johnbowman.net

I wrote this story this morning, but I hadn’t seen a picture of the “Nazi” panda until tonight. He’s so cute!

You know these people would make a fortune on eBay with these things.

Another mega-post. Here’s a draft of my rant for the show tongiht.

During this year’s holiday season, we’ve heard a lot about this store forbidding employees from saying “Christmas” in their greetings to customers or that ad replacing “Christmas” with another, more neutral word.

There was a brief row over Toronto city hall calling its decorated arboreal corpse a “holiday tree” rather than a “Christmas tree.” I mean, sure, the mayor’s a Jew, but I guess the tree has to be Christian.

My reaction to this has been? Is this all new this year?

Have all the Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and agnostics just sprung up out of the soil?

Hello! Not everyone celebrates Christmas!

The National Post ran a series of articles about “taking the Christ out of Christmas,” starting with a story about the Gap asking its employees not to say “Merry Christmas” to the customers.

The Gap says it’s just trying to be inclusive. I like that. The Gap being inclusive.

Even in their holiday ads, they decided not to go with a traditional Christmas song at all. Instead they remixed a 1973 disco track with jingle bells and had some ridiculously happy and thin models lip sync it.

But Gap employees not saying Merry Christmas? What’s new there? “Happy holidays” has been the standard greeting for a while.

By the way, Roots was quick to counter the Gap position. A Roots employee told the Post they’re allowed to say anything they want. “Christmas, Jesus, whatever.”

Yeah, whatever. I don’t know about you, but even as a Christian I’d be freaked out of a Roots clerk wished me “Merry Christmas and may the peace and blessing of our Lord Jesus Christ be upon you.”

The Post articles also mention that Royal Canadian Mint where “Moose and Squirrel” - or caribou and beaver sing the “Twelve Days of Giving,” rather than the “12 days of Christmas.”

Ok, so this one’s a little more obvious. I watch that commercial and try to lip-read that beaver to see if he was saying “Christmas” originally and then some government media flack noticed and made them change the audio.

Is hard to lip-read a cartoon character, y’know.

I figure they made the ad, realized too late that it wasn’t inclusive and decided to change the lyric rather than go back and remake the ad with a different song.

The Post article then mentions the ROM using “Common Era” and “Before Common Era” in their dates rather than AD and BC in their display of the James ossuary.

I have no idea what this has to do with Christmas, but since when did the Post have to make any sense?

Then there’s an article on corporate Christmas cards and how none of them say “Christmas” at all.

Oh please, say it ain’t so! Has Corporate Canada lost the Christmas spirit? I’m crushed!

The Post then champions Manitoba Premier Gary Doer for renaming the legislature’s Multicultural Tree, what they called the Christmas tree as of the mid-90s.

Doer decided, quite correctly, that the name was lame and called it a Christmas tree again.

The Post said he became an Internet folk-hero. I have little doubt of that. It takes very little to become an Internet folk-hero. The man who saved Christmas? Oh please.

So whether you’re celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Candlemas, Yule, Tet, Kwanzaa, the Solstice, Agnostica, Ramadan or just the fact that you might have a few days off work, have a Happy Holiday.

Note to self: Don’t buy tickets for a movie playing at the same time as an event mentioned in a previous note to self.

Duh.

Note to self: Go here. Bring minidisc.

Today’s my first today working in the main CBC TV newsroom. The online unit was moved up here from its own offices downstairs.

Now, because it’s the first day, of course, nothing’s working right. There’s no printer. The audio encoder crashed and I can’t get it back up again. So I can’t add audio to the stories on the site.

I can find anything either. I don’t think our reference books have made it up here yet.

And to top it off, they’re running tests of the fire alarm system, so every once in a while the klaxons go off like there are Romulans off the starboard bow.

But at least there are people around.

This caught my eye on CNN.com: Marvel Comics to unveil gay gunslinger

But what made it blog-worthy was this line: “Based on a blurb on Marvel’s Web site, the tone may be campy.”

Check out the pic of the “Rawhide Kid.”

Campy? Nooooo.

So, yeah, I went to Drinks with Jish tonight….

Exactly one week early. Duh.

BTW, I gotta see about getting relisted on GTABloggers. Hmm…

I hosted the first of my Thursday Word of Mouth episodes today. I didn’t manage to book my own interview, but I did the regular Taxi Talk segment and introed a great speech by Robert Fisk.

I really want to book my own interviews, maybe even produce some pieces for the show. It’s not every day you get the opportunity to produce a radio show.

I’m not sure why I haven’t been blogging lately. I think it has to do with the change in schedule.

I’m working nights now, so no one is likely to read what I’m writing until hours after I write it. Maybe I need that kind of feedback.

Or maybe it’s that I’m not surfing the Net in the same way I used to when I was working days.

I’ll try to make an effort to write more, even though, now that I’m working nights, my days seem to be a lot less eventful.