporn, and then the YOU JUST WOULDN’T GET ME scowly crap starts up, every single damn season.

:: In spite of the extreme importance that Dickens places on Marley's death right away in his story, all the film versions so far have left Marley out of the earliest scenes. Alastair Sim's is the first to introduce him this soon. (Michael May is surveying all the various versions of A Christmas Carol that are out there. Good stuff, as always!)

:: Okay, this is all going to be heavily theoretical, possibly annoying, and maybe even misguided, but I've been thinking about this a lot and I need to try and verbalize this. And just to get the trigger out of the way, this is going to be some thoughts about racism, intentional and unintentional, in pop culture. (This is a fascinating post about race in Sesame Street and Star Trek. Check it out.)

More next week!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

I think that my college choir performed this one year at our annual Big Christmas Music Hoopla, otherwise known as Christmas With Wartburg. Those programs were quite the undertaking, and they consumed four nights of our lives at the time: a performance on campus on Thursday night; a performance twenty miles down the road at a really big Lutheran church in Cedar Falls, IA, on Friday night; a performance at the Civic Center in downtown Des Moines on Saturday night; and a performance back at campus on Sunday afternoon. (The poor Choir, at the time, then had to do a performance of its own right after that fourth performance, during some kind of coffee hour, if I remember right.)

It was a lot of work and, coming as it did at the end of the fall semester, it put a lot of pressure on us students who also had to worry about finals and such. But those were some deeply special concerts, and I was more than a little bit 'at sea' in my senior year, when I was no longer in the band and thus was not involved in any way with the program. Those were wonderful times. In my sophomore year, I decompressed after the Sunday performance by watching Casablanca (this was the period when I discovered the film and watched it six Sundays in a row). The next year, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country opened on Friday, so right after the Cedar Falls performance, The Girlfriend (now The Wife) and I quickly changed and bopped over to the theater to see it. Good times. I miss those programs.

This is "Salvation is Created", by Pavel Tchesnokov. It's a live performance, so there's audience noise, and ignore the graphic...the music is the thing here.

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Via Michael Dean Jackson, I see that the newest meme-thing to be sweeping the Interweb is "Unimpressed Astronaut". I, of course, had to make a few of my own:

On that last: it always amuses me when people complain about a NASA mission that fails, such as lost probes to Mars. One of our standard cliches for indicating that a given task isn't as hard as someone is making it out to be is, "Hey, this ain't rocket science!" And yet, we get mad when people fail, even though they are actually doing rocket science. Anyhoo....

::  Hate Actually: the romances of Love, Actually tallied out and scored by pros and cons. I'm due for my annual viewing of Love, Actually soon....

More next week!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

One cool thing about Christmas is that it gives you carte blanche to enjoy all manner of schmaltz. Such as this Christmas-related Castle fan video.

"This isn't 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules."

I've heard for years about The Big Lebowski, enough to know that it's about a slacker dude who mainly hangs out in a bowling alley. I knew that he was called "The Dude", and that his most famous line is, "The Dude abides." And yet, I'd never actually seen the movie until recently. I always tend to take my sweet time getting around to things that everybody says I should already know about; most of the filmography of the Coen Brothers is one thing I most definitely need to get through.

The Big Lebowski most definitely involves a guy who goes by the name "The Dude"; he's played by Jeff Bridges as a kind of mystical blend of Obi Wan Kenobi and Tommy Chong. He needs half-and-half for home, and he pays for it with a check written for $.69. In most scenes he has his favorite drink, a White Russian, in his hand. He wears sunglasses constantly, has a weird habit of incorporating things he hears into his everyday conversations, and – in the masterstroke that leads to most of the movie's zaniest and funniest bits of comedy – actually turns out to have the strongest grasp of reality of any of the guys in his small circle of friends.

Description of the plot of The Big Lebowski is something of a fool's errand, as some of the particulars of the plot evade description entirely, while others seem utterly, utterly silly when described outside of their context. This is one of those movies that you have to see to really get, and even then, you might not really get it. Our story opens with an introduction to The Dude, who is out of cream for his White Russians so he goes to the grocery store in his bathrobe and slippers to get some, paying with a check he writes for $.69. (In a spooky bit of coincidence that couldn't possibly have been planned, we hear in the background as The Dude writes his check the voice of President George HW Bush, talking about Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait – and the date on the check is Sept. 11, 1991.)

The Dude goes home with his half-and-half, where he is attacked by hoodlums in his own apartment who are demanding that The Dude "pay up". But, he's with it enough to realize that they have accosted the wrong Lebowski. Not that this matters to the hoodlums, one of whom makes his big exit statement by urinating on The Dude's throw rug. This will become a major driving point in the plot: The Dude's desire to get restitution for his crappy rug, a rug which all of The Dude's friends agree "really tied the room together". So The Dude tracks down the right Lebowski, which draws him into some kind of rich-family intrigue involving kidnapping, money drops, and...well, a whole lot of gonzo stuff.

