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(Via Theo Spark.)

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Happy holidays to you and yours from the staff and management of Ed Driscoll.com!

Yes, I’m back in the one-man Logan’s Run biodome once again, the same place I ducked into last year to ward off all the global warming swirling about me. But I’m a little worried that, like Minneapolis’ Metrodome, the roof of my humble crystalline abode won’t hold up under the weight of the oncoming snow, either.

Let’s find out! And in the meantime, thank you for another year of your support. Please check out our earlier videos by clicking here, and the rest of the blog, by clicking here. Have a Merry Christmas if we don’t see you around the Blogosphere again before December 25.

(Bumped to top.)

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“Christmas is now celebrated, however imperfectly, in most lands where the worst tyrants tried to eradicate it and its celebrants,” Mark Tooley writes at the American Spectator. But for much of the 20th century, that wasn’t the case:

Today, unsurprisingly, North Korea and Saudi Arabia actively suppress Christmas. But much of the rest of the world seems to have at least secular versions of the holiday. Although still officially communist, Chinese cities are more and more decorated with holiday trees and lights, partly reflecting the country’s growing economic integration with the West, partly reflecting the growing Christian population. Much of the world’s Christmas ornaments are now manufactured in China.The old Soviet Union tried to displace Christmas by highlighting New Year’s Day as the alternative Winter holiday. (In the Eastern Orthodox calendar, Christmas follows New Year’s.) Of course, Christmas outlasted Soviet communism. East European communism collapsed in 1989 in time for Christmas. Romania’s brutal tyrant Nicolae Ceauşescu and his equally brutish wife were tried and executed by the “people” on Christmas Day. Two years later, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day, providentially ending the Soviet Union.

Less than two decades later, how easy to forget that the last century was dominated by totalitarian monster regimes like the Soviet Union. Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and German National Socialism together murdered more millions than all that century’s wars combined. The Nazis usurped Christmas by emphasizing its supposed pre-Christian pagan origins. This Christmas, we can celebrate, among so much else, despite the world’s current travails, that the great totalitarian murder machines are, for the most part, gone.

To get a sense of the Nazis warped Christmas to fit their ideology, check out this heavily-illustrated 2009 article at the London Daily Mail: “How Hitler’s Nazi propaganda machine tried to take Christ out of Christmas.”

Related: At Roger Kimball’s blog, it’s Christmas, Antonio Gramsci style:  “’Tis the Season to be Politically Correct.”

But then, isn’t that the case 24/7, 364 days a year?

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If the Krell from Forbidden Planet, or the civilization just offscreen that built the monoliths in 2001 celebrate Christmas, this has to be one of their more festive numbers. It’s “Silent Night” performed by Robert Fripp of King Crimson, using his “Frippertronics” technique of tape loops, and a Les Paul Custom run through a fuzz box with all of the treble rolled off the guitar, for a sine wave-style analog synthesizer sound. (No wonder he and Adrian Belew loved their Roland guitar synthesizers in the early 1980s incarnation of King Crimson — Fripp was playing with a similar sound several years before Roland bundled it as a preset.)

I posted this back in July when I stumbled over it via the Truveo video search engine, and thought it was a hoot — Mike Meyers’ old “Sprockets” sketch from the Saturday Night Live of 20 years ago could have had lots of fun with this as well:

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And for those who’d like to bring similar sounds home for the holidays, why not turn your Xbox into the perfect video Theremin interface?

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Particularly since, in this case, hindsight is 19/39. At Commentary, Ted R. Bromund writes:

I don’t spend a lot of time hanging out on British Liberal Democrat message boards. But a friend has pointed out a wonderful post — I hesitate to say it’s really in the spirit of the season, for reasons that will soon be obvious — by Stephen Tall on LibDemVoice, reproducing a Christmas card contained in the Conservative Party Archive and sent in 1938 by R.J. Rosie, a prominent physician, to Percy Cohen, a Jewish Conservative and then a member of the Conservative Research Department.

As Tall puts its:

The year is 1938, and you’re looking for a suitably seasonal picture for the front of your Christmas cards. A festive image which will convey seasonal goodwill to all humanity.  What could better symbolise those eternal truths than an international peace treaty signed by the two major European powers which had once been at war?

Shudder — yes, it’s exactly what you think. Or to dust off a phrase from the years after of 9/11, Neville again.

