It’s a wintry time of the year, and that means the Holiday Collection from Sam Adams! I look forward to this collection of six beers every year. Wintry, festive holiday brews!

Only, this year I’m unhappy.

The Holiday Collection comes, as I mentioned, with six different winter beer styles. In years past, the six have been:

• Boston Lager
• Winter Lager
• Cream Stout
• Holiday Porter
• Old Fezziwig’s Ale
• Cranberry Lambic

There’s been some variation over the years. I think the Cranberry Lambic is fairly new, like within the past two or three years.

The Cranberry Lambic is fantastic. I love the Holiday Porter. (I love porters in general; one of my favorite beers is Highland’s Oatmeal Porter, only that’s impossible to get north of the Potomac.) And Old Fezziwig is just… nice.

So, off the bat, you know I’m going to love half the case.

I make an exception for the Cranberry Lambic, because it tastes so good. It actually violates Allyn’s first law of beer drinking — if when poured into the glass and one’s hand is placed behind the glass, and if one can see one’s hand through the beer and the glass, then the beer is not dark enough to consume.

This year, Sam Adams took out the Cream Stout and replaced it with the Coastal Wheat.

This is disappointing. The Cream Stout was a bread-and-butter drink for me in college. It doesn’t go down smooth like an Irish Stout, like say Guinness or Beamish, and it’s a little bitter, but I like it. It’s not my favorite Sam Adams style — that would be the Honey Porter — but it’s still a good drink.

This leaves three styles, after the three I love, in the case:

• Boston Lager
• Winter Lager
• Coastal Wheat

I polished off the four bottles of the Boston Lager and the Winter Lager, knowing that these would be my two least favorite styles in the case. I am not a lager drinker, and I find both the Boston Lager and the Winter Lager unexciting and unmemorable. I don’t mind them, but they’re not my first choice. They’re not beers to savor.

Last night, I tried the Coastal Wheat.

I poured it into the glass. It was amber colored, so I knew instantly that it would not pass my hand-behind-the-glass test.

I took one swallow.

It was awful.

I cannot describe the ways in which the Coastal Wheat was awful. It didn’t taste good. It left a slight burning sensation in the mouth. It was… revolting.

My nose is crinkling just thinking about it.

Crinkling!

I’m going to set the bottle of Coastal Wheat aside. I’m not going to drink it. Maybe it will find its way into a recipe or something.

On the plus side, I still have the Old Fezziwig, the Holiday Porter, and the Cranberry Lambic to keep me company. Excellent brews, all.

If only I could get the Holiday Porter and Old Fezziwig on their own…

The snow continues to fall.

I spent part of the day working on PHP and CSS code for the website. I have the first segment of the design coded and the graphics made. I’ve done a test to make sure the code works, and it does. It looks like I want it to look. I’m content with that.

I’m moving on to the next coding challenge — multiple WordPress loops. The “loop” is what calls the content from the WP database and puts it on the screen. It’s completely invisible to you, the reader. It’s completely invisible to me, the writer and sometimes coder. Fortunately, the WordPress Codex article on the Loop has provided me with sample code to look at.

The next step is to code the CSS to handle the formatting and the PHP to call a specific category. Wait, I should probably figure out what kind of information I wanted outputted first…

I’ve also realized that one of my initial thoughts — serve this “front page” as a WordPress page isn’t going to work, as doing so will play havoc with people on mobile devices, like the iPhone or the Droid phone.

Which reminds me.

As near as I can tell, I’ve had my first visitor to my website from a Droid phone.

I have no idea who it is; it may have been a one-shot reader from Paris, who surfed in through a Google search. The user-agent string in amusing; the phone names itself as “Cupcake.”

In any event, I have no set timetable for finishing up the website redesign. It’s not urgent.

In other technogeekery, pointless to anyone but myself, I’ve worked up a print stylesheet.

I’ve always preferred having a print stylesheet, on the off-chance that anyone wished to print something out they read on this website. Fancy sidebars and dropdown menus may look fantastic on the screen, but they’re of no use whatsoever on the page. The important thing is the content, and the print stylesheet strips everything down, and outputs something that’s designed for the screen in a format that’s better suited for the page.

For reasons that pass beyond understanding, I set my alarm clock last night.

The trilling of the clock at six came as an unwelcome interruption to sleep on a Saturday. The damage was done, however, and I went downstairs and put on a pot of coffee.

