Entry the first: The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot

You’ve heard them: the bizarro Christmas songs that get played on the radio in December because they feature ‘Christmas’, ‘Holiday’, ‘Jesus’ or ‘Snow’ somewhere in the chrous. They confuse. They anger. They make you feel bad and conflicted about something that should make you feel good. So, in honour of the Holiday Season, I’ve decided to take a closer look at some of these Yuletide oddities. [N.B. I was planning on doing a lot more of these, but the 'man' says I have to 'work' in order to get 'paid'. Ah, well. No pop culture snarkiness for the white collar salary monkey. Or, at least not as much.]

First under the microscope is Nat King Cole‘s The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot:

[audio:http://nuncscio.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/08_nat_king_cole_-_the_little_boy.mp3|autostart=no|bgcolor=0x000000]

Right away, this song is weird. Santa isn’t supposed to forget anybody. He can actively deny presents to the poorly behaved, he can overlook entire religious denominations, but surely any man who can deliver presents to the entire Christian world in an evening has a fairly efficient logistics management system.

And it just gets weirder. Check out these lyrics:

He’s the little boy that Santa Claus forgot,
And goodness knows, he didn’t want a lot.

He sent a note to Santa
For some soldiers and a drum,
It broke his little heart
When he found Santa hadn’t come.

In the street he envies all those lucky boys,
Then wanders home to last year’s broken toys.
I’m so sorry for that laddie,
He hasn’t got a daddy,
The little boy that Santa Claus forgot.

The hell? First of all, this is borderline tragic. Dude just wanted some toy soldiers and a drum, and Santa totally let him down. There’s no mention of the kid being bad or undeserving. If anything, the kid is considerably less greedy than his peers. His neighbourhood chums, little more than a collection of simpering Little Lord Fauntleroys, now get to play with their shiny new gizmos while the titular ‘boy’ goes home to a busted Etch-A-Sketch and a pile of sticks he collected in th back yard. Lame, Santa. Lame. How did this scenario play out? Did Santa just ‘miss’ the kid’s house while making his deliveries? If so, he should have realized his error when he got back to the North Pole with a couple of soldiers and drums left in his bag. If, as I’ve been led to believe, Santa has the ability to stop time, an extra trip to deliver the truant toys would be no problem.

I guess another explanation is, owing to some bizarre clerical error, the little boy was just left off the list. But I’m not sure this is much better. As children, we’re taught to believe that Santa is an omnipotent present-bringing ninja. So now we’re supposed to believe that Santa’s operation has the bureacratic effectiveness of, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles? Either way, Santa is either incompetent or suffering from early-onset dementia. Not the image I like to hold of the jolly old elf.

And, to add to this symphony of misery, the poor kid is also fatherless. Charitably, we can assume that the songwriter’s intent was to frame the tragedy of absent fathers with the added emotional weight of Christmas. ‘Santa’ [wink, wink] is really ‘dad’, and therefore a fatherless child gets no love from Kris Kringle. Very prescient. But we have to remember that the average (un-ironic) Christmas song-listener is probably 6-11 years old. The subtleties of the social commentary will be largely lost on them, and instead they get to be afraid that they, too, will be forgotten by a magical man they are supposed to love. Nothing like getting an early start on the whole ‘unfeeling universe’ ennui.

Despite these blazing contradictions, The Little Boy That Santa Claus forgot still gets substantial airplay this time of year, and crops up on all sorts of holiday collections. It’s almost as if the DJs and producers haven’t actually listened to the song. This is not a heart-warming tale of brotherly love, peace on earth, or childhood whimsy. It is a bleak story of loneliness, economic privation and the breakdown of the nuclear family in post-WWII America.

Thus, and for the additional weirdness of being covered by Pink Floyd, The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot can be rightfully ensconsed in the gallery of weird Christmas songs.

As if it wasn’t hard enough to be Santa this time of year. The challenges of meeting a huge Christmas delivery deadline with a recalcitrant all-elf workforce has got to weight heavily on the mind. Not to mention the constant PETA lawsuits for alleged reindeer abuse. So you’ve got to feel bad for the guy.

And now, even more so.

Police in Danbury, Connecticut were called to a local mall after a 33-year-old woman on crutches sexually assaulted St. Nick. The offender, apparently taking advantage of Santa’s legendary lap-based hospitality, decided to cop a Christmas feel. Sandrama Lamy was charged with sexual assault and breach of peace and will appear in court on January 3rd. Officials at the North Pole could not be reached for comment, but police said Mr. Claus was “shocked and embarrassed by the whole incident.”

And that was bad enough. But on a visit to a Rio de Janeiro Shantytown yesterday, Santa was attacked by drug traffickers who apparently mistook his helicopter for an airborne police raid. C’mon, violent gangsters of Brazil…where’s your Christmas spirit? But it mill take more than machine gun fire to stop Santa. After making an emergency landing, Kris Kringle continued to his destination- a party attended by over 1,000 children and parents- by car. Less glamorous, but also less of a bullet magnet.

