I was doing some serious channel surfing the other night when I came across the Hallmark Channel. I usually surf right on by, but I was feeling Christmasy and a Christmas movie was on (what are the odds?) so I gave it a quick minute.
Apparently there’s more than a handful of the Hallmark Faithful out there, as the network churns out roughly 800,000 new Christmas movies a year (maybe an embellishment, maybe not). The new films add to their trillions of existing ones, sure to be running on a never-ending loop until the End of Time. They’re all pretty much the same movie of course, with different actors and characters’ names on rotation. I was barely a minute into the one I was checking out (and already having viewer’s remorse) whenit hit me:
Hallmark Christmas movies are just the television equivalent of romancenovels, with some holiday cheer sprinkled in for good measure.
You’d think I would’ve remembered. Ha! It’d be great if they occasionally put out a Christmas movie that was about…oh Idk…the meaning ofChristmas or sumthin? Or hey, maybe some that are all about dogs or circus clowns or anything other than the constant deluge of Paperback Love. When did Cupid hijack Christmas anyway?
After a moment of pondering all this, I realized I was still holding the remote, and that I have access to far more channels and streaming services than a cavedude needs. A couple minutes of professional scrolling later, I hit the jackpot with the 1965 classic “A Charlie Brown Christmas” that had just started on another channel.
There’s timeless magic in this Charles Schulz gem, from the storyline (good ‘ol Charlie Brown searching for the real meaning of Christmas), to the soundtrack (the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s jazzy piano-y vibrations are good for the soul) to the throwback to simpler times.
“I never thought it was a bad little tree. It’s not bad at all really. Maybe it just needs a little love.” – Linus Van Pelt
Christmas Love has a heartbeat, and it sounds a lot like that.
The monster known as The Merchant of Death, international arms dealer Viktor Bout who was freed in exchange for Brittney Griner, was arrested in March of 2008. He’s a baaaad dude (one doesn’t earn that nickname easily), was badly wanted by the U.S. government, and there was a huge price on his head. At the time of his arrest, he was set-up during an undercover sting operation. U.S. officials acted as Columbian rebels wanting to purchase millions of dollars worth of military-grade weapons from him.
Just thinking about this notion is fascinating, as we’re talking about complete spy stuff here. The time it took to plan such a meeting, the cost, the resources that it took, the risks – all of it could be right out of a movie (the movie referenced below was several years earlier). The undercover agents asked Bout for missiles that could kill U.S. forces and shoot down American planes, he agreed to the sale and reportedly said, “We have the same enemy.”
Fourteen years after the sting operation that put Bout behind bars and his arms empire out of business, the U.S. once again may have to decide how badly it wants to keep him locked away. Bout, the so-called “Merchant of Death” and the inspiration for the 2005 Nicolas Cage film, “Lord of War,” appears to be Russia’s preferred target in a potential prisoner exchange for American basketball star Brittney Griner.
Jeff Eisenberg, Yahoo Sports, article from May 31, 2022
It’s impossible to feel entirely good about the prisoner swap under the circumstances. As for Ms. Griner, of course it’s not her fault and she was clearly a scapegoat, used as one of Vladimir Putin’s pawns from the jump. Let’s face it – Putin has proven himself to be one helluva chess player. He was counting on us caving to his demands from the start.
Turns out, he was right.
Checkmate.
Now he’s laughing his ass off at us.
I can’t imagine what Griner went through and am glad she’s free. I wish her nothing but healing and happiness.
But at a time when Putin’s insatiable appetite for power has resulted in Ukrainian civilians’ blood running in the streets – and with his ongoing threats to use nuclear weapons, make no mistake about it – the Vik n’VladdyShow will be instrumental in Russia’s strategic military plans going forward. Viktor Bout was already a Putin loyalist, and now he owes him his very freedom.
How many people will be killed as a result of this man going free?
Whether directly or indirectly, the release of Mr. Death Merchant will end up costing more Ukranian lives, and almost without a doubt, the blood of Americans will eventually spill too.
I recently saw the trailer for the upcoming Will Smith movie, Emancipation, about a runaway slave in the 1800’s desperately fleeing from the plantation owners who tried to kill him. The clip was included in an article on social media announcing the film. Against my better judgement, I started reading some of the comments…
-I’ll never EVER see anything associated with Will Smith again, wish he’d do us all a favor and just disappear forever.
-This movie actually looks great. It’s a shame that Smith is the star and not someone else, because normally I’d be all over this. But nah I’m good.
-Fuck Will Smith!”
There were some positive comments mixed in but most were slamming him, many of them vulgarly.