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Story via the L.A. Times, headline and text bolding via the Weasel Zippers:

A suspected suicide bomber was killed and two people were injured Saturday in blasts that rocked a popular shopping district in Stockholm, the Swedish capital.A car parked at a crowded intersection in central Stockholm exploded about 4:50 p.m., followed by another blast a short distance away, Swedish news media reports said. At the scene of the second explosion, a witness reported finding a young man on the sidewalk with wounds to his midsection and a Palestinian kaffiyeh-style scarf tied around his face. The man, who has not been identified, later died.

…The car that exploded had contained several gas canisters, police said. Video shows a white vehicle engulfed in flames in the late afternoon darkness.

A few minutes later, another explosion is heard nearby. A witness told Dagens Nyheter newspaper that he ran to the scene and found a badly wounded man in his 20s lying on his back on the sidewalk, with a length of pipe next to him.

“It looked as if the man had carried something that exploded on his stomach. … My first thought was that the man was a terrorist,” said the witness, who identified himself only as Pascal. “His chest moved a couple of times, but I couldn’t get a pulse. I removed a Palestinian scarf from his face … but it was too late.”

Two people suffered minor injuries, although it was unclear from which blast.

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey discounts initial reports that the dead terrorist was seeking retribution for The Cartoons That Dare Not Show Their Pixels or for Sweden’s role in Afghanistan:

The cartoons again? That seems pretty thin, given the amount of time that has passed. Sweden has around 500 troops in Afghanistan, none of which are combat units.  They hardly seem like a sufficient target for terrorists’ ire, which suggests that perhaps the terrorists are looking mainly for targets of opportunity, and mainly an excuse for mayhem.

The BBC reported that the dead man had pipe bombs on his body, which may mean that the terrorist’s incompetence took care of the problem before any further damage could be done.  Assuming this turns out to be true, it could have been the start of an attempt to create a “12/11″ in Sweden.  We’ll keep an eye out for any more developments.

At Big Peace, Ned May dubs the incident an attempt at “Christmas Jihad in Stockholm.”

Update: Responding to the Swedish Foreign Minister’s description of the attack, Claire Berlinski asks at Ricochet, “And This Was a ‘Failed’ Terrorist Attack How?”

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“Obama lights the National Christmas Tree, says ‘Merry Christmas’ three times,” Andrew Malcolm writes at the L.A. Times, with more than a little satire implied in the subtext of his headline.

(I’ll bet the Christmas sermon at Rev. Wright’s Trinity United must be quite a manger burner.)

Malcolm’s headline last year at this time was even more fun: “Allegedly green Obama lights National Christmas Tree, leaves them on.”

I wonder how the ceremony plays at MSNBC and Newsweek? And speaking of Newsweek, for those on both sides of the aisle who write Al Gore as president revisionist history, how would the Goracle have handled this key event in, as Charles Krauthammer once quipped, “a predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity?”

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Joe Carter of the Catholic Education Resource Center explores “The Fountainhead of Bedford Falls.” As he writes, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark and Frank Capra’s George Bailey aren’t often discussed in the same breath, but the two fictitious characters, immortalized by Hollywood via Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart, two legendary mid-century leading men, have a surprising amount in common.

“To anyone familiar with both works, it would seem the two characters could not be more different, ” Carter notes. “Unexpected similarities emerge, however, when one considers that Roark and Bailey are variations on a common archetype that has captured the American imagination for decades:”

Howard Roark, the protagonist of Rand’s book, is an idealistic young architect who chooses to struggle in obscurity rather than compromise his artistic and personal vision by conforming to the needs and demands of the community. In contrast, George Bailey, the hero of Capra’s film, is an idealistic young would-be architect who struggles in obscurity because he has chosen to conform to the needs and demands of the community rather than fulfill his artistic and personal vision. Howard Roark is essentially what George Bailey might have become had he left for college rather than stayed in his hometown of Bedford Falls.

Rand portrays Roark as a demigod-like hero who refuses to subordinate his self-centered ego to the demands of the community society. Capra, in stark contrast, portrays Bailey as an amiable but flawed man who becomes a hero precisely because he chooses to subordinate his self-centered ego for the greater good of the community.

Read the whole thing, found via Kathy Shaidle, who has her own thoughts on the comparison.

And for my video interview with Jennifer Burns, the historian and author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, in which we discuss The Fountainhead, along with other aspects of Rand in postwar America, just click here.

Incidentally, say what you will about Rand and Capra, Roark and Bailey, and Cooper and Stewart; the Hollywood of World War II and its immediate aftermath was undoubtedly made of sterner stuff than its current iteration.

