Cute, cute, cute. It was great fun watching The Chicken's Christmas program at his school. They were off key and out of synch and completely adorable. I have a few thoughts about the experience.

1. My shit-cookin' brother-in-law is a shifty mofo. He was at the school to watch his granddaughter. When he saw Bunny and me, he wandered over to say hi. He greeted me, and he shook my hand later when we left, but the rest of the time he completely ignored me. He came over to talk to Bunny only, and made absolutely no attempt to include me in his conversation, which in retrospect seems to consist almost completely of "disinformation" he hopes Bunny will repeat to his currently separated wife, Bunny's sister.

2. My digital camera kind of sucks. It seemed very nice when I spent $400 on it almost seven years ago, but these days it seems pretty substandard. For that same price I can now get two much nicer cameras and still have money left over for beer. In particular, I'd like something with a stronger zoom feature. We weren't that far away from the action, but the pictures make it seem we were on the dark side of the moon.

3. Faster "shutter speed" would also be very nice. Most of the pictures are a little blurry. The only picture that turned out really well is the one I took of the back of some woman's head.

4. It must kind of suck to be a music teacher. Very few jobs of any sort have such public performance evaluations like school concerts.

5. The school didn't call this event a "Christmas program." It was the "winter holiday program." I understand why they did this and I agree with it completely. This community is pretty monochromatic, but not all students and parents are Christian and not everyone celebrates Christmas. Some people (ahem) even get a little resentful at Christmas being shoved in their faces every year.

   The music selections were pleasantly multi-cultural. There were a few Christmas songs, a Chanukah song, a "traditional Hebrew folk song," a Japanese new year song, and other vaguely holiday-themed tunes. But there's one song that really pissed me off. When the 3rd graders sang the English folk song "Christmas is coming," they only sang half the words. The way I remember it from my LP "John Denver and The Muppets: A Christmas Together," the words are:

   Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat
   please to put a penny in the old man's hat
   if you haven't got a penny, a ha'penny will do
   if you haven't got a ha'penny then God bless you.

   Looking it up on Wikipedia, I see there's another line I didn't know about.

   The "sanitized" school version included only the first two lines. How fucking dumb is that? I understand someone saw a need to cut out the bit about God, but then why use this song? There are plenty of songs that don't mention God. Why not use one of them rather than chop up one that does? A lot of you know that I'm not Christian, or even religious at all, but I resent excising such bland lyrics when it's so easy to simply choose a different song.

   I've called John Denver and Miss Piggy and they both agree with me on this.

(I meant to write this Thursday night, or maybe Friday morning. But I'm a little flighty about writing posts lately. I sit down to write something and then I think "Hey, look! There's code I can tweak!" and I don't get back to writing for days. Is there such a thing as blog ADD? If there isn't, there should be. I could start getting disability checks or something.)