I didn’t like this book. I didn’t like the people in it. For the most part they’re vapid, vain and self absorbed. The not-quite-rich with more money than sense.
I didn’t like the author. When he’s not insulting the people he’s dealing with over their oversized houses with oversized garages he’s sounding bitter and jealous over the very same things, often making sure we know the square footage of many the houses he’s been invited into.
We read about the people who obsess, over decorations, over lighting displays, over shopping. I was particularly offended by those people in the story who had a friend dying of cancer and after decorating the woman’s house they completely, utterly, ignored her. Do these people really think they “brought her so much joy!” by refusing to visit her in her last weeks on Earth? Were some free lights and tinsel a fair exchange for being ignored by her friends at Christmas?
I don’t know why the author chose this subject or these people but this just made me sad. I felt sorry for these people. I wasn’t amused or enlightened. The dry facts about the billions shelled out (and the amounts these families spent individually) during the Christmas season added nothing. Maybe if Hank Stuever had decided to focus on the overlooked people, the service people, the cashiers, the poor he’d have had a good Christmas story to tell. This, this only made me not want anything to do with Christmas this year.

I’ve already sent an email to my local paper asking if they’d add Lio to their comics page and I’ve added another Lio collection to my wish list.

I devoured this collection when it arrived, just could not put it down, then I went back and read it again. Dark, funny and touching, best of all Lio doesn’t always win and that adds the bit of humanity to the comic that makes it special. Lio is just plain awesome. The comic is done almost entirely without dialog (Lio never speaks).

My only disappointment was that the title on the cover didn’t, as I thought it might, glow in the dark. They way it’s printed I really expected it would.

FIVE stars!

I’ve edited or deleted a couple dozen spam responses made in reply to the 400+ posts on the blog.

The really weird thing? None of the replies made were ever made by any of the spammers who registered. None! Maybe they register and then realize they didn’t need to have done so to post replies, maybe they’re retarded…

Maybe they’re hoping that when I go to delete their user accounts that I’ll accidentally click the “Set the Role of checked users to [Administrator]” button instead of “Delete checked users.”

It’s really odd.

I got them home and since cherry juice isn’t something I normally buy that’s the one that went into the fridge first. A few hours later, after letting it chill a bit, I cracked it open for a taste… and it’s odd, the AFTER taste is decidedly cherry but before that, when it’s in your mouth it doesn’t taste all that ‘cherry’. So I looked at the label:

Ingredients: apple juice, pear juice, grape juice and cherry juice (water, juice concentrates), and less than 0.5% of natural flavors…

AND cherry juice! The juice of the label is almost an afterthought in the list of stuff you’re drinking! Five tenths of a percent natural flavors? There’s almost NO cherry in my cherry juice! Is 100% cherry juice gross? Too dangerous for human consumption? I’ve eaten cherries before and they didn’t contain (at least as far as I know) any pear, apple or grapes!

Happily, or oddly, the bottle of apple juice contains… apple juice.