Not getting coal for these songs

Since the bad Christmas list was taking up so much space I decided to separate the good list for another post and another day. That and typing with a broken finger starts to hurt after a while. This list was a little harder to make since there are definitely many more good an not annoying songs around the holidays. Limiting them to the five I like the most was difficult but I did my best so here they are in reverse order, because that's how you do top lists, in reverse order:

#5 - To keep with the way I did #5 on the bad list I will choose a grouping of songs for the good ones as well. Mannheim Steamroller and The Trans-Siberian Orchestra are two groups who have carved their own niche in the Christmas music business and I can say that I enjoy pretty much anything that they make. Even if the original songs aren't the greatest I still enjoy them after either of these two groups awesomify them.

#4 - This next one was actually introduced to me by Mannheim Steamroller which is sad because it has been around for a very long time. It's a Ukrainian work that was originally performed with voice only. It sounds amazing like that as well as with instruments and no voice. Unfortunately it has now been heavily commercialized and ruined by companies like Garmin and Hooters Casino in Las Vegas (don't ask). This has caused it to slip to #4 but it still is an amazing song. Also to keep with the whole synchronized light theme from above I've included another light display synced to the instrumental version. Carol of the Bells:

#3 - This song has the weird position of being on both lists. It's kind of sad that a song which I enjoy so much can be altered and changed to the point where one version of it makes my bad list. Then again maybe it's a good thing showing that no matter how bad you make a song you can still love the original. This simple carol sung by pretty much everyone at every Christmas is one of the first ones I was ever exposed to and still sing to this day. Even the rude Batman Smells or the French Vive le Vent versions are some of my favorites. Jingle Bells:

#2 - Yet another song with good childhood memories comes in at #2. During Christmas there are many special movies and cartoons. I wasn't big on the movies and still haven't seen many of them but I did watch lots of the cartoons when I was growing up. One song from one of the cartoons always plays through my head during Christmas. Unfortunately the cartoon has now been blasphemed with the two computer generated movies but I still love the original show and song anyway. That and I still want a hula-hoop. Christmas Don't Be Late:

#1 - Back to more traditional Christmas songs there is one carol that for some reason I always love listening to. It is a calm, peaceful song that crescendos into something that gives goose bumps every time I hear it. I also tend to prefer the male renditions of this song. For me Christmas isn't complete without hearing this carol at least once. Luckily almost every Christmas concert or musical performance includes this one. My #1 Christmas choice. O Holy Night:

Christmas makes my ears bleed.

It is almost Christmas and as typical with the season we are inundated with holiday music. radio stations either switch over to completely seasonal fare or intermix the occasional song within their rotation. While there are other December holidays with their own music I'd like to focus on the one with the most, Christmas. Sorry Dreidel Song you will have to find someone else's blog for recognition.

Unfortunately there are some really bad and annoying Christmas songs. Anyone who works in retail will attest that after 8 hours straight of listening to bad music you are ready to strangle the nearest reindeer. Then again I've never heard good music in a Gap store and always want to strangle annoying kids in the mall. Maybe it's some evil plot for human population management? Let's start with my five most hated Christmas songs in reverse order:

#5 - For this one it's a huge tie and encompasses an entire genre of music. if I didn't lump these all together I'd need like a Top 100 list to have room for anything else. Any country music singer slaughtering an existing Christmas song or writing an original one falls in at #5. I really don't care what it would be like if Santa drove a red pickup truck or started off hunting reindeer, stay away from holidays, in fact stay away from music all together.

#4 - This song is probably one that came to mind while reading the fifth worst song. While it has a very country vibe to it I don't really think it is a country song. It still is awful though. Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer:

#3 - This next "classic" Christmas song is probably one of the more creepy ones. It was written in the 50's so I'm sure it's innocent but for me it's still weird. This has been covered by many modern artists but Jimmy Boyd is the one who made it famous. For me his voice is kinda grating as well. Yes I said "his," this is a guy singing the song. Granted he is 11 at the time but he does sound like a woman. Another womanly man who sang this song is Dee Snyder of twisted Sister. I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus:

#2 - This next song would have placed #4 or #5 if only done by the original singer Eartha Kitt but the string of covers make it worse and worse. There is something about this song that exudes annoying. Looking around the web I see this is on many people's lists as well for awful Christmas songs so I am not alone. I couldn't remember who sang the worst version of this song and listening to it over and over by other singers was bringing out the strangle reflex (see above) so I will concede the most annoying version to Madonna's. Santa Baby:

