Coda to Culture Roundup

It's been a tough year for Barenaked Ladies. Some sort of problem with cocaine, cops, and fighting women or something like that on the eve of the tour promoting your first children's album is colossally bad timing. Then there was, I think, a plane crash. I'm not here for research, but anyway I think I remember some things like that. Not my business.

My point is that this morning we listened to Barenaked For The Holidays, the band's excellent seasonal CD. It is my second favorite Christmas album behind the super complete compilation of Elvis' Christmas recordings, If Every Day Was Like Christmas. Barenaked For The Holidays is great. I love that they took the time to really nail the Bono line of "Do They Know It's Christmas". (And tonight thank God it's them instead of you!) They do some funny, irreverent things, they do some poignant things, the music is varied and well thought out, and the sound is good. In other words, it's BNL at their best.

Movies? Yeah, I forgot about those. I don't see as many movies as I used to (a record of 55 in 1999 or one of those years like that) but Let The Right One In was quite good. It's in Swedish with subtitles if you can handle that. I loved the bleakness of the Stockholm suburb and the endless, relentless winter. I loved the basic decency of everyone in the film, trying their best to handle the tough situations they have been dealt. Plus, (Minor SPOILER ALERT! also perpetrated by the film's website) vampire!

And one more book. I finished the latest David Sedaris and started Jack Pendarvis' The Mysterious Secret of The Valuable Treasure. I've only read through the first story but I haven't laughed so hard since...well, since I just read David Sedaris, so that particular superlative phrase loses some power in this case. But I can heartily recommend the first ten pages of the Pendarvis.

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