Christmas Is All Around: Highlights and Oddities from the UK Holiday Chart

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Here’s one of my cardinal rules, one which comes into great effect during my favorite month of the year, December—it is impossible to watch the movie Love Actually and not feel better about life by the end of the running time. I watch this film every Christmas and am always left in a mix of hysterics and eyes welling up all over, and so many of my friends and family feel the same. Not a bad reaction in America for a movie as thoroughly British in its own way as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classics. It’s that characteristic which I’m using as the jumping-off point for my Christmas contribution to the Addison Recorder, one which fulfills our mission of bringing cultural singularity to your attention, for something not many people may realize is that one of the multiple plots in Love Actually involves a long-standing British holiday tradition.

The most purely fun section of the film, in my humble opinion, is near-forgotten, legend-in-his-own-mind rock star Billy Mack’s (the transcendent Bill Nighy) attempt to get back to the top of the pop charts with his cloying “Christmas Is All Around” single. Throughout the storyline, much is made of how Mack is dueling the real-life boy band Blue to have the number-one single in Britain on Christmas Day itself—which is a point lost on most Americans. We don’t particularly care what song is #1 in Billboard on Christmas week; it’s the same as every other week. But in the United Kingdom, having the #1 song on Christmas is akin to winning a Grammy award for Record of the Year or selling ten million singles and downloads of a song. Whatever song is #1 on Christmas is usually the biggest-selling single in the country that year, and small fortunes are won and lost as people actually wager on what song will take the top spot; not the usual subject for Las Vegas bookmaking.

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Breaking Down the Baseball Hall of Fame 2013 Ballot Part 2: The New Blood

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A good portion of my reasoning for breaking down the Hall of Fame ballot this year (beyond providing reasonable analysis for all twenty of our devoted Recorder readers) is strongly driven by nostalgia. Ballots from the past years have slowly started featuring the players that I identified with growing up (Barry Larkin! Barry Larkin! Barry Larkin!), and when I look over the names appearing on this ballot for the first time, the realization strikes me that I was up in arms about every single one of the players for one reason or another. Whether it was making cracks about Julio Franco’s age while he was still producing at a reasonable clip for the Braves or wondering exactly how many Flintstone’s Vitamins I would have needed to take to look like Sammy Sosa (Answer: All of them, only replace chewable vitamins with testosterone pills shaped like Dino the Dinosaur.), these are the players of my youth, and a sign that we are all sure as shootin’ getting older. Call it the Boys of Summer Effect.

Which is why the fact that these are the ballots the Steroid Era is mildly upsetting to me.

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Breaking Down the Baseball Hall of Fame 2013 Ballot Part 1: The Old-Blood

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The NFL Hall of Fame is in Canton. The museum is rather fun, and the hall enshrining the individual busts of players past and present is appropriately filled with dim lighting. It’s like an old gallery of ancient Rome, if all Romans were hulked-out on ‘roids, overweight, or just downright psychotic. (Maybe not too big a stretch to think about.) The Naismith Basketball Memorial Hall of Fame is somewhere in Massachusetts, and should receive a great deal of credit for enshrining, well, everybody. That being said, the Hall itself leaves much to be desired. I hear that the NHL has a Hall of Fame, where they can someday lay the carcass of the NHL when the sport’s owners have finished pilfering the body for vital organs and valuables. And let’s not get started on golf.

In all of American sports, there is only one Hall of Fame that truly weighs heavily over the entire sport that it is devoted to, a grand building situated in an idyllic town in upstate New York that can only be reached by driving through rolling hills and leafy forests. It is one hour from any major airport and features one massive hotel; there are more than enough accommodations in small cabins and bed and breakfasts surrounding the beautiful lake, as well as wide array of museums and small town charm. (I once took part in a peaceful protest against the Iraq War out front of the local post office!)

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Conference Realignment, or, How I Learned to Stop Caring and Hate the Future

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As I write this, players wearing maize and blue and scarlet and grey are stretching and warming up inside Ohio Stadium. Unsurprisingly, this means I am quite nervous and keyed up since The Game is only fifty minutes from kickoff. The annual contest between Michigan and Ohio State goes back over a century and has filled the intervening decades with jaw-dropping plays, gut-check defensive stands, and thrilling wins (or embittering defeats) for both sides. Bound up in this end of the year game is a wealth of feelings: regional animus, cultural identity, and the simple matter of bragging rights that mean something. It’s everything that is right and good about college football.

I am not here to write about everything that is right and good about college football, though. Instead, what I want to talk about is the business of college football. Earlier this week the Big Ten Conference announced two new additions to its membership starting in 2014: the University of Maryland will leave the ACC and Rutgers University will leave the Big East to become the 13th and 14th members of the alliance still known as the Big Ten (I’m not even going to touch that particular bit of…math). These moves are only the latest in a 3-year long cycle of schools moving from conference to conference in a dizzying cycle of realignment.
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Andrew’s Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey Guide to Doctor Who, Part II

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Mentioning Mr. Smith at the conclusion of Part I makes me ponder the differences between the three doctors since the resurrection. All of them were and are marvelous, all for different reasons.

Christopher Eccleston, a rugged, intense actor who could play big-budget movie supervillains, Jude the Obscure opposite Kate Winslet, and the most modern of troubled men in Our Friends in the North, was a great 9th Doctor, interpreting his character as that of the loneliest battle-scarred man in the world, a condition magnified by his Spartan ensemble of a leather jacket and all black clothing. The 9th Doctor’s whole modus operandi, in my opinion, was that he wanted to put the recent past behind him in some way despite thinking it was impossible: in his attempt to forget the horrors of war, he sought out adventure, excitement, and eventually when he didn’t think it would hurt his heart, friendship and love, and embraced them a little too eagerly but always with brio.  And when he found all of the above in his travels with Rose Tyler, Season 27 was the story of a man coming back to life.

