Christmas Songs That DON'T Suck, and Other Musings, Part I

Not even Frank Sinatra can
rock white socks like Dean.

After posting about the Christmas songs I abhor, a few others came to mind, and I realized that I could probably start a new blog called Christmas Songs I Abhor and have enough material to post every day for a year, then tie them all together and get a book deal.

Some day I'll do that. Today is not that day. AND DON'T STEAL MY IDEA OR I'LL FRIGGING SUE YOU IN INTERNET COURT. So, let's move on to my musings about other Christmas songs.

Christmas Carols That Suck, and Other Musings

Hell yes.

I really wanted to say something profound about the Occupy Wall Street movement, but instead I'll share my opinions about the Christmas songs I do (and do not) like.

(As I was thinking about which songs would fall into which category, I discovered that the Onion's AVClub wrote a similar article. I have not read it yet, but you have my permission to do so.)

It's a little harder to create these lists than in years past because now I listen to Pandora — I'm tuned to the "Dean Martin (Holiday)" channel — so I'm able to get my fill of the songs I like without having to endure the crap that I used to face when I'd listen to the streaming versions of the radio stations pumping out all-Christmas tunes this time of year.

Not So Yankee Doodle Dandy

You might hate these things by now, wondering why you
ever ate them in the first place, but when offered the opportunity,
you'd still eat them. And then hate yourself later.
What? Okay, just me, then.

Now, where were we? That's right...it's been a while. I'll skip the "I haven't blogged in a while wow what a lazy person I am" prologue and get right to it.

HERE'S WHERE I GET RIGHT TO IT
Due to the nature of the distribution of chores and responsibilities in the The Anthony Show household, I am rarely if ever involved in the weekly acquisition of foodstuffs and sundries.

Mrs. The Anthony Show prefers it that way. Now that the kids are old enough that I can keep an eye on both of them by myself without the missus worrying that one child may shove the other child into an outlet, she usually hits the supermarkets (generally, Trader Joe's and Stop and Shop) on her own.

It's like a private vacation! For her, that is. Anyway, she always returns from her supermarket odyssey with a number of treats that would never be found in my parents' house when I lived there, unless they were smuggled there via the body cavities of sympathetic friends and relatives.

What the Hell Is Going on NOW?

I'm attempting to complete NaNoWriMo, against my better judgment. This year, I want to actually "finish" (that is, write a beginning-to-end first draft, no matter how shitty), so I'll probably be lax in my posting to The Anthony Show.

Not that I've been much on top of things lately, anyhow. But let's see how it goes!

Then We Sent a Spirit Into My Dorm-Mate's Stereo

If he looked more like this Hurley, we
would have played different pranks.

So there I was, blogging about the time I conspired to nearly disintegrate the digestive and colorectal systems of one of my college dorm-mates, whom I'm calling Hurley due to his physical resemblance to the Lost character, when I remembered another prank we pulled on the guy, which I'll share with you now.

TRUST ME, HE DESERVED IT
I haven't even really begun this post, and I feel like I'm turning Hurley into some kind of poor martyr, but believe me, the guy could dish it out as good as he could take it. There are a couple of incidents I can mention but I won't, mainly because I like the guy and this blog is The Anthony Show, not The Guy Known On The Anthony Show As Hurley Show, that would assure you that he wasn't always the poor victim.

BUT ANYWAY
Unlike the Ex-Lax brownies incident, which required a small amount of planning, the next prank came about completely by accident when Hurley purchased a very expensive sound system for his room.

The Ex-Lax-in-the-Brownies Prank

It helps if you picture a less-smiley
version of this guy.

The post I delivered on Friday jarred a few additional memories from my college years, so I think I’ll be sharing some of them in the near future...like today.

The following tale involves a friend of mine whom I’ll refer to as Hurley, because if you were a fan of Lost and were able to flash back in time like many of the principals on that show, you’d instantly recognize the resemblances between my friend and the character portrayed by Jorge Garcia.

My Hurley was about five-foot-eight, 250 pounds or so (I never had the opportunity to weigh him), and usually wore his long wavy Cuban hair in a ponytail so thick that it seemed to defy gravity as it stuck straight out of his head.

Hurley was an area native who lived close enough to the university to be a commuter but, lacking car and driver's license (if I accurately recall), he lived down the hall from me during freshman year, then moved in with some guys from Brooklyn directly across from me.

Hurley was a friendly fellow but was also aggressive when it came to entering our rooms and eating our food. Rather than conduct an intervention with Hurley regarding his behavior, we decided to prank him.

The Time My Roommate Climbed Into Bed With Me

Writing this post reminded me of Bosom
Buddies. If Skip and I had to wear dresses
to stay at the dorm, it would have made
a much more interesting tale.

Man, I really suck lately when it comes to updates. But enough about me. Well, not enough about me. Here's a Story about something that happened to me in college.

It was sophomore year, and I was living in the dorms. The way my particular building worked, you lived in a two-person suite that was connected to another two-person suite via a bathroom that connected both rooms. For my freshman year I was randomly paired with a guy named Eric, who was (and, I believe, still is) from a town in south-central New York called (I'm not making this up) Horseheads.

(The town, outside of Corning and Elmira, was near another curiously named area called Big Flats. I liked to ask Eric if that's also how you described the women that lived there. Yes, there was a time when my jokes were actually worse than they are now.)

He and I were as different as a Horseheads resident and Long Islander could be — when he read my full-of-vowels name off the "This is your roommate" card over the summer, he expected to meet a guy who drove an Iroc and wore wifebeaters all the time, he later told me — but we made a great pair of roommates, so we chose to be roommates in the same room for sophomore year.

Our suitemates were a similarly mismatched pair of fellas who I'll call Ken and Tim. Eric and I expected to become closer to Tim over Ken, because on the first night Ken mentioned how much he liked to smoke what he called "the herb," and back then I was an almost militant teetotaler. But for reasons I'll explain in another post, we ended up being friendlier with Ken, Tim ended up befriending some guys in another dorm and moved in with them for sophomore year, and Ken filled the open slot with his friend Skip, who hailed from way-the-hell-upstate Ogdensburg, which probably was to Horseheads what Horseheads was to Manhattan.

Skip was, and as far as I know still is, a blast. But he liked to drink. A lot.

By sophomore year I'd loosened my standards on drinking, so the actual imbibing didn't bother me. But it was the result of his drinking that led to the incident that is the source of this post. So, now that I've finally completed this prologue, let's get to the Story.