#1 - This last one is kind of an interesting one. I like the song alright but Frank Sinatra's version adds so many annoying parts to it that it completely ruins the song. Combining a spelling lesson with a holiday song is never a good idea. I want to open presents not learn something! On top of that this one play frequently on loops in malls, department stores, and other public places. Most songs get bad after multiple repetitions but this one get annoying at an exponential rate. It's sad too since the original song and its other iterations are some of my favorites. Jingle Bells as sung by Frank Sinatra:

There you have it my 5 most hated, annoying, obnoxious, awful, bad Christmas songs. I am aware that there are probably worse than these (someone pointed out Elton John's Christmas song) but I haven't heard of them as of yet and don't plan to listen to new bad songs just for the list. Instead these are the 5 that first come to mind and are forever stuck in my head. Honorable mention goes to a song I was just introduced to this year. Since it hasn't the same time to annoy me as the other 5 I can't count it for the list... yet. I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas:

I wins!

A little while back I found an awesome deal on video games. As a certified gamer nerd I jumped on it. The deal allowed me to get 10% off all video game related purchases on Amazon. The only catch was I had to join a consumer's organization called The ECA. Luckily they were offering free memberships and I could cancel auto renewal so they wouldn't charge me $20 every year. It was a dream come true. Unfortunately, like all dreams, it was going to end.

The free memberships was an attempt to get as many members as possible to bolster their credibility and future profits. There very openly and frequently touted their Amazon discount and said it would pay for the membership fees by itself. With more and more members brings more and more people that are unscrupulous. Some user quickly figured out a way to exploit and stack the discount getting 30% off instead of 10%. This caused Amazon to quickly pull the promotion and members to jump ship in droves. The Amazon discount is the only reason people joined which makes sense since that was what the advertising campaign was focusing on.

This caused quite a stir and many of the legitimate and honest members were rightfully upset. During the whole fiasco they promised us the discount would be back and even kept their advertising the same. In the end the discount was discontinued and they quickly edited their website to claim they never advertised it. No problem they had other discounts right, wrong. Most are useless or normal discounts you can find on any bargain site. 2 more of the good ones, Tritton and Buy.com are also "coming back soon" and not working as advertised respectively. Starting to seem like a scam.

Here is where the fun comes in. Mysteriously people started noticing the cancel auto renewal button missing. Inquiries were rudely answered by their staff saying they never meant to have it and it never worked. They also called paying members names and started deleting all dissenting comments. They said we could use the feedback form to cancel auto-renewal anyway. Some of us tried that and no response. Then they said we had to send in a letter to cancel. They also removed the phone number cancellation method previously listed in their Terms of Service. On top of that they have a clause in their Terms saying they have no responsibility of keeping track of mail they receive. We need to send certified or something similar to prove we canceled. They also gave some rather lame excuses about the Internet was inefficient and snail mail was easier.

For week I tried hard to get this information out and get people to complain. When a company advertises something it can't provide and then makes it really hard to cancel membership it is a SCAM. Their immature responses, name calling, and other unusual behavior supports this. Finally a real consumer group The Consumerist picked up my story along with information from multiple additional parties. Now the web is ablaze. People are upset and hopefully something will get done about this. As my girlfriend can attest I always win!

Note: some of these sites have angry customers who like to swear a lot ;)

Consumerist article

New Consumerist Article that quotes me some more!

CAG Article

Kotaku Article

NeoGAF Article

Joystiq Article

IGN Article

BBB Page

Super late zombie of the month, redux

Look at me I used the word 'redux' Yay! Unfortunately this calendar again fails to impress. It was 10 months of awesome over the top zombie information and then 2 months of utter garbage. With all the zombie popularity lately you would think they could come up with something better than this month's lackluster Virtual Zombie.

Identifying Marks - No clear identifying features; capable of spontaneous mutation

Origin - Genetic manipulation

Gore Factor - Sick

Intelligence - Artificial

Mobility - Unlimited

Hot Spots - Underground, hi-tech laboratories; antiestablishment software design studios

Danger Rating - 13

Yawn, there you have it, 12 months of zombies. It is almost sad this has come to an end but fear not! My cousin has provided more zombie fun to last years. Her Christmas present to me was a couple of books of zombie poetry. That's right zombie poetry! Prepare for next years zombie haikus.

It will be awesome.

Zombies in poetry form.