At 6:30, the snow had not yet begun. A cold drizzle fell from the sky, and the cat sat huddled on the back step. I let him in, put him downstairs. The cat likes to nuzzle feet as one walks, only this morning he bit me in a toe. Naturally, it was the toe on the left foot that was in such pain yesterday. I gave him some food, then fixed a coffee concoction to get the day going.

Somewhere around seven the snow began to fall.

Snow has been steady. The snow on the holly tree outside the office window upstairs looks festive.

My grandmother has sat in the kitchen all morning, watching the snow. Her coffee has long since gone cold, and a half-eaten piece of toast is in front of her.

I’ve had to close the kitchen door several times; she keeps opening it, to watch through the screen door as the snow falls.

She speaks aloud. About the snow. About trucks or cars driving down the road. There’s no one there to hear her, and her sentences aren’t conversation pieces; like Austin Powers, she has lost her inner monologue, giving voice to her inner thoughts. I wonder if she’s even aware of doing that.

The forecast calls for an inch of snow, give or take. We’ve had snow before — about a month ago, I woke to snow on a Sunday morning — but this is the first accumulation of the season.

Ten and twelve year-old children can read through J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. I heard an interview on NPR where one young girl read through the final book twice in twelve hours. Harry Potter, massive tomes that they are, are often and avidly consumed by children.

So, why are Republican Senators having such a difficult time reading through the health care reform legislation?

As Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island points out, a Harry Potter novel is longer than the bill pending before Congress. So, septuagenarian Senators can’t manage to do with a ten year-old child can…?

And…

…I am in massive pain.

It’s the old foot ailment.

The story, for those coming late, is this.

In college I, being the excitable person that I am, would spring from bed, jumping out of the top bunk and onto the hard tile floor. In time, this proved to be a stupid thing to do, as one day I landed incorrectly and fractured a bone in the ball of my left foot.

However, I was unaware of this, because how could I tell the difference, when the balls of my feet hurt from jumping out of bed and onto the hard tile floor?

The bone healed in time, but when the weather changes — either it becomes damp, or it becomes cold, and we’ve had damp and cold recently, despite yesterday’s spring-like weather — the old wound aches.

Suffice it to say, I’m hobbling. It hurts to stand. It especially hurts to walk. I’m doing this limp/shuffle. I’ve just loaded up on ibuprofen.

At home, I’ll wear my sandals, rather than walk around barefoot as I am wont to do. There’s something about pulling the strap across the toes tight that makes it possible to walk relatively normally. The sandals are not an option for the office, however.

In a few days, probably around Tuesday, the ache will subside.

There is someone, I kid you not, who visited my website on this search phrase: “allyn gibson in sex and the city?”

Presently from Google, this takes a person here, where there’s a meme from late January about television shows I’ve seen. Sex and the City is among those I have not seen. Never ever, not once.

However, that’s clearly not what this mysterious Google searcher wanted to know.

I am not an actor. I can absolutely, positively guarantee that I have never appeared in an episode of Sex and the City.

And for the person who wanted to know about the Irn Bru Christmas commercial:

In the spirit of Dayton Ward and Entertainment Weekly, I’m going to offer up a list of seventeen movies I can watch again and again. And again. And so on and so forth.

These are in no particular order. Some may duplicate those from the article at EW. So be it.

1. A Hard Day’s Night
2. Contact
3. The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s a single movie.
4. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
5. King Arthur, the Clive Owen movie.
6. The Natural
7. The Shawshank Redemption
8. Dave
9. V For Vendetta
10. Good Night and Good Luck
11. The Bride of Frankenstein
12. The Rocketeer
13. The Hunt for Red October
14. The Princess Bride
15. Alien 3
16. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
17. Grosse Pointe Blank

Some random commentary.

You can tell some of my interests. There’s an Arthurian vibe, with King Arthur (#5), Monty Python (#4), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (#16). Oh, and The Natural (#6).

(I don’t often remember my dreams, but I remember dreaming about Malamud’s book The Natural last night. That’s super-freaky.)

Definitely into politics. See Contact (to some extent), Dave, Good Night and Good Luck and V for Vendetta.

I had to flip a coin for Grosse Pointe Blank. The other option was Say Anything…. (If you watch these together, and squint your eyes just right, they can almost go together as a single story. Which is why I want to see War Inc.)

A Hard Day’s Night was never not a choice.

Why King Arthur and Alien 3, since neither movie is highly regarded?

