My dad was really fond of saying you could never trust a man that didn't have a firm handshake, and wouldn't look you in the eye. I've met several d-bags over the years that would lie to your face while giving a firm handshake.

We have seen at least 7 so far. (Hey it gets the wife in the mood....to make me hot chocolate

A Magical Christmas Village - watchable
Lights, Camera, Christmas! - watchable
In Merry Measure - above average
The Royal Nanny - nanny is undercover agent for royalty-I liked it more than the wife.
Three Wisemen and a Baby-Above average. Think 3 Men and a Baby at Christmas time.
A Tale of Two Christmases - watchable
Haul Out the Holly - fast paced comedy and my favorite so far.

https://www.hallmarkchannel.com/chr...oOxDbca6BvAaApBgEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds#slide-0

The director Rob Reiner has said that an upcoming sequel to his 1984 documentary parody “This Is Spinal Tap” is scheduled to begin shooting in late February and will feature Paul McCartney, Elton John and Garth Brooks, among other stars.
“Spinal Tap” satirized a bungled tour by a fictitious British heavy-metal band of that name, as well as the process of documenting it. The film, which was mostly improvised, was inspired by “The Last Waltz,” a Martin Scorsese documentary about the rock group the Band.
Plans for “Spinal Tap II” were first announced last year. The entertainment news outlet Deadline reported at the time that the members of the fictitious band — the actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer — would all return for the sequel. Over the years, the three have played real-life concerts as their Spinal Tap characters.
Reiner announced new details about the “Spinal Tap” sequel during an episode of a podcast hosted by the comedian Richard Herring that was released on Monday. The film had initially been scheduled for release in 2024, but that was before strikes that disrupted filming schedules in Hollywood. No updated release date has been announced, according to Variety.
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Without elaborating, Reiner said that there would also be a few other surprise appearances in the film.

For most of the podcast episode on Monday, Herring and Reiner mostly talked about Reiner’s new podcast, “Who Killed JFK?” But they also discussed the original “Spinal Tap” movie, his directorial debut, which Herring said was his favorite film of all time.
Asked if he regretted anything about what was and wasn’t in the 1984 film, Reiner said no. And did he anticipate how influential it would prove to be? Also no.
“When we first previewed it, we previewed it in a theater in Dallas, Texas, and people … they didn’t know what the heck they were looking at,” Reiner said.
“They came up to me afterward and said, ‘I don’t understand. Why would you make a movie about a band that nobody’s ever heard of? And they’re so bad! Why would you do that?’” Reiner recalled. “They said, ‘You should make a movie about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.’”

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“I said, ‘Well, it’s a satire,’” Reiner said on the podcast. “I tried to explain, you know. But over the years, people got it, and they started to like it.”
Reiner’s comments on Herring’s podcast were reported earlier by the music magazine NME and other outlets.

Is laying the smack down on his republican colleagues.

how soldiers in war can kill so many and watch horrific acts then come back home and lead perfectly normal lives. How can they turn that on then off again?

Anyone do it?

My biggest regret in life is not learning an instrument despite loving music. I have more free time these days as my kids are young adults now and I’m thinking of maybe trying guitar lessons.

The Monkees weren’t exactly the poster children of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 1960s, but the pop-rock band was still the subject of an FBI file. In it, an agent reported seeing “subliminal messages” on a screen at one of their concerts, depicting racial-equality protests and “anti-U.S. messages on the war in Vietnam.”


That heavily redacted file from 1967 was declassified about a decade ago. But now, the last surviving member of the American rock group, Micky Dolenz, wants to know more. On Tuesday, Dolenz, 77, sued the Justice Department to release information the FBI gathered on the band and its members from that time period.
“If the documents still exist, I fully expect that we will learn more about what prompted the FBI to target the Monkees or those around them,” attorney Mark Zaid, who is representing Dolenz, told The Washington Post.






The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post about Dolenz’s lawsuit, which was first reported by Rolling Stone.
The Monkees were put together in 1966 by television producers for a sitcom that ran for two seasons. Their style largely mimicked British-invasion bands likes the Beatles, and the Monkees put out numerous hits, including “I’m a Believer” and “Last Train to Clarksville.” The band broke up in 1970.
In the 1960s, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI infamously surveilled and harassed civil rights and counterculture figures, as The Post and other news outlets revealed at the time. That surveillance sometimes centered on pop-culture icons who spoke out against the Vietnam War, like John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix.