Related: Since this is a movie-related post, I might as well hang this here: a movie Easter egg so cool, it goes to 11.

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Now is the time at Ed Driscoll.com when we juxtapose!

Celebrity gossip site TMZ today:

Sources close to the couple tell us … G&T placed an order with A-1 Christmas Trees and Lights in L.A. on Tuesday — purchasing two twelve-foot Christmas trees … and a whole mess of lights for their house … totaling approximately $7,500.

Tom and Giselle back in March:

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As the Professor would say, I don’t want to hear one more goddamned word about my carbon footprint.

(Concept H/T: SDA; more NFL-related incandescent hypocrisy here.)

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Power Line’s Scott Johnson has a little fun with would-be Portland Christmas Holiday Winter Solsticial Ceremonial Tree bomber Mohamed Mohamud, one of “Three Guys Named Mo:”

Over the weekend we learned from the local press that Mohamud was known as one of “the three Mohameds” in a local group of friends who shared the first name and Islamic religious beliefs. Today we learn from the Times that his American friends called Mohamud “Mo.” I guess that makes three guys named Mo and a nascent musical with the show-stopping number “I Just Met a Law Named Sharia.”

That would explain how Mo could swear to defend the Constitution while hating the United States, as Mo’s classmate Andy Stull told Portland’s NewsChannel 8. “The main thing was the way he said he hated Americans,” Stull said. “It was serious. He looked me in the eye and had this look in his eye, like it was his determination in life — ‘I hate Americans.’” Now that we have lots of guys named Mo, it probably makes sense to wonder how many of them share this Mo’s “determination in life.”

“I Just Met a Law Named Sharia” is one of the best musical mo-tune parodies since Mark Steyn’s “My Sharia Amour” from back in 2002. Speaking of whom, the Three Mos also brings to mind another memorable Steyn passage from a few years later:

These days, whenever something goofy turns up on the news, chances are it involves a fellow called Mohammed. A plane flies into the World Trade Centre? Mohammed Atta. A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed Hedayet. A sniper starts killing petrol station customers around Washington, DC? John Allen Muhammed. A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri. A terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed. A gang-rapist in Sydney? Mohammed Skaf.

And now the Duran Duran (or is it Humbert Humbert?) of Islamofascist set, Mohamed Mohamud.

Fortunately for the rest of us, one Muslim is calling for a much-needed sanity: at Tina Brown’s liberal Daily Beast site,  Asra Q. Nomani writes, “Airport Security: Let’s Profile Muslims.”

Alas, it’s likely in vain, but it’s also common sense. (As I’ve said for years, if 9/11 had been caused by the IRA, I would certainly understand being questioned at airports because of my last name.) Which is why Andrew Breitbart wonders if Nomani is about to be profiled out of a job.

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“Somali-Born Teenager Held in Oregon Bomb Sting,” the New York Times reports:

Federal agents in a sting operation arrested a Somali-born teenager just as he tried blowing up a van he believed was loaded with explosives at a crowded Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, authorities said.

Kathy Shaidle quips, “The only shocking thing about this story is that Portland still has a Christmas tree lighting,” but also equally shocking is that journalists are still allowed to use the words “Christmas tree lighting ceremony” without ironic scare quotes in the New York Times these days. Or did that happen to slip by Pinch’s layers and layers of fact-checkers and politically correct central scrutinizers?

Speaking of which, ever wonder how the word “Islamophobia” was coined? At Ricochet, Claire Berlinski, writing from Turkey explains all, but not before noting, “The phrase ‘some of my best friends are Muslims’ is more than a cliche in my case; most of my best friends are Muslims, all of my neighbors are Muslims, and the way I live my life would make no sense at all if I had a phobia:”

Really imagine that scene: a bunch of Islamists admiring how astutely the queers–people who in their ideal world would be served with the lash or hanged–had portrayed their critics as mentally disturbed. Brilliant. Let’s take a leaf from them and then kill them. The association of anti-Islamism–the noblest form of liberal anti-totalitarianism–with gay-bashing rednecks in the grip of a psychosexual panic was not just one of those linguistic accidents of history, in other words. These guys were sitting there in Virginia and really thinking about the best way to exploit the weaknesses of the Western psyche. They came up with this word–and admit it, it’s clever; I challenge you to find a better one if you want to yank the West’s chain–and they marketed it with  petrodollars, and now it truly does drive public discourse and policy the world over.

Meanwhile, Washington Post-owned Slate tut-tuts “sad-sack homegrown terrorists,” causing Sonny Bunch to respond, “So I take it we shouldn’t be worried about the sad sack Christmas Tree bomber, either?”