King Arthur is, I think, a pretty sharp movie that accomplishes what it set out to do, only the Disney marketing machine didn’t know what to do with it. (Much like The Rocketeer a decade earlier.) A better promotional campaign would have done King Arthur wonders. I like the acting, the story is compelling, there are some fantastic visuals. The weakest part of the movie, honestly, is Keira Knightley.

Alien 3. It’s a David Fincher movie, so it’s naturally visually interesting. He has a fantastic cast. And the story is utterly bleak. I don’t think Hollywood had ever made a movie this nihilistic before. Everyone you care about dies. People who are like “I don’t like that they killed Newt and Hicks!” are missing the point, because that is the point — the universe doesn’t care about you, and it will fuck you over every chance it gets.

The Bride of Frankenstein is traditional Halloween viewing, much as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is traditional Christmas viewing.

I could seriously skip work and watch any or all of these movies today.

Let’s see how long this post grows to be; I’m not sure I have two brain cells left to rub together.

I’ll put it this way. I broke five figures on word count at work today. My head doesn’t just feel like mush. I felt the hamsters inside my head running on their wheels, the axle overheating, and the brain cells melting from the heat. I think if I put a bucket to my ear, I could catch my gray matter as it leaks out.

So, yeah, I am seriously fucking wiped.

In what came as no surprise, because I mentioned it a few days ago, I did not sell “In the Eve of Our Lives.” The issue of City Paper came out today, and I picked it up on the morning commute when I changed from subway to train. They got nearly three hundred entries, which is a fair number.

Don’t worry about me; I don’t feel bad. I have five potential markets for the story in mind. One’s online, the other four are print. I’ll print out the draft tomorrow, look it over, potentially bleed some red ink on it, and get it out the door next week.

And yes, that is the title of the story. No cutesy acronyms this time. “In the Eve of Our Lives.” Has a nice ring. The story itself is somewhat Joycean. I aim for Fitzgerald (not inappropriate for Baltimore; Fitzgerald wrote Tender is the Night while living here), and I’ve spoofed Hemingway. This one has a strange sense of time.

Oh, that was a really good yawn.

I did another sketch of the website semi-redesign, and I wrote down the code logic, though not the actual code, to make one major element of the design work. If I weren’t leaking neurons, I might’ve taken a stab at it tonight.

No Sam Adams for me tonight.

The new issue of The Writer came in the mail a few days ago. It’s been sitting, sadly neglected, on a pile of magazines atop the dresser ever since, and this morning I put it in my briefcase to read on the train.

As I read through the magazine, a long-dormant idea resurfaced.

I keep meaning to redesign my blog.

I sketched out, about a year ago, what I wanted. I tried to implement in on top of the Tarski theme I was using, but the code never worked right. Part of the problem could have been the way Tarski works under the hood; it has so many hooks and routines that replace and enhance the standard WordPress function calls that it’s occasionally difficult to do things that should be simple. Like when I tried to implement dropdown menus. That really didn’t work.

Then the idea went away to some extent. I didn’t forget about it, per se, but it wasn’t that important. Did I really want to spend my time working on PHP and CSS code? And I some longtime Allynologists will tell you, I change my website theme as often as the eighth Doctor loses his memory or some people lose their socks, so it never makes a lot of sense for me to do a lot of work under the hood on the code; I’ll just move on to something else because it looks shiny and cool.

And does it make a lot of sense to alter the method of presentation? A fair percentage of my regular readers get their content through feeds; changing the look of the front page, which is what I had in mind, isn’t going to affect my regular readers at all.

Yet, I pulled out my clipboard and notebook paper, and began making rough sketches.

A little more than a year ago, as a proof of concept for a project at work that never came to fruition, I put together an interesting little WordPress theme, and there are some elements of that theme that I wanted in my new homepage. There’s no reason why that code can’t carry over; unlike the Tarski addition I tried to make, I know this code works.

Interesting fun fact. I called that theme Sherrinford, after Sherlock Holmes’ oldest brother, even though there was nothing especially Victorian about the theme.

What I’m looking at is a bit of a hybrid. It would have some magazine-like features and some blog-like features. To someone reading on an RSS feed, there won’t be any apparent difference. To someone landing on a page deep in the archives thanks to a Google search, there will be absolutely no difference. But to someone coming in to the front page, there’s going to be some major differences in the way content is presented.

