LAST SUNDAY OF ADVENT


And therefore rather too late to give my annual 'How to Put the Merry Back into Christmas -- Recovering Advent' sermon, but the reader can still benefit from a few of the recommendations, especially about music. Check out the archives here.





Been crazy-town busy, and am nearly partied out (yeah, I know, that's not really the spirit of Advent, but we all get calendar crunch this time of year), so blogging has fallen off the map.



Will return soon, when time allows, and provide all my thoroughly unsentimental, totally geopolitical strategery-based reasons why the man who didn't even make it to Time Magazine's Top Five is, in fact, the Indisputable Man of the Year, General David Petraeus, lynchpin of EVERYTHING that's happened this election season. It's brilliant. Fasten your seatbelts.


Must go. Plane to catch tomorrow a.m.


In the meantime, watch out for wolves.

MARK STEYN'S BEEN READING MY EMAIL

Apparently we both received the same piece of advert-spam from Amazon.com's music department, which offered a bevy of musical selections to celebrate THE TWELVE DAYS OF HOLIDAY. [screen cap here]

Now Amazon is almost a weekly visitor to our front door, so it's very difficult to think about boycotting its cornucopia of delights, but I have to admit that this craven crumple at the altar of Political Correctness got me seriously cheesed.

While I was contemplating what to do between now and Twelfth Night, Mark Steyn got on the case ["Don we now our vague apparel"], and I'm sure there were countless others who didn't need Steyn to lead them towards posting a complaint to Amazon's management.

The upshot is that it didn't take Amazon long to realize their mistake, and they are now advertising gifts for the TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS. Having drawn attention to the original travesty, Steyn began to regret the speedy return to sanity on Amazon's part, because the Bad Idea had been such fodder for parody, as follows:

Seven Customer Care Representatives A-leaping [Mark Steyn]

Following my post yesterday on Amazon.com's bizarre "Twelve Days Of Holiday" campaign, an unseasonably intemperate reader wrote:

Don't like Amazon? Don't shop at it then, you clot. Nobody really gives a damn if some online retailer is insufficiently Christian for your tastes. Nobody.

Oh, I don't know. The "Twelve Days Of Holiday" promotion has now been amended to "The Twelve Days Of [click here for offensive C-word]". So, if I'm a clot, I'm Rudolph the Red-Nosed Clot in whose wake you run-of-the-sleigh clots follow.

To be honest, I mildly regret this instant corporate capitulation as sometime Cornerite Michael Graham has started up a poll to find out your favorite "Twelve Days Of Holiday" song. As I write, the runaway winner is "It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Thursday".

[UPDATE: Things are going from bad to Norse:

Some may find it offensive to officially promote the Norse gods, so I believe it would be best to quit using terminology such as "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday" and "Friday" for our weekdays. Clearly, "It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Thursday" is highly offensive to those who do not worship Thor, and thus a more appropriate holiday song should be "It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like The Fifth Day of the Week".

But only if you assume the week begins on Sunday, as so many C-word obsessives do. Another reader writes:

Surely we should avoid offending those who do not worship Thor, god of thunder. So it should be “It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like the 4th day of the week”.

How about "It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Lunchtime"?

HIATUS:

Blogging slowdown due to fog (in my head) in Newfoundland. Readying the old homestead for Yule-tide.