Continuing with the holiday theme, here’s a prototype Christmas card my buddy Chenopup sent around for comment the other day:

What do you all think? Looks like the kid’s had enough shopping to me…

I have something of a fascination for Japanese culture, which seems to my admittedly uneducated eye to be equal parts beautiful, mysterious, and childish. Japanese TV is the greatest, a often baffling exercise in… well, silliness. Consider the following, which seems to be something like the old Candid Camera show here in the US. We’ve got a Spanish speed-walking champion out on the track doing his thing, and a group of phony samurai poised to see if they can get him to break his stride:

I love the dramatic Godzilla/anime-style music as the samurai chase this dude around the track, and the way the speed-walker actually thanks the TV show when he finds out what’s going on, as if he’s thrilled to have had a practical joke played on him. (He says, “Arigato,” which, thanks to the immortal song-writing capabilities of Dennis De Young, we know means “thank you.”) And who would’ve guessed that the Japanese for “stand by” is… “stand by”? Fascinating…

Okay, I feel kind of silly asking, but I’d like all of you reading this to do something for me. It’s like this: I’ve got this co-worker who has built a website for his wife… only she doesn’t know about it yet. For some reason, he’d like to get the hit count up before he tells her about it. Or, in his own words:

…last week my wife had a pretty tough week. And to top it off, she smashed her big toe with a large ceramic pot. So I decided to start building her site.

 

She doesn’t know it exists yet, and I’m hoping to keep it that way for as long as possible. I’d also like to have as many visitors as possible before the inevitable happens and she discovers it. So spread the word, to everyone (except her). My goal is one hundred thousand visits before she finds out.

As of my visit tonight, he’s had a mere 104 visitors. So, if you have a second, click on over there, will you? Just for a second, just to register that the site has had a new visitor. And if you’ve got a blog or friends with Internet access and nothing better to do, spread the word, will you?

Well, kids, if you’ve been looking for a definite sign that the Christmas season is upon us, the picture above is probably it. That’s the giant tree in New York’s Rockefeller Center, which was lighted last night in a televised ceremony that I — grinchy-grinch scroogemeister that I am — did not see. Fortunately, however, our special Manhattan-area correspondent Brian Greenberg was on hand to document the whole thing. Click the photo above to see his complete Rock Center Christmas Tree photoblog, or follow this link here. He’s got some really cool shots of the behind-the-scenes preparations (which I guess aren’t really very “behind the scenes,” since anyone walking down the street could see them, but they’re nevertheless things a lot of people wouldn’t ever see). He also provides some amusing commentary that’s worth reading, so be sure to take a minute or two to savor the text instead of just flicking through the pics. (I loved the story about Josh Groban. See, that’s the difference between New York and Salt Lake; here, people are too polite to tell an opera singer who sucks to pipe down, let alone somebody who can really sing!)

Be warned that Brian’s photoblog doesn’t seem to like Firefox, so you’ll have to use *shudder* Internet Explorer. But that’s alright… there are compensations…