Oh, and speaking of homegrown terrorists:

But the 38-year-old professor has been through this before. Last year, he woke up to an orange flash and a car alarm. He ran outside to find his car had been blown up….

Molotov-cocktail-like devices have been left near [other] researchers’ homes and under their cars, and in one case, a professor’s window was smashed and a garden hose inserted to flood her home….

Jentsch uses vervet monkeys in his research on methamphetamine addiction and tobacco dependence in teens, along with cognitive disabilities affecting schizophrenia patients…. Some of Jentsch’s work has included administering methamphetamine to monkeys and then withdrawing the drug, a project that includes killing about half a dozen of the primates each year for postmortems….

Lately, the researcher said, activists have been referring to him as David “Tiller” Jentsch, a reference to abortion doctor George Tiller, who was shot and killed last year in Kansas by a pro-life activist.

“They’re hoping I would be the first Tiller of the animal rights community,” he said. “My worry is some unstable person will hear these messages enough times and they’ll take it as a signal.” …

“They’re used to scaring people and getting their way,” Jentsch said. “It’s just not going to happen in this case.”

As the Professor writes, “Animal ‘rights’ activists are just anti-human. If only this got one tenth the publicity that a bogus charge of racism aimed at Tea Partiers gets as a matter of course.”

Update: “The TSA may be a useless invasive bureaucracy that has never caught a single terrorist, but the FBI knows what it’s doing,” Michael Totten writes, noting that the incident in Portland that the FBI averted was within walking distance of his house.

Related: The CAIR Bears.

Update: A Broad Strata of Society.

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Mark Steyn’s latest Christmas CD, complete with the sort of understated cover art reminiscent of a more tasteful bygone era in music, which one would expect to be associated with the Steyn brandname:

The CD is available from Mark Website, where Mark writes:

I know the on-again off-again nature of SteynOnline in recent months has sorely tried readers’ patience. Rather boringly, I have some health issues that demand somewhat more attention than I’ve been able to give them. So rather than keep driving you nuts by showing signs of life on the home page for a day or two and then lapsing back into sleep mode for a week, we’re going to close up shop for a while.

I very much regret having to do this. SteynOnline opened up just before Thanksgiving 2002 and, usually at this time of year, we’d be doing a big old anniversary bonanza. In recent seasons, late November and December have found me out on the airwaves plugging Jessica’s and my annual Christmas offering. But our instant disco classic will have to make it without my help this year. I would be remiss in not adding that it and many other delights remain available at our bookstore.

We will return before the end of the year. You can take that to the bank (and stick it in the vault next to your credit default swap).

Get well, soon.

Update (11/29/10): Welcome Steyn Online readers!

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Gosh, who didn’t see this one coming? “Could Climate Change Ruin Thanksgiving Dinner?”

The BlogProfessor responds, umm, no:

There has been no global warming for the past 11 years. No ‘statistically significant’ warming since 1995 (abeith that doesn’t deter Obama’s EPA chief:EPA Chief Lisa Jackson: Fifteen Years With No Global Warming Doesn’t Mean There’s No Global Warming). Historical records indicate that it was far warmer in the past than it is now. In addition, humans are responsible for only 3% of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, 97% being produced naturally mostly by the oceans and biodegrading vegetation. But FACTS don’t stop the alarmists. And no holiday is safe from fear-mongering, including today.

Naturally, the Discovery Channel article quotes a professor of “animal welfare physiology;” just offstage, if you listen carefully, you can hear H.L. Mencken laughing at the sheer — hopefully! — unintentional absurdity of it all.

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Yesterday, I was reminded that wishing a stranger in Northern California “Happy Thanksgiving” always carries a frisson of risk. It certainly felt slightly transgressive, especially after being among like-minded compadres last week, because you never know if deep down inside, the person to whom you’re speaking has self-installed the Stepford microchip that will make them go all Angelina Jolie upon hearing the greeting.

(As to why some choose to install the Stepford microchip, that’s the topic of this recent Dennis Prager essay.)

