K-Squared Ramblings

Errand Observations

• The Spectrum food court has ripped out the planters. I guess they realized they needed the floor space after they chopped off one end. #
• It’s Halloween, so Target has the Christmas decorations up! #
• Just heard a commercial that started off, “Winter is Coming.” #
• OK, only 3 people reading this will get the reference, but… “Where are you going?” #

Zune Fail, Comment Win & Holiday Creep

• Weird: Zunes all over the world froze up at the same time overnight. #
• Comment win: “like she was going to rip his arm off and beat his spleen to death with it. Not him; just his spleen” #
• Just a quick store run – yeah along with everyone else in town. #
• More holiday creep! I still need to mail Xmas gifts to people I missed! It’s still 2008! #

Carol of the Bells, ATM Design

Some more observations while Christmas shopping:

I like “Carol of the Bells” as an instrumental piece. Sung with lyrics? Not so much. It feels tacked on. #

Clever UI design on ATM: w/ fast cash, it won’t give you the cash until after you take your card. Usually I grab it fast, so I never noticed #

Mall Crush

Must remember: just because the mall is the CLOSEST place to grab lunch doesn’t make it the BEST place, esp. 3 days before Christmas. #

Christmas Shopping

• Need to sleep. Found myself typing “Satan Claus” by mistake. #
• Symptom of car culture: I almost feel like I have to justify crossing the street on foot to go to another store instead of moving the car. #
• Sun Halo. All you have to do is look up once in a while. #

• Linens & Things: Nothing left to sell but the shelves… #
• Almost. Walked around a corner and they do have SOME stuff left #
• Virgin Megastore is closing too, but they’ve still got lots of stuff. Incl 5000 copies of Serial Mom. #
• Replica toys: I get the nostalgia factor, but at the same time it’s a weird idea. #
• Going out of business sales seen today: 4. Mervyns, Linens&Things,Virgin,Steve&Barry’s. #
• And the more stores I look at, the more “What You Own” competes in my head for the ubiquitous Christmas music. #
• Amazon’s wishlist needs a generic option. Like “I want an 8GB Micro-SD card” rather than “I want THIS Micro-SD card specifically!” #

Even Santas Have it Tough

Presumably this institution is designed to serve the needs of Santa Clauses who subsist on Ho-Hos.

Christmas Songs

I like hearing so many different kinds of music at Christmas time. Except when they play the same songs over and over and over and over and #

Holiday Seasons: Then and Now

When I was a kid, I remember the last few months of the year broke down like this:

• Back to School in early-to-mid September
• Halloween for the second half of October
• Thanksgiving for the second half of November
• Christmas in December
• New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day

These days it seems more like this:

• Back to school in August (July, really — as soon as the Independence Day merchandise goes on clearance.)
• Some weird mix of Oktoberfest, Halloween, and Thanksgiving as “Autumn” or “Harvest” or some such thing covering all of September and October, resolving into Halloween specifically for the last week.
• Christmas from November through December, with a short break for Thanksgiving
• New Year’s

Everything’s crept earlier.  There aren’t any breaks between seasons.  And Christmas has swallowed up Thanksgiving as if it were merely an appetizer for the main meal.

Seriously… can’t we let Halloween be Halloween? And let Thanksgiving be Thanksgiving? And let Christmas be something special instead of taking up 1/6 of the year?

When Christmas starts showing up before Thanksgiving — never mind before Halloween! — I always find myself thinking of the story about the little girl who wished it would be Christmas Every Day, and found out why that wasn’t so appealing after all.

Line Items for 2008-10-29: Random

• If only the super high-tech jet fighters had identified, clarified & classified, they’d have seen the attack for what it really was. #
• Good grief. “Traditional marriage” didn’t go away when gays were let into the club. It doesn’t need a discriminatory law to “restore” it. #
• South coast has xmas decorations up ALREADY. Halloween doesn’t exist, I guess. Or thanksgiving. #

Shopping Oddities

Catching up here on some stuff I saw in stores last December during (and after) Christmas shopping.