I may stay with the theme I’m using and then build the front page on top of that, taking elements from the Sherrinford code. Or, I may start from scratch with a different theme’s code base. I haven’t decided yet; I see possibilities in both directions, and I know the second theme option if that’s the route I go.

This is not a priority, and I don’t expect to do any coding this week. I’ll sketch out some more, and figure out exactly what I want to do. Then when I’m ready, I’ll put some Barenaked Ladies in the stereo and start to code PHP; there’s just something about BNL that just makes coding that much better.

It would be so much easier if I had any sense of design. But I don’t.

Recently, I’ve been listening to some Celtic rock and Celtic punk bands. Not because I felt an overwhelming need, a musical itch I had to scratch, much like my recent compulsion to listen to Radiohead’s OK Computer, a compulsion that burned itself out after two days.

Rather, it’s for research purposes.

Part of “THOD” revolves around a Celtic punk/rock band named Arbroath.

As in Arbroath, Scotland, the site of the signature of the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, which I learned about when I read Michael Lafosse’s book, The Forgotten Monarchy of Scotland about ten years ago. The name of town sounds crisp, it sounds like the kind of name a Celtic punk band would have.

Which means there probably is a Celtic punk band named Arbroath out there.

In any case, I’ve had to get a “feel” for what Arbroath sounds like.

I knew what Arbroath didn’t sound like. They weren’t the Pogues. Or the Tosser. Or the Dropkick Murphys. Or Flogging Molly. In short, they weren’t Irish. These are all bands that I enjoy. But they’re not at all what Arbroath sounds like in my head.

I mentioned in June that they sound, at least as I imagine them, much like Washington Irving, a Glasgow-based folk band. And their song “The Magician” is rather close to the sound. But still, not exact.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to find an exact match for what I “hear” in my head.

The Real McKenzies, whom Steve Roby recommended on Psi Phi years ago, are in the neighborhood of Arbroath. So, too, is a Nova Scotia-based band that’s long since disbanded that I recently discovered — MacKeel. What do they have in common? Bagpipes. Distorted and overloaded guitars. A really loud sound.

And Arbroath may owe a little to Sonic Death Monkey as well.

I’ve recently worked out Arbroath’s set list at a gig. A couple of standards, a couple of off-the-wall tunes, and there’s a showstopper that, well, I’m not exactly sure how or why my mind latched onto the band playing that song, but once I thought about it, I realized how much it worked, in spite of the non-standard instrumentation.

Sometimes, my mind surprises me.

I’ve no musical talents. I can barely carry a tune. But this aspect of “THOD” is fun.

And as for the music I’m currently craving, I’m currently absolutely jonesing to listen to The Who’s Tommy, only I’ve no idea what I’ve gone and done with my CD. I thought I’d left it at the office, but it wasn’t there. And as I’m sitting here at my desk, I feel like it’s right here, yet I can clearly see that it’s not.

Oh, look. Alex North’s 2001 score. Oh! And my Dido CDs. Nope, no Tommy.

Ah, Napoleon. My favorite sparring partner.

I had never visited the Patagonia, despite the firm knowledge that the Dread Pirate Roberts had once retired there. It seemed an auspicious location for battle, ripe for conquest. Rocky shores, highland lakes, long and flat plateaus. Yes, indeed, this would be the site of my next battle.

My colony was far inland, in the highlands along the shores of a vast lake. I had Suleiman the Magnificent as an ally; his colony was to my south, in the lowlands near the coast. I’ve always found Suleiman a bizarre ally; he’s prone to histrionics and random babble.

Somewhere to the north were my enemies — Napoleon and the French, Ivan the Terrible and the Russians. Both have been dangerous enemies, and I was sure that this would be no different. Especially as I was on unfamiliar terrain.

I scouted out a rough map of the Patagonian terrain. The highland lake stretched across half of the map, long but narrow. I reasoned that if my colony was on the southern shore of the lake, then one of my opponents could be on the northern shore. And if I could control the choke point between the lake’s eastern shore and the plateau that ran on a vague northeastern incline to the east, perhaps by building walls and a series of frontier outposts, I could perhaps force battles to the east — away from my territory, and into Suleiman’s territory.

Yes, I would try and force my ally to take the brunt of the enemy’s overland attacks, while I attempted an assault across the lake.