For the rest of us, Roger L. Simon asks today, “Thanksgiving 2010: Is the American Dream Dying?” But before I get to Roger, a passage from Ronald Reagan’s epochal “Time for Choosing” speech nearly half a century ago serves as a great introduction:

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And despite the efforts of those who wish to weaken it, it still is, which brings us to Roger’s take on the American Dream on this key holiday:

One day, however, I was talking about our countries with my then French girlfriend — we spoke often of les différences between la France et les États-Unis — when she said of the USA: “Roger, you are the window of the world.”The window of the world? I felt a little embarrassed by such a sweeping statement, but I knew instantly what she meant and that it was true — it was a kind of epiphany, I suppose. America represents human aspiration to the world. It is humanity’s window. It is the best of us — where we see our own hopes … and dreams, of course. For all its excesses and imperfections, take away America and you lose that — not just for us, but for everyone. There is no dream, no symbol of humanity’s hope.

My real beef with Barack Obama is that he does not want to acknowledge that or he doesn’t believe it. I don’t know which. But in any case he rejects it. I saw that most clearly on what was for me the worst moment of his sad presidency — when he failed to respond publicly in support of the democracy demonstrators in Iran. He wouldn’t be a window for their dreams and aspirations. Ironically, given his own bloviations, he offered them no hope. He wasn’t a wimp — to come back to Smith’s dichotomy in his first paragraph. He was something worse — a cold narcissistic fish, interested in only his now-absurd negotiation with Ahmadinejad and, of course, in himself. He left the Iranian students with no window — no American dream for their world.

On this Thanksgiving Day, I sincerely hope that Barack Obama and what he stands for is just a bump on an ever-bumpy road and that we are on our way out of the slough of despond that our country finds itself in. I think we can all agree, however, that this slough is pretty deep. Getting out of it will not be as easy as a few tea party victories. The work has only just begun. But it’s worth the effort, most certainly. Happy Thanksgiving.

Related thoughts from Armstrong Williams.

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Two recent articles on America’s celebrities help to define what passes for conventional wisdom in 2010 Hollywood. First up, “Angelina Jolie Hates Thanksgiving, Refuses to Celebrate, Report Says:”

As families across America gather to give thanks this Thursday, one star who is determined to make sure her family doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving is Angelina Jolie, according to a report from PopEater.com.

Friends of the actress tell PopEater’s Rob Shuter that Jolie is completely “grossed out” by the centuries-old American holiday.

“Jolie hates this holiday and wants no part in rewriting history like so many other Americans,” the friend said. “To celebrate what the white settlers did to the native Indians, the domination of one culture over another, just isn’t her style. She definitely doesn’t want to teach her multi-cultural family how to celebrate a story of murder.”

Why, how very bourgeois.

Assuming Jolie’s worldview was described accurately above, while Jolie may not be a fan of Barack Obama, she sounds very much like a cast-in-the-mold punitive liberal with such tired rhetoric.

And speaking of which, 25 years ago, Bruce Springsteen warned his fans that “in 1985, blind faith in your leaders or in anything will get you killed.” These days, if you’re a singer with an utterly conventional showbiz mindset, it will get you a pat on the head from the White House:

“There’s a widespread political consciousness that’s perhaps deeper in Europe than it is in the States,” he told the Sunday Times magazine.

“The climate [in America] is very, very ugly for getting things done. The moderate reforms President Obama fought to make are called Marxist, socialist.

“I mean, the most extreme language is put into play to describe the most modest reforms that would move the economy back towards serving a majority of its citizens.”

The musician, often referred to as “The Boss”, added: “You have a guy [Mr Obama] who comes in, he gets to be president for four years. Maybe eight.

“But you have the financial institutions, you have the military, the corporations. They’re in play constantly and, in truth, they’re shaping the economy and shaping the direction the US is moving in.

“Those forces are huge. The money and lobbyists are pouring in to do everything they can [to preserve the status quo]. It’s a very tough time, a very hard time here in the States.”

But like Wall Street and big business, which by and large loved Obama in 2008, Bruce is the status-quo himself — as I wrote two years ago around this time, “To borrow from the vernacular of The Boss’s early ’70s glory days (to coin a phrase), has any musician become more Establishment than Springsteen?”

Fortunately, most Americans have long since rejected such conventional Ruling Class opinions, to forge a truly avant-garde worldview that European-bound elites such as Springsteen and Jolie simply can’t seem to comprehend. Or as Scott McLemee writes at the Inside Higher Ed Website, quoting a remarkably perceptive essay from Canadian writer Stephen Leacock in 1932:

Leacock wrote an enormous amount — there were one or two collections of his essays every year until his death in 1944. Much of it doesn’t hold up very well, after all this time. When you need a footnote to get a joke, it’s not really a joke any more; it is a fossil. But his observations on the civilization just south of Canada are another matter. Apart from a couple of topical references, they still apply after almost eighty years.