Trust me, it's not lame.

Gobble gobble!

What a crazy day it has been! I just survived a shopping marathon an figured I'd write a bit about some of the stuff I did today. Hopefully I can apply some sort of coherence to it all.

Turkey Day - Eat turkey, sleep, sleep, sleep, wake up at 11:30pm to go shopping!

Black Friday madness - Studies have been done and have shown that the majority of consumer spending doesn't actually happen on Black Friday (or Cyber Monday for all you nerd folk). Instead the Saturday before Christmas is the winner. To shatter my pre-conceptions even further my girlfriend has notified me that her store has already gotten into "the black" for the year as well. Now the name Black Friday carries next to no meaning for me. Instead I will call it Waste Money Fight Trash Angry Day.

Waste Money Fight Trash Angry Day madness - Much better. I got up around 11:30pm from my turkey coma to get ready and start shopping a bit earlier this year. The outlet mall near my home was opening all stores at midnight with great deals, prizes, and long lines. We get there just after 12:00am and already all the parking spots are filled and the Coach store has a 200 person line in front of it. Personally if I wanted to flush money down the toilet I'd buy Louis Vuitton but that's just me. Anyway we get really lucky on a parking spot and so begins our shopping adventures.

We start at a clothing store, Bass, and they are running a pretty good buy 1 get 2 free sale. At least i assume it's a good sale since the line to check out is over 2 hours long! I didn't even really look and moved from random store to random store. I ended up buying some pants for myself. Yippee my Christmas shopping started with buying myself stuff. Actually there really wasn't much good stuff to buy and most the sales there weren't that appealing to me. I just waited for my mother to finish trying on some clothes at a store called Black and White which had a 40 minutes dressing room wait and we headed back home to pick up the third musketeer in our merry band of early morning deal-getters.

This year this department store called Boscov's was giving out door prizes and was conveniently located next to the store my father wanted to buy out. So there I stood with the huddled masses int he freezing cold waiting for my prize. Strangely it seems too many years of mothering have caused my own mom to forget her own advice. She always wanted us to bundle up as kids before going outside and even offered me a scarf as we headed out. Since when do guys wear scarves? As we stood there shivering I realize that no only is my mother wearing capri-length pants but she also has no socks on, tsk tsk. Lucky for us the store came out early and handed out the prizes. I got the wonderful prize of getting the opportunity of shopping in the store for a $10 discount. I just waited 1 hour in the freezing cold for a coupon and I was happy to do so!

Since we already got our prize we immediately left the line with pretty much everyone else that got their prizes. No way anyone will wait the remaining 30 minutes in the cold for the store to open. In the time we had been waiting my father had already filled the car with stuff from the first store and was on his second trip to buy. I tried hard and succeeded in not buying stupid crap I had no use for at these department stores. Especially my father not so subtly convinced me I didn't want something because it was possible he may have already bought it. These department store really do sell a lot of crap. Chinese slave labor and lax safety laws I salute you!

In the early morning we managed to spend hours in just 2 stores making purchases at least 10 times. I did manage to find some gifts for my future nieces so it was a success for me. We moved on to the worst Waste Money Fight Trash Angry Day stores of them all. The big box retailers. We skipped Walmart which is good since I hear police were called to multiple Walmarts around the US. Darn you robotic hamsters! Darn you to heck!!!! We did, however, go to Target. Let's just say my future nieces are going to be happy this Christmas. Note to self, turn into cute grand daughter to rake in the loot. I only had one thing to get at Target and was hoping to avoid the 100 person long checkout line by coming back later but my dad had found lots of stuff so I dropped off my purchase with him and went to nerd central, Gamestop.

I don't know how they do it but Gamestop had really no good deals whatsoever and still were packed. Heck even I went there knowing this. I kept to my goal of not buying video games until next year and instead bought a gift for a family I don't even really know. Hopefully this makes up for buying stuff for myself. The line in Gamestop had maybe 10 people in it yet it took longer to get through that line than it took my father to get through the aforementioned 100 person target line. Go efficiency. While in line I learned that Old Navy now sells video games (say what?) and helped a lady find Wii stuff.

---Intermission---

This is a long post so deal with it!