The problem I quickly discovered was this — where my colony was placed was nearly bereft of resources. The highlands were broad and flat, true, and there was some game for hunting, but they were also woodless and there were few silver or gold veins to mine. These resources were in the lowlands along the coast; I would have to keep my settlers far from my colony in the lowlands to gather resources.

Unfortunately, this was exactly where the battle to come would be fought — if I controlled the choke points and forced the battle on my terms. I would have to risk my settlers to gather the resources I would need for victory. It was a devil’s bargain.

But nothing ventured, nothing gained. Victory cannot come without sacrifice.

Houses were built near the coast, in a flat plain between two vast forests. I didn’t want the houses on the coast, lest Napoleon or Ivan’s navies shell the houses from the Atlantic. Unfortunately, this flat plain was the route between Suleiman’s colony and our enemies to the north, once I had built a series of fortifications — walls and outposts — that closed off the path south along the lake’s shores and the plateau to the lake’s east. However, this was also an advantage; an attack on the houses would serve as a warning that I would need to evacuate my nearby lumber camps.

In retrospect, I should also have built defensive frontier outposts to provide a defense of the houses.

Napoleon and Ivan both tested the defensive walls I had built near the lake’s shore. Jointly or separately, they would attack the wall, and the outposts I had built — and musketeers I had trained — kept the two at bay. Later, Suleiman decided to place a massive fort inside the walls, and once that was constructed, neither Napoleon nor Ivan had a chance of breaching the walls.

My own plan was to cross the lake, hopefully catching Napoleon, whose colony, like mine, lay on the lake’s shore, unawares.

Unfortunately, I did not have naval superiority on the lake, and the element of surprise as I wrested control of the lake was lost. Time and resources were lost as my galleons and caravels came under attack by Napoleon’s high-water navy.

As Napoleon and I fought for control of the lake, the attack I knew was coming to the shores far to the east came to fruition, and an army comprised of French and Russian troops descended on the village of houses I had built.

I evacuated my lumber camps as I had planned, pulling them back to my colony’s town center far to the west as the Russian and French troops concentrated on destroying my houses. This did not concern me; I had much space on the vast plain where my town center stood to build a new group of houses.

I sent Suleiman a flare that these houses were under attack; as they reached nearly to the outskirts of his own colony, I knew that once they fell, he would face the armies of the French and the Russians. I sent a few musketeers into the fray to support Suleiman’s defense; he cried that his town was “under siege.”

In any event, my interest was with the lake.

I had achieved naval superiority, and my galleons made landfall on the northern shore. I had the resources to train an army of musketeers and grenadiers.

But how large an army?

I would rather have too large an army than too small an army. And Napoleon has always been a tough opponent.

I assembled an army of twenty musketeers and twenty grenadiers; this would do for an initial assault, and I could train a second wave if necessary. I was also bringing in Highlander mercenaries from the home country, and I’ve found the Highlanders to be dangerous in a fight.

Napoleon had built a massive fort in the midst of his colony. I took heavy losses from my musketeers and grenadiers in bringing it down, but apparently Napoleon’s attacks on my fortifications and Suleiman’s colony had drained his resources and he had few defenders for his colony otherwise. Once my army of reinforcements was ready and the Highlanders arrived, they proved enough to mop up the initial attack.

The town center was burned. Homes were razed. Farms were destroyed. The French colonists were slaughtered to the last man.

Napoleon requested a surrender. I laughed in his face.

With Napoleon dealt with, I consolidated my armies, rested my wounds, and prepared for an attack on Ivan’s colony.

I had more Highlanders brought in, this time along with Swiss pikemen. I trained more musketeers, more grenadiers. I had my arsenal prepare better armor and weapons for my armies.

The attack on Ivan’s colony came in two waves. The new army from the home country, along with musketeers, attacked Ivan from the south, coming up through Suleiman’s colony. As they approached from the south, the army that had destroyed Napoleon’s colony attacked Ivan’s colony in the northwest quadrant. My plan was to catch Ivan in a vice-grip. Suleiman sent a detachment of cavalry and cannon in support of my attack.

It was an overwhelming success. When Ivan at last asked for surrender terms, he had but one building still standing — a dock on the Atlantic coast. His armies and his colonists were dead to the last man.

The Patagonia was mine!

Last night, I moved a few things on my desk — I was looking for my Age of Empires 3 disc, because I wanted to commit some war crimes — and the rejection letter from Random House for the Merlin novel, and the outline for said novel, were sitting there.

