One last word on this Christmas season: this year, I attended a 2025 community theater loose adaptation of A Christmas Carol as a play, watched the 1938 MGM film version on TCM, and then read Charles Dickens' original 1843 book on Project Gutenberg to check how the others deviate.

137/2569. A Christmas Carol (1938)

Mostly, the key differences are the heavier emphasis on Bob Cratchit and Fred and the costume design of the spirits, but also the visual adaptations tend to leave out Scrooge meeting his own corpse. (The Ghost of Christmas Future goes hard.) These days, corpses aren't very Christmas-y.

I have never cared for Scrooge's abrupt change of heart, but Dickens clearly isn't much interested in how Scrooge became a miser or why he suddenly gave a shit about Tiny Tim so much as he's selling that kindness and charity are the only way for a society to become a community. "Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset." I do not personally enjoy the Christmas season, but I don't think Dickens is wrong.

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I think between all the cinnamon rolls, donuts, candy, hot chocolate, ham, mashed potatoes, and pie, I gave myself the gift of an extra 10 pounds for Christmas.

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I finally found a Christmas ornament I want.

Not to hang on a tree, mind you. There is no tree. There's never a tree. No, that one just needs to sit on my desk below my monitor where I can look at it often, nod, and sigh.

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For a guy who claims not to like Christmas very much, I sure do buy a lot of Christmas-themed comic books.

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143/2309. Violent Night (2022)
Santa Claus as reluctant action movie star in a film that is exactly what it promises to be. The script is a little rough around the edges, many of the camera shots are too tight, and most of the "actors" were clearly stunt people. But those were largely features, not bugs. If you want to see Santa Claus killing very bad people with a sledgehammer, then this is certainly that.

144/2310. Merry Little Batman (2023)
This Christmas-adjacent movie about Batman's very young son trying to replace his crime-fighting father leans heavily on 1960s animation aesthetics and feels about twice as long as it needs to be. I like the weirdness of the tone and style, but it reached me much too late in life -- and after far too many murderous psychotic Joker stories -- for me to find it endearing.

145/2311. Platinum Blonde (1931)
Frank Capra is the director, but this isn't quite as treacle as the films he would become better known for. It's the old story of opposites attracting and worlds colliding, but it's not very deep and the "happy" ending is an amicable divorce. I didn't care for it.

And that brings us to the last of the 145 movies I watched in 2023. At final count, Glenda Farrell, star of the "Torchy Blane" movie series, was the actor most often on my screen (6 times). The next closest was Jimmy Stewart (4 times in 2024, 23 times since I started tracking in 2012). I'd certainly watch more of both of them.

I'm already 17 new-to-me movies into 2024, which puts me on a pace to exceed my annual goal of 150. Will I get there? Only time will tell.

More to come.

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As she was getting ready for bed, Mom said, "You never told me what you thought of the thermometer I gave you."

"What thermometer?" I asked.

"The one I gave you for Christmas."

"You didn't give me any thermometer for Christmas," I insisted.

"Oops."

It was at this point that she realized that although her direct guidance had led to gifts for me with other people's names on the labels, she hadn't given me anything from herself. So hours after the annual family gathering had ended, she went into her closet and emerged with this new stack of gifts just for me.

It was like having two Christmases, the second including a fancy new meat thermometer, which, for the record, I think is very nice.

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Last week, knowing that Mom would be busy tending to her wounded beau, I sent a message to my standing group text with my friends looking for someone to accompany me to tonight's 7PM football game between #2 UGA and #9 Mississippi. They ignored me.

To add insult to injury, my so-called "friends" were unsympathetic the following day when I complained about people who put up and decorate Christmas trees the first week in November. Are they really my friends if they hate live football and think Christmas should be celebrated before Thanksgiving? I say no.

So I did what any sane person would do: I deleted the group text chain from my phone and went to the game by myself.

Sure, it was cold and drizzly, but I still had a great time (and a hand warmer), mostly because the Bulldogs were totally dominant (and because Mom wasn't there to talk me out of bringing a hand warmer to the game). The seniors were celebrated; the veterans were celebrated; the SEC Champion soccer team was celebrated.... After halftime, it was pretty much all celebration inside the 9th largest football stadium in the world. These are good times to be a Bulldogs fan.

There are still two games remaining on the season, but this was the last home game of the year, an unusually early ending to a (mostly lousy) home schedule. Looking back at the four I attended, Kentucky was the most fun, but this was an easy second place. The question is whether I will be back next year.

It is getting very hard to find people to go to the games with me, especially since I have fewer friends than I thought I did. (Christmas tree-hugging bastards!) So spending thousands on a couple of tickets I can't (and don't want to) always use is starting to seem like a bad use of my money.

I'll see how I feel when the bill comes due in February.

In the meantime, do as Miss Manners advises and "finish your turkey before putting up Christmas." Assholes.

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In hindsight, the biggest problem of my frequent blog posts complaining about the misguided preponderance of the poop emoji in unnecessary consumer goods is the undesired side effect of friends and family thinking that I actually want to encounter more of it.

For example, this is an actual gift that I received this past Christmas:

I will protect the anonymity of which of my mother's sisters thought this would be fun for Walter, but I will tell you that it's the same one who gave me a dancing penis pickle.

For the record, please do not buy things for me with the poop emoji on them. In fact, don't buy anything for me unless I explicitly ask you to. There's too damn much crap in this world already.

Also for the record, what inspired today's post (in addition to a desire to clean out my pictures folder) was the discovery of a poop emoji mousepad at Big Lots. Who needs that? Seriously. Who uses mousepads anymore?

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