The Great Christmas Record Odyssey, Ep. LXII

 Here we go, folks.  Time to get back into some weirdness.  Some terrifying, soul-shattering weirdness.

Album Title:  The Bells of Christmas Chime Again

Album Artist:  Eddie Dunstedter

I'm not gonna lie here, folks:  I totally picked this up from Radio Wasteland (for a $1) knowing that it was going to be a complete train wreck.  I mean, c'mon - chimes and organ?  In the dollar bin?  You know what you're getting here.  

You can practically smell the moth balls. . .

The opening track on Side A of this album is supposed to be 'White Christmas,' which - you'd think - would be a pretty straight-forward affair.  You'd think, with 'chimes' and 'organs' involved, this was going to sound like an every other organ-heavy Christmas album we've covered in this here Record Odyssey of ours.  Heavy on the warbly church service vibe, visions of elderly parishioners quietly nodding off all about you.  Maybe some dead poinsettias strewn about the wood-paneled walls of the congregation, along with faded gold tinsel and dust-covered hymnals.

Well, if you can believe it, dear readers, that would have been waaaaay better than what we have here.

The Haunted Mansion, ca. 2019.

For the first twenty or so seconds of the opening track, I wasn't aware I was listening to 'White Christmas' at all.  Instead, it sounds like the opening foreboding of Disney's Haunted Mansion, the eerie organ beating on in a sluggish cadence like it's summoning forth the deceased.  There's a few descending chord progressions, too, that seem to go on for minutes, as if the tormented soul hammering away on this organ is resolute in pounding EVERY. LAST. KEY. on the way down to the lowest possible octave.  

Straight down into the bowels of Hell.

Look, I know I sometimes have a flair for the dramatic, but if you were to listen to this album yourself, you'd see where I'm getting such horrifying imagery.  I've seen the likes of Tennessee Ernie Ford a time or twelve in this series of mine, but at least with that piece of absolute shit you have someone singing.  Here, without any lyrics whatsoever to remind us of a human presence in this recording, we're left to our own macabre imaginations.  

And it ain't pretty, folks.

May he haunt your dreams. . .

Dungeon music from The Legend of Zelda kicks of 'Winter Wonderland,' which later becomes a full-tilt, seedy carnival jamboree.  'In the Clock Store' sounds f***ing insane.  Cuckoo clocks and autonomic bird sounds over an organ?  With an overall German glockenspiel hammering away in a relentless swirl of noise?  It sounds like the sorta shit you'd hear in the heads of occupants in a Bavarian insane asylum.  Oh, and 'Ring Christmas Bells'?  The shit sounds like it's being played by the Phantom of the Opera on a two-week bender.

I wish I were over-exaggerating.  I really do.

If you guys ever want to see what the face of pure evil looks like, America, I'll show you:

Don't look directly into his eyes.

VERDICT:  1/10 - Ohio (This is the scariest Christmas album I've heard in a long, long time.)

- SHELVED -

- Brian

Grad School = Big Pain in the Ass

i already hate grad school, and i haven't even started classes.

as stated before, i have no head for financial figuring-out, using fax machines, scheduling through various departments, calling different agencies and waiting for 3 to 5 business days for answers to simple questions, etc. etc. - all important aspects of the applying-to-graduate-school process. it should come to no surprise, therefore, that i've been having one hell of a time with the whole ordeal. this is absolute hell, folks. and is turning out to be even more of a pain in the ass than the peace corps application i had to undergo. not very much fun.

as it stands - and again, this is from what kris and i can gather (she's been doing her best to help me out with this, as i'm clinically retarded with this crap) - it looks like all i have to do in order to obtain my professional certification (the five-year renewable teaching certificate that allows me to keep my job) is complete my second year of teaching and take the graduate courses outlined in my masters program. that's it. i was convinced that i'd have to take a crap-load of undergraduate courses, thereby stalling my graduate classes and blowing handfuls of loot just in order to keep my job. that would've sucked big time.

then again, when you owe over $26,000 in student loans, what's another $20,000? i've already come to the realization that these loans are never going away, that i'll have to pass them on through subsequent generations as family heirlooms. i'm sure my great-great-great grandchildren will appreciate this.

...though by that time i'm sure we'll all be ruled by space gorillas and robots, so it won't really matter. (see picture)

fortunately, that's not the case. i get to start right away with the mega-hard classes... which i'm not looking forward to in the slightest. like i said before, folks - i hated college (classes). i'm not good at studying, i'm easily-distracted, i can't stay on top of due dates, and i'm arguably the world's worst procrastinator. so, more or less, i'm screwed with this whole grad school nonsense.

so why am i putting myself through this gauntlet of hell? because the houghs are on a timetable, that's why. when kris and i moved down here to florida in january of '07, we expected to live in florida for four to five years - long enough to obtain teaching jobs, finish grad school, and find work elsewhere. i think i've spelled this out before. ideally, i'd like to find a teaching job in illinois or indiana - somewhere in the midwest, close to michigan (there's practically a zero percent chance i'm going to find any work in michigan any time soon). it'd be nice to be able to make the drive from our place to home in less than 10 - 12 hours. now it takes about 22... and that was driving straight through, without a kid. that drive would be absolutely hell now.

sure, you can fly. but around the holidays, you get screwed with ticket costs and all those crap-fees. $700 - $900 to fly home for christmas for four or five days? not worth it, as far as we're concerned.

and so, with grad school out of the way - hopefully by the fall of 2010 - i'll be in prime positioning to start scouting out job prospects in the great white north.

...at least that's the plan so far.

- brian