And of course you were going to take that left, too. Man, I'm telling you, I was about to light you the fuck up -- get on your ass, turn on my high beams, honk my horn, hound the shit out of you, and if you wanted to step out of your car and try something, I would have loved to throw down. But ... I had a family vacation to get to later that week, and anything that would have prevented me from seeing my sister graduate would be my fault. You're not worth that much trouble. I can only console myself by guessing, with reasonable certainty, that you're stuck in Minnesota where, right now, it's (checks Weather app on phone) -5 and it feels like -21. Meanwhile, for the past two weeks, I've been (for the most part) living in paradise, where other people besides me are paying for most of what I see and what I eat. It's 72 here at a quarter to 1 in the morning. We don't have a wind chill, we have a heat index; it feels like 74. And despite getting emasculated by My Fucking Mother (theme!), I think you'd be so fucking jealous of where I'm at right now. You do you, asshole.
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Alright, alright. Where is here? Might as well tell you; here is the Big Island of Hawai'i. I've been in the state of Hawai'i for about the past two weeks now. Started off in Honolulu, went to the Big Island, go back to Honolulu in a couple days, then fly back shortly after that. There was a snowstorm just before I left followed by a dip in the temperature, then this bomb cyclone happened last week and now Minnesota (along with most of the rest of the mainland) is still recovering from all the snow, the blizzard conditions, and the dangerously cold temps. But it's going to warm up above freezing on Wednesday ... and that's when I get back home. Maybe that'll knock the snowpack down to a manageable level to plow. Hell, I have to make sure the pipes in my house didn't freeze up.
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Oh yes, it's Christmas! Since I am in Hawai'i, I have to break down the Bing Crosby (with help from The Andrews Sisters) classic "Mele Kalikimaka!"
So the deal with this song (and I am totally cribbing this from the song's Wikipedia page) is that in 1949 a stenographer for Hawai'i-born composer R. Alex Anderson (and I assume all of this took place in Honolulu, the city where he was born and died), who was an expert in making Hawaiian-themed songs, wondered aloud why there wasn't a Hawaiian Christmas song. Anderson got to thinking and then to writing and came up with "Mele Kalikimaka," which wasn't a phrase he made but had been in use since at least 1904, when the greeting was found in a Hawaiian-language newspaper called Ka Nupepa Kuokoa. Anderson showed it to Bing Crosby, with whom he played golf. Sometime in the next year, Crosby showed him the recording. The song got onto Crosby's 1955 compilation album Merry Christmas, and it has been a somewhat overlooked classic since.
By the way, the term "mele kalikimaka" appears to be a phonetic (if not literal) translation of "Merry Christmas." The Hawaiian alphabet only has 13 letters, and the two most popular in the English alphabet, "s" and "r," are not in that alphabet. Furthermore, there is a litany of rules one has to follow; every consonant has to be followed by a vowel, and all syllables must end with a vowel. Because of that, someone determined (as appears to be the case in the citing in Ka Nupepa Kuokoa) that if you ... uh, "translate" probably isn't the right word but "derive" might be ... anyway, if you take "Merry Christmas" and you try and say "Merry Christmas" using the Hawaiian alphabet, it was determined that it would become "Mele Kalikimaka." The Wiki has a good step-by-step breakdown on why the "r"'s in "Merry Christmas" are replaced with "l"'s, for example. You have to admit that the syllables in "Mele Kalikimaka" lends itself to being sung, right?
Merry Christmas!
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