JIM'S MOST ANTICIPATED TV HOLIDAY SPECIALS

1.  "Christmas With the Gingriches"

2.  "Winnie the Pooh's Holiday Pot Party"

3.   "Herman Cain's 999 Mistletoe Memories"

4.  "Police Navidad"

5.   "Joey Buttafuoco's Last Incarcerated Christmas" (encore presentation)

(See your local listings for time and station information.)

TOP TEN YULETIDE TUNES YOU'LL TREASURE FOREVER

In response to numerous requests, here are the song titles Jim wrote for a Chicago Tribune staff newsletter of long ago.

10.  "A Way With a Stranger"
  9.  "It Came Upon a Midnight Leer"
  8.  "Rudolph the Snot-Nosed Reindeer"
  7.  "All I Want for Christmas is a Plea Bargain"
  6.  "I Heard the Sirens on Christmas Day"
  5.  "Have Yourself a Very Little Christmas"
  4.  "Do You Snort What I Snort?"
  3.  "It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Memphis"
  2.  "I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus"
And last but not least: 
 1.  "Christopher Walken in a Winter Wonderland"

(Get your copy of the lyrics to these songs at all participating Red Lobster.)

POPCORN

BY JIM SZANTOR 

Rhetorical questions, questionable rhetoric and whimsical observations about the absurdities of contemporary life: 

• Do they make partial toupees?  (What would they call them--throw rugs?)
• Got "Merry Christmas'ed" for the first time on Dec. 2!  (Well, the displays have been up since mid-September, so I guess I shouldn't have been all that surprised. )
• Remember when you went to buy orange juice and didn’t have 37 choices confronting you?  Lots of Pulp, Some Pulp, No Pulp, From Concentrate, Not From Concentrate, Fortified with Calcium, Fortified with Vitamins D and E, Low Acid . . . .  (Not labeled just yet:  Toxic and Non-Toxic!)
• Personal to Herman Cain:  If you aren't on horseback, don't wear a cowboy hat.  (Some called it a pimp hat, but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.  But only on that score.)
• Do they sell Quilted Southern toilet paper in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi . . . .?
• SZSEZ's Media Word of the Week (a word you only see in print or hear on broadcast media but never hear a real person ever use):  "Erstwhile."
• "Wanting to meet an author because you like his books is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pate."--Margaret Atwood, quoted in NYTimes.com.
• Cultural note:  Did a double-take when I skimmed the concert listings in the Weekend section of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and saw "The Milwaukee Symphony plays the music of Led Zeppelin, Dec. 10, Riverside Theater."  What's next:  "The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band Plays Rachmaninov . . . "?
• Musical note:  Tennessee has eight--count 'em--Official State Songs.  New Jersey?  None.  (Kind of hard to work into a conversation, but there you have it.  The SZSEZ experience at its quirky, idiosyncratic best.)
• Headline:  "Cops closed two brothels owned by gang." 
• Brothel. Now there's a strange word.  ("Hey, keep it decent; no brotheling allowed in here!" "What  the brothel is going on here?"  "I drank all weekend and really got brotheled up!")
• All-Over-Rated Club:  Roy Orbison, Jimmy Kimmel and Queen Latifah.
• Why do I have to "Log in" to "My Account" when it's already in MY mail box?  Don't they already know it's me?  How else do I have access to it?  They sent it to me!  Maddening.
• Another (bad?) sign of the times:  Twenty or more years ago, maybe not even that long ago,  most Americans could name the heavyweight champion of the world.  Now?  Not so much; in fact, not anyone that I know of.   For all I know, there could be three of them claiming the crown at this very moment.   (And outside of that sleazy, brutal corner of the world,  who cares?)
• "I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin deep.  That's deep enough.  What do you want, an adorable pancreas?--Author Jean Kerr to the Columbia, Mo., Daily Tribune
• Another in a series of Stupid Warnings on Actual Products: On a Japanese product used to relieve painful hemorrhoids: "Lie down on bed and insert poscool slowly up to the projected portion like a sword-guard into anal duct. While inserting poscool for approximately 5 minutes, keep quiet."
• Thirtieth entry in the Wisconsin Town I Didn't Know Existed Until I Saw it Mentioned in a Newspaper Obituary sweepstakes: Tigerton, Wis. (R.I.P., Candace L. Cornelius, Green Bay Press-Gazette obituary, Dec. 1, 2011.) Previous entries: Athelstane, Walhain, Duck Creek, Breed, Anston, Sobieski, Amberg, Osseo, Angelica, Brazeau, Waukechon, Sugar Camp, Kossuth, Lessor, Kunesh, Pulcifer, Cato, Florence, Greenleaf, Eaton, Poygan, Hofa Park, Hilbert, Hollandtown, Beaufort, Glennie, Harshaw, Bessemer and Crooked Lake.
• The question: What are public hugging, selling chewing gum or forgetting to flush a public toilet? Answer: Real crimes with big fines in Singapore (according to Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg).
• New SZSEZ Rule of Thumb: Never eat at a place called Mom's, never play poker with a man named Doc . . . and never answer the phone between 6 and 7 p.m.  (99.9 percent probability it's a telemarketer.)
• (Isn't it about time that charities and questionable organizations like "The Volunteer Firefighter's Adoration and Appreciation Association" get put on the No-Call List?)
• "People call us lazy, that's what gets to me. We're not lazy, folks. We've only been in this country for 300 years. We built nuclear weapons plants, malls, factories. We're not lazy--we're done."--Colin Quinn 
• Guys who wear their watches on the inside of their wrists are in need of immediate counseling.
• Stupid Warning Label on Actual Product II:  On a cardboard windshield sun shade: "Warning: Do Not Drive With Sun Shield in Place."
• Today's Latin lesson:  Is dico may exsisto recorded pro palaestra voluntas.  ("This call may be recorded for training purposes.")
   

