The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

It's time for a confession. One I've kept to myself for a long time, but I just can't find a reason to suppress any longer.

I completely love Christmas music. And uh-oh, what do you know -

"Well sure," someone said to me when I told this to them, "it's after Thanksgiving now, it's okay to listen to it."

But that's not what I mean. I love Christmas music. All the time. From New Years Day to New Years Eve. I love just about every kind of Christmas music. I love the old stuff, I love the new stuff, I love Christmas raps and Christmas song parodies. I love the songs about Jesus and the season, and the stuff about Santa and reindeer. About the only songs concerning Christmas or its indices I don't enjoy are "The Christmas Shoes," (maybe the most unnecessary song ever written) and anything wherein Santa is at the beach because that's soooo zany.

A sand snowman? Too wacky for me, Caillat.

No, I can listen to Christmas music with almost the same enthusiasm as I would Guns n' Roses, or Journey, or anything by the Muppets.

This is the greatest thing ever.

Maybe if there was good Hanukkah music out there I could include some of that, but whoever is in charge of our media conspiracy decided that our most popular songs about the holiday would just be lists of famous Jews..

This one keeps getting left out for some reason.

So all I wanted to do today was talk about some of my favorite Christmas songs, and share what you'll hopefully find to be some pretty good renditions of them.. Be warned that this post is going to be pretty video and link-intensive, but I'm sure we'll all have a good time at the end. So grab some hot cocoa, warm yourself by the fire, and, as I know we need it now more than most years, let's all share some holiday cheer.

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I don't know how, and I don't know when, but whatever it takes, whatever I have to do, I will make this a country where no parent ever has to worry that their child might not come back when they send them off to school.

I hope you will, too.

5 Reasons Joe Biden Won the Vice Presidential Debate

On the eve of the second Presidential debate, or Debate 2: Bate Harder, the results of the Vice Presidential confrontation a few days ago are quickly being forgotten. Here at Hofstra, campus is an absolute maze of news cameras and Secret Service, all focused on the two Presidential candidates. In my opinion, now is the perfect time to refresh our memories as to what exactly happened in the last debate, which people seem to be having trouble deciding who won.

Some very reputable and trustworthy news organizations are touting Paul Ryan as the winner. A number of polls indicate that the public considered it to be a tie. I think a lot of people with those viewpoints don't really know what "debate" means. Here's why it's pretty indisputable that Joe Biden scaled Ryan's harrowing widow's peak to become the clear victor.

5) He Was a "Bully"

A number of people keep pointing out that Biden continually interrupted Ryan, acted condescending by laughing, rolling his eyes, and smirking as the VP candidate spoke. The most overwhelming assessment of these actions were that Biden was "a bully."

So what's a bully, exactly?

A bully is what we call someone we see beating up somebody who can't defend themselves.

I do remember Biden stuffing Ryan's shirt with crud.

Neither of the candidates were completely honest up there, though Ryan did perhaps a bit more stretching of the truth than Biden. Joe did what Obama was not willing to do during the first debate - get up and in Ryan's face when he started lying. The most widely held reason people think Obama lost the first debate despite the fact that Romney told 27 lies in 38 minutes is that the President looked like he was floundering out there. His poise, his demeanor, his tone all bespoke a man who didn't want to be where he was. Romney, on the other hand, went on the attack, and no matter what he said, he looked good saying it.

Now the tables are turned. Biden put up a clear message of "I'm not putting up with any of that bullshit," and hammered back at Ryan on every point the Congressman tried to make. If Biden was a bully, it's because he made Paul Ryan look weak and ineffective by comparison. Detractors latched on to his attitude and confrontational demeanor because it's not like they had a lot of ammunition to hit back with otherwise.

Come to think of it though, Ryan does work out a lot.

4) He Looked Like a Human Being

                                                                               Image Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Paul Ryan is given credit for maintaining his composure and appearing dignified while accepting the beating he received. People have been pointing to his steadfast refusal to blink as a sign that he was doing a better job connecting with the audience. Biden's relaxed posture, eye-rolling, and laughing weren't "Vice Presidential," and so Ryan took that battle.

This is why we can't have nice things.

But if you go back and watch the video, you see a lot of Ryan staring ahead, grim-faced, while Biden enacts more or less the same body language Mitt Romney had in the debate he "won." The only difference being that Biden actually threw in some human emotion and reaction.

The people who want to make this argument are trying to have it both ways. If Obama is stoic and professional, he loses against a more animated and aggressive Mitt Romney. When Ryan is exuding the physical responsiveness of a coma patient whenever he's not speaking and Biden presses the assault, he's a bully and Ryan is "Vice Presidential."

