Heartiest congratulations to RAMH regular visitor and blog-friend Froog, who has performed the hat trick and then some in garnering — all at once — five best-of-the-year awards for his online presences:

Most Prolific Blogger,
Most Alcoholic Blog,
Most Uncomfortably Personal Blog,
China-Basher of the Year, and (the one I really envy him for)
Most Diverse Blog

It’s about time someone [...]

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…and probably always will. But this is a pretty damned impressive advertisement/trailer:

It sort of compresses all the memes from the SyFy cable network’s distinctive bumper spots into a big ol’ nearly coherent 2:40 whole (and avoids the corny-CGI temptations to which the network’s special-effects guys all too often succumb in the actual programs). Nice.
(Anybody know [...]

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Like many Americans, I’m embarrassingly illiterate in any languages other than English. The one exception is/was Latin, for which I had a truly strange affinity all through high school (even though the Latin program there only went through junior year). My freshman year in college, I took a Latin advanced-placement test which landed me in [...]

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[From this page, which includes a YouTube tour of the interior: "The Upside Down House is a project created by a Polish businessman and philanthropist named Daniel Czapiewski... The house is also meant to be a profound statement about the Communist era and the state of the world."]
From whiskey river:
Remember That Things Go
According to Your [...]

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Taking off from the first edition… All I’m going to do for the music portion here is just add ten songs (and pray that, over time, I won’t blow the little WordPress audio-player thingie out of the water).
As before, these artists and numbers appear, back-to-back, in the playlist:

Peter Robbins et al.: dialogue from A Charlie [...]

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Ryun Patterson of the Bookgasm site/blog (slogan: “reading material to get excited about”) has reviewed ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas as you’ve never seen it reviewed before. Excerpt:
Descriptions of human sacrifice and the power of blood magic are commonplace throughout history, but one — Clement Clarke Moore’s ‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS — takes place [...]

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…which I’m not, I’d say that the author of this book currently advertised on eBay will see none of the proceeds:

Ha! And there are 5 available, even! Hahahahaha…!
Omigod, thank you. I needed a good laugh.

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[See original at toothpastefordinner.com]
From whiskey river:
Report From A Far Place
Making these word things to
step on across the world, I
could call them snowshoes.
They creak, sag, bend, but
hold, over the great deep cold,
and they turn up at the toes.
In war or city or camp
they could save your life;
you can muse them by the fire.
Be careful, though: they
burn, [...]

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I had occasion recently to hunt down a story by James Thurber which I hadn’t read in *counting*… uh, many years. But the first time I “read” it, I didn’t actually read it: I heard it, read aloud, by my seventh-grade English teacher.
The story itself has nothing to do with Christmas or even winter (as [...]

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You probably already know the movie A Christmas Story, released in 1983 and based on the stories (and featuring the voiceover narration) of Jean Shepherd.
And if you’ve been hanging around here for a while, you may also know of my own childhood Christmas memories — and if so, you’ll know I share what seems to [...]

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