When I was a kid, I remember the last few months of the year broke down like this:

  • Back to School in early-to-mid September
  • Halloween for the second half of October
  • Thanksgiving for the second half of November
  • Christmas in December
  • New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day

These days it seems more like this:

  • Back to school in August (July, really — as soon as the Independence Day merchandise goes on clearance.)
  • Some weird mix of Oktoberfest, Halloween, and Thanksgiving as “Autumn” or “Harvest” or some such thing covering all of September and October, resolving into Halloween specifically for the last week.
  • Christmas from November through December, with a short break for Thanksgiving
  • New Year’s

Everything’s crept earlier.  There aren’t any breaks between seasons.  And Christmas has swallowed up Thanksgiving as if it were merely an appetizer for the main meal.

Seriously… can’t we let Halloween be Halloween? And let Thanksgiving be Thanksgiving? And let Christmas be something special instead of taking up 1/6 of the year?

When Christmas starts showing up before Thanksgiving — never mind before Halloween! — I always find myself thinking of the story about the little girl who wished it would be Christmas Every Day, and found out why that wasn’t so appealing after all.

  • If only the super high-tech jet fighters had identified, clarified & classified, they’d have seen the attack for what it really was.
  • Good grief. “Traditional marriage” didn’t go away when gays were let into the club. It doesn’t need a discriminatory law to “restore” it.
  • South Coast Plaza has Christmas decorations up ALREADY. Halloween doesn’t exist, I guess. Or Thanksgiving.

Spotted this in mid-August, during the height of Back to School sales. It’s a school bus-shaped display with shelves on the sides and back. Katie’s fairly certain that the other shelves weren’t all Rice Krispies treats — they were Pop Tarts and the like.

So, yeah, send your kids to school with a ton of these. Their teachers will just love it.

<voice=”cranky old man”>Of course, back in my day, we didn’t have those pre-made Rice Krispies Treats. We had to buy the cereal and marshmallows and make them ourselves. (And frankly, without all the extra preservatives, it was probably more healthy. Or less unhealthy, in any event.)</voice>

(Yeah, still catching up on photo posts.)

I found this while looking through a box of old photos, in an envelope marked Lunar Eclipse and developed in June 1994. Most likely the May 25, 1994 eclipse.

I’m not sure, but I think the bright splotch near the bottom is actually the moon, and the clear image of the moon up near the top is a reflection inside the camera. I have no idea whether the ring is an atmospheric phenomenon that got picked up on the film, or just lens flare.

Update: It was most likely taken with a point-and-shoot fixed-focus 35mm camera (though I had an SLR by that time that my grandfather had given me, so I’m not sure why I wouldn’t have used it). But even if it’s a really messed-up picture of an eclipse, it’s still an interesting-looking picture, IMO, which is why I scanned it.

I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of weeks as an additional update channel and sort of an adjunct to my blog, Speed Force (you can follow it at @SpeedForceOrg), and I’ve actually realized that yes, there is a point to it. It’s good for the random thought that only takes a sentence or two, but seems like it doesn’t quite warrant a full blog post.

So I’ve added a second account for general stuff, (i.e. not just comics & Flash) as an experiment, at @KelsonV, and I’m tying it to this blog using Alex King’s Twitter Tools. Let’s see how this works out…

Update: Okay, so I’ve got K2R announcing posts to Twitter. I’ve got Twitter feeding to Facebook using the Twitter app on Facebook. And I’m building daily digests on K2R using Twitter Tools (which is supposed to handle loops) and to LiveJournal using LoudTwitter (thanks, andrea_wot).

I looked at ping.fm per rialtus’s suggestion, but from what little I can see without signing up, it only does instant updates, and it looks like it’s push only — i.e., I’d post to ping.fm and it would go out to Twitter, LJ, Myspace, Facebook, etc., but I’d still need something else to pull blog headlines.

So, if I’ve got all this set up right:

Twitter → Facebook
Twitter → LJ Daily Digest
Twitter → K2R Daily Digest (except for stuff that came from K2R)
K2R Headlines → Twitter
K2R Headlines → Twitter → Facebook
K2R Headlines → Twitter → LJ Daily Digest