Biden looked like a person who couldn't believe what he was being made to argue against. Ryan looked like he was trying to keep every muscle flexed at once throughout the entire hour and a half.

Even - especially - his face muscles.

Out to the Ballgame

As I mentioned last time, I've wanted to talk about sports for awhile. As baseball season winds down, football season picks up, and hockey season is cancelled, it seemed like a good time to broach the topic. Now, this is normally the territory of fellow Gentleman Max Nova, but as I seem to carrying the banner solo for the time being, I'll step in where he would normally fill the gap.

Besides, he only talks about soccer, and that's lame.

Don't be bringing that noise in here, Max.

This summer I was given a challenge. Follow a sports team. I should clarify; I have "teams," I guess, and like pretty much anybody else they're the teams my family told me to like. My ancestry dates back to New York since the hipsters of the day were telling everybody how New Amsterdam was just so over, so the Giants, the Yankees, and the Rangers have been pretty much all I've ever been required to pay attention to for the sake of familial obligation. Actually, nix the Rangers from the list. No one in my family cares about hockey.

No, for the sake of this challenge, I was given two very specific rules. First, I had to follow a team. Watch their games, learn their players, and keep up with their standings heading into the playoffs. I thought that would be pretty easy; I'd just keep up with the Yankees. Then came the second rule. No Yankees. The Yankees, I was informed, don't count. It's not really being a sports fan if you follow the Bronx Bombers, for reasons I'll get to later (since I didn't understand at first myself).

So at first I thought, "okay, I'm living on Long Island, the heart of Mets territory, I'll root for the Mets." Then I quickly had the follow-up thought "why would I ever, ever do that to myself?" A better candidate immediately came to mind - the boys from my adopted state of Maryland, the Baltimore Orioles. Also, since the Yankees used to be the Orioles, I thought this was a clever work-around of the second stipulation.

Those pinstripes aren't an accident.

Now, the Os have had a fantastic season. At the time of this writing they're still in the playoff race, had just as good a year as the Yankees did, and gave me some really good moments and good stories.

They also made me realize why I will never, ever be a real sports fan.

Texts From My Father

I'm going to give you a brief introduction to my dad. My father is a person who, on the same day he gave me a copy of The True Believer and emphatically insisted I read it, happily displayed the new "Proud Tea Party Member" hat he received at the county fair.

So that pretty much covers everything you need to know for this.

I'd wanted the first time I wrote about Dad for These Gentlemen to be the story of how just this summer we went to a ball game together for the first time. It was going to be part of a larger sports-related post I've been working on for awhile, talking about making a dedicated effort to follow a team this summer, tying it back into my mentioning of the Orioles in my post about Otakon, and making a number of other observations and witticisms. Oh, it was going to be a great post. It'll still come, eventually. After yesterday afternoon happened though, it's taking a back seat.

I woke up yesterday morning to find I'd received a text message from my dad, with the following instructions. "Watch CSPAN2 1030AM this morning, discussion to follow."

My first impulse was immediately to just send back "sorry, don't have TV in the dorm," but for whatever reason, I decided to check CSPAN's website and sure enough, there's a live stream of all their programming. I looked at my schedule for the day. Reading, some volunteer work, and then maybe working on that aforementioned sports post. It was already after 10, nothing I was going to do was going to get started in the next 15 minutes. I waited until 10:30 rolled around and saw that there was some book talk going on, with an author deceptively named John Goodman touting his plan for health care reform. I watched the brief interview, sent my dad a text reading "anyone who says we should open up insurance across state lines is arguing for universal health care and doesn't realize it," and left it at that.

Then, compelled my reasons unknown to me, I kept the stream open. A reflexive groan escaped my lips as the segment ended and the next speaker came on. Dinesh D'Souza, talking about his new book, where he lays out exactly what a second term for Obama would look like. I decided to listen for awhile, but turned it off as soon as he broke out the "you didn't build that" line everybody with any kind of anti-Obama agenda has been ripping out of context for the last month or so. Man, I was glad my dad wanted me to see the book guy and not D'Souza.

So yeah, the next text I got back was "What? Did you see D'Souza?"

Just to sum up, D'Souza's latest argument is that the President has shaped his entire life and ideology through his father, whom he met once, 40 years ago. Not only that, but that his father had a friend who was an anti-colonialist (and Obama never met him at all), and so this friend influenced Barack Sr., who in turn influenced the President, and so now he's a rage-filled anti-American socialist who wants to tear down society. You know, I totally get that from his speeches, I don't see why so many other people don't hear it. The crux of D'Souza's contention comes from the fact that Obama titled the memoir he wrote about Barack Sr. Dreams From My Father. By saying "from" instead of "of," D'Souza posits, he means he's . . . you know what, it's easier at this point to just say D'Souza's entire argument is preposition-based and leave it at that.

