The Real St. Nick, Home Alone 3, Fairytale of New York, etc.
In which you promised me Broadway was waiting for me.
⚾️ Rest in peace to the late, great, always spoke in third-person, Ricky Henderson. “There may not have been any player in history who was better at more things than Rickey Henderson was.”
┃Happy Festivus, to those that celebrate. A donation has been in your name to the Human Fund.
🎅 So… this never made it into folklore. “‘Santa Claus’ corpse was stolen from its tomb. Though Christmas carols and Claymation specials have for some reason neglected the heist of St. Nick’s dead body, the details of that theft actually can tell us a lot about mythmaking and the power of stories, however bizarre, to shape reality. Plus, it’s just a good tale to tell at holiday parties.”
🍿 Siskel and Ebert talking Home Alone 3 is hilarious. Siskel is so baffled and angry.
🎶 Darlene Love, who annually sang “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)” on Letterman for just short of 30 years, came back to television to perform it once again, this time on Fallon, joined by Letterman’s old bandleader Paul Schaffer, as well as Little Steven & The Disciples of Soul.
🎤 Not a “Christmas carol,” but a clip from The Muppet Show, the only program where you could ever see something like Debbie Harry perform her theme from American Gigolo with puppets.
😂 Saturday Night Live was near-perfect this week. Love that Che and Jost kept their Christmas tradition alive, this year with a sly nod to Bernie Mac (warning: lots of cussing).
⚽️ Have had Home Movies on background a bit the last few days, and will all due respect to Bob and his burgers, Coach McGuirk flat-out kills me like few others.
📼 Via Reddit, I stumbled on a collection of handwritten VHS labels their father made. Really took me back.
˸ Movies titles have gotten longer in the 21st century: over 16% have colons (IE, Spider-Man: No Way Home), up about 300% since the '90s.
🥷 I’ve been doing research for [blah, blah, blah] on the earliest days of the Internet. While not quite that far back, I was happy to find Xiao Xiao on Youtube, videos I originally downloaded (as opposed to streamed) almost 24 years ago.
🧑🍳 Not nearly as old, but on the tenth anniversary of Too Many Cooks a three-minute piece on Adult Swim’s bizzare masterpiece, via All Things Considered. If you’re not familiar: it’s insane.
👃🏻 There are sixteen trademarked scents in the United States, among them Crayola crayons and Playdoh.
🌭 If you’re looking for a career change in the new year…
📖 Never read Diary of a Wimpy Kid, but this excerpt on Shel Silverstein is hilariously relatable.
🎄 And while it was always nice to hear “Fairytale of New York” on Saturday Night Live, nothing can top the original.
They've got cars big as bars, they've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you, it's no place for the old.
When you first took my hand on a cold Christmas Eve,
you promised me Broadway was waiting for me.
You were handsome.
You were pretty, Queen of New York City.
When the band finished playing, they howled out for more.
Sinatra was swinging, all the drunks they were singing.
We kissed on a corner, then danced through the night.
The boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay.
And the bells were ringing out, for Christmas day.
✌️ keep the Hoping Machine running and have a very Merry Christmas.
Love,
Luke