But then came David Tennant.

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Something’s Fishy in Miami: An Addison Recorder Editorial

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It feels like the baseball season ended (months ago) just yesterday, but already the winter spree of free agency and mega-trades has begun. Torii Hunter will now roam (right/left) field for the Tigers, while David “Who?” Ross has joined the Red Sox as their back-up catcher.

All right, it was a slow week for news. Beyond that election thing and some football nonsense.

However, it’s never too early in the season for a Major League franchise to make professional fools of themselves.

Currently, the Miami (Florida) Marlins have completed a trade with the Toronto Blue Jays that would give the Marlins shortstop Yunel Escobar and a small horde of prospects in exchange for the contracts of shortstop Jose Reyes, the expiring contract of John Buck, utility speedster Emilio Bonafacio, starting pitchers Josh Johnson and Mark Buerhle, mascot Billy the Marlin, three cases of Louisville Sluggers (weighted 34 ounces), a couple of boxes of pirogues, and a cast recording of “Sunday in the Park with George” from 1985, featuring Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patimkin.

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Andrew’s Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey Guide to Doctor Who, Part I

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Warning in advance: this article will contain plenty of River Song’s favorite things.

 

I am about to make a statement which will probably surprise a lot of sci-fi devotees, maybe even shock them.

Due to the caprices of PBS pledge drive scheduling, the first story I ever saw was “The Mysterious Planet,” the first four installments of The Trial of a Time Lord, the season-long story featuring the horrendously dressed, loudmouth, and usually really damn annoying 6th Doctor of Colin Baker.

And yet, I kept watching, and falling all the more in love with, Doctor Who.

(“The Mysterious Planet” is actually a pretty good story, and Tony Selby’s Sabalon Glitz was an excellent forerunner of characters like Jack Harkness.)

Doctor Who is now in the midst of its 33rd season, about to celebrate 50 years on the air. And yes, I said 33rd. Most Americans call it season 7. Netflix and the DVD industry and fans call it season 7. But the Guardian, and at least a few people who hope they don’t sound too pretentious (present company included) think of it as season 33. Because it really is.

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Our Place in Time: Reviewing ‘Lincoln’ and ‘Skyfall’

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Getting out to the movies at this time of year can feel a bit like a crapshoot. It can also feel immensely overwhelming because of the glut of studio product that gets dumped out in time for Oscar consideration. Consequently, those of us who are less on the affluent side are forced to pick and choose between the wealth of cinematic offerings available at your local multiplex. (Similar to what happened with Chicago theatre in the fall season, where at any given point, Sunday in the Park with George, Black Watch, Sweet Bird of Youth, Metamorphoses, and Good People were all playing, amongst dozens of other offerings. Chris Jones attributed the outpouring of high quality theatre to there being ‘something in the water’. I attribute it to a bunch of quality theatre artists working in concert all at once in an effort to collectively blow the minds of the patrons attending these wonderful institutions, all the while dynamiting my checking account with discount offers that are just fine if you’re seeing one or two shows, but not between five and ten. Coincidentally, there will be spaghetti for dinner at my household for the next week and a half.)

Therefore, when I was presented with both a day off and a discounted price for attending a matinee and not just one but TWO high profile releases, I was presented with my first conundrum of the fall season: should I attend Steven Spielberg’s latest docudrama Lincoln, featuring Daniel Day-Lewis and a host of character actors reenacting the last third of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s wonderful biography Team of Rivals? or should I attend the 23rd James Bond movie Skyfall, featuring Daniel Craig as the venerable 007 going up against the psychotic Javier Bardem on an island off of Macao?

The short answer was simple: why not both? And so that is what I did. Tickets in hand, I stepped into the River East multiplex in Downtown Chicago, popcorn at the ready, to take in these two winter offerings.

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Why Strachey Matters

Lytton Strachey.

Who?

I would imagine that few people could tell exactly who Lytton Strachey was and what he did, even those who recognize his name; with a few exceptions in scholars, academics, and devotees of Bloomsbury and Strachey’s close friend/ex-fiancee Virginia Woolf. This is a mistake. It is more than that Strachey was, by the time of his death in 1932, something of an international celebrity, cutting a distinctive profile with his massive but gaunt body, long beard, and reedy voice. For at the same time Woolf was revolutionizing fiction alongside Joyce, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and other contemporaries, Strachey was reinventing full-length non-fiction almost overnight.

He also knew how to rock a beard.

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The Tragedy of Narrative: World Series 2012 Game Four Recap; PLUS 2012 MLB Awards Wrap-Up

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As October turns into November, so yet another baseball season draws to an unspectacular conclusion. (What makes it unspectacular? Well, this particular World Series does, as well as anything that involves the Yankees winning. But that’s besides the point.) Now we turn to the inevitable stream of awards and hardware handed out to assuage the fragile egos of many a ballplayer, as well as to celebrate what went right for so many teams and what went wrong for all but one of them.

When last we left the World Series recap, the Giants had just gone up 3 games to zip-zada-zero on the Tigers, with imminent demise highly foreseeable for the boys from Detroit. Once again, I was at work during the majority (i.e. all) of Game Four, yet with the game featured on the big screen televisions in the bar at which I work. I did manage to see Miguel Cabrera’s home run that gave the Tigers their first (First!) lead of the Series, followed by raucous celebration from the Detroit fans.

And then the channel was switched over to showcase some football game featuring the New Orleans Downtrodden and the Surgically Prepared Monster that is FrankenManning.

Sigh. So much for prescient analysis.

However…

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