At first I assumed she was buying for her kids but it turns out her and her friend were "getting into the Wii experience" for the first times and were buying it for their husbands. There were hopelessly confused by all the random plastic things that come with Wii enjoyment and I gave them a crash course in all things gun attachment related for the Wii. their husbands wanted to shoot things and hunt (it is Pennsylvania after all) and they were getting them the awful, awful, awful hunting games. The nerd part of me yearned to explain how bad these games were and how they shouldn't support shovelware but when I noticed the joy they expressed at getting these gifts for their families I bit my tongue and refrained from explaining to them the finer points of zombie hunting on the Wii. So for those keeping track that is 2 points for Joe at Gamestop. 1 for buying a gift for someone I didn't really know and 1 for increasing the profitability of garbage games on the Wii. Oh my goodness, maybe that's why Gamestop is so popular. It brings out the good in all of us! Oh and I am pretty sure Hurley from the TV show Lost was the guy who rang me up. 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42 4 8 15 16 23 42

Then it was back to the mall to finish up visiting the stores that couldn't force their employees to work at 3am even though the guy who ran the Asian slushie drink stand was there with the rest of us. There really wasn't many good stores in that mall anyway so we defaulted back to the very same store we spent all morning in. After making our gajillionth purchase from the same store it was off to Lowes and then we were done. 13 hours of straight up shopping spanning 2 days. I ended up with 2 points and maybe 4 gifts total and it was worth it. Didn't get to see any fights or stores getting bashed in though. Oh well.

Tip - Amazon has most of the same deals and you don't need to brave the cold at 3am.

Tip - Seems like most stores' temporary early morning sales were "extended." Like I believe they made all new signage that morning to "extend" their sales.

Tip - Do not buy hunting games on the Wii.

Editors note: Just kidding I don't have an editor but I did edit out a lot of more specific gifts that were purchased and the more obvious places i went to buy gifts. even with Christmas lists some surprise is still fun.

Super late zombie of the month

Insert lame excuse here________ work _______ blah blah ________ saving the world. A couple friends have asked me about why I haven't posted this yet and it surprised me that someone other than my girlfriend actually reads this blog. Then it surprised me again that I somehow convinced someone to be my girlfriend. Then we get back to the beginning with the surprise that she actually reads this drivel as well.

I actually hesitated to post this month's zombie because it seems the coven of professional zombie biographers who created this calender got swine flu or something and totally phoned it in for the month of November. This is the stupidest and most worthless month yet when it comes to zombies and I am almost embarrassed to allow this on my blog. OK, I'm really not since I have a PS3 trophy card and a section for spinning fetuses on my blog. For the month of November I present the Alien Zombie. Err, what?

Identifying Marks - No Identifying features during incubation period

Origin - Unknown

Intelligence - Immeasurable

Mobility - Inter-galactic and inter-species roaming capabilities

Hot Spots - Evacuated mining colonies, abandoned space stations, points of terrestrial impact

Danger Rating - 12

So, uh, yeah. Apparently we having alien zombies and they are boring and uninspired. I either forgot to copy down the gore factor before leaving work or the calendar people forgot to make up some off-topic word to describe it. I really don't want to justify this month's zombie with any sort of write up so I won't.

Zombie of the month

Wow am I late with this month's zombie. I think the excuse I will use is that my work is blocking all our non-work Internet access so I can't update this as easy seeing as the calendar is at work. Ok, so technically blogger isn't blocked but with everyone watching the Internet usage closely right now I probably shouldn't be blogging from work anyway even if it is just to do the zombies.

One of the freakiest and most disturbing things in horror movies for me is closely related to this month's zombie. Evil children of any kind for some reason just plain freak me out. Whether they be demons, zombies, girl's stuck in wells or dybbuks (see below) they all give me nightmares. So here goes nothing, the Child Zombie!

Identifying Marks - Sunken eyes; discolored flesh; open wounds; delayed motor response; limited speech capability (i.e., low growls and moans)

Origin - Cosmic radiation; hell runneth over

Gore Factor - Particularly upsetting

Intelligence - Low; manipulative

Mobility - Slow with long-range roaming capabilities; lures victims

Hot Spots - Churches; abandoned schools; parks

Danger Rating - 11

I can't say I've ever heard of zombies created by cosmic radiation. I'm, pretty sure that's how Marvel superheroes are created so maybe the author of this got confused. Then again maybe there was a zombie X-Men or something. This month comes at a good time since I just finally got around to watching the movie The Unborn. Unfortunately that movie sucked. But at least the kid was freaky. Who cares how awful the movie was if that kid remained in my dreams for days to come? He technically wasn't a zombie but a dybbuk but close enough in my book.