The Great Christmas Record Odyssey, Ep. CXVIII

Behold, the Christmas titan. . .

Album Title:  Merry Christmas

Album Artist:  Andy Williams

This album is going to be kinda hard to review, folks. 

I mean, c'mon - it's Andy frickin' Williams. The guy stands in the pantheon of Christmas music - alongside Nat King Cole, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra - as one of the most well-known in the genre. Many of his versions of Christmas songs are Holiday classics, and you've heard them all your life. Some of his versions are THE versions of these songs, and when an artist gets to this level of Christmasdom it's difficult to objectively analyze the music itself. It's like analyzing your memories, or analyzing the nostalgia of the Holidays themselves. And so before we go any further with this, I'm going to come out at state that I'm going to try and remain as objective as humanly possible in reviewing Andy's album here. . . but give me some grace.

Andy is cut from the same cloth as the previously mentioned heavyweights, with a crooning style that is part campy variety show and part Las Vegas casino. He's a little less 'Vegas' than Frank and Dean, though - I don't think Andy could have kept up with the hard-partying Rat Pack back in the day. Not sure if it's the subject matter, his voice, his image, or the dude's overall vibe. . . but he's kinda like the Canada to the Rat Pack's U.S.A. The crooning sounds similar, but this is a little less 'edgy,' I guess.

Several songs on here are safe selections, but none of his best-known Holiday songs are on this particular album. You get the feeling while listening to this one that his other Christmas album - which must surely contain all the aforementioned hits - was the first one he did, so then he released this follow-up album to capitalize on the craze. 

He picks a few holiday standards that are hard to screw up, and the production value and backing music that accompany his singing is pretty solid. But then he side-steps the safe, conventional path that would have landed him, like, a '6' for this album and doubles down on a few weird song choices that, while they may have something to do with Christmas (it's hard to tell sometimes), they're not familiar Holiday songs. And they gravitate to the more somber, religious side of the spectrum.

Nobody cares about your range, Andy - skip the introspective stuff and just focus on knocking out the recognizable shit. 

'My Favorite Things' makes a random appearance on this album. Not entirely sure why it does, it's not a Christmas song at all. And honestly I can't even listen to this song without thinking of the Nazis trying to hunt down and capture Julie Andrews so they can ship her off to a concentration camp (at least that's what I think happens in the movie, but it's been quite a few years since I've seen that one.) Andy's version is okay, but Mary Poppins definitely did it better.

In summary, there's not a ton wrong with this. If he's guilty of anything here it's recording songs that are done by other people - in the exact same crooning style as them, but not doing it as well as them.  Kinda like when you listen to Greta Van Fleet for a couple songs, who sound exactly like a Led Zeppelin cover band, then turning it off and going, "Okay, now I'm gonna go listen to Led Zeppelin." 

For that reason, I think I'm gonna have to pass on this one. Andy does a decent enough job, but I can't imagine putting any of these songs on any of my Amazon playlists when there are better, similarly-sounding Christmas songs out there to use instead. If I had space for a hundred Holiday records, I could be talked into holding onto this, but Christmas real estate in The Colonel's Record Collection is cutthroat.

Better luck next time, Andy.

VERDICT:  5/10 - Meh (A swing-and-a-miss from one of Christmas' heavyweights. Had he stuck to his guns and played it safe, he could have scored higher on this, but he's got a lot of lesser-known songs on here that hamstring the album's potential.)

- SHELVED-

- Brian

World Thinking Day

Girl Scouts.  Yet again.

Hey Internet,

Another day, another frickin' Girl Scout obligation.  I won't bother you this time again with another one of my tirades against this organization - you all know how I feel about the Girl Scouts - so I'll just cut to the chase:  this evening was World Thinking Day.  Like I explained last year, this was an exhibition of multiple foriegn countries, each represented by a display created by one of Midland's various Girl Scout troops.

It's a f***ing trainwreck.

This year, Alayna's troop chose Germany as their country, and Abby's troop (led by Kris and Courtney) selected India.  They all went up to the Trinity Lutheran church around 5pm in order to set up, but I didn't have to head over until 6:30 or so (booya.)  After an hour or so of watching various cultural 'skits' (which varied from traditional dances, to simple readings, to actual skits), people walked about the room to check out other countries' display boards and 'artifacts' and sample one another's cultural cuisine.

So here we go again:  World Thinking Day '19.

Enjoy.

Super Sashes

Abby's troop.  Bein' weird as always.

Here come Ze Germans.  I had a pretty good video of their troop, but, again thanks to Blogger's 100mb size limit, you folks won't be able to see it.  Sorry, guys.

Alayna's troop leader didn't know how to pronounce the proper German name for this authentic German children's game, so she called it 'Hit the Pot.'  Which I, personally, found quite nostalgic.

The Indian delegation, reading the India Girl Scout pledge.  Or something.  I guess.

Archa, one of the girls in Abby's troop, is of Indian heritage (hence why they picked that particular country), and her mom made up an authentic Indian dish of some kinds of vegetable curry stew that was, in all honesty, one of the greatest things I've ever tasted.  It was incredible, and seeing how the mom 'just threw it in an InstantPot,' we begged her for the recipe.  Hopefully Kris can pull it off.

