“I think results are secondary right now to our process,” Montgomery said. “Winning net-fronts, winning special teams, winning the Grade-A chances — there’s a lot of details that go into the major part of the process, and if we continue to be better at those things, the results will take care of themselves. I’ve always believed that, and I will always believe that.”
However, it’s still very Platonic versus Aristotelian, which sounds like so much in the corporate world (and even the political world) these days. The process is what’s important; the results will align with the right process, not the results will lead to the right process.
Ya know, I noticed when in Milwaukee this autumn that they were just about done working on Highway 45 on the western reaches of the city. Which should of tipped me to the fact that they would be starting construction on I94, which runs west to Madison, again.
They do seem to alternate running multi-year or decade construction projects on these roads. So much so that I got conditioned to never driving on 94 into town because the cycle was focused on 94 when I was driving up to Milwaukee monthly, and then merely frequently, after I graduated college in the middle 1990s.
Because I waste the couple of minutes whilst building and uploading apps which won’t sell by writing short, twee snarkbait posts instead of completing a thought. Or a successful build, either, for that matter.
So the monthly subscriptions must be tailing off, ainna?
I’ve mocked the monthly subscription language places before, saying they’re not geared to help you learn the language–they’re geared to make you come back tomorrow.
Or maybe I’m just bored because in Duolingo, I only got far enough into Japanese to introduce myself and to order green tea and rice. After a couple of weeks.
I think of this as a later Adam Sandler film, which is odd, because he has continued to act in a pile of films since then, but before this you’ve got almost an annual film that became a classic, including Happy Gilmore, The Wedding Singer, The Waterboy, and lesser films that still were pretty big hits. Around the end of the first decade of this century, though, he mixes in some dramas and the comedies are a little more spaced out. And then he signs with Netflix, which really dropped him off of my radar (unless I’m over at my brother’s house, I guess). But, somehow, this film is 18 years old. Almost black-and-white, although it came out well into the 21st century.
So: In this film, Sandler plays Chuck, a womanizing firefighter. Kevin James plays Larry, his best friend, a widower with two kids. In a hazardous situation, Larry saves Chuck’s life, so Chuck owes him. Due to a paperwork error, Larry cannot assign his benefits and life insurance to a trust for his children which means they would get nothing if he died–so he enlists Chuck to enter into a domestic partnership/civil union with him so that Chuck can be the beneficiary. Although they thought they could keep it on the down-low, an investigation leads their firehouse to learn of it, which has two effects: The gay firemen are inspired to come out, but the others are no longer comfortable with Chuck and Larry. Jessica Biel plays a gay-friendly attorney (straight) who helps them on their case, but Chuck takes a shine to her. Hijinks ensue, and a dramatic courtroom scene ends the major drama and a gay wedding ends the film.
I suppose the film drew its share of ire for being about straight men pretending to be gay, but it’s definitely gay-positive in its tone and message. Of course, that might require more intellectual work to evaluate the message instead of reflexively condemning it.
Still, I wouldn’t call this one of my favorite Sandler works. Somewhere below Little Nicky and Don’t Mess with the Zohan but on par with Happy Gilmore 2 (ahut).
As is my wont, I am cutting off my “annual reading” in this, the week after Christmas, and am starting anew the count. I won’t pick up anything too long this week since the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge starts in January. But I am picking out books and stacking them up for that time period, a period where I might be taking a little trip with just me, my beautiful wife, and a stack of books. So this year’s reading challenge might be easier than most–and although one only has to read a book in five of the fifteen categories, you know I try to complete all fifteen.
92 books. This list includes three or four that I did not add to my tracking list but only spotted in the book reports on this blog.
So what are the trends? A lot of poetry. Some westerns. Several games based on video games, and one set in a video game. Many sports books based on teams or individual biographies–and the bios are all of baseball players. A couple of martial arts books. Probably a little lighter this year on nonfiction than in the past.