The Dude endures all this with the support of his two best friends: a clueless bowler named Donny who is constantly trying to catch back up to the conversation, and Walter, a Jewish security contractor who served in Vietnam and who has all manner of anger issues and who is unbelievably foul-mouthed. These three oddly-matched friends discuss things at their sanctum sanctorum, a local bowling alley where they are members of a league. Donny is forever not quite hearing the discussion, but his every attempt to catch back up is met by a harsh "Shut the f*** up, Donny," from Walter.

The Big Lebowski is one of the most foul-mouthed movies I've ever seen. This doesn't bother me at all, but for folks who are turned off by salty language, this movie will turn you off within five minutes of the first title card on the screen. The language forms its own poetry, though, giving nearly every conversation in the film a kind of rhythm all its own. It's really very fascinating to listen to the permutations of the various curses, expletives, and naughty phrases our language has to offer. John Goodman's Walter engages in a lot of this, and he has what is my favorite line in the movie: "Life does not stop and start at your convenience, you miserable piece of shit."

A movie like this desperately needs a cast capable of pulling it off, and Jeff Bridges as The Dude is...well, I figured Bridges had been born to play Kevin Flynn in TRON, but now I see that he was really born to play The Dude. I just love his weird blend of wisdom and stoner slackitude; all through the movie, Bridges makes it seem like The Dude understands what's happening to him on some instinctive, subconscious level, but he can't really put it into words. And it's that inability which leads him into new situations, each one more bizarre than the last, because he wasn't able to just articulate things. I also love how he's able to come up with some witty responses to some of the things that happen to him, such as when the thugs first break into his apartment and threaten him. One of them shoves The Dude's head into the toilet several times, each time shouting "Where's the money, Lebowski? Where is it?" The Dude clearly has no idea what he's talking about, but instead of protesting, he says, "Uh, I think I see it down there. Let me take another look." And down goes his head, into the toilet again.

Given that this is a Coen Brothers movie, there's a liberal use of music and song to create mood, right from the 1970s bowling-alley graphics that form the main titles. O Brother Where Art Thou? may have had a more famous soundtrack, but the musical choices in The Big Lebowski are as skillfully made, with each song seeming to exist, as do the people in the movie, in some backwater world that we on the outside aren't always aware of.

Near the end of the film, The Dude utters his most famous line, "The Dude abides." He sure does. He's probably out there right now, somewhere, abiding away. I wonder if he ever got another rug, or if whatever rug he eventually got tied the room together as well as the first one.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

I don't care if the eyes are creepily unreal; I like the movie The Polar Express. Part of it is the music, by stalwart composer Alan Silvestri. Silvestri is not a great composer, by any means, but he is a very solid and professional one, with a fine gift for melody and clear orchestral writing. He was really the ideal composer for a project like The Polar Express. (He also tends to be the composer-of-choice for director Robert Zemeckis.) Here is Silvestri's Suite from the film.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Ayup...I missed a day, but through the magic of backdating posts, I can act as though this was here all the time! Huzzah! I had to work very early yesterday morning, and then after I got home from work, there was a nap followed by a shower followed by a lovely evening out with The Family, so I never really got a chance to do any blogging whatsoever. Hence this entry...a day late.

Anyway, it's something of a law that we're all supposed to watch A Christmas Story a bunch of times each year. Now, I'm not the biggest fan of this movie, to be honest. It's enjoyable enough, but I don't find it essential -- in fact, I didn't even see the whole thing, start to finish, until just a few years ago. It basically puts me in mind of an overlong episode of The Wonder Years, without the earnest life lessons and Kevin's eternal yearning for Winnie Cooper. Still, the scene with the kids going to see Santa at the department store is comedy gold, so here it is.



I'm not one to wax poetic a lot about the stuff from yesteryear that's been lost to the Onward March of Time, but I do kind of miss downtown department stores at Christmas, from the era when each city had its own store instead of every city having a Macy's downtown. (Except Buffalo, of course. Our downtown department store died years ago and ain't coming back, ever. Fuhgeddaboudit.)

Something for Thursday

This speech was delivered seventy years ago today.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Just a picture this time, but a funny one:

(Grabbed from Facebook, where I first saw it posted by George Takei!)

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

What aroma of cooking food do you most love to smell in your home?

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

I used to watch re-runs of Little House on the Prairie quite often, and I still have a soft spot for the earlier seasons of the show, before it started going way over the top in later years. It was just such an earnest show. I vaguely recall this clip, which is pretty simple: a bunch of Walnut Grovians are snowed in at the schoolhouse. I don't recall what strife prompts Charles to soothe the savage breasts of Walnut Grove by reading from Luke chapter two, but...well, Michael Landon was the William Shatner of family dramas.

Golden Moon

I just had to share this, from one of my Flickr contacts who produces some wonderful photography. This is the moon over the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Because who doesn't like a good mash-up video? Here's the Trans Siberian Orchestra's "Christmas Canon", set to images from Harry Potter! Hey, why not?

Sentential Links

Linkage!!!

:: Isn’t that breathtaking? This image shows a portion of a much larger complex which currently has over a dozen stars forming inside it. Several of the stars you see here are quite young, only a few million years old.