Some traditional Indian. . . stuff.  Again, Archa's family provided, like, 100% of this display.  Kinda like I did last year with the girls' Ghana display.

The German display.  I observed that there were similar displays from other European countries - Poland, Austria, France, Belgium - so I pulled a few members of Alayna's troop aside and told them that, since they were Germany and everything, they should start seizing other troops' European display boards.  I then had to give a brief lesson on Germany's aggressive behavior during the 1930s and '40s, and I almost had a few of the girls convinced that this was something they should totally do, but Kris - of course - had to shoot that idea down.  Just like the buzzkill she is.

Abby's troop.

- Brian

The Diary of Marion (Heeb) Harte

You guys aren't going to believe this.

So the other day I was in a thrift store, browsing through old books.  I do this a lot, as I like books a great deal and have established a small library collection of my own over the last two years.  And, when not nabbing my books on such sites as Amazon, Ebay, or Half, I enjoy the thrill of the hunt in second-hand antique and thrift stores.  I've found all kinds of treasure there - hundred-year old books, autographed books, first editions, etc.  Sometimes you can get them in mint condition, too.

Diary of Marion Heeb

Yes, thrift stores are a treasure trove for fortune hunters likes Yours Truly.

Anyway, so the other day I was at a thrift store perusing through their hardcovers when I stumbled upon a vintage-looking book that had been tucked in the back.  It was stamped with the date '1945,' so that right there was reason enough for me to pick it up for closer examination (I'm a big World War II fan as well.)

That's when I opened it up and realized what I was looking at.  A woman's diary.  From 1945.

Doodles on the inside cover

Yes, readers - a hand-writtern, first-person account of 1945.  A young woman, living in New York City in 1945, describing her daily life during one of the most pivotal eras in modern history.  Her name was is Marion Heeb.


I've only read a couple pages, and flipped through here and there, but I've come to the conclusion that she was in love with a man named Edwin Harte, who was serving overseas in Europe during the War.  Eventually, this Edwin guy makes it back home to the States and proposes to her. . . so I'm assuming he survived the war. 


The craziest part about this diary is the first-hand, personal experience you get surrounding such important dates in human history.  I mean, this Marion woman talks casually about the fall of the Nazis and the end of the war in Europe.  Even crazier, three months later she talks about how her and a few friends make their way down to Manhattan and just so happen to attend the famous end-of-the-war victory celebration in Time Square that followed the Japanese surrender:

This book is like a frickin' time capsule, folks - it's mind-blowing how different day-to-day life was like seventy years ago.  This Marion chick talks about writing multiple letters per day to friends and family members.  No television, no computers, no iPads, no smartphones - lots of community events, lots of social gathering. . . people weren't so disconnected via technology back then.  It makes you pretty depressed when you stop and think about how dependent and untrusting we've come in such a short timespan.

So what am I going to do with this book, you might ask?  Well,  I thought about it, and the diary really doesn't belong to me.  How could it?  I think I'm going to try and decipher a few more clues and see if I can't find out if this woman is still alive (I'm assuming she would be).  I can then get her address, via cyberspace, and mail it to her.  I'm sure she'd want it back (I know I would).  Honestly, how her diary from such a tumultuous period in history ended up at a central Florida thrift store is beyond me.

I'll keep you posted with what else I uncover, folks - stay tuned. . .

- Brian

A Duel 10 Years in the Making...

If it's one thing I can't stomach, it's some a-hole cracking wise on my golf skills. I refer not to that sissy, 18-hole, pastel-polo-tucked-into-khakis golf you see the well-to-dos killing their idle time with. Nay. I refer to a real man's golf.

Pirates Cove Adventure Golf.

To call this 'miniature golf' would be akin to referring to Indiana Jones as a professor. I had lots of professors through undergraduate and graduate school, but not one of them carried a pistol and whip, combated Nazis, and trounced around the world theater collecting ancient relics of antiquity and occult. Not that I'm aware of at least.

No, Pirates Cove is something glorious and unique, and therefore it was with great offense did I scorn the infamous Zack Smith - co-founder of the Sausage Pad and fellow Alpha Team compatriot - when he dared to state that he would 'destroy me' at an 18-round tour-de-force at Pirates Cove. Without missing a beat, I accepted his challenge, however ludicrous and heretic it was at the time, and we made a pact to hold a duel at the earliest possible juncture.

That was ten years ago.

Now, this week, the duel commenced.

It was an epic battle of gigantor proportions, and definitely one for the history books. I had an early lead over Z. Smithers that I somehow managed to squander about three-fourths of the way through the course, and so he managed to catch up to me on a few of the last holes. Alas, as the tally was taken after we completed the 18th hole, we discovered that, after ten years of shit-talking, we had tied.

That's right. It was a tie. Unbelievable.

So what happens now? I'll tell you what happens now:

Hough vs. Smith 2020.

Be there or be square.

- Brian