Throwing stuff at the wall, just to see if it sticks.

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?

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 30th, 2013 at 11:51 am and is filed under Books, Christmas, Clippings, Media, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Throwing stuff at the wall, just to see if it sticks.”

  1. Kesha says:
    December 7, 2013 at 5:38 pm

    Great Article! In my younger days I liked the harder punk song remakes. I still kind of do, but not that I’m a little older I tend to like christmas covers that make you FEEL the christmas spirit (which at least in my opinion you don’t really get with most modern christmas songs). One exception to this is this Christmas remake ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0a_QTfTK7g ) that I found on youtube. Christmas songs don’t usually get to me, but this one did! I hope you check it out, I promise you won’t regret it! Merry christmas!