Dan prefers to think the Nessie does exist, because there’s no proof that it doesn’t.
Here we go again. It seems as though, once again, my opinion is wrong and has been invalidated by our site’s speech-impairing oppressor, the same man who makes up words like “opinionary” for use in his reviews. The opinion in question is my agreeance with the masses that the Christmas season is starting a bit earlier than normal this year. I have presented four facts proving that the department stores, media outlets, and product manufacturers have started promoting Christmas-themed items well before Thanksgiving. I provided dates for numerous events that occurred this year, not some vague concept of a time long ago, yet his rambling review is supposed to have more credibility than mine, just because it came more recently? I don’t see how this can fly. Sure, my facts may be wrong, and if presented with proper evedence that shows Santa coming to the mall before November 19th in any past years, or The Grinch airing before November 13th in the past, well then I am all about offering a retraction statement. Unfortunately for my detractors, I have very high doubts about said evidence’s existence. The reality is that Walmart has gone on record stating that their campaign, which started on November 1st this year was the earliest it’s ever been. Toys R US sent their first catalogue out the day after Halloween. Looking at the internet, it seems that either most of the evidence seems to agree with me, or it’s just more popular to agree with my point of view, as I’ve found numerous articles from places like the Chicago Tribune, one of Upstate New York’s top news outlets, and Dan’s favorite, USA Today. Of course, there are stores who are still sticking to the more traditional Thanksgiving-time start to the season, but if just two of those stores would start earlier, I would still be justified in saying that some stores are pushing Christmas merchandise earlier.
I suppose I’m getting away from Dan’s review, so let’s look at it, paragraph by paragraph. First of all, the picture caption. It’s said that I hate Christmas. While I actually laughed at the caption, it’s simply not true. In fact, Christmas is probably my favorite holiday, because there’s actually something to do, unlike the boring Thanksgiving, the all-too-saccharine Easter, and the incredibly depressing Valentine’s Day. Not only that, but nothing in my review states that I have any dislike for the holiday.
Next, he states that I have offered no valid negative effects of Christmas coming earlier each year. If I would’ve offered the negatives, I’m sure I would’ve been chastised for taking up valuable space with cliched arguments that one can find anywhere else on the worldwide web. If my implications in the review weren’t enough, I’ll put them explicitly. The continued expansion of the Christmas season has led to a decline in the amount of celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday, and potentially soon-to-be the Halloween holiday. In addition, the purveyors of said trends run the risk of creating a dissatisfaction with the holiday spirit, weeks before the holiday actually arrives, making it all the less enjoyable for us, the consumer, and the people who have to deal with Christmas songs 24/7.
Next, it is stated that I offered no comparison to years before, which is completely inaccurate. I offer that Santa used to come on Thanksgiving, the entire reason the Macy’s Parade exists in the first place. I also offer that in my childhood, I don’t remember Christmas progamming starting until at least after Thanksgiving, as I used to consider the showing of Rudolph and Frosty to be quite early. I then go on to say that it is completely inappropriate for candy to be Christmas-themed before Halloween, mostly because I’m not used to it being sold that early.
After this, he misreads my attempt at satire (in this specific case, exaggerating the start of the Christmas merchandising season to begin in July) as completely serious. In reality, I was searching for a picture of Santa on the beach, but this was the best picture I could find. I in no way actually believe that the Christmas season would ever start before Halloween (there’s too much merchandising to be made in the Halloween holiday that Thanksgiving doesn’t offer, as well as running the risk of completely alienating their consumers), let alone July.
I suppose that by using this thought process, Dan is literally suggesting that I transform myself into some sort of sheep and time travel back to twenty years ago to see that Christmas music was playing on the radio on November 1st (which is not an exaggeration), see the err of my ways, and come begging on my knees for forgiveness for being “wrong”. I don’t pretend that I’m not agreeing with all the other half-wits who haven’t thought this through, but the last time I disagreed with all the sheep who were following each other in agreeance, I was ripped apart anyway.
