How would monks who have taken a vow of silence sing the Hallelujah Chorus? Like this:

One of the joys of watching “A Christmas Story” over and over is the challenge of deciphering Darren McGavin’s made up swear words when he’s doing battle with the furnace in the basement or with a flat tire on the Oldsmobile.

With that in mind, here are some key phrases that may come in handy for you over the holiday or in the next three years of the Obama administration:

“You wart mundane noodle”!

“You schottin’ shiskafaskafa!”

“You snort tunger”!

“Lay munger snacka shacocker”!

“Notafingah”!

“You filthy piston helkin”!

“You whip mauker”!

“Smelly wump wustler”!

“Grab dump fratin’ hosstickel fifer”!

“You bladder pussnot grapah”!

“You dortin’ donobado”!

My thanks to “Rhod” over at “It Don’t Make Sense” for having the gift of interpretation of tongues.

(All this reminds me of one my very first blog posts here more than two-and-a-half years ago: “On Faux Swearing, Gosh Darn It!“)

Jonah Goldberg has a great essay up over at Commentary Magazine about the way Battlestar Galactica deteriorated into liberal nonsense and New Age gobbledygook. Excerpt:

In the two (awful) sequels to The Matrix, a -science-fiction hit about humans being used as a fuel source by a world overtaken by machines, Bush is visually compared to Adolf Hitler. In the Pixar film Wall-E, the “global CEO” of an environmentally devastated Planet Earth apes Bush’s “stay the course” line. In -X-Files: I Want to Believe, Bush and J. Edgar Hoover are paired. On television, Bush hatred or liberal antiwar paranoia suffused the NBC series Law and Order like a metastasizing cancer. The hospital show Grey’s Anatomy, the attorney show Boston Legal, the cop show Bones, and even the mother-daughter show Gilmore Girls included notable and needless instances, some playful and others less so, of what Charles Krauthammer dubbed Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Read the whole thing if, like me, this kind of thing irritates the living daylights out of you.

This long and mildly technical post by Marc Sheppard over at American Thinker is a pretty devastating explanation of just how bad the Clima-quiddick scandal is. As I read it, it occurred to me that we now have a couple of generations of “Postmodern” scientists.

By Postmodern, I mean that these scientists start with a preferred “narrative” (po-mo’s are all about narratives) — in this case, the narrative is: “Modern humans through capitalism and progress are destroying the planet. Both capitalism and progress must be rolled back to save Nature and ourselves.”

Like all good Postmoderns, these scientists ignore or suppress all information that tends to undermine or falsify the preferred narrative while seeking out and highlighting data that validates it. It’s a process tailor made to create a “scientific consensus.”

Nicely done video by Ed Driscoll. Have a look:

The Blather house has exploded with Christmas cheer in the last seven days. Tonight, as the New Orleans Saints thump the Patriots, from my strategic vantage point here in my comfy chair I have 360 degrees of festiveness. Want proof? Okay . . .

With FOU #1 home from Baylor and FOU #2 recently back from the Serengeti, we had five places around the table for the first time in months. It was good and sweet and fun and right.

This was Mrs. Blather’s mom’s first holiday since the passing of Poppa George a few months ago so we went to Oklahoma City on a mission to fill Gramma’s house with joy and baking smells. Or failing that, fill it with snoring and dog smells. Mission accomplished.

On Friday I made the three-hour drive alone down to my folks house in the hills of Southeastern Oklahoma to visit and install a new computer for my Dad. His old one . . . and I mean OLD one (I think it was running Windows 95) had crashed recently and he was missing having email, web weather, and solitaire. Of course now an 80-year old who is battling Alzheimer’s is having to get used to Windows XP. Could be worse though. It could have been Vista.

Dr. Baker joined us for some Thanksgiving leftovers, after which, I headed back to OKC to rejoin my family.

We’re facing a lot of challenges this holiday season, but so is almost every family we know. And we remain rightly and profoundly grateful for daily demonstrations of God’s faithfulness. And how can a guy be glum when he’s surrounded by such cheer and love?

In these days of confused situations.
In these nights of a restless remorse,
When the heart and the soul of the nation,
lay wounded and cold as a corpse.
From the grave of the innocent Adam,
comes a song bringing joy to the sad.
Oh your cry has been heard and the ransom,
has been paid up in full, Be Ye Glad.

Oh, Be Ye Glad, Be Ye Glad,
Every debt that you ever had
Has been paid up in full by the grace of the Lord,
Be Ye Glad,

(M.K. Blanchard)