Strangely enough, this is also an annual metric I’m proud of, but it doesn’t do me any material good.
January 2025
Slate-grey skies and relentless rural gloom. The Wiltshire idyll that my husband and I moved our young family to 15 years ago entirely loses its charm at this time of year. I long for London. For high heels on pavements. For culture around every corner. I head to the butcher in Tisbury, a picturesque, largely independent high street between Shaftesbury and Salisbury, to buy something cheering for dinner. And that is when I see it: the three arched windows of the shop opposite, formerly a gift shop full of cotton nightdresses and the type of wooden toys no child ever wants to play with, a “For Sale” sign hanging outside.
February
“A bookshop?” says the solicitor we have instructed with the conveyancing of the purchase. “Lovely, romantic idea. You’ll go under in a year.”
I read The Bookshop in 2021 and saw the film in June.
My beautiful wife’s barometer and comfort level with the idea of opening or acquiring a book store waxes and wanes. Given our current fiscal situation, it’s definitely not in a gibbous state.
As you might know, gentle reader, if you’ve been around blogs for any period of time, Gerard Van der Leun was a long-form blogger from way back who recently passed away, and Neo, with whom he had become romantically involved, put out a couple of books of his work as she had promised him she would. You know, I didn’t read his work all that much when he was alive and blogging–it looks like I linked to American Digest twice in 2004 (here and here, two consecutive posts in October 2004). Which is a shame, since the essays in this book are quite good. I cannot check to see what it was like now since it redirects to a payday loan site, showing again how ephemeral our life’s work on blogs will be. Fortunately, these books will survive.
At any rate, it’s a 250+ page book with 45 or 46 essays in it (the last, 46, is an epilogue, so I don’t know whether to count it as an essay per se). The topics range from light-hearted humor to rather detailed family-based life lessons tinged a little with regret at times. They’re proper and good essays, not blog posts. Van der Leun was born in the 1940s, spent some time as a hippie, got into publishing, lived in Europe for a while, and lived a proper writer’s life.
Man, it’s the life I’d hoped for, but I took turns into the mundane with a tech career and then working-from-home for decades which left me with little interesting to write about and but a blog to write it. So I feel called out a bit by the book, too, but that’s just my year-end mood talking.
So neo has done a good job putting this book together, and it’s worth a read. I’ve also just received the collection of his poetry that she put together as well, but I’m not going to dive into that until January where it will fit into the Short Story or Poetry category for the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge.
I am pretty sure I hate most of John Lennon’s oeuvre, especially if it’s not with the Beatles (and I’m not that much of a Beatles fan either).
I find the sentiment artificial and cloying, and I also tend to feel a stinging indictment that I’ve mostly frittered away another year, that I have continued to squander my inheritance that I’ve been given, and that the next year will probably be more of the same.
I did have some accomplishments this year:
I got to the rank of 3rd degree black belt in martial arts (but I’ve been very intermittent in attendance since last January).
I have four poems submitted to a major, actual print, magazine, and they have not been rejected in seven months.
I mean, I guess that’s a couple of things to hang one’s hat on, conversation starters and whatnot, but some other numbers are less encouraging.
I “applied” for 1,035 jobs this year, of which I received…
26 responses requesting more information, assessments, or scheduling screener interviews, wherein…
I talked to actual people at 9 companies, mostly screeners, but…
2 times I went deep into the interview process and got…
1 job offer in February, contingent on contract award in April. Given how the times have a-changed, there’s no telling if that contract was awarded. I liked my chances elsewhere, though, although this seems to have been an overly optimistic view of the market and/or my salability.
I have been blessed to have two part-time, sometimes, contracts to provide some income, although it’s frankly only enough to cover COBRA health benefits now. One of the contracts, though, requires me to be available a lot of the time but I only get to bill when I’m responding to needs. Which has left me feeling chained to my desk for many days over the year. And it has night meetings, which means I’m “on” until 8:30 or so at night, which leaves me little time for reading. I’m lucky to have it; it’s one of the few job offers I’ve had in the late over-the-transom period of applying on the Internet.
