"Israel's Katrina"

Hezbollah and Jeffrey Goldberg ended up on similar pages regarding the giant forest fire in Israel, which killed 41 at last count as well as 5 million trees. “This fire revealed sheer helplessness on Israel’s part,” wrote a columnist in Palestine — and others came to this position with a little more glee. Meanwhile, stateside, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg had this to say: “Israel’s per capita GDP is nearly $30,000. Israel is a rich country. The fact that it doesn’t possess adequate firefighting equipment is its own fault.”

Have Some Ham For Chanukah

“Delicious for Chanukah” indeed. Update: Here’s the original pictures! The place: Balducci’s. The year: 2007.

Have You Seen The Video Of All The Old TV Stars Lip-Syncing "Let It Be?"

You have? Then how about this one, made by the same Norwegian pop-culture nostalgia show, Gylne Tider (“Golden Times”) a couple years ago, focussing more on one-hit-wonderish musical stars, and using “We Are The World?”

This Gylne Tider show seems pretty interesting. Apparently, the three hosts show up at the houses of aging celebrities who were most famous in the 1980s, interview them about their lives and careers, and film them singing along with feel-good all-star benefit songs. Check out this amazing stuff they got from Kelly McGillis earlier this year.

Lastly, how about this commercial for World’s Best Cat Litter?

I think the cat litter one might be best of all these, actually. (Apples and oranges, obviously. And, actually, no: The Kelly McGillis clip is the best.) At the very least, this commercial seems like a good example of what Danielle Sacks was talking about in her “The Future of Advertising” article for Fast Company, when she wrote, “The death of mass marketing means the end of lazy marketing.” I mean, getting people to sniff cat urine, and eat cat litter? I don’t care how well it works, or what its made of, those advertisers are working very hard. And I hope those actors, or focus-group participants were paid very, very well.

What Did You Learn This Week?

Pop quiz:

• Who wants to enslave your children?

• What are the benefits of troll culture?

• Why does @Vincent_Gallo love maple syrup so much?

• Who made the album that a lot of other female rappers once refused to record?

• What are young people on Knifecrime Island angry about now?

• Why do the ads for Christmas engagement rings make some people uncomfortable?

• Who is proud of his new gig selling Uggs?

• What reignited the culture wars, and exactly how offensive was it to your average Catholic Republican mom from Ohio?

• Why will people in New York and Boston be extremely hungover next week and the week after, respectively?

• How did this guy make it all the way through Sarah Palin’s new book?

Extra credit: What are you naming your Hanukkah candles? What are you going to serve during your celebration?

You know what, don’t bother scoring. You’re all winners in my eyes. Have a great weekend, kids!

Photo by Garrett Ziegler, from Flickr.

The Emperor's New Headset

Between my crippling fear of seeing Tony Siragusa in person, the unflattering work clothes, and the likelihood of traumatic brain injury, it’s safe to say that I really do not want to play in the NFL. That makes it somewhat easier to bear that I haven’t had a serious contract offer from a NFL team in months, but it doesn’t quite explain the fact that, still, some adolescent brain node periodically beams strange fantasies into my mind. I’m executing shifty cut-backs and running for daylight on a crowded stretch of a crosstown street in Manhattan, and suddenly — and briefly, and embarrassedly — I’m Barry Sanders. Times Square is, briefly, Soldier Field or something, and the eyes-up waddlers choking some midtown artery are the helpless, hapless also-rans in some dramatically scored highlight-reel. (In worse moods, the tourists and slow-walkers and meandering texters are receivers hung out to dry on a crossing route, and I’m a Steve Atwater-ish safety, steaming with that obscure and vicious loathing specific to safeties and all too ready to hand out some concussions) And then it breaks, and I’m myself again — a thirtysomething goof with a literary physique, running late for some appointment or other. That the fantasies are so persistent is kind of shameful, but there is some good news buried in all that ridiculousness. And that is that I have not yet crossed the bar into darker territory — that other shore where men dream of being football coaches.