I’m not averse to Christmas being a season. In fact, it is a season, and always has been in the Church calendar. But that season starts four weeks before Christmas. Even this year, with Christmas falling on a Sunday, and Advent actually starting five weeks before Christmas, the season doesn’t start until November 27th, again, after Thanksgiving. My point was that this is the first year that I’ve seen significant proof that the people who have been harping on this point for years might be right. My disclaimer at the end effictively showed that in order to see if this is true, we would have to wait until a few years from now. Because I did not have the forethought to write down specific dates of things in the past, does that mean that my opinion should be considered wrong and invalidated? I don’t think so.
Dan’s Review of The Myth of Christmas Coming Earlier Every Year gets two stars, mostly because he presented little evidence to prove his case, instead relying on meandering, obscure ideas about the grass being greener on the other side and the probability that old people are wrong simply because they complain a lot and don’t always remember things. I’m not saying that he is wrong, per se, just that it appears as though my evidence greatly outweighs his, thereby lending more credence to my opinion. In addition, for a review that was specifically not supposed to be a review about my review, he spent more time discussing the merits of my ideas, instead of presenting his own case. I may be lashed for speaking out against the upper management, but perhaps this serves to be the last of the unwarranted reviews of other people’s reviews, namely those presented by the Junior Staff.
4 responses to “Dan’s review of The Myth of Christmas Starting Earlier Every Year”
At the risk of demotion from my already figurehead-like position on the Junior Staff…
Nate wins (from a purely scientific view)
It’s really sad that the Junior Staff’s Editor-at-Large will provide solid reviews supported by actual evidence only after the Site’s Upper Management challenges him. That lack of initiative is the type of character flaw which terminally condemns staff members to positions in middle management.
[…] Because the readership has relatively low interest in detailed (or any, really) computer-related stuff, this will probably be one of only a handful of “high-tech” reviews. In the first post I had mentioned reviewing this product (keep in mind this was before Nate and I had really developed some sort of “concept” for the site), so here it is. Also, it can serve as a starting point back into normal reviewing after the Junior Staff had felt it necessary to call my reviewing skills into question. Being that anyone looking for an opinion on this particular monitor can look up highly technical, highly detailed reviews by lots of other websites, I’ll focus on whether or not it was a worthwhile purchase. Any of those other reviews are far more thorough in both methodology and scope, but being that their samples are usually sent by the manufacturer for free, specifically for the task of reviewing, their price/performance discussion is rather superficial as they’ve not spent any of their own money on the product. You probably can’t do this on your monitor. […]
[…] August 11th, 2006 Nate Oh, those kids. Always at it. You guys really shouldn’t’ve. So here we are at the first of what may be a few reviews of our first milestone, 100 reviews. Not only is this the first review of this milestone, but of what could be very many milestones. We here at the Bookshelf like the word “milestone”, and don’t believe in Thesauruses. So here we go, our first hundred in a nutshell. The first actual review happened way back in October of 2005… remember that time before the Steelers won the superbowl, before “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” movie, before Dick Cheny accidentally shot his friend while hunting, and before Bristol, United Kingdom celebrated the 200th birthday of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (actually April 9) by relighting the Clifton Suspension Bridge? Dan’s first review was aimed at complaining about post-game hype surrounding an extremely long baseball game. Of course our readers probably care about boring Astros-Braves baseball games as much as they seemed to care about my terrible review of the dictionary. Even though that picture was good, it was nowhere near the five star quality of this image. I too tried my hand at reviewing food, but it was an utter failure. On the plus side, my review of the letter to the editor is one of my favorites, and my first review actually got eight comments, including this link. The few following that grilled chese review focused mostly on music, my opinion of “Good Night, and Good Luck”, a particular episode of Trading Spouses, and Dan’s opinion of My opinion of “Good Night, and Good Luck”. Dan also said that the Colbert report wouldn’t last, which seems to have been proven false. October seemed to be us finding our footing. November saw Dan’s Cleveland Trifecta, a diatribe against horses, a road that he liked, an episode of “Coach”, and his complaints about how much he