What followed was a back-and-forth with my father I found noteworthy enough to record for posterity. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.

Conventional Wisdom

Several years ago, I had the chance to go spend a weekend in Toronto with a good friend of mine who was there for grad school. It just so happened that the Toronto Fan Fest was happening at the same time I would be there, and a favorite webcomic artist of ours, Ryan Sohmer of Least I Could Do, was looking for booth babes. As my friend is both a) a babe, and b) happy to let people give her things in exchange for being able to admire her, she applied for and got the job. This meant that we both got to go to the convention, and I wandered the floor taking in the sites while she hawked books while wearing a chain mail bra.

This was the first time I'd ever been to a convention for anything. Several friends of mine had sung the praises of New York Comic Con, and I'd heard of a few others happening in places I'd lived, but I never had the time or inclination to actually attend. Also, throughout much of college I was in a phase of my life where I was very concerned with my outward persona, so letting people know I read comic books? Watched anime? Had - gasp - seen all of Star Trek? These things were not topics I brought up outside of the presence of two or three friends from high school, why would I intentionally go to a convention advertising my interest in all that nerd stuff?

I'll tell you why, because that nerd stuff is awesome.

Walking through the convention in Toronto, being inundated by booth after booth from major comic book companies, indy film studios, costume makers, video game companies, artists, designers, - this place really had it all - I was struck by how many amazing things I loved they'd managed to cram into one place. Even more amazing, all those things I loved, there were people walking around in costumes dressed up like the characters from them! That's a thing you can do?! Before that point I'd always imagined "dressing up for a convention" was for people who had a Starfleet uniform in their closet.

I was wrong. I was stunned by how accurate and well done these costumes were. Everybody was there; there were Spider-Men, Batmen, Jokers, Ash's from Evil Dead, people from anime, people from movies, whole groups of people in coordinated costumes walking around. A patrol of Storm Troopers was walking the halls. Street Fighter characters would assume fighting poses for mass groups of photographers. People in steampunk outfits wandered around next to cylons. This place was like nothing I'd ever seen.

And I knew as soon as my friend and I left the floor that day; this is something I wanted to do.

At least once, sometime in my life, I wanted to get a costume, go to a major convention, and just walk around.

Unfortunately, as time went on and my Toronto experience faded, it seemed like that goal was going to be lost to me. The opportunity never really arose, and I never put much time into seriously pursuing it. I would bring up the idea from time to time, but usually the case was had neither the time or the money to put an outfit together, I didn't know whom I'd want to dress up as, there wasn't any convention conveniently nearby, or some combination of the three. Ultimately, I had pretty much forgotten the whole idea.

Until earlier this summer, when I got a phone call from my friend Matt.

The Talk

"Son," I called into the next room, "would you come in here, please?"

"Coming!" His reply made me sigh unconsciously. The falsetto squeak of my young teenager's changing voice was just another reminder of how quickly time goes by. "What is it, Dad?"

"Put your game down," I told him, and he could tell right away I was using my "serious" voice. I remembered having the same feeling of anxiety he was feeling whenever I heard that voice from my own parents. Fortunately - or unfortunately - for both of us, I wasn't going to yell at him, or question him, or punish him.

No, as his sixteenth birthday loomed, and soon he'd be taking girls to prom, asking to stay out all night with friends, and driving his own hovercar, it was time to have "The Talk."

I gestured for him to come sit next to me on his hoverbed. "Son," I began, clearing my throat, hoping my own nervousness wouldn't show through, "it's time we had a talk."  I gave him a meaningful look. "THE talk."

"Aw, Dad," he hung his head down, kicking his feet, "We have the googlenet, I know about sex and stuff."

"I know, but it's not enough to just know the mechanics. Pretty soon you're going to be going out with girls or attractive robots, and I've got to make sure you understand there's a big responsibility that comes with it."

"What do you mean?"

"Well son," I took out the box I'd been sitting next to, the awkwardness of the moment startling even me. "if you're going to have sex, you've got to use a condom."

"Daaaaaad!" He was just as embarrassed by the whole thing as I was, but I knew this was important.

"This is important," I pressed, letting the box of hovercondoms float next to him, even while silently wondering if maybe mankind had gotten overzealous with hover technology. "Sex is a wonderful thing, but it can carry some heavy consequences. If you're not careful, you can get a girl pregnant."

"What?" He seemed genuinely shocked. "Babies come from sex?"

"It's true," I affirmed, "but these will help prevent that from happening."

