Jingle Bells Chime in Jingle Bell Time

[vovat]

For Thanksgiving, we considered eating at Wo Hop in Chinatown, but since there was a line, we instead went to Wo Hop Next Door. For some reason it's hard to find information about what the difference is, but apparently the Next Door place does have different owners. I had shrimp lo mein and Beth sweet and sour chicken, and we shared an appetizer of fried wontons.

After the meal, they gave us fortune cookies and orange slices, and while there's nothing that special about the latter, getting them out of nowhere is a pleasant surprise.

This mural wasn't at the restaurant, but it was nearby.
We had a more traditional Thanksgiving meal, with turkey and ham, at Beth's mom's house on Saturday. Felix was very interested in the turkey. Nellie not only doesn't care about people food, but doesn't even want cat treats, which seems weird. That evening, we all went to the Creamy Acres Night of Lights, as we have for the past few years.

It's a hayride through a lot of holiday lights, and there's also some stuff to look at inside.


Thursday before last was the Kevin Geeks Out Christmas Show. The first of these shows we saw was a Christmas one, so I guess it's become a tradition of sorts, although we attend all of these when it's feasible.

Steve Young, a former writer for David Letterman who had presented at an earlier one, did two segments this time. One was on a celebrity bowling Christmas album, which was mostly just clips from the show, a strange idea as there's no way to tell who the celebrities are from how the ball and pins sound. It also has a version of "Jingle Bells" made up of falling pins, although the technology they had really only gave them two notes to work with. The other presentation was about how jingle bells have become a symbol of winter jollity when they were originally intended as a warning. I know I pretty much always think of jingle bells as the sound of falling snow, even though I know that doesn't really sound like anything. There's a Minus 5 album, Let the War Against Music Begin, which has dark lyrics but mostly upbeat music, and a lot of the songs use jingle bells. Another presentation was about how eating KFC on Christmas has become a tradition in Japan, dating back to when some tourists introduced the custom in the early seventies. There are even commercials that play "My Old Kentucky Home" like it's a holiday song. Instead of a movie or TV show, the Kindest Cut this time was a collection of weird holiday-themed commercials, including an infamous coffee ad with incestuous overtones. Another presenter discussed Scrooge McDuck, and how he loves the character despite hating actual billionaires. One bizarre bit of trivia he included is that, in the movie The Last Days of Disco, Chloe Sevigny claims to find Scrooge sexy. I messed up on the first entry in the Santa suit game this time, which I believe has happened before, but somehow I once managed to win it.

The show this time was at the Nitehawk in Williamsburg, which is difficult to reach by subway from other parts of Brooklyn. Google Maps always tends to recommend going from downtown Brooklyn into Manhattan and then taking the L train back into Brooklyn, which might well be the fastest, but is remarkably inconvenient, so I usually take the G. There's a horror bookstore in Brooklyn, the Twisted Spine, which Beth had been wanting to visit, so we went there before the show. Beth ended up buying something there. I'm not a big horror reader, but I do read it sometimes, especially when it's mashed up with fantasy or science fiction. There were several things there that interested me, and I wouldn't mind going back sometime.

Nearby were a video store and a place that sold tabletop RPGs.


Last Monday, we saw a Paul Williams show, part of a lyricist series, at the YMCA on 92nd Street in Manhattan. Beth was originally familiar with him because he appeared on an episode of The Odd Couple where Felix's daughter wanted to follow him around on tour. We watched that episode the night before. He also wrote (or co-wrote) a lot of familiar songs, and worked quite a bit with the Muppets, including co-writing "The Rainbow Connection." I also thought he and John Denver, who also collaborated with the Muppets a fair amount, had kind of Muppet-like floppy hair. The show started with Paul emerging from a casket, and he went on to do a few bits and sing some songs, although the main vocalists were four theatrical performers. The set included the Monkees' "Someday Man," the Carpenters' "Rainy Days and Mondays" and "We've Only Just Begun" (the latter originally written for a bank commercial), and a medley of several songs from Phantom of the Paradise, which we just watched not that long ago. "The Rainbow Connection" was the last set of the night. Paul said something about how different it was to work with Jim Henson compared to Barbra Streisand, which I would certainly imagine is true.