POPCORN

BY JIM SZANTOR 

Rhetorical questions, questionable rhetoric and whimsical observations about the absurdities of contemporary life: 

• I've never been to Malaysia, but my pants have!
• How 'bout that Herman Cain?  Aimed for the White House, wound up in the dog house!
• Black Friday, Cyber Monday:  How many more contrived commercial calendar days till Christmas?   Before you know it, the Big Day itself will be elbowed off the calendar by some not-yet-named Big Event!
• Another Media Word, a word you never hear a real person actually use in real life:  "Exhort."
• Fun With Fortune Cookies, cont.:  Just opened one the other day that said (and I am not making this up):  "You are the mast of everything situation."
• Words fail me--and, apparently, the cookie "authors" too!  (I hope I fare better with the "Lucky #s.")
• I've had it;  I refuse to switch to any car insurance company that uses lizards with annoying Aussie accents to entice me, no matter how much money I may or may not save.
• Speaking of accents, don't you sometimes get the idea that people with British or Australian accents overdo them (or . . . overaccent them!) just to impress us?
• Speaking of Australia:  "The boomerang is Australia's chief export (and then import)."--Demetri Martin
• "60 Minutes" still does some of the best journalism on television,  but . . . couldn't we get by with about half the clock ticks that they insist on using 9 or 10 times each program?  We get it, CBS--it's called "60 Minutes," it refers to a clock, it lasts an hour; it has been on for decades!  Three of four ticks should suffice!  Less is more!
• Speaking of more, if Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner had known it was going to take about 15 people to replace them, they probably would have asked for a lot more money.  That's one huge reporting staff! (In an era of downsizing, CBS has taken to upsizing.  Good for them, but that's a news story in itself, isn't it?)
• (But lest the reporters on that prestigious program get too swelled in the head, let us remind them that they often have to wait till the end of a bottom-feeder football contest to begin their august proceedings.  Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick . . . .)
• Do anthropologists ever have nicknames?  Like . . . Chauncy "The Primordial Realist" Wellington.  Ellsworth "The Punky Paleontologist" Whitney.  You never see that!
• Isn't it about time for the Postal Service to add four more numbers to the Zip Code that won't mean anything and few people will pay any attention to?  Has anyone ever had an envelope or package returned because it didn't contain those extra four numbers?  So why have them in the first place?
• "The world is a dangerous place. Not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."--Albert Einstein
• Redundancy patrol:  Dropping down (as in "Temperatures will be dropping down into the 20s  . . . .")
• Street cred:  When a Cincinnati woman driving her choking 8-year-old to the hospital hit a deep pothole, the jarring sensation dislodged the locket stuck in the girl's throat, thus saving her life. --The Week magazine, Nov. 25, 2011.