So, what am I going to do differently in 2026 to improve my lot? Probably not a lot, gentle reader.
I haven’t had “New Years Resolutions,” but I have tried to pin some themes on the years. Things to focus on improving, so to speak. The theme for 2024, for example, was “Focus.” I realized I was a little busy-minded, especially when reading at night, where I was constantly checking the Internet for this or that on my phone when I was supposed to be reading. So I worked hard to resist that urge to respond to a text until the end of a chapter or to not look up something when it occurred to me. I did okay at that one.
This year, the goal was “Industry.” Given my employment situation, I wanted to make sure that I spent the time at my computer and other daytime hours in a productive fashion. Well, kinda, especially early in the year. But my Industry yielded few sales of apps, which discouraged me, so, yeah, the latter part of this year has been less industrious.
Next year, though: “Get the hell away from the desk.” It’s not one word and not very snappy, but it will probably do a lot for me. One of the things that I’ve been proud of going into my fifties has been how sort-of athletic I am and how healthy I am, and the latter part of 2025 has seen me relinquish that day by day. Plus, I really could use the interaction with humans that I get from martial arts classes or business networking events or tech meetups.
I should probably start today. I should probably start right now. Maybe after a nap. Which is away from the desk, after all.
Here’s the thing. The cash option on that beast was about $500 million, making the lucky winner a semi-billionaire. And that life-changing thing is what stopped me from buying a ticket.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I wouldn’t be able to spend the money — I have plenty of relatives and friends, all of whom I could make extremely happy/wealthy. But honestly, I don’t want to change my own life that much.
Believe me: change it would. With 500 big ones to your name, you become a target for all sorts of undesirable people: kidnappers, scam artists, robbers, whatever. You might think that you could disappear from public life and become anonymous, but you can’t; that sum of money is just too big. So you’d have to hire lawyers, accountants, financial planners and personal bodyguards… and that all adds up to a massive lifestyle change.
That’s the exact line of reasoning I express to my boys when we pass by the grocery store courtesy counter when the jackpots get that large.
I mentioned to my brother yesterday that the winning ticket was sold in Arkansas, and he said he’d have to check his numbers–he lives not far from the state line, and wasn’t sure what state he bought his tickets in.
Now that would be more my luck: he wins a billion dollars, and I’m the one kidnapped for ransom by some Eastern European syndicate or South American cartel. I mean, we’re close, but are we a million or ten million in ransom close? I’d hate to discover.
Well, here we are in this blessed year of 2025, and we didn’t pony up to service the billionaires who own a football team, and they’ve gone on and….
Well, who knows what the future will bring.
Flamin’ Manchicis, oh so soft and cuddly. Missourians do seem to be catching on, though. Thirty years ago, they gave the Rams a new stadium, and the Rams decamped for LA the first chance they got. The St. Louis Cardinals threatened to move across the river, so Missourians gave them a new stadium and they returned with a fairly mediocre product. Recently, Springfield voted down a tax increase for a convention center, and Missourians voted against a tax-provided stadium for the Chiefs who are showing their loyalty to Kansas City, Missouri by crossing the state line to service the highest bidder.
A lot of articles are billing this as a loss for Missouri, but I think it’s a mark of sanity on the part of the citizens.
And let’s be honest: Going from Kansas City, Missouri, to Kansas City, Kansas, to spend a thousand dollars or so to see a football game is just crossing a line in the dirt. It’s not like crossing the Mississippi River at bridge chokepoints, so it’s not any extra hardship to get there. But who knows where professional sports will be in six years. It might not be what it is today, and this might turn into a better deal for Missouri to let them walk.
