On the 1200th day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...

Wow. I'm so glad that we're finally done with Christmas. The hype and madness for the holiday season start earlier and earlier every year, to the point where the Twelve Days of Christmas sound more like 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. The malls were decking the halls weeks before Halloween. Call it Christmas Creep.

That's what makes it so ridiculous that Bill O'Reilly has spent the last two months indulging his viewers' victim complexes by insisting that Christmas is under attack. How can it be under attack when you can't get away from it? You can't go into any store of any kind without being assaulted with Christmas propaganda. Support the baby Jesus! Buy some shit! Everyone's trying to get into the act. There is absolutely no part of the retail sector that doesn't try to pitch itself as the perfect gift for somebody. Colostomy bags make the perfect stocking stuffer!

Who can blame them? The holiday season is a massive juggernaut that drives the American economy. A lot of industries hit their numbers based on the strength or weakness of the holiday season. Between gifts, travel and entertaining, Bill O'Reilly has an offensively phrased but somewhat valid point about how companies in America should give baby Jesus a nice gentle loofah scrub of the taint or whatever out of gratitude, because there's no disputing the fact that Diamond J puts asses in the seats, so to speak.

Has Christ been sucked out of Christmas? Like, duh. But is it the fault of the humorless PC fuckwads who get their panties in a bunch over the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Of course not. The almighty dollar always takes center stage, especially when the alternative is God. This has been a recurring theme ever since the 1st commandment, or at least since Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker.

As much as materialism is derided as a modern American phenomenon, that's right there on the stone tablet too - commandment number 10. Materialism over spiritual purity and devotion is nothing new, but the right motivates its base by making them feel victimized by the boogeymen of gays, liberals, and liberal gays. Bill O'Reilly's use of the topic is red meat and nothing more.

The holiday season just sucks in general. There's so much pressure, so much tension. Suicides are highest during the holiday season, as loneliness, depression and anxiety are at their peaks.

This season really brings out the worst instincts in everybody, not just sexually repressed windbag hypocrites. You have to deal with the public in their finest form - driving with even less attention paid to those sharing the road with them, acting cutthroat and selfish in the malls, everyone short on patience and long on attitude - keying somebody's Hummer because they cut you off and stole your parking space as you tried to find a place outside Wal-Mart to park your Suburban to buy predatorily priced goods made for pennies by third-world children really captures the spirit of the baby Jesus.

And Christmas carols piss me off. They are inescapable and played the fuck out. There's never anything new - occasionally you'll get some bubble gum pop flavor of the month covering "Deck the Halls" or some crap, but it's the exact same recordings of the exact same songs year after year after year - doesn't anyone get tired of being bombarded with "Feliz Navidad" once an hour for two months every... single... year? When was the last time somebody wrote a new Christmas song that entered the zeitgeist like "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer?" Especially with the massive explosion of contemporary Christian musicians lately. Can none of these self-righteous hacks write a decent song about their beloved Jesus' fake birthday? The gauntlet has been thrown, bitches. I'm just glad we're at the point where we don't have to hear any more carols for at least another seven or eight months.

With all that being said, Santa gave me quite the little reacharound this year. My fiancée gave me a gorgeous set of chrome-rimmed martini glasses. Some of the gifts from my family included a Frank Lloyd Wright coffee table book, a
Jamie Oliver cookbook, The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Perfect Marriage (I think my brother's trying to tell me something?), and some super-soft towels.

How did y'all make out?

Who knew Hitler could be so gay?

Bored with our Festivus festivities by 1 o'clock, I went to see The Producers, the adaptation of the critically acclaimed Broadway musical (itself an adaptation of the 1968 Mel Brooks movie). Faithfully adapted for the screen, the movie is a ton of fun. Brooks' songs aren't great, although his lyrics are fairly clever (especially in the riotous "Keep It Gay"). The music was especially lacking in comparison to last month's powerful Rent adaptation, but let's face it - you don't go to see the Producers for the songs. You go to see the outrageously offensive, so-bad-it's-good play-within-a-play, Springtime for Hitler.

The cast was very good - especially Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, whose chemistry as nebbishy accountant Leo Bloom and scheming has-been producer Max Bialystock is undeniable. Although there is a certain cognitive dissonance to Lane playing a shameless womanizer.

Or to 4'9" Matthew Broderick hooking up with 7'2" Uma Thurman, who radiates heat as Ulla. Of course, her character is pretty much one-dimensional eye candy. Great actors seem sort of fish out of water in roles like those, but do you have any idea how long Uma Thurman's legs are when projected across a thirty-foot screen? No complaints here.

I wonder if having two big-budget adaptations of Broadway musicals featuring gay and transvestite characters hitting theaters in consecutive months is proof of the homosexual agenda.

Probably not. Unlike Brokeback Mountain, where homosexuality is used as a conduit for love (insert your own anal joke here), or in Rent, where homosexuality is a matter-of-fact part of the fabric, here gayness is played over-the-top for good-natured laughs.

I'd give the movie a grade of B+.