HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Dec. 29, 2004 Christmas is another one of those pagan holidays ruined by Christians. Originally, it was a time of year when kids were given toys to keep them occupied, while parents went to orgies and drank too much. It was such a popular holiday that Christian rulers wouldn't dare risk an uprising by banning it. Instead they made up a fictionalized story of how Jesus Christ was born on Christmas. People didn't care whether they were celebrating the winter solstice or the birth of Christ or the anniversary of the day Caesar locked his wife in a sauna and threw away the key: they just wanted to celebrate. Gradually, boring, pious people have managed to frown on the drinking and reduce the frequency of the orgies and wife-swapping, but giving toys to children has grown astronomically. In modern times Christmas has become a commercialized worship of children. Parents ignore their children for three-hundred sixty- four days of the year, but on Christmas they "prove" their love by buying ridiculous amounts of toys for their children. It gets worse every year. My daughter gets more in one Christmas than my two sisters and I got on every single Christmas of our childhoods combined. And I--personally--don't get my daughter anything. My wife, her friends, grandma, aunts, and others more than make up for my nod to Scrooge. The real God of American civilization is money, and my experiences with money-grubbing sellers of the trash everyone buys on Christmas was a source of constant vexation for me beginning with the present my wife and I got each other--a new computer. To avoid litigation I won't use the name of the computer, but I'll just call it a Deal as in dude your getting a Deal. I found out how they sell it so cheap. They farm their technical support out to India. I had problems with the printer immediately. The second thing I tried to print caused a paper jam. Just a single piece of paper caused the jam. The owner's manual said to firmly pull paper out. I did, and it tore off a piece leaving the jam in place. I finally found a knife long enough to scrape the paper free. My troubles weren't over. I had technical problems so I called Deal's technical support. After a fourty-five minute wait, I talked to a man with a heavy Indian accent who I could barely understand. Because my trouble was printer- related (though it was a problem with the computer) he couldn't help me so he transferred me to another man with a thick Indian accent who I could barely understand. He couldn't help either. Visions of strangling Deal corporate executives danced into my head. Strike One. The toy my daughter wanted to play with the most didn't work. To avoid litigation I won't use the name of the company, but I'll call them Junko. The toy was simple. Just plug-n-play as in plug into the television and play games like Ms. Pacman. Only, it wasn't that simple. I have three different kinds of televisions. The plug-n- play would't plug and play on any of them. The piece of junk made by Junko didn't work. It's probably made in some Chinese sweatshop. Strike Two. For Christmas dinner my sister sent me a turduckhen. It's a boneless turkey wrapped around a boneless duck wrapped around a boneless hen and stuffed with dirty rice and cornbread dressing. To avoid litigation I won't use the real name of the company that makes it. I'll refer to it as the Frog-Market. The Frog- Market's worship of the dollar was evident in how they made the turduckhen. The left out the duck entirely and substituted extra dirty rice which is much cheaper because it's made out of chicken entrails rather than duck meat. The cheapskate, two-bit thieves figure no one would complain. It's a gift and one wouldn't know they were being cheated until they cut the bird open and find no duck. By then it's too late to prepare another Christmas dinner and return the defective turduckhen. Well, I can't return it, but they will never hear the end of it from me. They cheated the wrong person. Strike Three. Christmas Strikes Out. ------------ About the author Mark Gelbart: My book, Talk Radio, is a black comedy about a radio talk show host who gets kidnapped and psychologically tortured by a loser. It will be published by Publish America within the next year. Email: agelbart@aol.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