aches, now that he’s an old man. I started the month strong with the Beth review, but struggled through the rest of it, with lame reviews like Thursday, a type of tooth”paste” that doesn’t work for me, and an insightful, yet completely unnecessary complaint about my nosebleeds. My FAO Schwarz review kinda made up for them, but the highlight of the month involved Dan and I sparring about how Christmas is coming earlier every year, and something about me being a time-traveling sheep. November didn’t see much improvement over October, but the Christmas stuff was entertaining. December got a bit better, even with a few less reviews. I busted out the old NES games, for a few reviews that I swear are not trying to copy off of XE, another personal favorite, Christmas Cards, Adam’s first review, Dan throwing the hate down on Pitchfork media, and a suprising amount of people commenting on Roger Ebert’s take on video games. The biggest advance in December was the pop-ins, that added added some clarity to our parentheses-obsessed-writing. December was a highly engaging and entertaining month, even with only nine reviews. 2006 rolled around, and January saw Dan get political, review half of a book, not like warm winters a lot. I only contributed three of ten reviews that month, but all three of them were relatively alright, mostly because “Where In Time is Carmen Sandiego”, and “The Simpsons” after season 9 is so easy to complain about. January’s topics fell off a little. February, while being the shortest month, was also a monster for us, as far as number goes. A whopping twenty-one reviews. To be fair, 17 of them came in our envelope-pushing live superbowl reviews, the biggest stunt pulled in the history of reviewing anything and everything on a five star scale. The only other reviews of any substance were my Gauntlet Review of the Beatles albums, and Dan’s digging up of our one-issue underground high-school newspaper. Despite the big stunt, and two good reviews, February was kinda lacking. March just plain sucked. Four reviews total. One by me. Three mega-reviews by Dan. April was slightly better, with another of my top five of my reviews, Legacy of the Wizard. The other four I would give an average of 3 stars to, but since there were only four during the month, that’s going to cancel out the Legacy of the Wizard bonus and take it down a half star. For my money, May was our best month yet. Dan’s contribution was the lengthy three-part TV landscape review. I threw out quality stuff with my Songs for Silverman, and Degree Navigator reviews. The shorter American Dreamz and Davinci Code video game reviews were serviceable, but my immense LOST season 2 review tops everything. June fell off a bit. Four reviews total. Split two and two. Mine were based on a ridiculous news story, and anger at other people for coincidentally coming up with the same ideas as me. Dan tried to put everything into perspective by seeing how well the entire history of human ingenuity and artistry stacked up in the interstellar community, and complained a little about how the national geography of roadways isn’t designed to suit his needs. July was filled with the (I gotta admit my ignorance as to the relevance of this phrase… and wikipedia does nothing to help) Navel Gazing set. I was had for a few minutes by a Jimmy Kimmel hoax, and I thought the critics were a little too harsh on Shayamalan. Despite the mediocre numbers for the month, I’d give it a 3.5 This gives us a per-month average of 3 stars, which isn’t too shabby. In my first ever review, I reviewed the concept of this website. I claimed that we wouldn’t be able to keep it fresh, that we’d run out of ideas, and that we wouldn’t be able to stay somewhat funny at least. I believe my exact quote was “It has the potential to provide hours of entertainment for readers, and shape their lives for years to come. However, the downside is that it could get old real soon, and provide us with nothing but an excuse not to get real jobs.” Well, I think we’ve significantly proven wrong every single point that I just brought up. We have 29 categories, 19 subcategories, and even two sub-sub categories. We’re still writing about reasonably different things, and while we may have slacked on the funny in recent months, we still bring the ‘A’ game on occasion. As far as my quote goes, I’d be willing to bet that we’ve provided maybe a few hours of entertainment for a handful of people, which probably did nothing to shape their lives for even the near fututre. On the upside, it hasn’t gotten old, and we have gotten real-ish jobs. For all of these reasons, I’m willing to up our star rating by half a star, over the average rating of 3. I’ve also realized that my method of calculating the rating might not be the best, so I’m gonna throw in another half star for a final rating of 4 stars out of five. And for those of you playing along at home, yes, this technically is the 100th review and so therefore should be included. This review receives 3 stars for not having much to offer in the way of witty musings, and for having a faulty overall rating method, but for packing so many subjects and links into one review. […]