• Psychologist and Nobel-winning economist Daniel Kahneman on why we shouldn't trust "experts":
• "There are domains in which expertise is not possible.  Stock picking is a good example.  And in long-term strategic forecsasting, it's been shown that experts are just no better than a dice-throwing monkey."
• The trouble with wearing T-shirts with clever sayings on them:
• 1. Not everyone thinks they're clever.
• 2. People who do appreciate the shirt also realize that you're just wearing what the actual clever person wrote . . . and that you're most likely not that clever.  (Or maybe not that tacky, depending on the shirt, in which case you might actually look better in comparison) ....  Or  . . . maybe not.
• 3. People also realize that you paid money to look clever; and that the person who wrote it received money and probably doesn't wear T-shirts with clever sayings on them . . . or wouldn't be caught dead wearing a "SARCASM/just another service I offer" T-shirt.   Or a "JENIUS" T-shirt . . . or "I recycle  . . . I wore this shirt yesterday" T-shirt.  (I'm just sayin'. Your wardrobe may vary.)
• Next week:  Insights on sweatshirts with clever sayings on them.  (Just kidding!)
• Twenty-ninth entry in the Wisconsin Town I Didn't Know Existed Until I Saw it Mentioned in a Newspaper Obituary sweepstakes: Crooked Lake, Wis. (R.I.P. Gloria M. Alger, Green Bay Press-Gazette obituary, Nov. 14, 2011).  Previous entries: Athelstane, Walhain, Duck Creek, Breed, Anston, Sobieski, Amberg, Osseo, Angelica, Brazeau, Waukechon, Sugar Camp, Kossuth, Lessor, Kunesh, Pulcifer, Cato, Florence, Greenleaf, Eaton, Poygan, Hofa Park, Hilbert, Hollandtown, Beaufort, Glennie, Harshaw and Bessemer.
• Wish I'd said that:  "Maybe the ideal man to fix Washington’s dysfunction is the one who made it dysfunctional. He broke it so he should own it."--Maureen Dowd on Newt Gingrich in her Nov. 30 column in The New York Times.
• It was kind of ironic that Andy Rooney and Joe Frazier died during the same week--both were pugnacious, and neither one had anything genuinely profound to say.  It's kind of funny, then, that the "violent" guy--heavyweight boxer Frazier--was easily the more likeable of the two.
• All Over-Rated Club:   Talk show host Ellen Degeneres, documentarian Ken Burns, "comic" Dane Cook.
• Today's Latin Lesson:  Nulla nec lictor circa vos postulo unus. ("There's never a cop around when you need one!")

LAGNIAPPE

New York Times columnist David Brooks asked readers 70 and over to share the lessons they've learned from life. Here are four SZSEZ favorites (for more, see The Link Tank):

-- Many people lament the fact that they had to make the most important decisions in their 20s, at the age when they were least qualified to make them.

-- Many of the most impressive people . . . were strategic self-deceivers. When something bad was done to them, they forgot it, forgave it or were grateful for it. When it comes to self-narratives, honesty may not be the best policy.

-- It’s trite, but apparently true. Many more seniors regret the risks they didn’t take than regret the ones they did.

-- Many writers mentioned that given their own flaws, they are astounded that their kids turned out so well.