The Monkees were also caught up in the government’s surveillance. In a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, Dolenz said that his band’s 1966 hit “Last Train to Clarksville” was an antiwar song about a man going to an Army base and not knowing when he’d return to his girlfriend. But exactly what caught the FBI’s attention about the band — aside from what the agent called “left-wing” images during the 1967 concert — is unclear.










Much of the seven-page memo released by the agency is redacted, though Zaid told The Post it’s possible other files exist based on what’s shown on the declassified document.
“It’s pretty obvious that there are other linked files,” he said. “Now, it may not be directly on the Monkees — it could be peripheral — but these files are connected to other files.”

It was Zaid who suggested that Dolenz, whom he met through a mutual friend in April, demand more information about his band’s FBI’s files, he told The Post. The Washington-based attorney has represented government whistleblowers, including the one who filed the complaint that ultimately set off President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial.
But the 55-year-old lawyer has a personal interest in the Monkees case. When he was a kid, his babysitter from across the street gave him all of her Monkees albums, and when the band went on its reunion tour in 1986, Zaid was there. He saw them live about eight more times, he told The Post.










“I mean, literally, this is fun for me,” Zaid, who is working on the case pro bono, said of filing the lawsuit for the FBI files.

With Zaid’s help, Dolenz filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents with the FBI in June. He requested the agency review the redacted document and provide other possible files relating to the band and its members, according to the lawsuit.
The government has 20 business days to respond to FOIA requests, barring “unusual circumstances.” Dolenz has so far only received acknowledgments of his requests, the lawsuit says.
“Any window into what the FBI was up to can lead to the opening of another window,” Zaid said. “That’s the beauty of gaining access to these types of files — because there are little nuggets and pieces within them that can lead to a bigger picture in understanding what was going on within the FBI at the time.”

He's on his morning show, he's on the NFL Thursday Night show...

When does this man get any sleep?

No, this isn't about whether it is or not, but why it has to be an annual topic of conversation? Why is this funny or edgy? Same memes posted year after year, I just don't understand the fascination of this. What am I missing?

Do you keep a lot of clutter?


A confession, first: I love clutter.

The horizontal surfaces in my family room are covered with newspapers, magazines, books I’ve started, books I intend to read, books I want to read but never will, erasable pens, a sweatshirt or two, a soccer ball, a bucket of toy cars, and wayward Legos that gouge my stockinged feet. In addition to a computer, two telephones, and a TV remote, my desk at home is strewn with notebooks, folders, loose papers, birchbark, a modem, scraps of paper with notes to myself, photos of my wife and kids, flash drives, nail clippers, pens, coins, a stapler, a thesaurus, shopping receipts, a hand-grip strengthener, a blood-pressure cuff, two- and three-dimensional likenesses of Abraham Lincoln, four baseballs, three baseball caps, two 1909 baseball cards, two flashlights, a pair of AirPods, a miniature boxing glove my father gave me before I can remember, one Pokémon card, and two Tibetan bowls.



Blame my childhood, if you like, in a small suburban house that was tidy verging on sterile, but I find it cozy and comforting to be surrounded by stuff. Possibly I could part with a flashlight, the coins, and the smaller Tibetan bowl, and yet I can’t. It’s not too fanciful to suggest that the clutter on my desk sketches pretty accurately who I am. I do not make the claim that having a messy desk implies being a genius, à la Edison or Einstein or Steve Jobs. Still, I do know where everything is.

Read: The pandemic has made a mockery of minimalism

Our culture has declared war on clutter. Clutter, it seems, is now evidence of a character flaw. Trendy are homes with minimalist furnishings and stark, cold surfaces—places I find, well, cold. I stand against the zeitgeist, believing from personal experience that clutter can contribute to the warmth of hearth and home.

As we stumble to the end of another holiday shopping season, I asked experts in the growing field of decluttering: Doesn’t clutter have an upside?

“No! No!” Joseph R. Ferrari shouted into his cellphone one evening in the run-up to Christmas, outside a store in Chicago where his wife was making an exchange. He is a psychology professor at DePaul University, a specialist in chronic procrastination, who co-authored a paper called “Having Less,” which the Journal of Consumer Affairs recently published. “Do you need 15 pairs of blue pants?” he thundered. In clutter, Ferrari sees only downsides. It causes stress, by impinging on living space. It’s expensive—the average American household, he said, contains $7,000 of unused stuff. It can also put stress on relationships if you’re sharing a home with someone who has a different tolerance for mess.