There’s a distinction to be drawn, I guess, between college football coaches and NFL coaches. The odd Sloppy Joe exceptions notwithstanding, contemporary high-end college coaches have a trim, churchgoing aesthetic about them — the sort of men who play heroic amounts of golf, eat a lot of grilled chicken (almost no fat), and have uncomplicated relationships with a personal savior. Photoshop a suit onto Florida’s Urban Meyer or Alabama’s Nick Saban, and you’ve got a three-term Republican congressman who refers to a specific group of people as “illegals.” Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I walked into a sporting goods store in my hometown and was surprised to see it transformed from the shabby emporium of my youth into what I can only describe as Coach Mart — the entire stock was given over to windbreakers and polo shirts and stern nylon pullovers in the colors of the high school sports teams. This is in suburban New Jersey — the mind reels at the prospect of how profoundly That Urban Meyer Look has influenced the middle-aged males of, say, South Carolina’s swathes of golf course-adjacent sprawl. We will live long enough to see a certain type of dad wearing coaches whistles around their necks in the way that their wives wear necklaces.

NFL coaches, for their part, are a different and more outwardly desperate bunch. Where college coaches spend their hours private-jetting around the southeast and attempting to charm the mothers of linebacking prodigies, NFL coaches — well, they don’t seem to sleep much as a rule, and the lifestyle seems notably more isolating and un-fun. While that may be broadly true of the head-coaching gig itself, it’s obviously different for different coaches, and different types of coaches.

And those types: There are your Magnificent Walruses, the saturnine and improbably girthy martyrs of game-film study monasticism — Andy Reid would be your representative figure, here. There are the odd ex-players — scary-eyed Mike Singletary with that life-size wooden crucifix bouncing on his chest at one extreme; sleepily devout pokerfaces like Lovie Smith on the other. And the Bill Parcells acolytes, bile-steeped adepts of umbrage and haughtiness powered by a potent combination of brainy mastery and amorphous hate — Bill Belichick, most brilliantly and most biliously, but also howling martinets like Tom Coughlin and all the sourapples that fell from the Belichick/Patriots family tree. It’s both telling and damning that the cohort which includes the totally psychotic Jon Gruden — these would be the third-generation Bill Walsh followers, who worked under Mike Holmgren in Green Bay during the 1990s and stand out for including vaguely decent-seeming people like Steve Mariucci and Marty Mornhinweg — actually seems to be the most functionally human. Or at least they do among the classifiables. There are other coaches who aren’t so easily classified, and it’s outliers like Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin and Atlanta’s Mike Smith who appear possessed of an ineffable football coachiness that makes them seem more organic and a bit more admirable than their peers. It is either a case of me reverse-engineering my argument or a result of that ineffable thing that these coaches tend to be good at their jobs.

That ineffable thing is not calm, exactly, but it does manifest as that. In the best contemporary NFL coaches, there is a sort of basic confidence in and conversance with the old masculinisms of football rhetoric and an ability to imbue some ring of new and particular truth in old truisms, but there’s also something deeper than that, a self-certainty that scans as fully understood and earned. That sort of cool self-security is rare, in football coaches or football players or football fans or football non-fans or football columnists — or Presidents of the United States — and its combination of scarcity and grace makes it uniquely enviable, even if it’s no guarantee of success. Mike Tomlin couldn’t win with the Carolina Panthers any more than a reasonable chief executive (pick one) could self-assuredly reason his way to legislative success in a Congress populated by frothy, hacked-off adolescents. But just as surely as there are more tinhorn Chamber of Commerce chuckleheads in the House of Representatives (and the world) than there are Barack Obamas, there are more insecure overcompensation specialists among the NFL’s coaching caste than there are legitimately and profoundly confident Tomlin types. Which delivers the results you’d expect, in both cases.

And that result, as we’ve seen on issues of such utter and inarguable comparability as the START Treaty and the way in which Tennessee Titans coach Jeff Fisher handled the desultory mutinous noises of quarterback Vince Young, is not so much bad rhetoric and bad faith and bad decision-making as it is, finally, simple and silly performance. What the average member of Congress actually does in a day’s work is just as opaque and obscure as what Andy Reid does in his average 18-hour day. We can guess at certain things — fundraising phone calls and parm-style sandwiches, respectively — but it shades into the inexplicable at a certain point. In both cases, though, there is a very simple way to tell when it isn’t working. It’s a different kind of loudness, a specific type of look-at-me bluster that depends on a very specific sort of horror — the simple and almost-always-justified fear of being found out as full of shit. That fear, in turn, leads to a familiar and frustrating bluster-intensive discursive style, one performed through assertions and re-assertions of individual dominance and grounded in a terrified stubbornness and paralytic constriction of thought.