Ah, gentle reader, I just read this book, wherein the just here refers to 2017, the Hot Springs vacation year–I read the author’s Travels with Epicurus when traveling (to Hot Springs, Arkansas), and I borrowed this book from the library later in the year. As to this audiobook version, I picked it up this May because I remembered reading the author, but I didn’t remember this book, per se, but certainly Travels with Epicurus. Since I’m again in the habit of putting in audio courses and audio books in the truck even though I’m only spending thirty minutes in the car several days a week instead of an hour or more every day. It takes me longer to get through them, but I’m getting through them. The odds are far greater that I’ll listen to the two and a half boxes of overstock I have in my closet before I read all the unread books in my library, but the odds of completing either stack are pretty low.
At any rate, to recap, this book (on audiobook) takes a list of quotes that Klein wrote in notebooks from when he was young and then picked it up again later. You know, I might have done something similar in journals, but I remember writing some quotes on index cards and taping them to my monitor. Not so much philosophical quotes–I was mostly an English major, after all. But Klein was not a professor of philosophy; this book alludes to it and his Wikipedia entry seems to confirm that he got his BA in philosophy and then took to writing for television and then some books. So we’re about even on formal education but definitely not on erudition. And the best part of his Wikipedia is the present tense (“Daniel Martin Klein (born 1939 in Wilmington, Delaware) is an American writer of fiction, non-fiction, and humor.”) God bless him, for he has blessed us.
So, yeah, in this book, he quotes something included in his notebook, a quote by an proper Philosopher of some sort, along with some history including the bio a bit of the quoted and then goes into a freewheeling discussion of what he thought about the quote and where it led him. Some relate to previous entries, but not all of them. The book came out before Substacks became popular, but one could imagine each being a Substack post.
Klein is an agnostic who has little truck with formal religion–one of his pithies pretty much attacks Christianity–and some of the things have aged poorly–his utilitarian defense of vaccines, for example, has taken a bit of a hit recently, but he’s never polemic or offensive. He does try to find meaning, and he embraces a lot of Existentialist points of view and the currently (and ever) popular drive to live mindfully in the moment and offers a number of pithies defend that approach.
The book, read by someone other than the author, spans six discs, so six and a half hours of listening over a month or two. Definitely worth my time. And, you know, I borrowed his books from the library, so I don’t own them. And if I can find them in the wild, I will by them and add them to the to-read stacks. Because I like them that much. Maybe I should also keep an eye out for his novels as well, but they’re probably more obscure/requiring of ordering than the philosophy books. Although I see on Abe Books that all of them go for about $5 a paperback which is not bad.
In a post about upcoming movies, he likes the trailer for The Odyssey but:
But now here’s some more Slop Superhero Content: Wonder Man. They did a race swap on Wonder Man which I don’t care about because, get this, literally no one cares about Wonder Man. The character was invented for purely cynical reasons — it was practice back then to steal another company’s IP by just flipping the gender of a character. Thus, Marvel created Wonder Man just because DC was making some money with Wonder Woman. (And Stan Lee created She-Hulk because he knew that someone, likely DC, would create a female Hulk if he didn’t do so first.)
If you never heard of Wonder Man, don’t sweat it. He’s a D-list team member on whichever Avengers team needed a spare body in the 80s. He was one of those characters I would actively avoid by not buying a comic if he was on the cover or if I knew he was on the team. Like Captain Mar-Vell or Quasar or a dozen other generic Superman-derivatives.
Oh, that’s going to leave a mark on my retirement portfolio which is heavy into Gen X Collectibles that later generations don’t want anyway.
I have the first 13 issues of the Wonder Man comic book from the 1980s and the first 17 of Quasar.
As a matter of fact, I recently saw a Facebook memory from, oh, a decade or so ago asking what everyone’s favorite Avenger was, and I said Wonder Man to tut tut the people who only knew the Avengers from the movies.
Probably not going to see a streaming series, though, so I won’t know about how it compares to the comics which were a little arch in their day.
