Holiday with my Left wing family and friends----------

As I’ve related here before, my family and friends are composed mostly of Left to a few hard Left with only four of us Right Wing fascist pigs in the group of forty or so. Political topics have been banned at these gatherings since my son patriotically threatened his hard Left uncle last year and refused to show up this year as a result, which hurt his left wing feminist mother to her heart. So???

Posted on the refrigerator was an anti-God newspaper article from somewhere. And there was one remark made in a conversation regarding Bush, but other than that the conversations remained largely neutral. However a lot of the remarks made at the two parties indicated that many were upset by the anti-Christmas tone of the Holidays, even among a few in the atheist Left. Quite a few had refused to shop at Federated Stores—I tore up my Bloomingdale’s charge card and sent it back—and I was surprised at the almost uniform anger at the schools for banning Christmas. In fact when we sat around singing Christmas songs some remarks were made that the children would be expelled if they sang them at school. I take this to be an indicator that the anti-Christmas movement may be dead, or at least ready to be killed if we all rally to kill it.

I also got the feeling that most have recovered from the Republican victory and are moving on without benefit of therapy and aren’t storing ammunition in their cars just in case. I did have a few private talks with close friends who honestly fear a theocratic take-over of the government. Nobody is afraid of terrorists or Muslims. The other topic that surprised me was that many of the wealthy, all of whom own at least one of the two ton SUVs, thought that conservation had to be done and had only bought new SUVs because the tax code punishes those who “step down” in car price (all deduct vehicles on their taxes); one had purchased a BMW SUV that he doesn’t even like because he had to step up in price. I think this means that a lot of people are ready to downsize, something that is showing up in resale values for SUVs.

Surprising to me was the number of people who have seen quite a few movies since election. People didn’t like the movies they saw other than Neverland and “Riding Giants”, a monster surfing movie that had been seen by most of the young children and their parents. “Million Dollar Baby” has only been in wide release for two days so no one had seen it. A doctor had been stuck somewhere for four hours and saw Alexander and really liked it while acknowledging that he was one of only two people in the theater, knew the story was a fake, but was so intrigued he is going to buy a book about him. The ones who saw “Sideways” hated it, ditto for the one or two who saw “Ray.” Everybody “heard” Closer was awful and surprisingly, had also no intention of seeing “Eternal Sunshine etc.” or Kinsey. All wanted to see “Phantom” and most thought they’d catch “Aviator.”

Other than the above, politics stayed out other than their tastes in movies. Oh, and “Desperate Housewives?” All the men work so staying up late isn’t an option and I didn’t hear the women talk about it. A big movie because there is nothing that parents can take their kids to see is the critically slammed Jim Carey flick LEMONY SNICKET'S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS, a movie in which Jim Carey and Merryl Streep have been branded as “bad” as have both writer and producer. Reviews are “D” but the votes will be in the money collected. The bad news is that the movie cost $190 mil including marketing and it has barely grossed $70mil so far. Don’t kid yourselves by the reports of huge box office. The costs of the failures will run into the billion dollar range. Don’t invest in these companies.

Football was a big topic at the parties; three UCLA grads were outraged by the loss to Wyoming the night before, the USC grads were slightly high on the Trojans beating Oklahoma but a guy who was willing to bet $150 on Oklahoma straight up had no takers, and all were pissed that CAL wasn’t in the Rose Bowl against Texas. No SoCal local is interested in the Rose Bowl and if Texas didn’t travel well attendance would be a serious problem. Anyway, this is still the USA where people other than hard core lefties seem to care more about football and movies than they do about politics.

And, and, gasp....for the first time in 50 years we are going to have rain for the Rose Bowl. It's an El Nino year. Last rain was Rose Bowl of 1955.