• Working in retail, I’ve had this song running through my head all month:
That’s “12 Days to Christmas,” from the Bock and Harnick musical She Loves Me. Lots of Christmas songs mention the hustle and bustle of Christmas shopping, but this one gets at the mix of adrenaline and animosity that fuels December retail.
That musical is an adaptation of The Shop Around the Corner, which itself deserves a bit more Christmas-movie love. It’s sappy, mannered and dated, yet still kind of wonderful. My second-favorite Jimmy Stewart holiday movie.
• Mandy Patinkin, Inigo Montoya himself, is pleased that Sen. Ted Cruz is a big fan of The Princess Bride, but thinks the Texas Republican doesn’t understand the meaning of the story:
This man is not putting forth ideas that are at the heart of what that movie is all about. I would love for Sen. Cruz, and everyone creating fearmongering and hatred, to consider creating hope, optimism and love. Open your arms to these people, these refugees trying to get into our country, and open your hearts.
Let me add that I’d also like for Cruz & Co. to stop falling victim to the classic blunder, advocating for an ever-expanding number of land wars in Asia. Vizzini wasn’t wrong about that.
• Brian Tashman reminds us of “Five Failed Right-Wing Prophecies and Predictions of 2015.”
In a more rational world, or in a world with better religion, people who were as confidently and epically wrong as Jonathan Cahn, John Hagee, Jim Bakker, Bryan Fischer, Joseph Farah, Pat Robertson, Rick Wiles and Michael Savage would be obliged to slink away in shame, never to be heard from again.
But then, of course, in a more rational world or in a world with better religion, such people would never have had influential public platforms in the first place.
• Pete Enns offers a pretty terrific analogy for better understanding the Hebrew Bible: “What Christmas in ‘Christian America’ tells us about ancient Israel.”
Enns also links us to a countdown of “The 16 Worst Christmas Specials of All Time.” No. 1 is no surprise.
• “It should say a lot that the worst part of that sentence is not a white guy using the word ‘phat.'” The white guy in question here is, sigh, Mark Driscoll.
• My old slot editors and chiefs were still fighting to preserve the choke/strangle distinction when I worked at the paper. Male rage being what it is, they had a dismaying number of opportunities to emphasize this and never allowed the redundancy “strangled to death” to appear in our pages. So I was thinking of them when I saw a story in my newsfeed, from several sources, involving an interview with a strangling victim. That’s not possible, unless you’re the witch of Endor.
I’m not generally a fan of pedantic prescriptivism, but I don’t like losing words when that involves losing distinctions and the ability to make them. Usage, increasingly, is making strangle merely a synonym for choke. So now instead of two words that mean two different things, we have two words that mean the same thing and one thing that we no longer have a word for. I prefer to have words for all the things. Makes it easier to think about them.
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