It’s a lovely rejection letter. I hadn’t read the outline in a while, and so last night I did. Looking at it now, in the sober light of the first season and half of the second, I can see that the story doesn’t really work — as a Merlin story, that is. I wrote Merlin as being a little more competent, a bit more assured than he is on the series. There are no “Merlin, you idiot” moments. It’s still a good story, maybe a little more like The Tudors (minus the smut, plus talking dragons) and a little less like Merlin.

As I said, the rejection letter from Random House Children’s Books UK was lovely. It was unexpected, as the outline was unsolicited, but I had a story and I wanted to take the chance. I expected (best case scenario) I’d never hear anything or (worst case) the outline would have been binned outright. Instead, I got back not just a rejection letter, but they returned the outline as well.

I bring this up because of a short story I submitted earlier this month.

While I haven’t heard, one way or the other, I know, in my heart, that I didn’t sell the story.

I’ve suspected as much for a week, and I decided that, had I not heard by this Monday past, that the story had been rejected.

It’s a problem of time, you see.

The issue of City Paper publishing the winners of their annual fiction contest comes out next Wednesday. While it’s theoretically possible that they’re waiting until the last possible minute to notify winners, send contracts and money, it strikes me as unlikely. And it strikes me that there’s no reason to notify the losers, for want of a better word, as the issue hitting the stands will make that clear.

I pulled a couple of back issues of The Writer and made up a list of other markets I could send this story to. I think it’s a good story, though also a little strange. There’s a Joycean quality to it that I didn’t quite intend, but I chalk that up to the mood of the piece.

It’s the first piece of “THOD” to leave the nest, in a way; it’s based on material from the first and fourth chapters, but it’s also a parallel narrative as there’s nothing in common in terms of the text. A variation on the theme.

Suffice it to say, I’ll find a home for this story. Even if it’s just a low-circulation lit-mag.

Onward and upward, as a friend would say.

I have added this to my Amazon wishlist.

But the relationship between character names in the series and the Arthurian myths is really breaking under the strain.

The use of names can be baffling, if you try and associate the Merlin characters with their accepted roles in the legends. The relationships between the characters are different, and that can sometimes cause some cognitive dissonance. I spent “Sins of the Father” trying to puzzle out the exact relationship between Morgause, Morgana, and Ygraine. (Okay, Morgause/Morgana is simple, because the episode tells us they’re half-sisters, both daughters of Gorlois. But I’ve been working under the assumption that Ygraine had a child before Arthur, to match with the legends, but “Sins” scuppered that. So what’s the relationship between Morgause and Ygraine? Sisters?)

The confusing one is Nimueh. In some legends, she also goes by Vivian, and that’s Georgia Moffett’s character’s name in the next episode. In the legends, Merlin and Nimue have an interesting relationship; they’re lovers, he teaches her his magic, she imprisons him in ice for all eternity. Obviously, this doesn’t work in Merlin, as Merlin fried Nimueh with lightning in last season’s finale. Is Merlin going to teach Vivian his magic? Will they become lovers? Will Merlin flirt with dark magic? Will she become a “big bad”? And let’s not forget that Nimue/Vivian/Ninian is the Lady of the Lake. Except that, per the most recent episode, the Lady of the Lake of Merlin is someone else entirely.

I do a little fist-pump any time I hear a familiar name, like Pellinore, but at the same time, I get a little disappointed when the relationships aren’t what I expect. It’s like the writers are reaching into a grab bag and pulling out names because they sound cool, not because they make sense. And that’s a bit frustrating. Cognitive Dissonance. Yadda yadda yadda.

Where else can you drive a ball 500 feet and not get it out of the park?

Author Kevin Killiany pointed this out, an article on the American HUmanist Association’s new Christmas ad campaign.

What sort of ads? Their press release says this:

“No God?…No Problem!” proclaim the ads, featuring an image of several smiling, Santa hat-clad individuals. The ads will kick off in Washington, D.C. in time for Thanksgiving weekend, running inside 200 buses, fifty rail cars and on the side or tail of twenty buses. The campaign will continue with ads appearing on select buses in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco starting in early December.

And they have a website devoted to their ad campaign, too.

Frankly, I think this is kinda cool.

There’s more to being good than being godly. Christmas is a lot more than a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ; many of the things we take for granted with Christmas — like Santa Claus, like the tree and presents and misteltoe — are accretions from pagan religions. Eating roast beef for Christmas owes more to Mithras than it does to Christ.