So, this Christmas eve, as you hang your stockings and prepare to settle down for a long winter’s nap, leave something a little special for Santa. Like an extra big cookie or a bottle of Jim Beam. Cuz brother, he has sure earned it.

Santa reads up on his insurance policy. Ho, ho, oh no!

Oh, BBC. You do so much good, but sometimes you act like a stodgy bastion of 1940′s uptight morality.

The broadcaster has censored portions of The Pogues‘ Christmas classic, Fairytale of New York. The song, a duet between Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan and late singer Kirsty MacColl, is a bittersweet look at a relationship gone sour on Christmas Eve. At one point, the two lovers trade insults, and MacColl calls MacGowan a ‘faggot’. The BBC, in its infinite wisdom, has deemed this offensive and dubbed it out of the song.

Which is totally riduculous. It’s a narrative song, and part of it’s character is the frank language. Said Jean MacColl, Kirsty’s mother:

“These are a couple of characters. They are what they are, this is the way they speak.… It’s like a play and it’s very amusing and sad, and it’s a great song.”

The BBC’s decision is particularly strange, as they’ve been playing the song, uncensored, since 1987.

So, in the interest of preserving a great tune about the vagaries of love and, somewhat tangentially, Christmas, please enjoy the original uncut video in all its boozy splendor.

UPDATE: Praise Zod! The decision to censor The Pogues has been overturned.

IGN has a great feature up detailing the evolution of Batman’s greatest foe- the grinning homicidal lunatic known simply as The Joker. It covers all the ground from his 1950′s origins right through to the character’s dark reimaginings in the upcoming The Dark Knight. I didn’t think Heath Ledger could look particularly scary, but there you go.

Anyways, well worth the read. Fascinating to trace the development of a truly great villain.

Photo: Heath Ledger as The Joker. Courtesy of IGN.

With American election hysteria settling once more upon the continent, I thought it would be an opportune moment to post this piece of inspired silliness:

“I am Friedrich Nietzsche und I approve this message.” Genius.

Cryptozoology- literally, the study of ‘hidden animals’- gets a bad rap. If you say you’re into cryptozoology (which I am), people tend to look at you cock-eyed. I think this is due to two problems. First, with all the crazy Loch Ness Monster and Sasquatch hunters out there, cryptozoologists tend to come off as a little bonkers. This is not to say that everyone who studies Nessie or Bigfoot are crazy. In fact, there are a lot of serious researchers out there doing yeoman’s work into these phenomena. Loch Ness’ Adrian Shine and the USA’s Loren Coleman come readily to mind. Still, for every serious cryptozoologist there’s a dozen liquored-up hillbillies with a truck or boat, claiming to have been kidnapped by sasquatch or to have hung out in Nessie’s undersea lair for an afternoon. This type of thing tends to sap credibility.

The second problem is that when scientists find a new species, it’s never something cuddly or cute. Take the Coelacanth. Sure, it’s an immensely important living fossil. But it looks like something the alien from Alien would keep for a pet. And today, we have fresh news of ‘exciting’ discoveries from an expedition to Indonesia: scientists have found a giant rat previously unknown to science.

Marvy. Finding a bigger, apparently unafraid of humans version of something roundly despised by people everywhere seems like a sure-fire way to torpedo your research grant. And it is pretty big. It weights in at 1.4 kilos, roughly 5 times the size of your average city rat. This of course raises serious questions for the extermination industry, which must now consider expanding their anti-rat strategies from ‘traps and poison’ to include ’shoulder-fired rocket launcher’.

So here’s a little advice to burgeoning crytozoologists out there: find cuter animals. Like unicorns. Or that flying dog thing from The Neverending Story. The world will thank you for it.

Wonder what your cat has nightmares about? This. Photo Courtesy of The New Scientist.

I’m not quire sure how it happened, but celebrating the birthdays of inanimate objects has become a veritable tradition here at Nunc Scio. Maybe it’s because I think humanity’s gizmos are invariably more interesting than the people who make them. Or perhaps this is some holdover of my youthful fear that if I wasn’t nice to my stuffed animals, they would come to life and smother me while I was sleeping. But I’ve said too much.

Moving along…

Today markes the 72nd anniversary of the Douglas DC-3‘s first flight. The ‘Dakota’ or ‘Gooney Bird’ is easily one of the most legendary aircract ever produced. It revolutionized commercial aviation, was a workhorse in WWII (as the C-47), and continues to fly around the world to this day. Over 10,000 were built, and pilots love them for their easy handling and fly-through-anything ruggedness.

So, whether you’re flying from through some arctic wilderness or dropping paratroops into Nazi-occupied Europe, when it absolutely, positively has to get there, it’s nice that you can still choose DC-3 after 72 years.

The DC-3. It keeps going and going and going…