Okay, let’s do this playlist thing… These artists and numbers appear, back-to-back, in the playlist:
- Peter Robbins et al.: dialogue from A Charlie Brown Christmas
- Anonymous 4: Hodie Christus Natus Est
- Waverly Consort: Three Spanish Villancicos – Dadme Albcrecias
- Perry Como: Home for the Holidays
- Mannheim Steamroller: Joy to the World
- George Winston: The Holly and the Ivy
- Celtic Woman: O Holy Night
- John Denver and the Muppets: The Twelve Days of Christmas
- Al Hirt: Nutty Jingle Bells
- The Roches: Deck the Halls
(Note: After some experimentation, I’ve found there doesn’t seem to be a simple way — like a single button to push — to fast-forward to the end of a number. What you do instead is drag the little progress-meter thing all the way to the right, to the end of the track; this cues up the next number in the list.)
Next: I can’t put a YouTube video into this audio-playlist thing, but Christmas music doesn’t get any better than this. Judy Garland, in Meet Me in St. Louis, introduces the world to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” — and more or less ruins it for every succeeding performer:
(As Jordan Baker of the Dealing in Subterfuges blog recently reminded readers, the original version has none of this hang-a-shining-star/highest-bough stuff. What that verse actually — much more piercingly poignantly — says is:
Someday soon, we all will be together —
If the fates allow.
Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow…
So have yourself a Merry Little Christmas now.
Got that???)
Finally, the music of Christmas writing. Dylan Thomas reads his own A Child’s Christmas in Wales (in two parts, back-to-back — thanks, WordPress Audio Player plugin!):
(The complete text is here, if you’d like to follow along; link opens in a new window/tab, so you can move back and forth from the text to the audio stream.)
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Bonus: Video from 1979’s Christmas Together special, which shows John Denver and The Muppets singing the Twelve Days of Christmas (audio only is in the above playlist, obviously):
Don’t you wish you could see the chaos “backstage” as all the Muppeteers, their arms waving, squeezed in around John Denver?
From an appreciation of novelist (and biographer, etc.) Penelope Fitzgerald, by novelist (etc.) Julian Barnes, 
Among the many dramatic narratives playing across the pop-culture landscape of recent years, one of the most dramatic — from a certain perspective — has been the South Park saga. Not that there’s really a continuing story line (each episode stands more or less on its own), no; the “dramatic arc” such as it is comes from the tension between what the show is and does, and what the broader culture implicitly says it may say and do.
When I first started programming, both I and a brother-in-law worked for AT&T. This was back in the days before all the local phone networks got spun off into their own companies — when the entire US phone network was called, collectively, “the Bell System.”
