If you’re like me, and just a wee bit tired of Virginia, here’s a Christmas story you might enjoy (reprinted: it originally ran on Christmas Day in 1986).
This is a story that has everything: a dying child, an impossible request, and a gruff but kind hearted hard-drinking city editor. It is almost as if someone took many of the cliches of 1950s journalism and rolled them into a single morality tale.
He listened to the problem and told me to telephone the Secretary of Agriculture and have him clear the peaches when they arrived.
“It’s close to midnight,” I argued. “His office is closed.”
“Take this number down,” Reck said. “It’s his home. Tell him I told you to call.”
It is the most celebrated letter to the editor and its reply the most celebrated editorial in American journalism.
Yes, that one.
In the summer of 1897, 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon sent a letter to The New York Sun asking if Santa Claus was real. An editorial writer named Frank Church was assigned the task of answering Virginia’s letter. Church’s response, published anonymously Sept. 21, is a Christmas classic.
Or you could read it on the Newseum website. On on the New York Daily News website. Or any number of other places where they don’t charge you to read something that (I strongly suspect, but you never know with US copyright law) is in the public domain.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I loved the “worst” lists published in various places. Jeff Millar‘s worst movies list in the HouChron. Siskel and Ebert’s “worst movies of the year” episode. High points, things I looked forward to every year.
(On a side note, it fills me with delight down to the bottom of my coal-black little heart that Siskel & Ebert.org has the complete 1992 worst up on their site. This is the year that Roger lost the coin flip and picked Shining Through as his worst movie of the year, complete with the interminable strudel scene. Really. I kid you not. Melanie Griffith just goes on. And on. AND ON. Here, watch for yourself:
The Shining Through section begins at about 15:30, but you should really watch the whole thing.)
But things have changed. Siskel and Ebert and Millar are all dead. For a while, the AV Club was an acceptable substitute.
But this year’s AV Club is a little off. Take their worst movies of the year, for example. I admit I have not seen Planes (I don’t care for Pixar films) or A Good Day to Die Hard. But were they really among the worst movies of the year, in a year that included The Purge and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone? Worse than Last Vegas or the Carrie remake? At least Battle of the Year made their list. (Didn’t see it, but saw the trailer for it.)
Smurfs 2 came out this year. It isn’t on the AV Club list. Enough said.
Likewise, a “worst TV” list that doesn’t include Bob’s Burgers, Family Guy, or Raising Hope is pretty much worthless, and tells me that the AV Club writers are either on drugs or taking payoffs from Fox.
But there is one thing I can count on, although it technically isn’t a “worst” list (except maybe of family disasters): the Carolyn Hax Hootenanny of Holiday Horrors. The 2013 edition is here.
All of the sudden she stuck out her hand and bellowed “SPOOOOOON!” at which point someone meekly handed her a spoon and she proceeded to stir the gravy.
(And dryer lint really is great for starting fires. Especially with a flint and steel. At least, that’s what I learned in the Boy Scouts.)
Edited to add more: someone on the AV Club posted a link to “The Dissolve”, aka “Where Many of the AV Club’s Most Interesting Writers Went to Languish In Obscurity”. And they have their own worst list, which I find…kind of credible.
Yeah, okay, the Die Hard movie is on it, and Smurfs 2 isn’t, but they do get points for reminding me of some other candidates for year’s worst movie. For example, The Internship, aka “A Two Hour Long Commercial for Google”, and Movie 43. Might be worth keeping an eye on this site in 2014.
Meanwhile, we have obtained a copy of The King of Sports: Football’s Impact on America. According to our Kindle, we got about 65% of the way through it while waiting for new tires to be put on WCD’s official vehicle. (“Daddy Drank Our Xmas Money”? Yeah, bullshit. Daddy put all our Xmas money into car tires. Daddy doesn’t even have enough money for cheap vodka. Not that Daddy’s bitter or anything.)
It probably will not happen today, but we do plan to have a review of King of Sports up between now and the next TMQ.
Instead of a musical interlude, or random snark, we’ve decided this week to bring you something we hope you’ll really like: an interview with Gregg Easterbrook about The King of Sports: Football’s Impact on America from Reason magazine. Why? Well, we self-identify as libertarians, we like Reason, and we’d like to give them some more exposure. Also, we think this is a rare opportunity to see and hear the man himself, just in case you were wondering what TMQ looks and sounds like.
Holiday quiz time! Test your knowledge of ‘Elf,’ ‘Home Alone’ and more
Last year, we ran a hugely popular quiz from Dale Roe for what might be the greatest holiday movie of all time, “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”
And that was as far as I got, since:
The article is behind the Statesman‘s paywall.
Everybody knows the greatest holiday movie of all time is the original “Die Hard“.
(Though the less cynical side of me thinks The Annotated Christmas Carol would be a swell thing to have, even if it is unlikely to displace Mr. McGee in my affections. But I’m also a sucker for annotated books.)
When I was younger, my family had a subscription to Scientific American, and I loved “Mathematical Games” (though I didn’t really have the mathematical background at the time to follow many of Gardner’s columns). When I was older, I encountered him as a skeptic, in the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer as well as in Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus and Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.
Anyway, my point (and I do have one) is that this a very good thing. I’m not sure how many Gardner fans are out there in my audience, and if any of them already knew about this; but if you did know, why didn’t you tell me?
72 bottles over 16 months is 4.5 bottles per month, or a little over a bottle per week. Or, if you want to look at it another way, 23 gallons over 16 months is 1.4375 gallons, 184 ounces, or 5441.53 ml per month. Assuming a 30 day month, that’s a little over 6 ounces of vodka a day. Or somewhere between two and three stiff drinks.
If you drive drunk with an open bottle in your car, you have a problem. If you have two stiff drinks a day, do you have a problem? I’m not so sure. (One of the current comments on this story calls out the hidden assumption that she drank it all herself, rather than having parties, having friends over, another family member drinking some of it, etc.) And it bothers me a little that the attorney was able to get records of her purchases from Twin Liquor. I buy from Twin Liquor; is some lawyer going to be able to subpoena records of my purchases? Should I start paying in cash?
(Another hidden assumption: she only bought from Twin Liquor, and not from Spec’s, or any of the dozens of other liquor stores around town.)
(Am I the only person who sees Debs Liquor and thinks to myself, “Well, good for him. I’m glad he found more honest work than running for president.”)
Also interesting: the “board” (or the former board, depending on how you look at it) is remaining silent. One former president, and the guy who set up the organization’s PayPal account, “declined through his lawyer to comment due to the ongoing investigation.” A second former president, who allegedly brought Shon Washington into the organization, also declined to comment.
. According to our Kindle, we got about 65% of the way through it while waiting for new tires to be put on WCD’s official vehicle. (
off the shelf for the annual re-reading.)
would be a swell thing to have, even if it is unlikely to displace Mr. McGee in my affections. But I’m also a sucker for annotated books.)
.
and 
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was my introduction to Chesterton, and let us not forget 
.