Tag Archive for Christmas

2022 Adult Advent Calendars

2022 Adult Advent CalendarsThere is a sleigh full of adult advent calendars available for the 2022 holiday season. The adult version of these kiddie holiday tradition, include wines and spirits. They variety of spirits from around the world. Here are the best wine and spirits advent calendars that can help you get in the holiday spirit according to the Thillist. Be sure to purchase early, because the best boozy advent calendars sell out quickly.

Namazake Paul 2022 Sake Advent Calendar

Portland, OR online retailer Namazake Paul is offering sake advent calendars. Sake is the national drink of Japan. It is an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting rice.

What’s inside: What is billed as the “only” sake Namazake Paul’s 2022 Sake Advent Calendaradvent calendar carries 23 180ml cups of sake. There is also a full-size bottle to open on Christmas Eve. The package also contains a handbook written by Namazake Paul to get the background on each sake. It also contains a place to add your own tasting notes. The sake advent calendar promises a cup for each day “representing every major style of sake,” including Futsu-shu, Honjozo, Junmai, Ginjo, Daiginjo, Namachozo, Yamahai, Kimoto and Nigori.

Packaging: Each cup is glass with painted art on it. So you’re getting reusable glasses. The outer package is cardboard with wintry designs. Price: $300.

Flaviar’s Whiskies Advent Calendar

NYC- based Flavair, a self-described band of spirits enthusiasts, made the list in 2021. The box includes rare and hard-to-find whiskies from all across the world.

Flaviar’s Whiskies Advent CalendarWhat’s inside: Flaviar’s whiskey advent calendar is one of the most sought-after boxes annually. It usually sells out before it starts shipping. The advent calendar includes rare and hard-to-find whiskies from all across the world. It also includes a tasting guide. Flaviar’s doesn’t reveal where the whiskies are coming from before you crack open the box. It does, however, promise that it includes Scotch, bourbon, and rye varieties, as well as at least one each from Rieger’s Kansas City Whiskey, Keeper’s Heart Irish + American Whiskey, and Akashi Blended Malt.

Packaging: The packaging from Flaviar is annually among the best you’ll find. The box comes with a well-designed tasting guide, a concrete coaster, and a Glencairn tasting glass. Price: $260.

Give Them Beer’s Whiskey Advent Calendar

Beer gift basket website Give Them Beer is offering a whiskey holiday treat. Their advent calendar does not offer the rare whiskey’s available elsewhere, but still seems enjoyable.

Give Them Beer’s Whiskey Advent CalendarWhat’s inside: You’ll get good but not rare drams in tiny bottles here. This advent calendar includes releases from big distilleries like Jameson and Four Roses.

Packaging: Some of the bottles are plastic, some are glass. All are tucked inside a cardboard box with a faux-wood grain design sporting perforated doors on the top. But it’s not out of line with other calendars in this price range or what you get in most beer advent calendars. Price: $140.

Vinebox’s 12 Nights of Wine

If whiskey is not your thing, San Francisco based online monthly subscription service Vinebox offers a red or white wine advent calendar to help ring in the holidays.

Vinebox’s 12 Nights of WineWhat’s inside: Vinebox’s 12 Nights of Wine is a collection of wine samples in thin glass drams. It promises “crisp, bright, and vibrant wines” in its Holi-DAY box, while the ‘Twas the Night box contains “bold, silky, and rich selections.” Each year, Vinebox’s calendar is one of the most stylish options for wine lovers.

Packaging: It’s a beautifully designed box with thin glass bottles with screw-on caps. It has an elevated design that makes it a great gift. If you get it for yourself, you won’t mind having it out on display. Price: $129 for 12, $199 for 24.

 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Clippy Christmas Sweater from Microsoft

Clippy Christmas Sweater from MicrosoftRemember Clippy? Well the annoying animated Microsoft Office virtual assistant is back for the holidays! The paperclip would pop-up at just the wrong time to offer suggestions that were only slightly useful. Microsoft has brought back Clippy in a an ugly Christmas sweater available from the X-Box store for $74.99.

The sweater includes the annoying dialog boxes that would interrupt your work that “helpfully” assisted users if they were typing up a Word document, making a PowerPoint, or working on an Excel Spreadsheet seemingly the exact second you were working on something important.

Windows Ugly Sweater: Clippy Edition

According to The Verge, Clippy first popped into Word document in  offered its assistance from 1997 until 2001. Those were the Windows XP days over 20 years ago. More recently, Clippy has shown up in Microsoft Teams. Clippy has also returned to replace the standard paperclip emoji in Windows 11.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Have a Merry T. rex mas

T.Rex ChristmasMerry Christmas from T. rex. ‘Rex’ an animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex at London’s Natural History Museum is sporting a giant ugly Christmas sweater. His ugly sweater sports a Stegosaurus-inspired snowflake pattern.

Despite what Steven Spielberg tells us T. rex did not have anything to do with the Jurassic period. Tyrannosaurus Rex lived during the Cretaceous period, about 50 million years after the end of the Jurassic. That means they would be used to much higher temperatures than we are today. So it makes sense that a modern T. rex would want a holiday sweater.

Carla Treasure, a buyer and product developer at London’s Natural History Museum, told the BBC they wanted to do something fun to encourage people back after a tough year of COVID lockdowns. Ms. Treasure said, “There is nothing more funny than a jumper fitted for a dinosaur that has the tiniest arms in the world.” She continued, “I think he looks absolutely fabulous …  we really wanted to do something which would generate interest.

