Christmas day entailed a quiet trip to my cousin's home near Princeton. No blizzard like last year and no confrontations among the family members. We tend to be very polite with one another, restraining all displays of temper for the privacy of our own homes. The worst behavior might include interrupting one another as we discuss some topic of common interest, although even that is rare. Over the years we've discovered the subjects on which we disagree and we stay far afield of those. Neither Caitlin nor my sister attended; both are recovering from the flu. Uneventful drive there and back - I got to use a new set of earphones (which actually fit my oddly shaped ears!) and listen to music from my laptop (since the cable for the iPod has not arrived yet).

Today I will spend copying music onto the laptop in anticipation of loading it onto the iPod. I've already done this once before, having copied a bunch of CDs into the Windows Media Player format. There does not appear to be a way to convert those to a format that iTunes can use. The Mac/PC religious war results in inconvenient fallout. As I looked through my small CD collection, I realized that I only listen to about 20% of it on a regular basis. Most sit dusty and unused on the shelf. Some are from the CD-of-the-month club I belong to at WXPN and are just not to my tastes. Some are by musicians whose work I enjoy on one specific CD, but have found all other CDs disappointing (Bruce Cockburn falls into that category). And others are those that appealed to me once but have faded over time.

Books: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. Irreverent in the extreme, sure to offend many who do not look beyond the title (in the dedication Christopher Moore writes, "If you are here to be offended, may your ire rise and your blood boil." I've read one of his other books - The Island of the Sequined Love Nun - and found it very enjoyable. He writes with biting wit and great attention to detail. While the humor is not as broad as Terry Pratchett, it is similar to the book Good Omens by the team of Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. As Bill Fitzhugh, another writer notes about this book which focuses on Christ's early years, "It's as believable as the rest of the story."

Movies:
The Office. A snickeringly funny look at the functioning of the office of a British paper company, populated by the types everyone who has ever worked in an office setting has run into - the smug, smarmy manager, the officious team leader, the snitch. The second series is apparently airing now on BBC America, which I would watch, if I knew how to find that channel on my non-intuitive cable guide.

Storytelling. I almost gave up on this about 20 minutes into it, but was too tired to even move my hand to the remote. The first story called "Fiction" was an obnoxious piece of pretentious crap that took a thin look at a college writing class. The second, unrelated piece was a more interesting story of a documentary being made about a high school student and his family. Sort of Donnie Darko without the wierd time travel element.