Which, honestly, isn’t that hard to relate to. The insecurity that comes with responsibility isn’t an illusion — people really are watching, people really will notice if you fuck up. The fear that follows has the function of telescoping reason into a blind alley that’s only wide enough for one, and making every choice — every decision point, if you like — about the decision-maker. And so we get the terrified lizard-brain twitchiness and frantic deference of a shit-scared about-to-be-fired Brad Childress — who was, finally, fired by the Minnesota Vikings last month — or the puffed-up tough talk and hamfisted Hulk-smash assertiveness that has defined Jeff Fisher’s recent handling of his frustrated quarterback’s brittle bravado. And so, too, we get the Custer-grade idiocy of Senator Jon Kyl’s baffled and proud stand against nonproliferation, or the seething, stupid certainty with which various Congressmen on the right have attempted to one-up each other in their disdain for the extension of unemployment benefits and those who would receive them.

They’re in tough spots, all of them, and complicated questions with complicated consequences — although, honestly, START doesn’t seem that tough — always beg for simplification. But fear can focus the mind too sharply and on the wrong object, and lead to an overdetermined determination. Standing before a locker room or a Senate chamber with much at stake, facing a bristling brace of microphones and knowing that one’s words will be heard and have consequences — this is fucking terrifying, for one, and I’m glad I don’t have to do it. But it also calls for complex judgment, and demands real and un-simple courage.

There is a difference between being calm and being unworried in these situations, I think, but one doesn’t need to be blithely without qualm to project the calm I’m talking about. What is needed, though, is the generosity of mind to acknowledge and comprehend the plain and daunting truth that big decisions have consequences for those besides the person making them. It’s not hard to tell who can deal with that and who can’t — how and how loudly the decision arrives has something to do with it, but the answer itself is where the answer is. It is so much easier to be petty when the only thing on your mind is your own lonely self.

And then there’s this: I have passed my inanimate object rival for the first time this season. I can’t really gloat, though, because Toonie is made of metal and I am made of dazzling intellect, boyish good looks and adjectives, and also because I trailed the freaking coin for like three months. So let’s just get to the picks. Oh, also:I’ve incorporated Thursday’s predictions — both the coin and I were winners — into our overall records. That’s a really important note, and will no doubt interest many readers. As always: coin flips by Garey G. Ris, betting lines by Sportsbook.com.

Week 12 (and overall): David Roth: 10–6 (88–81–9); Al Toonie The Lucky Canadian Two-Dollar Coin: 9–7 (87–82–9)

Sunday, December 5
• Chicago (-4.5) at Detroit, 1:00 pm — DR: Chicago; ATTLCTDC: Detroit
• New Orleans (-7) at Cincinnati, 1:00 pm — DR: New Orleans; ATTLCTDC: New Orleans
• Jacksonville at Tennessee (NO LINE), 1:00 pm — DR: Jacksonville; ATTLCTDC: Tennessee
• Washington at New York Giants (-7), 1:00 pm — DR: New Jersey G; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey G
• Buffalo at Minnesota (-5.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Buffalo; ATTLCTDC: Buffalo
• San Francisco at Green Bay (-9.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Green Bay; ATTLCTDC: San Francisco
• Denver at Kansas City (-9),1:00 pm — DR: Kansas City; ATTLCTDC: Denver
• Cleveland at Miami (-4.5), 1:00 pm — DR: Cleveland; ATTLCTDC: Cleveland
• Oakland at San Diego (-13), 4:05 pm — DR: San Diego; ATTLCTDC: San Diego
• Atlanta (-3) at Tampa Bay, 4:15 pm — DR: Atlanta; ATTLCTDC: Tampa Bay
• St. Louis (-3.5) at Arizona, 4:15 pm — DR: St. Louis; ATTLCTDC: St. Louis
• Carolina at Seattle (-6), 4:15 pm — DR: Carolina; ATTLCTDC: Carolina
• Dallas at Indianapolis (-5.5), 4:15 pm — DR: Indianapolis; ATTLCTDC: Indianapolis
• Pittsburgh at Baltimore (-3), 8:20 pm — DR: Baltimore; ATTLCTDC: Baltimore

Monday, December 6
• New York Jets at New England (-3.5), 8:30 pm — DR: New England; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey J

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

Image by SD Dirk, from Flickr.

