Sunday Morning Links pt. 14

I remember when Christmas was fun.

I would watch news reports about how to deal with Holiday stress, listen to adults as they listed the many things about the Holidays that bothered them and scoff at their lack of spirit! How could you possibly not like Christmas? I get to stay in my pajamas all day, eat a hearty breakfast and open presents all day!

Boy do I owe those people (that I just made up for the purpose of this blog) an apology!

Christmas is stressful as a mofo (are you as shocked as I am that "mofo" is recognized as a word by Blogger?)! You have to find presents, make travel arrangements and rework your whole schedule to fit around this behemoth of a holiday. The whole country may shut down at 12:00 AM, December 25th but for the preceding two weeks there is almost two much preparation to manuever around.

Take the blog you are currently reading as an example. Have all 2.3 of my regualr readers been noticing a signifcant drop in quality in my posts? Yes? Well, that is stress, mofos, stress (as long as "mofo" is a word, I am running with it). And not just stress but an increased work schedule. I have been preparing for a busy week of shopping followed by a week in Internet-less DuBois Pennsylvania for Christmas festivities at my grandmother's house. As a result, I have been writing two, maybe three full-length blogs a day. I don't mean to attribute my obvious lack of rhetorical talent to a busy writing schedule, but I sure know it isn't helping.

And then there's the shopping itself. Shopping for my brother is easy enough. Does it look shiny? Is it a completely useless commodity? Would I want it? If the answer is "yes" to all three, then he gets it. Mom and dad are no sweat either; parents are pretty easy when it comes to gifts. It is all about the effort, which for me is actually mustering up the energy and motivationto get them something. But then there's my girlfriend.

Don't get me wrong, shawty (again, Blogger is compeltely fine with this word) does not have expensive tastes and is not particularly pretty. She is just a good gift-giver. This means that I have to polish my skills too so I don't look like a jackass come Christmastime. I spent the better part of Tuesday driving to every story in a 40-mile radius, but try as I might I could just not find anything close to being good enough. The frustration mounted until I felt like razing whole towns to the ground. I elected not to do anything quite so drastic, but believe you-me, there was a hell of a lot of pillow-punching that day (why does pillow-punching sound so dirty?)

Anyway, Christmas sucks. Here are the Sunday Morning (Mofo) Links. 

- I know I promised to curb the amount of baseball talk on this blog. That such nonsense is reserved for my excellent and informative Bojay's Baseball Blog (seriously: read it. I am not above begging). But this was just too good to pass up. On his ESPN Uni Watch blog, Paul Lukas ponders if CC Sabathia's Yankees' jersey will feature the most pinstripes ever due to his substantial girth.

- Holy crap! Winnie from Wonder Years is still around! And she is still strangely appealing.

- The Onion makes me giggle endlessy and this may be my favorite headline in a while.

- File this under: Only in Northeast Ohio. Looks some some teenager made the reasonable decision to kill his parents because they wouldn't let him play Halo 3.

- Poor little Adolf Hitler Campbell. The mean supermarket in his New Jersey town won't inscribe a name on a cake for his 3rd birthday.

Hope that was as good for you as it was for me. I am going to go wrap presents now. 

Peace.