Yes, I’ve been neglecting the old blather blog here through the holidays. My excuse? Well, it’s certainly not because I’ve been covered up with work. On the contrary, it’s been decades since I’ve had less going on. Things work wise are s – l – o – w. I mean slower than Joe Biden on NyQuil.

Nor is it because I’ve been doing lots of holiday feasting. Not only have I not gained a couple of pounds through the holidays as in past years, I’ve actually lost about 12 pounds since before Thanksgiving. My secret? I’ll let you know after I’ve lost another 12 or 15 . . . or 20.

We had the first white Christmas this area has seen in more than 80 years. Of course, this added an appropriate finishing touch to all the other charm and wonder that Mrs. Blather always brings to Christmas at our house. It’s amazing how much light and cheer she can create, even in the leanest and sternest of times.

On Christmas morning, our girls–Female Offspring Units 1, 2 and 3–gave us one of the greatest gifts we’ve ever received. In our stockings the wife and I each found three rolled up pieces of paper secured with ribbon. On them, the girls had handwritten long, sweet notes expressing admiration and gratitude. Those notes are now filed away among my most precious documents.

Long time readers will recall that I spent the opening days of 2009 on walkabout in Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle. It was a long-overdue and badly needed few days of quiet, reading, prayer, hiking, stargazing, introspection, and personal inventory taking.

One of the most jarring yet beneficial aspects of the retreat was the complete cut off from all media noise. Until then, I hadn’t realized how I tend to spend every waking hour in a broadband media cocoon. The silence was good. I needed the silence. So I’ve scheduled another retreat for next week.

This time I’m off to the Hill Country of central Texas, northwest of San Antonio and southwest of Austin. Through the power of the internets, I found someone with a solitary cabin to rent a few miles outside of Utopia, Texas. From my cabin, it’s a short drive to two great hiking spots. On my first full day, I plan to hike Lost Maples Natural Area and the next day explore some of the trails at Garner State Park.

As last year, Mrs. Blather expressed some concern about me hiking steep canyon trails alone and in unfamiliar terrain. I reassured her by reminding her of all the Survivor Man episodes I’ve watched and therefore know how to build a fire using nothing but the power of my thoughts and know which grubs and slugs make the best eating.

These assurances didn’t seem to produce the level of comfort in her I had anticipated.

My hope is to come away with some fresh vision and a renewed sense of just what it is God wants to do with the gifts and desires He has deposited in me. You see, in a sense I’ve been hiking unfamiliar terrain for some time now. Having turned 50 a few weeks ago, I find myself in circumstances I’d never dreamed I’d be in at this stage of life. Frankly, I’d hoped for better, more comfortable times. But don’t we all.

It’s not just us, of course. For almost everyone I know, 2009 was tough. But for me, I’m leading my wonderful family up a new, unfamiliar trail.

I’ll let you know what we find around the bend.

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)

I seem to have missed this when it made the rounds last Christmas. Heard it on a Christmas station today and loved it. Check it out, particularly the end of the song when it morphs into Toto’s “Africa.”

A friend of the helpful folks over at the American Enterprise Institute went to the considerable trouble of classifying the backgrounds of each past president’s cabinet, going back 100 years. The following graph shows, for each president, what percentage of his cabinet had private sector work experience before entering the cabinet.

In other words, what percentage of the folks surrounding the president have ever had a real job. Behold:

If this research is accurate, about 93% of the folks advising President Obama and running executive branch departments on his behalf have never held a meaningful job outside of government or academia. Is it any wonder this administration seems so utterly clueless about and dismissive of businesses and business owners?

From the AP newswire:

BRUSSELS – A mother says her son has emerged from what doctors thought was a vegetative state to say he was fully conscious for 23 years but could not respond because he was paralyzed.
Rom Houben had a car crash in 1983 and doctors thought he had sunk into an apparent coma. Still, his family continued to believe their son was conscious and had sought further medical advice.
Dr. Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse said Houben’s mother finally met Belgian expert Steven Laureys, who realized that the medical diagnosis for her son was wrong. Laureys then taught Houben how to communicate through a special keyboard.

Makes you wonder how many people who have been declared to be in a “persistent vegetative state” actually overheard discussions of removing them from food and water but were helpless to say, “Hey! I’m still here!”

Horrifying to contemplate.