The Pheromone Myth

“The pheromone term seems to have mainly attracted perfume manufacturers and people looking for the fountain of youth. It’s just not the way things are. It would be like saying a particular colour is why we choose a mate. That’s just not how relationships are formed.”
— Dr. Richard Doty, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Smell and Taste Center, denies the existence of pheromones., “the mysterious chemical signals that trigger attraction.” The real reason you fall for someone is because they have an ass that just won’t quit.

What's So Bad About Ghostface Killah's New Album Cover?

I mean, it’s nothing as glorious as his last one, Ghostdini: Wizard of Poetry, but I don’t think the cover to Ghostface Killah’s new album, Apollo Kids, is as Pitchfork says, “truly unfortunate.” In fact, I kind of like it.

I don’t know what the problem is. The font? What, like only Ratatat is allowed to play with Judas-Priest-style ‘80s-metal electro-lettering? The colors of the notebooks? Garish. But eye-catching! And, hey, Ghost is nothing if not colorful. The custom-printed “Apollo Kids” pencil? That’s the best part! It’s all of theme and it’s got a positive message. Stay in school, kids!

Here’s a clip of Ghostface in the studio, recording the album’s opening track with young producer Frank Dukes. I never don’t love listening to Ghost talk.

The clip was made by Red Bull because Dukes won the energy drink company’s “Red Bull Big Tune” competition earlier this year. I guess that’s how he landed a recording session with Ghost? That seems disgusting. As does so much of the world, right? But maybe that’s a 20th-century attitude. Why shouldn’t energy drinks open up A&R; departments? I don’t know. The beat sounds pretty good. Definitely very much Ghostface-like.

Is it as good as the original “Apollo Kids,” the song from the classic Supreme Clientele album, from ten years ago? No.

But how many rap songs are as good as that? Not many. So.

Pac-Man by the Math: "Inky is Difficult to Predict"

“The blue ghost is nicknamed Inky, and remains inside the ghost house for a short time on the first level, not joining the chase until Pac-Man has managed to consume at least 30 of the dots. His English personality description is bashful, while in Japanese he is referred to as 気紛れ, kimagure, or ‘whimsical.’ Inky is difficult to predict, because he is the only one of the ghosts that uses a factor other than Pac-Man’s position/orientation when determining his target tile.”
 — Games is maths!

Elaine Kaufman, 1929-2010

“Elaine Kaufman, who became something of a symbol of New York as the salty den mother of Elaine’s, one of Manhattan’s best-known restaurants and a second home for almost half a century to a bevy of writers, actors, athletes and other celebrities, died Friday at Lenox Hill Hospital. She was 81 and lived in Manhattan.

Krampus Comes This Weekend! Beware Sinister Saint Nick Sidekicks

by Robert Lanham

Christmas is nearly upon us and, with all its commercialism and saccharine rituals, it’s all too easy to forget the true meaning of the season. Thankfully, the sanctity of this glorious holiday is still appreciated in parts of Germany and Austria where good, hardworking folk remember that Christmas isn’t merely about the gifts; it’s about dressing up like a cloven-hoofed demon, terrifying children with violent, demonic folklore and drinking 180-proof licorice-flavored liquor until you puke.

For centuries, our central European friends have scared the bejesus out of their children with tales of Krampus, a hairy, seven-foot-tall, horned fiend with a suggestive, Gene Simmons-esque tongue who accompanies Saint Nick on Christmas Eve to beat the hell out of naughty children with whips and branches from a birch tree. Like Santa, Krampus carries a satchel, but instead of filling it with presents, he stuffs it with children who have been especially bratty, before tossing them into a molten pit of flesh-charring destruction. Merry Christmas indeed. In some traditions, Krampus was said to make children perform a song or a dance. Those who failed to impress, well, their fate was sealed. Get in the bag! Some believe the myth of Krampus predates Christianity and that families would gather together in one room on the night of his visit, terrified that their children were about to be taken away.

Likely one of the more disturbing creatures you’ll come across in European mythology, Krampus is the water-boarding bad-cop to Santa’s gift-giving good-cop. The Beelzebub to his saint. And assuredly a hell of a deterrent to bad behavior.

Li’l Timmy: But Daddy, I want the new iPad. Why can’t I have it?! Sally’s parents said Santa is going to give her one. I HATE you Daddy. HATE you.
Li’l Timmy’s Father: Son, be quiet. Remember, Krampus can hear you.
Li’l Timmy: [becomes silent, stares at shoes]

Krampus (and “krampus” means “claw”) even has his own holiday referred to as Krampusnacht, The Night of Krampus. In many parts of central Europe, men assemble in pubs and town centers on December 5th dressed as the ungodly beast, flailing with whips and branches those unfortunate enough to pass by. In Schladming, Austria there’s an annual Krampus Karnaval where thousands of drunk, branch-waving men gather adorned in masks and sheep skins in honor of Kris Kringle’s masochistic sidekick.

