DEUS EX FRYING PAN

Four words that will change your life:

Egg Nog French Toast

I like to use Southern Comfort Egg Nog.

You mix this carton of joy with some eggs and soak your bread in this holy mixture, and you're on your way to knowing what Jesus tastes like.

After you've cooked it, dust it with some powdered sugar and drizzle a small amount of real maple syrup over it. REAL Maple Syrup. Don't try this with Mrs. Butterworth's. You need to use the actual stuff that comes out of trees, not some corn syrup and artificial flavoring concoction.

And if you truly want to experience the power of Christ in your mouth, here's the final ingredient.


Savor the taste of the Son of Man!

You Want to Be Like Me!!!

You know what bores people?

When celebrities sing songs about how hard their lives are.

Take any writing class or ask any editor or literary agent what they think the most important thing is in a main character, and they will almost always tell you the character needs to be "relatable." Some will toss out the horrid work "sympathetic," which is completely bogus. Jack Nicholson made an entire career out of playing unsympathetic characters. But all his characters are relatable.

How is an ordinary person supposed to relate to how difficult the media spotlight and having millions of dollars is?

Look, I hate getting my picture taken too. But seriously, if that's the worst thing that happens to you today, it's still about a thousand times better than the shit the rest of us have to deal with. I know, I know . . . it's so hard being so awesome. It must be a tremendous burden being the greatest thing ever in the world ever. But can't you just go back to writing innocuous love songs?

Of course, there's the other old saw that says "write what you know." And, for a second, I'm going to allow that some pop tarts actually write a bit of their music. And this is their reality, so that's what they can relate to. They think it's some kind of deep personal statement.

But there's a line where it becomes so self-absorbed and self-pitying that the rest of us just lose interest.

Motley Crue. Often credited with the first power ballad. And what is "Home Sweet Home" about? Well, on the surface it's about being in a band and growing weary from touring. Not really something most of us can relate to, you might think. But the real essence of the song is about missing someone or something. It's that idea of "you can't go home again." It's about longing. That's something we can all definitely connect with.

And maybe I'm giving the Crue a bit too much credit, but they were the metal equivalent of Britney Spears. Being in a band was eating away at Nikki Sixx, but the song isn't about just him complaining. He's tapping into a collective feeling.

Britney's new song follows in the tradition of MJ's "Leave Me Alone." That being the whiny celeb who's seeking out pity because it's just oh so hard being rich and famous and woe is you that you can't get any privacy. That's because you live in California! You want to live like a normal person, move to Montana and volunteer as a rescue pilot like Harrison Ford does.

Now I'm not saying the average pop music consumer is giving this much conscious thought to what they're buying. I mean, we're mostly talking about teenage girls here, who, traditionally, have the absolute worst, most vacuous taste in music imaginable. But go look at the discographies of some of these pop stars and compare the chart positions of songs like "Hit Me Baby One More Time" and any of her songs about the hard-scrabble life of a celebrity. I think the message is clear:

Shut up! We're here to dance, not listen to you bitch about your problems!

Winter in NYC

New Yorkers Hate Snow!

I don't mean people like me who moved to the city from somewhere else. I mean hardcore, born-and-raised New Yorkers. Any time there's even the rumor of snow, you'll hear the natives start to moan. And I don't understand why. New York has never seen snow. I mean REAL snow. I'm talking Blizzard of '78, Blizzard of '80, open your door to find a four foot drift blocking your exit snow. Buffalo snow. Worcester, Mass. snow.

In New York City we get two hours of snow, followed instantly by two days of freezing rain.

And I have a theory why.

The hate from all these people creates an umbrella of energy that hangs over the city, so only the most serious of snowstorms can even hope to penetrate. And then, having travelled through the Hate Umbrella, snowstorms that blanket everywhere else in the area turn into a dusting that is quickly transformed into an awful gray mush by the metropolitan traffic.

It's this mush that natives complain the most about. The very mush their Hate Umbrella caused!

This happens about a dozen times between late November and early April. Though, by the time February rolls around, there's next to no chance of snow in the city because the Hate Umbrella grows super insanely powerful on Groundhog's Day, when every New Yorker starts bitching about how "this has been the worst winter ever" (the reality being, we got two snowstorms with three inch accumulations and the temperature dropped below 30F only a few times). They start saying stupid shit like, "I can't wait for this winter to be over." Yeah, because I know I'm always looking forward to the start of another wonderful 100% humidity, temps in the upper 90s, concrete retaining the heat so there isn't even relief at night New York summer.

Nut up, New York. You bitches are supposed to be tough. You have entire stereotypes built up around how hard you are. And yet, in seven years, this suburban New England kid has yet to experience a snowfall that comes even close to making me rush to the Key Food to stock up on canned goods and bottled water.

Let it snow!

CHRISTMAS MOVIES & SPECIALS

Divided by loosely defined categories:

Classic - Been around forever, will be around forever
It's a Wonderful Life
Oddly, most of the movie isn't set at Christmas, and the moral seems to be that abandoning your dreams is okay as long as everybody else is happy. No wonder it was once considered a Communist propaganda threat by the US government.