There’s no reason that atheists and the irreligious can’t celebrate Christmas. Hell, I’m probably going to work on getting my Christmas cards ready this weekend.

And yes, I said Christmas cards.

I never have a problem with wishing someone a Merry Christmas.

True story. About five years ago, at EB Games, on a weekly conference call, my district manager brought up that he was going into stores, and the employees were wishing people a “Happy Holidays.”

One of my fellow managers said, “But, they’re trying to be inclusive. We don’t want to offend anyone.” And then, he said, “What does Allyn think? He’s an atheist.”

To which I said, “I wish people ‘Merry Christmas’ all the time. None of this ‘Happy Holidays’ stuff.”

The reason was simple. “Merry Christmas” really isn’t offensive, precisely because Christmas has become the secular, commercial holiday that it is. If someone takes offense to being told “Merry Christmas,” they’re probably looking for any reason to be offended.

Or you could be like a friend of mine, and wish everyone a Happy Chrismahannukwanzukah. No, that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue naturally, but once you’ve practiced it a few times, it comes out pretty well.

I really like Christmas. I love listening to Christmas music; I’ll listen to it year-round. Why, just today, I was listening to Tori Amos’ Midwinter Graces and Enya’s When Winter Comes. And I’ll probably listen to the Fab Four’s two Christmas albums in the days to come, and Jethro Tull’s Christmas album, and Christmas Inspired by Lord of the Rings, and dozens more. There’s nothing wrong with celebrating Christmas if you’re an atheist. Hell, Richard Dawkins does, too.

I am a war criminal. I have played video games.

Two human rights organizations have conducted a study of video games. Do video games that simulate war allow players to commit war crimes? Can players kill civilians? Torture enemy units? Destroy property?

Their conclusion? War video games allow their players to commit war crimes.

The study condemned the games for violating laws by letting players kill civilians, torture captives and wantonly destroy homes and buildings.

In particular, the testers looked for how combatants who surrendered were treated, what happened to citizens caught up in war zones and whether damage to buildings was proportionate.

Some games did punish the killing of civilians and reward strategies that tried to limit the damage the conflict, said the study.

However, it said, many others allowed “protected objects” such as churches and mosques to be attacked; some depicted interrogations that involved torture or degradation and a few permitted summary executions.

Unfortunately, the human rights groups played only first-person shooters. The strategy games — like Civilization, like Age of Empires, like Rise of Nations — weren’t tested.

However, I can say from long experience with these games that I’m a Pol Pot. A Stalin. A Mao. I commit war crimes on a semi-frequent basis, as any of my after-action reports for Age of Empires III will attest.

I have wantonly killed civilians.

I have destroyed churches and mosques with impunity; I once laid siege to a town center in Age of Empires II so I could destroy the enemy’s church and take his relic, it was a battle like a medieval Stalingrad, and I had such a sense of satisfaction when his church fell and my squad of monks rushed in to grab the relic amidst the carnage.

I have refused my opponents’ surrenders, just so I can kill more of his units and destroy more of his infrastructure.

Torture? I can’t say I’ve ever tortured anyone in an Age of Empires game. No point, really.

I have dropped nukes in Civ, though. I have turned my enemies into radioactive glass. And I’ve liked it.

Killing civilians, razing towns to the ground, disproportionate warfare — these are all part-and-parcel of a strategy game. Of winning a strategy game. It doesn’t matter what you’re playing. It can be WarCraft or Command & Conquer.

Have I wished, at times, for other methods to win? Yes. I have.

But I also have to fight the war at hand. I am a cruel general. War is hell. I am a war criminal.

I am feeling bereft of excitement or interest in my life at the moment.

This happens. We all reach lulls in our lives.

I’m not feeling particularly creative at the moment. I have no great political insights or opinions to share. I’ve read some comic books recently, but I can’t be arsed to write about them.

As I said, this happens. I blame the sinus headache or the sneezes or the general dreariness that was Baltimore today.

But something of interest did happen today.

I started living in 2010. The Year We Make Contact.

Well, maybe not that last part.

I started writing copy for the January catalog today.

Secret word! Secret word!

Well, not today.

After watching 2001: A Who Odyssey for the fifteenth or sixteenth time today, after making a joke about 2010: The Year We Make Contact, I now feel like rereading 2010: Odyssey Two and 2061: Odyssey Three.

So maybe life isn’t as unexciting as I thought!