He took the box and looked it over, quickly putting it to the side, clearly feeling uncomfortable. "Okay, okay, use condoms, I got it. But, why, Dad? I thought women could choose when they can and can't get pregnant?"

"Oh ho ho," I laughed heartily at the youth's ignorance. "No, son. And don't say that around women, it's very offensive. See, they have no control over it - unless they get raped."

"Really?" He seemed confused, but I could understand why. No one had really thought that way until Senator Akin, many years earlier, had brought light to the scientific fact.

"You see, son, when a woman really gets raped, she secretes a certain secretion and keeps herself from getting pregnant."

"What do you mean, "really" gets raped? And aren't you thinking of ducks?"

"Well, to answer the second question first, we all used to think so, but a very smart man named Todd Akin, who was a Senator in Missouri, showed us all we were wrong using testimony from a real doctor. When he first said he heard that from a doctor, even I thought he meant like, a chiropractor, or maybe someone whose last name just happened to be "Doctor," but no, it was a real, actual doctor. And he taught us all a valuable lesson about how women get pregnant. If a woman is forced into having sex, she can't get pregnant."

"But - how does that work? If babies come from sex . . . "

"Ah, but going back to your first question, a woman's body is an amazing thing. If she doesn't want it, her body will shut down the baby-making stuff and she'll be alright. That's why, thanks to Senator Akin, we outlawed the morning after pill. It was just one more way for women to think they could have sex without consequence."

"Wait a second," my son said, mulling that over in his teenage head, "there are other ways to prevent pregnancy and we outlawed them?"

"Of course," I said, "sex is a huge responsibility, and making it safer for everyone involved just encourages more of it. Since we know women who are legitimately raped can't get pregnant, it means that all those women who had abortions or took emergency contraception were lying about being raped in the first place. And that's terrible son, rape is a horrible crime and those women are bad people for lying about it."

"Is that really true?" He seemed more confused than ever. I felt bad for him - I knew this was a lot to take in, and a young, hormone-addled mind could become overwhelmed by all the science.

"Hey, Senator Akin was on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, so I trust him to know what he's talking about. It was thanks to him that we finally got rid of birth control being covered by health insurers and passed that Constitutional Amendment banning all forms of abortion."

"So, so . . . " I could hear the gears turning in his head as he tried to wrap his head around it, "women have no right whatsoever to choose when they want to start a family? If they want to have sex, it's all up to luck?"

"Luck and condoms, son," I told him solemnly, "luck and hovercondoms."

"But . . . Dad, that sounds really, really unfair to women."

I shrugged. "I used to think so, too," I recalled, "because no matter how strongly I felt we should be focusing on making a nation where women had enough options that they'd never feel like abortion was all they could do with an unwanted pregnancy, I knew at the end of the day, it wasn't my choice to make. But since Senator Akin made it clear that way of thinking just encourages women to lie about rape, I had to change my mind. That's why you wear a condom, son, every time." 

That wasn't the whole truth, though, and if nothing else I wanted this talk to be thorough. "But," I started to clarify, "if you maybe find a girl with enough money to pay for her own birth control, then it's okay not to use protection."

"Really? But . . . aren't there like, diseases that come from sex?"

Now, this was an important question, and I wanted to make sure that my son and I were on the same page here. I looked him square in the eye, putting my hand on his shoulder. "My boy," I was using my "serious" voice again, "you know I'll love you no matter what, right? No matter what, I'll always be proud of you, and I'll always support you." He nodded, though he was clearly confused. "Son, are you gay? Or . . .hoversexual?"

"No," he said, shaking his head, "I know I like girls. I mean, I REALLY like girls."

"Good," I breathed a sigh of relief, since that made this next part of the talk a whole lot easier. "In that case you've got nothing to worry about, since you can't get AIDS through heterosexual sex."

"Is that true?!" He exclaimed, looking more surprised than ever.

"It is," I assured him. "If you were gay, we'd have to talk about all kinds of safety precautions and preventative measures, but as long as you stick to girls you'll be okay."

"Wow," he was trying to process everything he'd just learned. He took the box and looked it over, the flush of embarrassment coming back to his cheeks. "Okay, okay," he said, his teenage irritability surfacing, "I think I get it. Can I go now, Dad?"

"Alright son, but remember everything I said today."

"I will, I will!" He dropped down to the floor, scooping his game off of the dresser. He stopped at the door, looking back at me with a smile. "Hey," he offered meekly, "thanks, Dad."

I smiled as he walked back out into the hall. Parenting is a big challenge, but knowing I'm sending my kids out there with the right information made me feel pretty darn good about myself.

When it comes time to tell my daughter how it is, though, I think I'll leave that up to her mother.