How’s your comic book collection these days, Brian J.? you might ask. Well, the last comic I might have bought was Sarah Hoyt’s Barbarellain 2021, but I’ve read a couple from the older ones I reclaimed when my boy cleaned his room this summer, so I’m at 1216 logged in the spreadsheet. Don’t anticipate buying any anytime soon. Man, I miss the Comic Cave and it’s dollar-each multi-issue runs. But the business model that made it affordable to me put him out of business. But Comic Force is still going–I just was in there to buy a couple of short boxes and poly bags.
On the comic book movie/series front, I wonder why nobody has tapped into the Marvel 2099 titles. They came out in the early 1990s with imaginings of other people claiming the hero names in a dystopian future–Doom 2099, Punisher 2099, Spider-Man 2099, Hulk 2099, Ravage 2099, X-Men 2099…. And some of them ran for two or three years. I wonder if they could make something of that, but the people in charge are probably just too young.
Lileks today delves into old computer magazines. In this case, old magazines for the Sinclair computer, the British version of the Timex Sinclair (which, to be honest, was the American version of the Sinclair).
I remember in seventh grade that Mr. Durst had a Timex Sinclair that we could play on during the lunch period in the middle of his math class. A small device with chiclet keys. I’m not sure I ever saw one in the wild (meaning at garage sales and estate sales around the turn of the century). But I wouldn’t have minded one.
But, as you can expect, in addition to cabinets full of Commodores and TIs, I have a closet full of Commodore magazines which we subscribed to back in the day. Maybe a couple of TI magazines or catalogs, too. But no Apples or Apple magazines, unfortunately. But plenty of books on how to program them and some handwritten programs for them (when I would write the programs by hand in middle school and type them in when I got to the computers up in the loft).
My beautiful wife helped with Christmas cards this year, so we got the sixty-five or so addressed in two days, which is good because we started late. Every year, I think I should start at the beginning of December or even late November, but I never do.
Our Christmas card list is dwindling. A couple of years ago, it was almost one hundred. But people have moved, cards have been returned, or people have died. Sometimes we never know.
When the card comes back with the yellow label or when we learn otherwise someone has moved, the address gets erased but the name gets left on with a grey or yellow stripe. How long until I remove those lines from the list? Scott’s been on it ever since I started tracking diligently in the spreadsheet instead of working from an address book like an old man–I think we briefly worked from my wife’s Google contact list, but it favored recent friends.
Most of the people on our list are acquaintances from twenty years ago or more. I’ve got two friends from my time in Milwaukee in college; a couple of former co-workers, but nothing since 2007 when I went fully remote consulting. We’ve added a couple from church and the family of a girl who attended school with my youngest, but mostly it’s from 20 years ago, and mostly it’s the only contact we have with most of them, especially since Facebook has gone to ads, suggested posts, and slop instead of, you know, friends.
So far, we’ve gotten seven Christmas cards. And of those, one are from the Lutheran school we continue to support and one is a thank you card from our postal carrier after we gave her a couple of gift cards.
Christmas cards seem to be becoming an anachronism; we receive fewer each year, too, and it would seem odd to start adding to the list now.
It kind of feels like casting my bread upon the waters except without the return. But that kind of matches most of what I do with my life. A blog with a couple of readers (Rick and Chinese LLMs, mainly). Publishing books which yielded, what, 50 sales (John Donnelly’s Gold), 1 sale (The Courtship of Barbara Holt), and maybe ten sales (Coffee House Memories). I’ve written and released apps to lackluster sales (Boxing Drill Companion, 2; Dr. Franklin’s Art of Virtue Tracker, 2; Nico’s Kitty Translator, 3).
So, like so many things these days, instead of joy or pleasant memories of the people to whom I’m addressing the cards, the experience reinforces my fin de siècle mood these days.
