Matt Of All Trades

 Every year for the past I don't know how long now - at least a decade - I've posted Darlene Love's annual TV performance of her classic "Christmas Baby (Please Come Home).   For the past few years, she's done this on the chat fest show, "The View." It isn't happening this year. Yes, Covid got in the way again.  Thankfully and most importantly, Love seems to be A-OK. One of her band members tested positive, so the entire band was quarantined.  In a video i nterview last Friday with The View, Love says she feels fine. She said she's fully vaccinated, had her booster shot, and also a flu shot.  The band member who tested positive with a probable breakthrough infection was also fully vaccinated, rendering that person a bit less likely to spread the virus.  The quarantine was lifted last weekend, and Love was once again able to give public performances. o You can't stop tradition, so I'm using that video for this year's Darlene Love salut...

A Christmas fright from Karens!  Just for laughs and giggles, I've decided now, after the gardening season ended, that I have time to devote to this blog thingy, so I'm reviving it. At least for awhile.  This blog has mostly been on hiatus since spring, since I didn't have time to deal with it. But let's go for broke.  Since it's the Christmas season, let's start with the holiday spirit, if you will. With Karens, since they've been all the rage - literally - this year. Jimmy Kimmel recently had a fantastic holiday Karen segment that you have to watch.  It starts pretty frighteningly, with a woman doing an anti-vax version of Mariah Carey's Christmas classic "All I Want For Christmas Is You."   Sweet Mariah can sing this lovely song. Anti-vax Karen.......cannot. Anti-Vax Karen, "performing" at a San Diego county board meeting, reworked the lyrics into extreme nonsense. Worse, her singing voice is about as good as the tragic sound of ...

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 ...

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...