:: Can you blame them? 76 years later, we are still seeking answers when it comes to the question of life on Mars. Curiosity is the latest tool in that scientific quest to see if we are alone in the universe. One can't help but wonder what our 2011 astronomy textbooks will look like when they're pulled from a dusty shelf by future generations. (I'm feeling astronomical and science-y lately. I like it when this mood comes!)

:: There are lots of people who consider themselves “old” who yet were born in the age of microwave popcorn. I maintain you can’t really consider yourself old unless you’ve cooked Jiffy Pop on the stove. (I remember Jiffy Pop...and not at all fondly. It's terrible popcorn.)

:: It it important that you compose, without delay, our Standard Opening Narration for Bill Shatner to record. It should run about 15 seconds in length, as we discussed earlier. (Wow!)

:: These characters haven’t just lost their race, their culture, their home, and their age to this adaptation. They’ve lost what made us love them to begin with. They’ve lost their souls. (I suppose I should watch Akira one of these years....)

:: How is it, for whatever reason, ST:TNG always manages its way into the upper echelons of science fiction lists despite the weight of its first season, an unbalanced second season and a good number of lemons to boot along the way?

:: That's what I kept thinking about, watching that little flap of flesh. It's one of those little things in our bodies that we are never really aware of, those small working parts that flick a tiny fraction of an inch, or release a certain chemical just when it's needed, or do a thousand little things that they do day after day. Until they don't. Because we are delicate things. We imagine ourselves to be strong or tough or even big, but we are not. We are made up of little, bitty, breakable things, only as strong as the weakest bit, and vulnerable in ways we dare not imagine.

:: My poor kitty was alone and terrified and dying and I wasn’t there…and now he’s gone. (These posts invariably make me terribly sad. I hate when beloved cats die.)

More next week!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

From That 70s Show, Red Foreman as Santa Claus...with the results you'd expect.

Titans 23, Bills 17

What it feels like to be a Bills fan these days, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Well, I don't know if the Buffalo Bills are still "mathematically" alive for the playoffs or not, but it really doesn't matter, because there is zero real chance they could get there. They'd have to win out now just to finish 9-7. Their play this last month, during which they have now lost five straight, has been disastrous.

The game was blacked out here at home, so I didn't watch it. All I have to go on is stuff I read online, via Twitter and some other places.

For instance, I read that Ryan Fitzpatrick was wildly off target again, missing a lot of open throws. I guess that's bad, but then I look at his stats from the game -- 29 of 46, 288 yards, 1 TD, 0 INT -- and I think, "You know, if my quarterback is completing over sixty percent of his passes and averaging ten yards for every completion and he's not throwing any picks, then maybe he's not really the reason the team lost.

The reason? The defense apparently couldn't stop anybody today, which has been the trend for weeks now. They contained the Titans' passing game, but got lit up by the running back, as usual. There were apparently some questionable tactical decisions by the Bills' coaches -- punting in Tennessee territory, for one thing -- but I don't know much about those.

This team really needs to do two things in the offseason: make sure all the good players are under contract, and then bring in a lot more talent. And yes, it's all about the offseason up here in Buffalo. We're good at talking about the offseason. Hell, to look at it one way, the Bills are in the midst of a twelve-year-and-counting offseason.

Sigh.

Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: I typically don't like the "Pretty young people stranded somewhere with killers on the loose" genre, but I may have to make an exception in this case. What a hilariously wonderful idea for a movie!

:: As a guy, I thought it was the height of innovation when some restaurants stuck a cork board in their restrooms and tacked up the day's sports page right above the urinal so we dudes had something to read. Now comes the next generation of urinal entertainment. Sometimes I tremble to realize that yes, this is the future. Somebody thought this up instead of inventing, oh, I don't know, supralight drive or flying cars or lightsabers.

That's about it. I can't really top the urinal thing, anyway....

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

I'm not a fan of How the Grinch Stole Christmas; something about it just bugs me. But I like this:

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

This is The Wife's favorite Christmas song. It isn't mine, but it's right up there in my personal ranking. Here's Bing Crosby singing "Do You Hear What I Hear". I love the orchestrations in this arrangement -- there are lots of little effects that add a Middle Eastern flavor to a very Western song.

Saturday Centus

This week Jenny throws a curve: we're supposed to use only 16 words to write about when we were 16 ourselves. Sixteen constituted most (except for the first few weeks) of my junior year of high school. What do I remember of that period? Hmmmm...one of my favorite English teachers ever, chemistry class, Mr. Jones's final year at ACS before moving away, playing Civil War music all year in band, and Dustin died. But anyway, here's my Centus entry:

When I was sixteen, I knew she was out there, somewhere...but I didn't know yet where.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

For years, I wanted the same thing for Christmas that this guy wanted. I finally bought one myself.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas (also, Something for Thursday)

I did this a few years ago, and I figured it's time to do it again: a video clip pertaining to Christmas each day until...Christmas. Some will be funny. Some will be straight music. Some might not be music at all. Who knows!

We'll start with the Muppets and their take on what is my least favorite Christmas song. This now establishes that there is one version of "Carol of the Bells" to which I will listen without reaching for the 'skip' button!