Christmas has finally come. Fear not though, I have saved the best for last. Initially, I was only going to have one song today, but I found another this morning that couldn’t wait until next year. Lady GaGa’s “Christmas Tree”:
And finally, the undisputed champion for worst Christmas song of all time: “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” produced for Live Aid in the 1980s.
Today I present popular artists’ attempts at Christmas songs.
Queen’s surprisingly popular 1984 song “Thank God It’s Christmas” is perhaps the best attempt:
There are no words for Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful ChristmasTime”:
Even the Beach Boys’ smooth harmony can’t save the terrible lyrics of “Santa’s Beard”:
I’ve got a few for you today but they all follow the same style: parodies of the twelve days of Christmas.
First, a policemen’s twelve days of Christmas:
An emo’s twelve days of Christmas:
The Twin Peaks’ twelve days of Christmas:
Trust Fall Out Boy to turn even the most cheery of holidays into a self-absorbed pity party. I present, for your listening enjoyment, “Yule Shoot Your Eye Out.”
I present you the old Christmas classic, Shana Lynett’s “Mr. Russian, Please Don’t Shoot Down Santa’s Sleigh”. Via Twitter.
To celebrate the holidays, I will be posting bad christmas songs all this week.
New-ish video from 30 Seconds To Mars. Allegedly directed by lead singer/actor Jared Leto under the name Bartholomew Cubbins.
A professional football player lives over 20 years less than an average American. At the same time, professional athletes in soccer live longer than the averages in their countries. Though this may be a shocking revelation about America’s favorite sport to spectate (though not entirely surprising considering a new focus on football injuries), I don’t see much changing.
On this weekend’s On The Media, Nicholas Kristof discussed how difficult it was to market humanitarian crises given that the effects are collective and so far removed from the public’s consciousness. Football is no humanitarian crisis, though, and this is exactly why people will not care. We are paying them millions of dollars per year, do they really need our pity? Even if you select a single player be a spokesman, there would be almost no incentive for their thoughts to be heard: all of the people with vested stakes in sports make more money without these thoughts.
The NFL did change the rules for concussions and now players will not be allowed to return the same day after a concussion, but this does nothing to change the way the game is played. The new rules change the consequences but not the causes of concussions. Until this happens, players’ lives will still be considerably shorter.
It looks like REI has taken to television advertising for the first time ever. The ads are kind of cool:
From The League of Ordinary Gentlemen’s cover contest. As a side note, I have really been enjoying The League of Ordinary Gentlemen for the week that I’ve subscribed to them so consider trying it out.
From former norwegian black metal band Ulver and a YouTube user, comes dubbing of David Lynch’s Lost Highway with Ulver’s song Porn Piece or the Scars of Cold Kisses. Lost Highway is probably my favorite Lynch movie because its story actually makes sense. The song isn’t metal, but viewers should watch out for shocking images that Lynch might throw at them.
By The Faint.
Dear CNN,
You probably don’t know me, but I am one of your 2.8 million followers on Twitter. I’ve been with your Twitter since before you knew twitter existed and your account was run by English hacker James Cox. I subscribed because I wanted to have breaking news updates sent to my phone via text message. For a long time this worked well, and I especially liked the (very) occasional human touch Mr. Cox put in when he screwed something up on accident.
In the beginning, breaking news was just that: big news. I would get a text every few days, sometimes more, but this was a volume that I could handle. Sometimes you posted breaking news about people such as O.J. Simpson and it was easy to forgive you, because the signal to noise ratio was relatively high.
Then you discovered Twitter. You decided to accept Ashton Kutcher’s challenge to reach one million followers after acquiring the breaking news account from James Cox. This, I’ll have to admit, was perhaps the high point of your stay in the Twitterverse. Over the summer, you ran unconfirmed reports from the Iranian protests citing only Twitter, and more recently, your volume of tweets has been unacceptable. Let’s take friday’s ten tweets as an example:
Of these tweets, I would say that only three of these could be considered breaking news. Four of the others are about the thanksgiving mishaps of a single person, two were completely expected reports, and one was about secret service mishap that happened days before.
CNN, I would love to tell you that I am going to unfollow you in protest–I wish I could do that–but I am simply too reliant on the actual news reporting you inform me of. You feed my addiction to information, but you’re feeding me too much nonsense. So please, stop sending me fourteen texts while I’m asleep, I really don’t care about Tiger Woods.
Sincerely, @ctbarna
Crunch time at school in the lead up to thanksgiving break. Sorry for the lack of politics, culture is all I have time for.
Them Crooked Vultures is a new rock supergroup made up of Nirvana’s Dave Grohl, Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones. As my friend DJ put it, “they might just save rock n roll.”
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