I thought I might have mentioned the story about Curt, the guy who ran the Didde-Glaser printing press next to mine on second shift, somewhere along the line, but I cannot find it on the blog. Curt would come in at 3pm when the rest of us were getting off, and he was known to come in with a bit of a buzz. As he explained it to me, he would go down by the lake for lunch and sometimes have a six-pack somehow and then it was time for work. Of course, he was carrying on a tradition–some of the old-timers (they were all old-timers at the print shop which was over 100 years old by the time I worked there 1996 to 1998) would bring in six packs and drink them while they worked. Not a thing by the 1990s, and not a thing I would do working with industrial machines that could rip your arm off.
But sometime in the middle of my stint there, I was telling Curt all about how much you could find out about a person in the Internet. Bear in mind, this was 1997ish. And I was on America Online, the last company to buy Time Warner and die (I’d short Netflix if I could about now).
I came in with a printed (surely sheet-fed by then and not dot-matrix, but one never knows) pages including his address and a map to his house. And I asked him if that was his address even though the electric bill had a different first name.
It was his kid’s name–when he couldn’t make the payment, the electric company cut him off, and he had it reconnected in his kid’s name. As a certain segment of the population was wont to do in those days where the internet was in its infancy and all the things were not yet connected.
I thought about this yesterday when I mentioned to my oldest son, who is old enough to sign contracts now, that if he registered for a free trial of Fox One or whatever, we could watch the Packers game. I couldn’t do it because I’d used the free trial to watch the Packers game two or three weeks ago. I cancelled the trial before half time because it was not going well for the Packers.
And he did, so we watched the football game. Well, the boys watched the first half of it, and I stuck until the bitter and disappointing end.
But for a brief moment, I was just like Curt, briefly. I hadn’t thought of him for many years, maybe a decade ago. When I searched the Internet for him again then I found his obituary and was momentarily shaken. Because in my memory, he’s younger than I am now.
This time last week, I was in Florida. My beautiful wife had purchased a “marketing package” from one of our timeshare companies in 2022, back in the days when I had an income. It was a three night stay at a resort in Orlando, and we would have to attend a pitch for buying more timeshare. She pushed it off as long as she could, but it finally came time to fly down or sacrifice our prepayment. So we did.
Springfield offers (likely subsidized) direct flights, but at odd times. So we were at the airport at 6:30, and we were in the Orlando area a little after noon. I say area because the direct flight was to Sanford, Florida, about an hour north of the southern part of Orlando where we stayed. We got to Orlando, had an early dinner, and I was wiped since I’d been up since 3am. So I read a bit and went to bed early.
The next day, we had the sales presentation. It was supposed to be only two hours, but they let us marinate for a full three and a half, sweating us or letting us discuss the pros and cons of an additional purchase. I said earlier “one of our timeshare companies” because when she bought the package, we had two, but this company bought our other company, so now we have one. Being the cynic I am and seeing how they’ve only partially integrated, I think company #2 is going to skim the best of company #1’s properties and get some of company #1’s owners to buy in and then spin the rump of company #1 off. These companies are always coming up with novel ways to acquire each other and to create new “ownership” products that are good for the company. It didn’t help that the place where we had the sales pitch was the same place we had it 11 years ago, when we bought. Back then, the plans were to develop the whole plot, with buildings surrounding the little “lake” in the center. In 2025, the project was not completed, and the company representative said they would probably not build new again since it was time-consuming and expensive, whereas fiscal gimcrackery was easier and has better ROI (well, I inferred the last part). So the great importance of buying now did not affect us, even if we could. I’m starting to wonder if the timeshares were a good idea at all, but we skipped a year and bugged out on our vacation this year. Eh, who knows.
But! I took a weekend trip. What did I do on my trip?
We went to an outlet mall after our sales pitch and the next day we went to an Orange County park. It was a low-key visit with no amusement park trips or anything especially touristy.
We had two dinners out and several in.
I read a bunch of magazines, a couple issues of First Things, New Oxford Review, and Reader’s Digest. Even though I did bring books (including What the Frost?, I stuck to the magazines. And during our walks, I made several allusions to what I read in Reader’s Digest. The others, not so much.
