Four calling birds: austin

austin_dern

Four calling birds

Sep 13, 2024 00:10

On my humor blog this week I considered whether leaning into clickbait was a good move for me, and then I did some nonsense with Heathcliff and calendars. Read on, in case you missed it:

And now back to Crossroads Village to see their holiday stuff the last week that was running, back in the distant year of 2023:

The train does its first big turnaround to The Twelve Days Of Christmas and here's the silliest of the lighted displays.

As the sun set and night crept in the lights got better and the photos got worse. Also we forgot to bring a cloth to wipe down the windows.

So here we are back in the general store, with a nice chalkboard train to show off.

We went into the opera house for a show. The Frosty Follies Show is what they're doing these days, a program presenting a bunch of shenanigans at the North Pole. It wasn't the same show as the last time we saw. Mrs Santa Claus had no part, while Mister Santa did, and there was a guest star we did not expect to see.

No, not Frosty. He was there in past years too, as part of helping a polar bear overcome his sadness at being just in the mail room.

That's him! The Grinch showed up and dominated the show even though it's hard to reconcile the show with his famous story.

Santa and the Grinch having it out. Ah, if I had been courageous enough to use a fill flash .. .

More of the charged battle between Grinch (on the theater floor) and Santa (on stage, with a candy cane).

We didn't choose a seat just for good poses of the Grinch dominating the foreground but it worked out that way well.

Finally, color balance! The Grinch is picking a volunteer for something I forget what.

But here's what that Grinch-versus-Santa pose looks like when it's not flooded green. Note the inflatable gifts under the inflatable tree.

Ah, could it be? Grinch and Santa united at last?

Trivia: No specific legislation defines the calendar followed by the United States. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel. So it is, more or less, effectively on the British reverse-engineering of the Gregorian calendar adopted by the British in 1752, except perhaps for the territories which had been French or Spanish, and so on the Gregorian calendar. (Alaska switched from the Julian to the Gregorian/British calendar in 1867 with a one-shot eight-day week.) (Steel makes the argument that the British calendar coincides with the Gregorian without being identical to it. A strong piece of evidence is that the British muddled their Easter calculation rule, meaning it stops being coherently defined in 8501.)

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 44: Truth Is Stranger, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. The story, I'm told, where Popeye finds his Momma, a character you remember seeing animated like one time, and that in the remake of Goonland that's too racist to show.

crossroads village, humor, holidays