--David Brooks in The New York Times, Nov. 29, 2011

POPCORN

BY JIM SZANTOR 

Rhetorical questions, questionable rhetoric and whimsical observations about the absurdities of contemporary life: 

• You can tell a lot about a person by his or her ring tone. 
• (Most of the time, more than you ever wanted to know!)
• Fortune Cookies Enter the 21st Century, continued:  "Your present plans are going to succeed.  Want more?  Visit: www.myfreefortune.com."
• How many times have you read that "sweat itself is odorless"?
• How many times have you actually believed it?
• Jim's Law of Locker Rooms:  Some guy will put on 10 times more cologne (or after-shave) than needed and will then reek worse than with whatever odor he started with.  (With a smell that travels much farther!)
• (People who put on 10 times more cologne/after-shave/perfume than needed should be beaten with rolled-up copies of The Door County Advocate.)
• You have to wonder about those Occupy Wall Street protesters, don't you?  ("Let's go bang on some drums in the park with a muddled message and no discernible leader.  Yeah, that'll work.") Frank Rich of New York magazine says they look like a tired road company of "Hair."
• (About their message:  At one point in time were they happy about the haves and the have-nots?  Have they just discovered this?)
• All those who have ever written a letter to your congressman, raise your pens.
• Life was easier when all the college football games were played on Saturday afternoon and all of the pro football games on Sunday afternoon.   Now they're all over the map--or, the calendar.  Thursday night pro games, Sunday afternoon pro games, Sunday night pro games, and, of course, the villain that started it all--Monday Night Football.
• I'm afraid to look at the sports section--there could be a Tuesday morning college game somewhere. ("Check your local listings for time and station.")
• I'm going to start a new magazine called Geezer.  Don't miss the annual Bathrobe Issue.
• Sad commentary on our world:  How do we describe a person who has achieved great fame or prominence in our society?  As a statesman?  As a great humanitarian?  No--as a rock star!  "Bill  Clinton has achieved rock-star status. . . ."  (I know he did the sex part of it, but trashing hotel rooms?  Not so sure.)
• SZSEZ's Stupid Actual Warning Label of the Week: On some Swann frozen dinners: "Serving suggestion: Defrost."
• Don't fret too much about all those dire forecasts about a harsh winter due to the so-called La Nina effect.  According to USA Today, the Arctic Oscillation, known as the "wild card" of weather, will be in play for most of the Northeast, Midwest and East Coast this winter.
• The oscillation phenomenon is marked by shifts in high and low pressure that causes the position of the polar jet stream to fluctuate.
• (Alas, it can be predicted only about one to two weeks in advance.)
• SZSEZ's Media Word of the Week (a word you never hear any normal person actually use in real life):  Vex/vexed/vexing.
• Why are prosecutors' feet rarely held to the fire when DNA exonerates a wrongfully imprisoned man?
• According to a Oct. 29 Wall St. Journal story, they enjoy broad immunity from civil suits and a measure of professional courtesy that discourages defense lawyers and judges from filing complaints,  attorneys said.
• That is as it should be, said Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association. If prosecutors could easily be sued or sanctioned in the rare instance of a mistake, he said, "They may then err on the side of caution in bringing charges, to the detriment of society." 
• (Does that sound as self-serving to you as it does to me?)
• SZSEZ's Stupid Actual Warning Label of the Week II: On a hotel-provided shower cap: "Fits one head."
• "Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."--Anais Nin.
• There will never be a Morley Safer Lookalike Contest.
• Obituary Headline Nickname of the Week: "Juice."  As in Kenneth "Juice" Eick, late of Seymour, Wis.  (Green Bay Press-Gazette obituary, Aug. 9, 2011.) R.I.P., Mr. Eick.
• Today's Latin lesson:   Vos can dico de homine suo, consectetuer adipiscing elit.  (You can tell a lot about a person by his or her ring tone.)
  

Jim's TOP TEN

SZSEZ's Top Ten REJECTED New Motel Names

By Jim Szantor

10.  Doze Inn

   9.  Slumber Party

   8.  The iPillow Pod

   7.  No-Wake Zone

   6.  Forty Winks Plus Tax

   5.  No-Roach Motel

   4.  Mattress Mambo Inn

   3.  It IZzzzz what it IZzzzz

   2.   Snooze Break

         . . . and the most quickly rejected of Jim's suggested new motel names . . . 

   1.  Jimbo's Cut-Rate Sleeping Bag

                                                                 Copyright 2011 Jim Szantor