Yule is the Rule

Tome to celebrate the holidays

Passes on from breebop is a wonderfull idea for a Christmas party / drinking game. Spirits optional (seasonal spirit mandatory)

"My buddy Jason and I are having a lit geek gift exchange/drinking game party next weekend. We just came up with the idea today. Here's how it goes:

Each invitee brings a wrapped book that must have come either from his or her own library or from a used book store. If bought from a secondhand store it must have cost less than $10.

The prezzies go in a pile.

We spin a bottle or draw names out of a hat or something to pick who goes when, and then take turns either picking a mystery book from the pile or stealing someone else's book.

If your book is stolen, you get to take a shot of a yummy liqueur to dull the pain of your loss (any suggestions from the peanut gallery?). If you are evil and steal a book -- covetous knave! heartless bandit! -- you have to take a shot of something punishing (Fireball whisky maybe?).

On it goes until the last wrapped gift is opened.

The hope is that everyone will bring good books, which will hopefully stimulate discussions about authors and spark suggestions for must-reads.

If a bunch of guests want to read the same book, I'm thinking we'll suggest people let others write their names and phone numbers in the front cover, and when the new owner of the book finishes reading it he or she can pass it on to the next name on the list. That way not only do we each get a new book, we also get to read other people's books."

Hey you in Kansas! Yeah I know your reading. Find a book and do it! ( Vote Democrat to while I'm at it. Eh?)

Oaths and Curses

Would not approve.

There has never been a time when the cuss, swear or blasphemous oath has not been a segment of the lexicon of language. Marketeers, curs and villians, crofters, soldiers and pompous braggarts have from Arcadia to America spouted a vile stench of offence to pepper their uncultured, limited vocabulary to add colour, meaning or emphasis. Sacre! Other languages than Albion's have been plagued by this base and vapid veneer of basic communication.

While understandable in rigidly hierarchical societies where life was truly nasty, brutish an short, the lowest of the low were barely human or worse, property and had no pretense at social morals or even mediocre education; in our own time and among those I would otherwise assume as sentient, this odious rot is deplorable. Is it laziness? Is it used to dot the emotive 'i's and cross the proverbial 't's? Or is it the entropic puss of a cheap and manufactured culture referencing itself in the word choice of the otherwise useful?

Not that all swearing is to be seen as out of place. John Wane can regard the oncoming enemy with a despairing 'sonofabicth' and get away with it. It is the unneeded and pervasive peppering of words with poison that is truly the subject of my righteous disapproval. Imagine the vapour brained twinkie grating through a sentence with one dozen superfluous 'likes' and 'fer-sure ya know?s but instead of being merely depressed with the empty skulled twit you were disgusted with too frequent reference to fecal matter and crude debauchery.

Pathetic.

I invite your comments and for those of you tempted to foul my comment box with the very evil I deplore, know that your own feeble and predictable attempt at irony will easily out done by my assessment of your lack of understanding of that word.

Pernicious fiend.