The ION Television Network is presenting a good five hours of Christmas-themed mysteries for this day after Thanksgiving. From 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. EST, the network will show reruns of two episodes of Monk, two of Psych, and one of Leverage. They're all well worth watching. (Schedule details below; check your local listings for confirmation.) I was disappointed last year to find out , , ,
“It snowed all day and all night. On the 22nd it was still snowing. Snowballs flew, snowmen grew. Sceptical children regained their belief in fairyland, and sour adults felt like Santa Claus, buying more presents than they had ever intended. In the evening the voice of the announcer, traveling through endless white ether, informed the millions that more snow was coming…. More snow came. It floated down from its limitless source like a vast extinguisher. Sweepers, eager for their harvest, waited in vain for the…
Let’s call it the after-Christmas Merry Christmas issue (or maybe the Boxing Day issue). After all, Dickens noted at the end of A Christmas Carol, the day Christ is born is a day we should keep in our hearts all through the year. Therefore … This week’s issue focuses, naturally, on Christmas stories, particularly those of the mysterious variety. As Mike Gray notes, in his review linked below, “Some of the finest mystery authors regard the Yuletide season as the perfect opportunity for crime.” It…
An inspiring Christmas story: Virginia public school students were apprehended for wearing funny sweaters and tossing candy canes to fellow students before the start of school. “They said the candy canes are weapons because you can sharpen them with your mouth and stab people with them,” a student reported. Thanks for defending us from the horror of Christmas, O, all-wise administrators of Battlefield High in Haymarket, VA! You’re our heroes! Story here.
An $11 million Christmas tree in Abu Dhabi suggests its owners might not have understood the true spirit of the season: Abu Dhabi hotel regrets $11M Christmas ‘overload’ – USATODAY.com.
By Daniel Crandall I have noticed quite a few people dissenting from what has become, for great multitudes, the Thanksgiving weekend shopping ritual known as “Black Friday” (a ritual driven mostly by Mad Men ad men and our desire for, as George Carlin put, “more Stuff”). Instead of Christmas cheer, a lot of very vocal Americans view this past weekend, and the weekends leading up to that December Holy Day, with disdain. They despise the crowded malls, pushy shoppers, and, as one Seattle-based novelist noted…
Once in a while something special happens in America culture to bring joy to our country’s vast population of Christians, and especially those who take their Christian faith very seriously. We are more used to being the butt jokes and ridicule, or the object of libertarian fears, and more often than not just ignored. Just stay in your closets, or churches, and quit bothering us with your absolute standards and exclusive claims on The Truth. It’s just tough for Christians to be popular in a…
The USA Network’s latest comedy-mystery Christmas specials succeed in conveying not only the trappings of Christmas but also the more serious themes.
The Fox TV series House made an interesting, rather subtle comment on religion and unbelief last night, but the scene reaches so many levels of irony most viewers won’t know what to make of it.
Tonight USA Network presents two mystery-comedy Christmas specials. At 9 EST (repeated at 12 a.m.), is the annual Monk Christmas special. The comedy-mystery program is a limted series appearing in two sets of episodes per year, in summer and midwinter, so USA Network wisely presents a Christmas episode each year to help sustain viewers’ interest during the long layoff. The USA Network describes tonight’s episode, "The Man Who Shot Santa," as follows: "Monk becomes a social pariah when he shoots a man dressed as Santa…
Caitlin Moran of the Times of London asks several important questions about Christmas in the paper’s December 18 issue, the most important of which is, who wrote and performed the better Christmas song, Roy Wood of Wizzard or Noddy Holder of Slade? Slade is one of the most underrated rock bands of all time, at least in the United States. The great pub rockers brought a delightful Scottish, working-class flair to hard rock in the early to mid 1970s (and some of the worst clothing…
Tonight at 8 p.m. EST, Turner Classic Movies is showing an excellent Christmas film, one which I recommend highly. Remember the Night (1940) stars Barbara Stanwyck as Lee Leander, a beautiful shoplifter in a big city (New York City, I think), whose court case is continued until after Christmas by clever assistant district attorney John Sargent (Fred MacMurray, who would costar with Stanwyck in Billy Wilder’s 1944 venture into film noir, Double Indemnity), who realizes that no jury will convict her right before Christmas.…
TV stations tend to show the great 1944 film Going My Way, directed by Leo McCarey and starring Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald, more often around Christmas, even though only a couple of scenes are set during Advent. The film, however, always repays watching. In particular, it illustrates the superiority of moral suasion over coercion in the creation of civil order — a lesson always worth remembering. Although Going My Way won several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, the film’s reputation rapidly declined beginning in…
If you’ve read my article on Christmas music below, you probably noticed that the Omniculture has made itself thoroughly manifest in that area, providing an astonishing variety of music for the season, for every taste. And some for those with no taste at all, or at least an infinite sense of humor and boundless tolerance for chaotic assaults on the senses. Everything happens in the Omniculture, as I’ve noted, and the following post from CybersMusic illustrates that perfectly: it documents a death metal Christmas album.…
If you’re interested in seeing an unusual film set at Christmas, and a good one, you might want to take a look at The Ice Harvest, which was released to theaters about a year ago and is now available on DVD. For more info on the film, here is my review from Breakpoint: A Film of Second Chances By S. T. Karnick1/3/2006 The Ice Harvest Just as crime statistics are a good measure for gauging the health of a society, crime films can reveal…
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