It was, however, a three-Wargames weekend. My wife mentioned she had seen the film again on a recent flight while we were flying; because the building we were staying in was the Ville de Falconi, I unlocked the room door at one point and said, “We’re in. It thinks I’m falcon!” (which she didn’t recognize because she doesn’t say it when logging into any new device for the first time), and New Oxford Review had a piece called “DEFCON, Neocon, Katechon” which alludes to the film.
I missed what might be my only chance to say “Mele Kalikimaka” to a native Hawaiian–the woman giving the group part of the sales pitch. One never knows when one will get another opportunity to speak to a native Hawaiaan in December.
Wondered if the decorators of the room knew that they had two of the same picture in it.
Or if one of the housekeepers was playing a little joke.
Got to watch most of the Packers game which we could not do at home. But turned it off near the end when they were done before the Broncos were. Just like home in the days when we had DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket.
At any rate, it was an okay trip. It was nice to spend some time alone with my wife–but we will someday soon be empty nesters spending all of our time together alone. We did have to leave Orlando at 3:45am to catch a 6:30 flight home, but I slept better and was able to function Monday afternoon. But it was essentially two travel days for two days of vacation which is a little much for my taste, especially as it involved airports.
Once home, though, the bad habits resumed. Spending too much time doomscrolling at the computer because my one contract needs me to be available even though I only bill for times I’m working–not all of the available time.
Also, I thought “Zoot Suit Riot” was Squirrel Nut Zippers, but it clearly is not. The rockabilly/Big Band sound had a brief moment back in the middle 1990s, ainna?
Well, this book (which I just bought in October) is kind of a Christmas book. I mean, it stars Santa Claus, and he’s trying to save Christmas, so….
Okay, here’s the deal: Santa Claus’ marriage is in trouble because he looked at a Victoria’s Secret catalog a couple of decades ago. On Christmas Eve, as he’s preparing his trip, the reindeer, zombified, attack. After he dispatches them, he discovers only young Rudolff is unaffected. He seeks help from a cantankerous but inventive elf recently fired for drinking who provides him with an engine he developed and which NASA and SpaceX are interested in. They outfit the sleigh with it, but then Santa finds that the MacGuffin is missing. It’s a Timepiece, a time and space device that allows him to deliver all packages around the world in time. Father Time has taken it and offers it back in exchange with a night with Mrs. Claus. Santa says no, and Father Time sets a couple of zombie polar bears on the elves.
Santa looks to find Father Time and to save Christmas and heads into the blizzard with the inventive elf, whose dark elf cousin comes along to protect him. Then booby-trapped puffins attack; they join up with their weapons expert Vladimir Putin (this being before the current war made him into the tabloid supervillain he has since become); they fight zombies but are saved by mermaids; dinosaurs attack; et cetera.
So it’s a bit of a romp where you never know what might happen next. It’s chock full of allusions to pop culture, including Indiana Jones, Die Hard, Frozen, and others. It’s the kind of thing I would have written in high school, kind of reminiscient of Samurai Cat and not unlike Rickshaw Riot.
So I am down to two Ben Wolf titles…. Will I make it through them both this year? Tune in and find out!
I think of this as a later Adam Sandler film, which is odd, because he has continued to act in a pile of films since then, but before this you’ve got almost an annual film that became a classic, including Happy Gilmore, The Wedding Singer, The Waterboy, and lesser films that still were pretty big hits. Around the end of the first decade of this century, though, he mixes in some dramas and the comedies are a little more spaced out. And then he signs with Netflix, which really dropped him off of my radar (unless I’m over at my brother’s house, 
As you might know, gentle reader, if you’ve been around blogs for any period of time, Gerard Van der Leun was a long-form blogger from way back who recently passed away, and 
Ah, gentle reader, I just read this book, wherein the just here refers to 
Well, this book (which I just bought