I laughed.

“You laugh!” he exclaimed.

Can’t knock a psychology professor for being perceptive. I confided that after the annual visits to my sister-in-law’s lovely house, with its gleaming tabletops, my wife is prone to suggest that we cancel our newspaper and magazine subscriptions. I have demurred.


“People rarely take ownership for their own foibles,” Ferrari tsk-tsked. He added, “And listen to your wife.”

I recognize that I’m in the minority here. The claims made for decluttering are lavish indeed. “When you’ve finished putting your house in order, your life will change dramatically … You’ll feel your whole world brighten.” This was Marie Kondo’s promise in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, the 2010 book that launched her career—more than 8 million copies sold!—as the decluttering movement’s secular saint. Go through your house, she famously counseled, and keep things only if they “spark joy.” As if anyone should aspire to emulate somebody who recollects in her book: “At school, while other kids were playing dodgeball or skipping, I’d slip away to rearrange the bookshelves in our classroom.”

Several more books and two Netflix series later, Kondo has succeeded in commercializing a movement whose underlying philosophy is anti-commercialism. Take a look at her website. “This holiday season,” it suggests, “gift everyone on your list sustainable, multi-functional storage that sparks joy no matter where or how they use it.” Buy the “Joy Is Sustainable Gift Set” for $79.99 or four interest-free payments of $19.99. Or cedar mothballs (15 for $8) or a “Small & Joyful Flower Vase” ($32) or a Stonewashed Linen Pajama Pant Set in Smoke Pink ($199) or a Copper Birdhouse ($220)—472 separate items in all.


Read: Marie Kondo goes full Goop

Kondo launched not only an entrepreneurial empire but also an ecosystem. Decluttering has become a robust business, estimated to be worth about $20 billion a year. (That’s a third of the size of the global market for bourbon.) A Google search for decluttering services near me gets three hits, including Compassionate Decluttering and Mindful Decluttering & Organizing. The Institute for Challenging Disorganization—I kid you not—is a nonprofit group for professional home organizers based in Larchmont, New York, that, according to its website, has a staff of 11. It publishes a Clutter Quality of Life Scale as well as a Clutter-Hoarding Scale, which distinguishes between mere clutter and true hoarding, a condition now classified as a psychiatric disorder.

Ferrari, the psychology professor, sums up a big difference: Hoarding is vertical, involving numerous piles of similar things, while clutter is horizontal, describing my desktop. The conflating of the two in the popular mind has not only made decluttering more popular but also given clutter what Caroline Rogers calls “a really sad press—absolutely undeserved.” As a professional home organizer in England, she often meets new clients who describe themselves as hoarders—but aren’t—and are ashamed to let their neighbors know what she’s up to.

Clutter-shaming—that’s what I’m against. And I’m pleased to report that I’ve found evidence of my heresy even among the declutterers. What is clutter, after all? Both sides agree that the epithet is subjective, that clutter is in the eye of the beholder.

Rogers, for one, thinks along these lines. In her master’s opus in applied positive psychology from the University of East London, she measures clutter not by the volume of stuff but by the owner’s feelings about it. Serene about your clutter? Then there’s no problem. “Decluttering promotes well-being,” she told me via Zoom, but she isn’t opposed to clutter. “What I’m for is for people to live in a home that feels like them.”



Thank you!

Another expert I contacted was Catherine Roster, a specialist in consumer psychology at the University of New Mexico’s Anderson School of Management and the lead author of a paper called “The Dark Side of Home,” published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 2016. When people accumulate material things in hope of creating a comfortable home, the report laments, they “sometimes … fail to achieve the desired effect.”

Read: What do early KonMari adopters’ homes look like now?

Meaning that sometimes their efforts succeed? Can mild clutter be beneficial to a person’s well-being?

“YES,” Roster replied in an email. “However, it is important to note that this may only be true of people who have mild or ‘normal’ issues with clutter.” I feel seen.

I have a suspicion that even Marie Kondo might be okay with the state of my desk. I wandered around her website and found, below her statements of philosophy, a declaration that she isn’t a minimalist: “Minimalism advocates living with less; the KonMari Method™ encourages living among items you truly cherish.” And I do.