Whipped Cream Difficulties

Headline and subhead on the Statesman‘s website:

Holiday quiz time! Test your knowledge of ‘Elf,’ ‘Home Alone’ and more

Last year, we ran a hugely popular quiz from Dale Roe for what might be the greatest holiday movie of all time, “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”

And that was as far as I got, since:

1. The article is behind the Statesman‘s paywall.
2. Everybody knows the greatest holiday movie of all time is the original “Die Hard“.

(Speaking of the holidays, I guess now I can start listening to my favorite Christmas song and get my favorite Christmas book off the shelf for the annual re-reading.)

(Though the less cynical side of me thinks The Annotated Christmas Carol would be a swell thing to have, even if it is unlikely to displace Mr. McGee in my affections. But I’m also a sucker for annotated books.)

And speaking of annotated books, I was delighted to learn of this (by way of the Publishers Weekly blog): Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner.

When I was younger, my family had a subscription to Scientific American, and I loved “Mathematical Games” (though I didn’t really have the mathematical background at the time to follow many of Gardner’s columns). When I was older, I encountered him as a skeptic, in the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer as well as in Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus and Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.

And, of course, Gardner memorably annotated a few books: his The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown was my introduction to Chesterton, and let us not forget The Annotated Alice.

Anyway, my point (and I do have one) is that this a very good thing. I’m not sure how many Gardner fans are out there in my audience, and if any of them already knew about this; but if you did know, why didn’t you tell me?