I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: OLD NAVY HOLIDAY HITS (2003).

It seems that every year stores release their own Christmas mixes.  I feel like Old Navy was one of the first stores to do so (especially in their weird retro style).  What is surprising is just how much I enjoy this compilation.  It has a great mix of traditional and unusual.  There’s some cool remixes, there’s some unexpected “space-age” tracks and it’s just boppy and light and fun.  Until the end where they go for an unusual (although it somehow makes sense for Old navy) but unenjoyable song to end it with.

PEGGY LEE-“Winter Wonderland” A great, slightly space age version of this song.
ANDY WILLIAMS-“Sleigh Ride” I do love an Andy Williams Christmas song—earnest and clean and lots of fun.
HOLLY COLE-“Christmas Is” I don’t know this song that well.  It’s a fun, different Christmas song, done on a jaunty piano.
ELLA FITZGERALD-“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” I love Ella, and I love the horn blasts as the song opens and closes.
PATTI PAGE-“Boogie Woogie Santa Claus” I don’t love this version, which is surprising as I love this era, but I think I don’t like her voice that much.
CAPITAL STUDIO ORCHESTRA-“Cha Cha All the Way” one of my favorite swinging weird holiday songs.
THE PENGUINS-“Jingle Jangle” has a fun “native” beat to it. It’ sa n odd song and I don’t love the singer’s voice, but the music is fun.
RAMSEY LEWIS-“The Twelve Days of Christmas” a piano instrumental that sounds nothing like the song…fun though and appropriately Christmassey somehow.
DIANA ROSS AND THE SUPREMES-“The Land of Make Believe” I didn’t even realize this was Diana Ross—the production is so low key. And the shuffle beat and strings seems very much unlike the Supremes to me. It fits in well with these songs.
DUKE ELLINGTON-“Jingle Bells (Robbie Hardkiss Remix)” I love this remix a lot, it’s one of my favorite Christmas songs.
JACK JONES-“Mistletoe and Holly” another retro-seeming, very clean-sounding song. It’s kind of mockable but fun at the same time—like the best Christmas stuff.
MARVIN GAYE AND TAMMI TERRELL-“Two Can Have a Party” I really don’t like this song in general and it doesn’t feel holiday enough for this disc.  But it’s a harmless end to an otherwise fun collection of Christmas songs.

[READ: December 1, 2014] One More Thing

I really enjoyed Novak’s short piece “The Man Who Invented the Calendar” in the New Yorker (which is included in here). So I was pretty excited to read this collection of his “stories.”

There’s over 60 stories in this book. Many of them are really short (some are just a few lines).  And typically the shorter the pieces the funnier they tend to be (the super short ones are pretty much a perfect set up for a punchline).  But interestingly, there are several really long pieces (some over 10 pages) and these are more thoughtful and, while kinda funny, not meant to be laugh out loud funny.  It’s an interesting mix.  It’s especially interesting because at the end of the book, he has a piece called “Discussion Questions” in which he asks:

Did you flip through the book and read the shortest stories first?   The author does that, too.

If you do that, you will laugh a lot at the beginning and then have precious few laughs at the end, so don’t do that!

Some funny very short ones are: “Romance Chapter One” and”Kindness Among Cakes.”  “Confucius at Home” is also short and funny.

I loved “The Rematch” which pits the hare against the tortoise one more time.  The hare has learned his lesson and the outcome is hilarious.

Some of the slightly longer ones are “Julie and the Warlord” which starts funny in one way and then turns funny in a different way.  “Dark Matter” is one of the longer pieces that is kind of funny (in parts) but more thoughtful–it’s smart and stupid funny at the same time.

“The Something by John Grisham” is hilarious in that it respects and disses Grisham at the same time.  It made me laugh very hard in parts.

“No One Goes to Heaven to See Dan Fogelberg” is a very long story that bucks the trends of mildly funny longer stories by having a hilariously unexpected punchline about three quarters of the way through.

“The Girl Who Gave Great Advice” is mildly funny, but I loved that she appears in another story later (see, you have to read them in order).  This same delayed gratification comes with “All You Have to Do” as well.

“The Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela” is hilarious and inappropriate and hilarious.

“Quantum Nonlocality and the Death of Elvis Presley” is one of those stories that is not laugh out loud funny, but is kind of funny all the way through.  The joke at the end is a good twist too.

Speaking of twists, I loved the ones in “The Market was Down,” “Great Writer Steal” and “The World’s Biggest Rip-Off”(the set of and pay off for this were fantastic).

“One of these Days, We Have to Do Something About Willie” unfolds in a really funny and expected (but not exactly the way you expect) way.  But it ends in a rather sad way–surprising for this book.

“Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Missing Bicycle” is hilarious.  And “Constructive Criticism” is funny in very unexpected ways.

The title of “Everyone Was Singing the Same Song: The Duke of Earl Recalls His Trip to America in June of 1962” seems like it would not need a story because it tells you everything, but he is sable to get more than a one note joke out of it, and it made me laugh a lot.

There are so many very good laugh-out loud jokes in here.  It’s great collection which he says he honed from doing readings  I imagine hearing these read aloud by Novak would be even funnier.

Sure, there are one or two clunkers, but overall this is one of the funniest collections of stories I’ve read this year.