Not too much

light from heat

More snow coming, maybe this weekend. Today I took my favorite "person served" up to the mountains near my house, and we stood on a frozen waterfall. He was excited. It was nice. He always brings Michael Jackson to play in my car, and I told him about the Smooth Criminal video. He laughed. He laughs at everything and nothing.

A "Smooth Criminal" Retrospective

There are many many many reasons to watch this video. First of all, it's like a dance narrative, although the plot is cloudy. Michael Jackson plays some sort of mobster/speakeasy boss, and there's tons of easy ladies nearby and also random bouts of aggression. It's like what a very effiminate man would imagine as a masculinity play. For example, MJ's buttering up two fine ladies and a large man appears behind him with a glittering knife, and the ladies get all freaked out but Michael just blows him through a brick wall without even turning around. That's unchecked fantasy, people. Also, ragamuffin orphans are peering through the barred windows, talking about how cool Michael's moves are. It's kind of too bad that every Michael Jackson video reads like a warning sign.

It's not the best song, and the wierd sound quality of the grunts inserted over it makes it worse. But I've always remembered this video as being legendary because I owned a Nintendo game based off it. Michael would jump/dance-kick, throw his white hat, lean impossibly far, and shoot his arm up in the air all the way to victory. I'm surprised that I can't find this game on a Google search, which makes me think this was all a legend I created in my Michael Jackson-obsessed youth. But I did find this - a Flash animation which features MJ in every other Nintendo game you can think of.

photos etc

I did make it home in time for Christmas, and it was decidedly less snowy there. By this time, New York is well into the misery that is its winter weather, with infinite gray skies and lackluster periods of snow and freezing rain. But this year, it's been positively balmy. It hadn't snowed yet at the time I got there, and there was much talk of suicidal skiing on depressed mountains. My dad and I like to go cross country skiing far upstate at least once a winter, but it wasn't going to happen.

Other Christmas vacation traditions occurred: I had all my doctors' appointments, saw that our cousins' kids had another year of growing up between holidays, avoided people from high school at the YMCA. I missed most of my friends by getting home so late, and went down to the city to visit a few. It was wonderful.



Michelle, me, and Meg at the tiny underground lair of the Irish bar where we spent a very long time on Friday night.



Bridget, Jen, and I became friends during a disasterous French cooking project - we added a dozen eggs to our supposedly cream-filled pastries. The result tasted like omlettes filled with whipped cream. We did not order these at breakfast.

The next day I flew back to Colorado and drove out to Vail for New Year's Eve with Lara.



This is us after a good deal of celebrating. We're thinking that 2007 might taste gross, but the passage of time is inevitable.

In addition to New Year's, I recommend the Denver Aquarium after dark. It's cheaper, there's no kids there, and also no adult supervison.




I'd love it if they had a little replica of Davy Jones' locker that they would put kids in afterwards, and then after you hear muffled screaming, open it up and have some sort of waterproof sign that says, "Ha, ha."



Camera phones are popular.



It was decided that jellyfish are cool.