Reportedly, it’s kind of like Mardi Gras only with young women being terrorized by goat-horned demons instead of Girls Gone Wild mogul Joe Francis.

In less politically correct times, the drunken Krampuses (Krampi?) would travel door to door shouting and banging cowbells. Pushing their way into the homes of townspeople, they would whip local children with branches and refuse to leave until they were appeased with booze. Of course, things still occasionally do get out of hand. Last year in Austria, someone dressed as a Krampus put a thirteen year old in the hospital after choking him, beating him with a stick and ramming his head into a wall.

Though since forgotten, the Krampus myth made its way to America’s sanitized shores in the 1800s, when Germans began importing holiday postcards bearing the image of the supernatural beast. Predictably, some were not amused:

Opinion makers in the American upper classes… were dismayed by this invasion of wild foreign characters and the equally wild festivities they provoked, where crowds of costumed drunkards would break up church services and invade homes, demanding alms and hospitality. In a campaign to domesticate the holiday, intellectuals in the former Dutch colony of New York championed Sinterklaas, the benign Dutch gift giver. Starting with an appearance in Washington Irving’s History of New York in 1809, his wholesome image was refined by a generation of writers into the Santa Claus we recognize today.

By the time the U.S. entered World War I, the Krampus myth had begun to lose even more steam.

When the U.S. entered the First World War in 1917 the import of German holiday cards came to an abrupt stop. The enigmatic European gift givers, the alternative Santas and the sinister sidekicks all disappeared. Styles of child rearing had changed too and modern parents disowned the dark, punitive gift-giver tradition that had fuelled holiday nightmares for so many generations. The jolly fat fellow in red had won the marketing battle and banished the whip-wielding demon.

Not surprisingly, different regions have their own variations on the Krampus myth, and in many cases sinister Santa sidekick traditions of their own. In northern Germany, Santa has a fur-covered sidekick named Belsnickel who, if you’re naughty, will fill your stocking with coal, switches and other crap you don’t want like starlight mints. The Netherlands have Zwarte Piet (aka Black Peter) — a servant of Santa who dresses in blackface and fills children’s shoes with candy. Some traditions claim Black Peter’s ebony color comes from the soot in the chimneys he slides down, but older traditions suggested he was a Moor who would kidnap naughty children and drop them off in Spain to punish them. Um, okay. In France, Santa has a buddy named Le Père Fouettard who notoriously slits three children’s throats before making a holiday stew out of them. You can friend him on Facebook! (Incidentally, some have speculated that Le Père Fouettard is the man featured on the cover of “Led Zeppelin IV.”)

And in more contemporary times, there’s Boehner, an orange-faced scalawag who takes control of the House just prior to Christmas, tries to terminate funding for the unemployed and the arts and terrorizes children by taking part in cover-up scandals

But back to Krampus. Clearly, after a century of overly sanitized “It’s a Wonderful Life”-corncob-pipe-dream-sugar-plum fairy tales, there’s never been a better time for a Krampus revival. Some are already doing their best to reinvigorate the myth. Last year, Stephen Colbert tried to enlist Krampus to the front lines on the War on Christmas. And on Sunday, there’s Cramp-us in the East Village, a celebration of Krampusnacht set to the music of the Cramps. But why not take things further? We’re long overdue for a KrampusCon, which honestly sounds much more interesting and fitting than Santacon anyway. And where’s our definitive Krampus gore-porn film? Silent Night, Deadly Night was great, but who wouldn’t prefer watching Krampus, scored to a peppy piano tune by Vince Guaraldi, drop-kick Justin Bieber and the guy with the mohawk from “Glee” into a fiery abyss?

So, in the spirit of restoring a taste of the macabre to the season, join me December 5, and raise a glass of Krampus Imperial Brown Lager in honor of this long forgotten myth. Merry Krampusnacht!

Robert Lanham is the author of the beach-towel classic The Emerald Beach Trilogy, which includes the titles Pre-Coitus, Coitus, and Afterglow. More recent works include The Hipster Handbook and The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right. He is the founder and editor of FREEwilliamsburg.com.