Matt Of All Trades

My annual Darlene Love Christmas greeting.   A very  different year, Notice the face mask on the drummer. We can still hope for better days ahead, with  Darlene's help Every year for at least a decade now, I've featured Darlene Love's "Christmas Baby (Please Come Home) as a holiday tradition at Christmas.  As she does every year, first for the David Letterman show and now for "The View," Love performed this classic again, much to my delight.  The song is bitterly ironic this year.  We're not supposed to go home for Christmas this year. We don't want to risk spreading Covid to our loved ones during this pandemic.  So I'm sure this song inspires more yearning than usual in 2020.  But it's optimistic in a way, too. It will get brighter in the future, as the cheerful, take-me-to-church melody suggests. I hope everybody is safe and as happy as they can be. Merry Christmas and here's to a much better 2021! Video: As always, click on the YouTube ...

A Daily Show parody of a Fox Christmas family Zoom meeting that doesn't go well.  The Christmas holiday is always fraught.   You want to spend time with the family. In most cases. Sometimes, there are certain family members you don't want to spend time with.  For a few people, staying home because of the pandemic is a good thing.  An excuse not to spend time with certain people. Then there's this comedy video. Imagine having THIS family.  Full of Fox personalities. So this comedian imagines how a Zoom family Christmas would go.  Watch. As always, click on the YouTube logo at bottom of video to make it bigger and easier to see.

The Kohls Christmas ad hints at this year's dark times  while still maintaining the sugary sweet feel of the holiday.  It's that time of year for sappy Christmas ads. Most are silly, too sticky sweet, or just plain annoying and dumb.   A few ads do manage to cut through my inner Scrooge and I end up liking them. Despite the obligatory sugary sweet tone. What follows are this year's nominees of ads that actually are OK.  Oddly, the weight of this terrible year has lead to a large group of good ads. I think this bodes well for the arts when we get out of this pandemic, judging from the creativity of some of these ads.  Feel free to respond to agree, or disagree, or suggest your own ads. In each video, click on the YouTube logo to watch it there. If you do that, the videos will be bigger on your screen and easier to view .  One of my favorite comes from Kohls , of all places. Supposedly, ad experts say this is the most effective seasonal ad of the year, ...

I haven't posted too many Randy Rainbow videos of late, as I've long come off as too much of a fan boy.  But it's the Christmas season, and Rainbow has season's greetings in the air, sort of.  What's in the air actually smells like a fart, and you'll understand why when you watch his latest video. As always, click on the YouTube logo to make the video bigger and easier to see.   

Marie Dallum in those green glasses, seems in the Christmas mood, or something.  Talk about getting into the Christmas spirit.   The woman in the video at the bottom of this post is really, really into the mood of the holidays.  If that mood is blissful mania, that is.  The video was shot a couple years ago, so don't worry about the choir breaking Covid protocols. The video of the OK City Chorus was taken well before the pandemic.  This happy lady is all in her glory, ringing her jingle bells in her green holiday sunglases and dancing like she ingested a lot of, well, something. The brunette woman to the right of our enthusiast appears to be looking askance at the spectacle, but she was in on it.  Turns out the character in this video, Marie Dallam is no goofball in real life, as Inside Edition reported two years ago, shortly after the video first went viral. She is actually quite sane and stable.  She's an Associate Professor of Religious Studi...

Check out the "We Didn't Start The FIre" update of the  Billy Joel classic below. Yes, the image has been altered to fit the current times. Billy Joel had a big hit in 1 989 with his song "We Didn't Start The Fire," which was basically a huge review of all the major news events that baby boomer experienced, from the 1950s to 1989.  Yes, giant things happened, but he could fit it all within a song.  Now, Donald Trump's exhausting presidency is limping into its closing days.  Exhausting, because let's face it the guy is high maintenance to the extreme, and every day he's be behind something stupid.  Trump's term lasted four years, not four decades like in the Billy Joel song. But it seemed like four decades. So here's a parody song using the tune of "We Didn't Start The Fire" as the melody.  As usual in this blog click on the YouTube logo on the video to see it in a bigger, more viewable size.