Toren Atkinson’s Absolute Blog

The very first Christmas-themed commercial I have seen this season made me actually cry “oh my god” out loud. Maybe you’ve seen it: Old grandpa opens his front door and on his porch/stairs is a little plastic snowman and a little plastic dog, side-by-side. The snowman sings some of the lines of ‘jingle bells’ and the dog musically barks the others. Additionally, they both vibrate and make a tinkling sound. The vision fades into a younger ‘mom’ type, who is in a store and daydreaming the whole scenario. At this point, I’m ready for the punchline. I’m ready for the lady to shake it off and buy something cool and extreeeeeeme for grandpa, or the Juicy Fruit nun to come in with the guitar and break it over the knicknack. But no - this santa-ized singing fish wall trophy is actually the product they’re advertising on television, I realize when the Hallmark “Jingle Pals” $12.99 blurb. You really have to see it to believe it.

“US to Canada: S.O.S” - That was how Jeff Curtis signed an email to me today. Poignant. Everyone knows how I feel about Bush so I won’t do a big rant on my blog. Instead I’ll just do a small one:

It’s just completely unbelievable how it doesn’t matter to (51% of the voting) American people what actions their president takes. As long as he waves the flag and has the rhetoric down (and even this seems a bit shakey) - that seems to be good enough. And it’s scary to think what this means for the future, now that the precedent is set. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but it’s just as likely that next time around they could make an even worse choice.

There. Under 100 words.