“Americans are a queer people,” he writes. “They can’t rest…. They rush up and down across their continent as tourists; they move about in great herds to conventions, they invade the wilderness, they flood the mountains, they keep the hotels full. But they can’t rest. The scenery rushes past them. They learn it, but they don’t see it. Battles and monuments are announced to them in a rubber neck bus… So they go on rushing until the Undertaker gathers them to the last convention.”

The same state of distracted haste prevails in the educational system and in publishing. Americans “have more schools,” Leacock writes, “and better schools, and spend more money on schools and colleges than all of Europe. They print more books in one year than the French print in ten. But they can’t read. They cover their country with 100,000 tons of Sunday newspapers every week. But they don’t read them. They’re too busy. They use them for fires and to make more paper with.” Today, of course, we publish everything digitally, then ignore it.

If they ever bothered to read anything, Americans would probably be unhappy. But we don’t. So (as the quintessential American phrase now goes) it’s all good: “All the world criticizes them and they don’t give a damn….Moralists cry over them, criminologists dissect them, writers shoot epigrams at them, prophets foretell the end of them, and they never move. Seventeen brilliant books analyze them every month; they don’t read them .… But that’s all right. The Americans don’t give a damn; don’t need to; never did need to. That is their salvation.”

But for those who prefer more the comfort of more conventional elitist wisdom, pre-printed talking points are available in the lobby.

Related: “If we cannot trust our authorities, who can we trust?”

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As James Taranto would say, “Questions Nobody is Asking” — except in this case Reuters — and some Germans, who ponder, “Who wants a Santa-free Christmas?”

BERLIN — A group of German Catholics wants to do away with Santa Claus because of the fictional figure’s commercial hype and replace him with St Nicolas and the selfless giving they say he represents.

Even before shops fill with Santa-themed goodies, the Bonifatiuswerk of German Catholics — a Catholic aid organization — has begun calling for “Santa Claus-free zones.”

The organization sees Santa as “an invention of the advertising industry designed to boost sales” and as “a representative of consumer society” who has little to do with the historical figure of St Nicolas.

Its website describes Nicolas, the patron saint of children, as “a helper in need who reminds us to be kind, to think of our neighbors, and to give the gift of happiness.”

The campaign is supported by several German celebrities.

“Unlike Santa Claus, Nicolas wants to give children inner riches and not just encourage them to strive for material wealth,” German TV presenter Nina Ruege was quoted saying.

A group of Germans who want to change the iconography of Christmas? I’ve seen that movie before, and it wasn’t A Wonderful Life.

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If the Krell from Forbidden Planet, or the civilization just offscreen that built the monoliths in 2001 celebrate Christmas, this has to be one of their more festive numbers. It’s “Silent Night” performed by Robert Fripp of King Crimson, using his “Frippertronics” technique of tape loops, and a Les Paul Custom run through a fuzz box with all of the treble rolled off the guitar, for a sine wave-style analog synthesizer sound. (No wonder he and Adrian Belew loved their Roland guitar synthesizers in the early 1980s incarnation of King Crimson — Fripp was playing with a similar sound several years before Roland bundled it as a preset.)

Apologies for posting this so out of season, but I just came across it while randomly flipping (Fripping?) through the Truveo video search engine, and thought it was a hoot — Mike Meyers’ old “Sprockets” sketch from the Saturday Night Live of 20 years ago could have had lots of fun with this as well.

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Google’s neglect, benign or otherwise of Easter is infinitely more preferable to how MSNBC chooses to cover the holiday. Mark Finkelstein of Newsbusters spots  “Easter, MSNBC-Style: Network’s Facebook Page Features Crucifix Juxtaposed With Man Hooded in White.”

As Paul Mirengoff of Power Line writes, regime change at the perennially low-rated GE-owned network is long, long overdue.

Related: Legendary holiday institution incarcerated for insufficiently redistributionist polices.

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Not surprisingly, I can reprint verbatim my Easter post from two years ago. And something tells me I won’t need to add an update later in the day correcting it:

Since this newly-born “holiday” lacks the historic significance of, say, World Water Day, Google, starting from zero, sits this one out with no special logo on its splash page. Again.

(At least Dogpile’s artists spent 15 minutes to dress up its mascot for the day. [And in 2010, so did Bing] And as Mark Steyn notes, sadly, some aspects of the season are becoming a bit too much for traditional churches)

And these days, some presidents as well.

Update: The Binkmeister has an Easter-themed post with numerous links today; and the Anchoress has a pair of timely posts as well.

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