Ms. Treasue explained human-sized versions are available at the museum gift shop or online. Proceeds will help to fund the museum’s work. “All the proceeds from the sale of these jumpers goes back to supporting the museum, not only for its pioneering research but also caring for its 80m specimens.

T.rex Ugly Christmas sweater

The Natural History Museum chose British Christmas Jumpers to make the Tyrannosaurus Rex’s ugly Christmas sweater. The UK-based firm was chosen because the T. rex sweater was manufactured using recycled yarn and plastic bottles.

Snahal Patel, director at British Christmas Jumpers, said T. rex’s ugly Christmas sweater was the company’s biggest job. It took staff 100 hours to complete. The jumper is 12 times heavier than a regular sweater.  He said,  “We’ve never done anything like this.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

9 Fun Facts About Christmas Vacation

9 Fun Facts About Christmas Vacation

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation made its debut in movie theaters on December 1, 1989. Christmas Vacation unleashed more Griswold family dysfunction upon the world and created a classic holiday movie. Here are some things you might not know about one of my favorite Christmas comedies.

1. Christmas Vacation is based on a short story

Christmas Vacation is based on the short story, “Christmas ’59,” written by John Hughes for National Lampoon in December 1980. The movie pays tribute to the short when Clark is trapped in the attic and pulls out a box of old home movies, including one labeled “Christmas ’59.”

2. The Christmas Vacation cast was very impressive

Christmas Vacation’s cast is chock-full of seasoned comedy performers, including leads Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo but also featured older stars and early roles for younger actors.

  • Johnny Galecki – Rusty Griswold, went on to star in Roseanne before being cast as co-lead Dr. Leonard Hofstadter in The Big Bang Theory. He earned a Golden Globe nomination for Big Bang Theory.
  • Juliette LewisJuliette Lewis – Audrey, made more movies post Christmas Vacation including Natural Born Killers, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and the 1991 remake of Cape Fear, for which she received a best-supporting actress Oscar nomination.
  • Julia Louis-Dreyfus was the Griswolds’ yuppie neighbor Margo Chester. Soon after Christmas  Vacation, she would debut on “Seinfeld” and the rest is television history.
  • Randy Quaid – Cousin Eddie, earned a best-supporting actor nomination. He was a Saturday Night Live member from 1985 to 1991. He also starred in the Roland Emmerich disaster sci-fi Independence Day.
  • E.G. MarshallE.G. Marshall – Art Smith, played the father to Ellen Griswald. Before his role in the Christmas classic, appeared in 1957’s 12 Angry Men. His TV credits include  The Defenders, The Cosby Show, and Chicago Hope. He died at the age of 84 in 1998.
  • Doris Roberts – Francis Smith (Clark’s Mother-in-law), career began in 1951. Her most notable role is probably as Ray Romano’s outspoken mother, Marie, in Everybody Loves Raymond. She died in 2016 at the age of 90.
  • Diane Ladd – Nora Griswold, the mother to Clark. her career started in the 1950s. Her credits include Gunsmoke, Alice, and The Love Boat and the movie Chinatown and Primary Colors.
  • Mae Questel – Bethany, Clark’s aunt. Her career began in 1930. She was the voice of both Betty Boop and Olive Oyl. She passed away at the age of 89 in January of 1998.

3. Christmas Vacation has ties to another holiday classic

Footage from the Frank Capra classic holiday movie It’s A Wonderful Life appears in the Christmas Vacation. In the scene where the Griswolds are putting up their tree, Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life is on the TV. Christmas Vacation has another fun tie to It’s a Wonderful Life: Frank Capra’s grandson, Frank Capra III, is Christmas Vacation’s assistant director. 

2. Clark Griswold grew up in Samantha Stevens’s house

BewitchedClark’s childhood home is the same house featured on Bewitched as well as The New Gidget. It is part of the Warner Bros. backlot, located on what is known as Blondie Street. And if the home of their snooty neighbors, Todd and Margo, looks familiar, that’s because it’s where Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and his family lived in Lethal Weapon.

9. Clark’s rant was fake

Beverly D’Angelo explained in a 2015 conversation with The Dinner Party Download, that Clark’s rant was scripted.

… this particular scene … was blocked in a way that would allow each of us to have around our necks a piece of rope that was attached to a big cue card. The rant was divided into sections so that he could go all the way through from the beginning to the end without a chance of forgetting his lines … If you watch it, you can see him. His eyes go from character to character as he’s going on in the speech because we’ve got the lines there.

 

8. Ellen Griswold lied to the cops

In the scene where Ellen Griswold apologizes to Mrs. Shirley—the wife of Clark’s boss/Eddie’s kidnapping victim—assuring her that “This is our family’s first kidnapping,” when, it was the second kidnapping that we know of. In the first Vacation film, the Griswolds force Lasky (John Candy), the security guard to open Wally World for them.

6. You can buy your own Dickie

Randy Quaid borrowed many of Cousin Eddie’s mannerisms from a guy he knew growing up in Texas, most notably his tendency toward tongue-clicking. But Eddie’s Dickie? That was an idea from Quaid’s wife. You can buy your own Cousin Eddie dickie at the National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation Collectibles, a website dedicated to all things Christmas Vacation.

5. Roger Ebert did not like Christmas Vacation

Though it has become a bona fide holiday classic, not everyone was a fan of Christmas Vacation. Roger Ebert gave it two stars out of five in his review of the film. Mr. Ebert described the movie as “curious in how close it comes to delivering on its material: Sequence after sequence seems to contain all the necessary material, to be well on the way toward a payoff, and then it somehow doesn’t work.”

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Merry Christmas 2020

Merry Christmas 2020

Merry Christmas 2020

 

 

Stay safe out there!

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.