The “perfectly cromulent gifts” is my favorite of the bunch. The Simpsons display was found at a Borders bookstore, probably the one at The Block at Orange.

I love the fact that the “Bah Humbug” hat is actually labeled as a “Santa Hat.” I think someone’s got their wires crossed. Found in the clearance aisle at the grocery store.

These bars of tomato soap (not a typo!) were at the World Market at The Village (the one that used to be Orange Mall, not the apartments across from the Spectrum — though I think they use the same font for their logos, which is kind of strange. Better than the apartments that use nearly the same font as the logo for The Prisoner, though!)

I think the reason I get such a kick out of this toy is that laptop computers didn’t exist when I was in preschool (or if they did, they certainly weren’t affordable to anyone who didn’t absolutely need one for business). A laptop meant the top of someone’s lap. And now, in the grand tradition of transforming the everyday objects of the adult world into toys for infants (cars, telephones, bubble pipes), we now have something that vaguely looks like a folding keyboard and screen.

Santa’s other job

Spotted last summer. In case you were wondering…

…now you know what he does for the rest of the year!

Christmas Creep On-Air

Went to lunch today, and the restaurant was playing Christmas music, two days before Thanksgiving. It wasn’t entirely their fault; they were just playing KOST, and the radio station had gone into full Christmas mode.

Now, I normally like hearing Christmas music on the radio. It’s one of the few times of year that you hear a variety of music styles (many of them otherwise vanished from the radio) without playing them yourself. Though after a while it does start to grate, especially when they overplay the same few songs. But come on, at least wait until Friday!

I guess it’s official: Thanksgiving no longer exists as its own entity. We’re now going straight from Halloween to Christmas. “Turkey Day” is just the pre-Christmas get-together.

Does anyone remember the story of the kid who wished for it to be Christmas every day, and it happened, and then suddenly Christmas wasn’t special anymore?

Snow More!

Oh the crowds outside are frightful,
But the music’s so delightful…
’Cept for ev’ry darn place we go,
It’s “Let it Snow!” “Let it Snow!” “Let it Snow!”

Seriously. It seems like this song has somehow become the most popular Christmas song this year. I normally don’t mind it, but come on!

It doesn’t help that it’s about as likely to snow here as it is for a meteor to strike Times Square at exactly midnight on New Year’s Eve. But that’s worth its own post.

(Incidentally, the parody’s original. We made it up together in the grocery store on Sunday. Katie has more, but I can’t remember it.)

Star of Damocles

For various reasons, braved the crowds at South Coast Plaza yesterday. Oddly, it’s the easiest mall I’ve parked at all weekend. Getting to the Marketplace was a disaster, but that’s just because the streets are wholly inadequate to get cars in and out of the parking lot, and the Village (formerly the Mall of Orange) was just plain full.

At South Coast, as part of their Christmas decorations, they had these giant, shiny, 14-pointed stars hanging from the ceiling in several places.

Classic Christmas, but when you go down to the first floor and look up, there are all these giant, gleaming spikes hanging over your head.

It’s a little disconcerting. “Death from above!” is not something I want my holiday decorations to invoke.

DC’s Missed Opportunity

As of two weeks ago, DC was still talking about its upcoming Infinite Christmas special. Yesterday, the book came out, complete with a logo based on the Infinite Crisis logo.

Only it had been renamed the Infinite Holiday special, ruining the joke.

No word on why they changed it, but someone suggested “Christmas on Infinite Earths” would have been even funnier.

Note to those who are likely to cite this as more evidence for the non-existent “War on Christmas:” Most of the stories in the book are Christmas stories. Many of them with the word in the title. And in a country where atheists are the most distrusted minority, the idea that Christians are being persecuted is laughable. (Why do I think this footnote is going to get more comments than the actual post?)