We all have our reasons to like or dislike someone and I respect the opinion of others, but I’ve had a little different take regarding Smith since the infamous slap at the Oscars earlier this year.
It seems that overnight, most people felt the same as those quoted above. Prior to the incident, I didn’t know anyone (or hadn’t heard of anyone) who absolutely hated Will Smith. Just the opposite actually. For the longest time, he was widely considered one of the good guys in Hollywood; 0ver-the-top talented and someone who, for the most part seemed to be a good family man and kept it real. In recent years, he made many short motivational videos, encouraging people to not give up on their dreams. He was one of the biggest box office stars in the world and yet still seemed in touch with his own humanity and that of others.
I won’t delve into the relationship problems the Smith family had / has. All I’ll say is that an open marriage isn’t a marriage at all, as far as I’m concerned. The argument could be made that Smith invited the pain he was feeling, in the months leading up to that ill-fated night.
Being in pain, having a hurting soul, doesn’t justify his actions but it seems that was the backdrop Smith was coming from when he tried to smack Chris Rock’s face right off his head. There’s zero excuse for it. Comedians often say things that are considered offensive, and Smith should’ve anticipated and rolled with the moment. But he didn’t.
He lost his shit on national TV with millions of people watching.
So what’s the difference between someone like Will Smith, and you or I?
Welllll aside from our bank balance, the most obvious is that he’s a global celebrity and the cameras were rolling when he had his moment. Truth is, we’ve all lost our shit at times, multiple times. Sometimes justified and sometimes maybe not so much, but even so – hopefully we’ve learned something about ourselves each time, and hopefully it happens less frequently than when we were younger. For most of us, it probably still happens occasionally. Life’s brutal sometimes and of course, we all come from a place of our own pain too.
There’s a quote from the late Stephen Covey that seems pretty relevant –
“We judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions.”
If you think about that longer than 2 seconds, it’ll cut straight to the heart. It’s true, we’re all guilty of this. It’s ridiculously easy to judge someone for their actions, isn’t it?
How’d ya like to be forever condemned / judged by others for a single event in your life?
Disclaimer: sometimes, peoples’ actions are exactly who they are. Theydon’t try changing their behavior and they just don’t give two fucks. There are some sour apples in the world who don’t deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt. In these cases, we’d do best to just avoid them altogether.
Then there are people who genuinely try to change.
This is another one that should cut to the heart too. We’re all guilty of holding someone’s past against them, sometimes regardless of how much they’ve worked on themselves. And of course, others have done that with us.
I don’t care how anyone else feels about Will Smith. But as for myself, I get the feeling he’s been doing some serious soul-searching, has been genuinely remorseful, and has been doing the work so that he can get his personal life back on track
I’m looking forward to seeing the movie – it looks very poignant, and according to the trailer is “inspired by a true story” from a very dark time in our history.
Alrighty then! Just a day after writing about my complete lack of enthusiasm for early Christmas celebrations / decorations in my previous article “Youltide” last week, I began throwing some decorations up in the cave and did some holiday shopping online. Initially, it wasn’t so much a change of heart as it was simply something borne out of pragmatism – I was home for the extended Thanksgiving weekend anyway…why not get a jump on things rather than put it off? Decorating can take a while and the older I get, the pickier I seem to have gotten when it comes to Christmas Cave decor and placement (which is undoubtedly a good thing).
Somewhere along the way, it became less about being pragmatic and more about embracing the moment – I put on some holiday tunes and had a glass or two of Christmas cheer. I started thinking of Christmases past – from my own youth, to when my kids were little, up to the present day. It occurred to me that over the course of the last 12 years or so, since my divorce, I had kind of conditioned myself into thinking that Christmastime would forever be “less than” – it would never be the same. Never the same when having a broken family, never the same while not having the kids with me all the time due to shared custody, never quite the same as the kids grew older and ventured out on their own. Well of course, as with everything else in life, things change and they simply don’t remain the same.
Does that mean we’re condemned to having a less satisfying life as time goes on? Should we just accept having less contentment? Should we just be always looking at the past?
The obvious answer is a resounding NO, but sometimes it’s the most obvious things that somehow elude us. Sometimes we inadvertently condition our own thinking in negative patterns, and we end up condemning ourselves to a ‘less than’ life, whether it’s during the holidays or year-round. But hey – life can be hard enough on its own without getting any help from us to make it harder.
I must say, realizing that I’ve somewhat sabotaged my holidays all these years was quite the downer at first – until it became quite liberating.
I still have a bit more decorating and shopping to do, but I’m largely done with it all, which is unprecedented for me in early December. For the first time in years, I find myself embracing the Season, as opposed to just looking ahead to the day. What a concept!
