War on Christmas! War on Christmas!

You know, I found the two-year-long presidential campaign utterly fascinating, but I'm already sick to death of the Christmas season. TV was already flooded with ads last night, including one where a guy complained that he'd just been carving pumpkins, it couldn't be Christmas season already, but wait, what a great deal on this wonderful gift item, I can't resist! Bah. What a tool! (The guy, not the gift item.)

Christmas: the season of desperate businesses, desperate shoppers, and desperately good cheer. President-Elect Obama should abolish Christmas and establish a new solstice holiday in which everybody just gets drunk and curses the darkness. Yes, every child too, although they can also have a lump of coal to burn in the long, cold nights.

Tuba Man, RIP

I've been meaning to post something about the death of Edward McMichael, who was an iconic figure around Seattle known as the Tuba Man. He was beaten to death at a bus stop last week, apparently by three teenagers who had earlier attacked some other people at another bus stop. This story has been in the local papers ever since, and today it even made the NY Times, which notes that "[m]ore than 1,000 people turned out for a memorial service on Wednesday night near Qwest Field." Sports events were a common place to see him, an eccentrically-behatted character playing "Flight of the Bumblebee" or Black Sabbath outside the stadiums. He always seemed to be wherever there was a large crowd, so I'd see him at things like Bumbershoot too. I never gave him any money, never asked him for a song, but he was as familiar a face as the busker who sings on the corner outside my workplace, Schmitz Hall, who always points at me and nods whenever I walk by.

It's strange to feel this pang of loss for someone I did not know at all, but somehow we had a relationship that lasted years. I'll miss him.