News You Can Bruise for 2002 December 21

Kris is tinkering with popular winter holidays, but he's not alone. Recently making the weblog rounds have been "What if Christmas Were a Jewish Holiday?", with all the nitpicky attention to edge cases found in actual Judaism; and the Klezmonauts, a Chicago-based[0] klezmer band which released an album of Christmas Carols called "Oy To The World!". Because I am a sucker for klezmer music, I listened to the sample MP3, was hooked, and ordered the album.

OTTW! is the first CD in my playlist of new CDs for my Bakersfield trip. I find driving incredibly boring, and whenever I go down to Bakersfield I have to get some new CDs to distract me, or I am slowly driven insane by the vastness of I-5, which I am convinced is an enormous, serpentine H.P. Lovecraft monster in disguise. I kind of went overboard this time: I bought about 10 CDs, and then Kevin bought me some jazz so that at the drop of a hat I'd be able to say "Ah, Brubeck." and act sophisticated, and then what with the klezmer and all it got out of control (I'm sure you all know how this feels).

[0] Whenever I hear that some person or group of people is "Chicago-based" or "Los Angeles-based" I think that it's like "soy-based" or "carbon-based" and they are actually made out of the city in question. Which I guess is true, if you count the food as being part of the city.