Miracle on 34th Street
Santa ends up in Bellevue. Makes me wonder where kids send their wish lists now, in the age of e-mail.

A Christmas Carol
Stricly OG. Scrooge might be the character most identified with Christmas after Santa.

White Christmas
Never seen it. I believe Hollywood made this movie to cash in on the popularity of the song.

Cartoons - You still watch them as an adult
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Even Jim Carrey and Ron Howard's pointless live-action film couldn't diminish the greatness of Chuck Jones collaborating with Boris Karloff and the Doc.

A Charlie Brown Christmas
It wasn't until I was 24 that somebody pointed out to me how sad this cartoon is. I prefer bittersweet, which is what Christmas often is.

Frosty the Snowman
Happy Birthday!

Mickey's Christmas Carol
Come on, give it a chance. Yeah, I know it's "Disney" (in quotes to enhance the loathesomeness people attach to that name), but it's fun just to see how they cast the Disney mainstays in the various roles.

Comedy - Bringing the ha-ha to the holidays
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
The second best of the Vacation movies, and one of the last good movies Chevy Chase made. We have all been Clark Griswold slowly breaking from sanity at one Christmas or another.

A Christmas Story
For many, the single greatest Christmas movie of all time. Fudge, I won't argue.
Scrooged
"Cross: (noun), something you nail people to."

Trading Places
Eddie Murphy in his prime. Dan Aykroyd drunk, in a Santa suit, putting a gun to his head on Christmas Eve in front of a bunch of asshole stock brokers. And Jamie Lee Curtis's jingle bells.

Family Comedy - Blame it on your kid for watching these
Elf
Could probably be in the regular comedy category, except for the part at the very end with the singalong that reboots Santa's sleigh. Still great.

Home Alone
Another "give it a chance" movie. Ignore the fact that it's Culkin. It's all about the scene where the two crooks break into the house and the kid fights back. Classic Tom & Jerry action.

A Very Brady Christmas
Pure cheese, but perfect Brady.

The Night They Saved Christmas
North Pole City is threatened by an oil company dynamiting nearby, so Santa kidnaps the lead geologist's wife and kids to convince them he's real. Obscure, and kinda lame, but it's also kinda quirky and endearing.

Puppets - Creepy!
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
What isn't awesome about this show? The elf who wants to be a dentist. The Island of Misfit Toys. Yukon Cornelius. And, if that's not enough for ya, there's an Abominable Snowman. This thing's got a friggin' Yeti!

The Year Without a Santa Claus
Fast forward to the song and dance revues by Heat Miser and Cold Miser.

Santa Claus Is Coming to Town
The bad guy is a German anus named Burgermeister Meisterburger who hates the sound of children laughing. Just like all Germans.

The Muppet Christmas Carol
See also Mickey's Christmas Carol.

Strange Christmas - WTF?
Gremlins
Her dad's corpse was cooking in the chimney! Dude, that's just messed up.

The Nightmare Before Christmas
More puppets. Tim Burton puppets.

Silent Night, Deadly Night
A Santa Claus slasher movie made by Belgians. What else do you need to know?

Santa Claus Conquerors the Martians
I wish I had something clever to say about this movie like on one of those VH-1 clipshows, but this one is just too screwed for words.

Manly Christmas - To be watched while drinking one of those fruity holiday lambic beers your family gave you

Bad Santa
It's the caper we all wish we'd thought of. And it's got an angry midget. (Like there's another kind.)

The Ref
Denis M-F-in' Leary. He spends the entire movie crapping all over everything, and still somehow manages to reconcile a couple near divorce and reaffirm their relationship with their wayward son.

Die Hard
It's like Die Hard, but at Christmas.

Lethal Weapon
I think most people forget that this movie is set at Christmas. That's really just sprinkles on the sugar cookie of this, the first installment of the greatest heterosexual man-on-man love story of all time. "Whadda ya say? Would you like a shot at the title?"

Urinational

Bathrooms fascinate me.

Bathrooms frustrate me.

As a dude, I'm particularly interested in urinals. I could talk for hours just about urinals alone.

There's the privacy issue: some have dividers, others are really close together, some are even just an entire wall and you have to jockey for your spot at the trough.

The sanitary issue: some cause a ridiculous amount of spray, others take a little time until you find the sweet spot that doesn't cause any spray at all.

Technique: Do you aim for the cake, try for a cascading arc against the back, or shoot for the loudest noise the impact in the water will make?

And then there's etiquette to consider. Personally, I don't want anybody talking to me while I'm doing my biznuss--I already feel dehumanized enough essentially having to piss on a wall in public. Some people have their best conversations while up against it.

Of course, everybody has a funny public bathroom story to tell. Like the time a guy walked up to the urinal next to me, unzipped, shivered and said, "Damn, that water's cold!" Who knew there was urinal schtick?!

This is just a salty taste of my thoughts on the subject. More later.