¡Feliz Navidad!

(First an apology. My illustrations using YouTube videos have ads that you have to endure for a few seconds before you can dismiss them. YouTube needs to make money, after all.)

Years ago I was bewildered by the popularity of José Feliciano's Christmas tune "Feliz Navidad." It has a catchy tune and two lines that are repeated over and over and over.

A web site that gives us songs' lyrics gives us this:

Feliz Navidad

Feliz Navidad

Feliz Navidad

Prospero Año y Felicidad.

Feliz Navidad

Feliz Navidad

Feliz Navidad

Prospero Año y Felicidad.

I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas

I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas

I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas

From the bottom of my heart.

[Repeats]

"Repeats" is putting it mildly. 

The song got a lot of airplay when it was new. I didn't really like it then but the rest of the world seemed to love it. It came back year after year. I was hoping the interest in the song would wane and we could get back to more complex Christmas tunes.

I made a game of my bewilderment. I deemed a successful Christmas season as one when I didn't hear that tune played even once. It is difficult to avoid. Shopping malls play Christmas carols and you can't avoid shopping malls at Christmastime.

Its popularity spread...it's not just for shopping malls anymore. It has invaded classical radio. It can't be avoided. The Three Tenors™ sang a version of it. They livened it up a bit with some extra lines. Plácido gives us the line "I want to wish you a Merry Christmas with lots of presents to make you happy!" It doesn't help. It's a dull song even when given superstar treatment.

Christmas 2012 is not a success. I got to hear a very sappy rendition of it today in the bathroom of the restaurant we had lunch at today. Today is still September.

I don't think I have gone a year without hearing the song since I invented my game. Sigh.

The Sun has risen

Merry Christmas! I hope your day has been full of wonderful surprises!

Ours started out with a nice sunrise.

We got an email last month from Karla Winterowd of Winterowd Fine Art, Santa Fe, suggesting that Jerry and I could do all of our gift shopping at once by giving each other a piece of art that we knew each other would love. We had gotten our Destiny Allison piece from them and had been admiring their glass pieces by Alex Gabriel Bernstein.

So we took her suggestion.

This is what we got.

Red Flash Muse
Alex Gabriel Bernstein

It's very nice. It's being backlit by a little, battery-powered spotlight.

I hope your Christmas was as good as ours!

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

This turtle post is kind of stretch.

Mikey gave me a Gömböc for Christmas.

This is a fascinating piece of metal.

So what is a Gömböc? Well, if you went to the link above, you'd see that it "is the first known homogenous object with one stable and one unstable equilibrium point, thus two equilibria altogether on a horizontal surface. It can be proven that no object with less than two equilibria exists."

So, since it is impossible to keep it balanced on its unstable equilibrium point, it will always wobble to its one stable equilibrium point no matter how you set it down on a smooth, horizontal surface.

Weebles do the same thing but they're not homogeneous. They have a weight inside their plastic bodies. A Gömböc achieves its stability completely through its shape.

So, what does this thing have to do with turtles? Good question.

It turns out that the shape of the Gömböc helps explain how some tortoises get back on their feet after they've been flipped onto their backs.

I made a little movie of my Gömböc finding its stable equilibrium point. It's not YouTube-worthy so here it is in Blogger's own video form.

I edited out a lot of the rocking. It takes a long time to finally come to rest.

We'll get back to more literal representations of turtles next week.

(Thanks, Mikey!)

First Christmas with all five kids

Merry Christmas (plus 45)!

We're up to the seventh carousel of slides.  This has a few pictures of Christmas, 1963.  All five of us are here (but never all together at the same time in any picture).

Carousels 1 through 6 go from August, 1949, to December, 1963.  That averages two years and four months per carousel of 100 slides.  With this volume Jack has become a picture-taking maniac.  We have only two months of our lives here.

Carousel-07

That was some fur coat our grandmother had.  The last picture in the group has her smiling with teeth showing.  She always seems to have a rather grim expression so that one is a nice surprise.

What happened to cousin Danny's eye?

Here is an article from The New Mexican that tells about the plane ride we took.  The caption for the picture was for another family that also took the ride.  I guess they decided after they laid out the page that ours was a more attactive family so they used our picture.  They just didn't get around to rewriting the caption.
We were the first family to fly and there was some difficulty getting things going.  So they gave us a longer ride than the 20 minutes we were supposed to get to make up for our long wait.

MLM: All I want for Christmas

Showing old letters to Santa seems to be a common thing to do this time of the year. I hope seeing a few more doesn't cause too much anguish.

When I was planning this post I was thinking that I would be griping about the process of having to write these letters to Santa that never produced the desired results. I thought that it had been a futile effort but it turns out that I actually did get some of the things I asked for. How about that?

Here is my letter from 1958 that I dictated to Mom.
A look back at the pictures of Christmas, 1958, shows that I did get a train! YAY, SANTA! I don't know if I got the stylish brown jeans.


I had to print my letter for 1960 myself.
I got a Dennis the Menace doll sometime but I don't see him in the 1960 pictures. Let's assume that Santa came through for me that year (and years later for Izzy when she sold the box it came in for a tidy sum on eBay).

But I did have a major disappointment that year. I really wanted the Mr. Machine (you'll notice it's first on my list). It was introduced that year so maybe it was the must-have toy of the year and Mom and Dad just couldn't wrest one from another shopper at the local TG&Y. Or maybe they realized that it had an annoying bell that rang constantly. I saw one a few years ago at a local antique store but it was just too late. Watch this commercial for Mr. Machine on YouTube and you'll understand my disappointment.

In 1965 I got more helpful in my letter. I gave Santa the prices (from the Sears catalog) of all the things I wanted. (Why would Santa need to have prices? He has elves making these things!) I checked off the items I got. I scored three times!
I don't remember the Jr. Chef Mixer (for the fantastic price of $6.66!) but it's got a check mark. I was a junior chef! And I got the Mouse Trap game. Did that finally leave the building in the Crapture after only 42 years? I couldn't remember what the Crazy Clock Game was but thank goodness again for YouTube (and TimeWarp Vintage Toys)! That was a silly toy.

Years later I got some toy slot machines from Edmund Scientifics when I could appreciate them more. They were a good introduction to probability.

I hope Santa brings you much of what you want for Christmas this year. Especially world peace.