I’ve written before about the awkward charm of nonparallelism, but I finally decided to wash my hair of the problem. I’d already used this bottle of shampoo in my brother’s guest bathroom a few times before Mindy had me take a closer look at the label.

“Strength and rejuvenate”! This shampoo will not only rejuvenate your hair, IT WILL STRENGTH IT! It will strength the hell out of it.

I mentioned this to my brother, because he didn’t just choose the least-stylishly-blurbed shampoo on the drugstore shelf–he’s also a client! That is, this shampoo is a product he brought home from his old job as an attorney for a (possibly slightly dodgy) nutritional supplement MLM.

“I kept telling them!” he said. “I told them, ‘Legal’s not going to approve this unless you change one word, either to “strengthen” or “rejuvenation.” ‘ But they never did.”

The French and Spanish, amusingly, are correct (i.e., parallel but not literal). The translation department at Dodgy Utah Multilevel Marketing, Inc. (or D.U.M.M.I.) is apparently smarter than the marketing department.

Well, four questions, actually. But they’re about 2009.

It turns out that 2009 is not a prime number, as I briefly wondered if it might be. In fact, one of its several divisors is a perfect square. What is that factor?

While you’re killing time on meaningless stuff (I imagine Friday is going to be a slow work day, if you’re in the office at all): what was the last year that had such a large perfect square as a factor? What will be the next one?

And what year is the next prime number?

Last night, we were playing Quiddler with Mindy’s family. Quiddler is a Scrabble-meets-rummy card game from Set Enterprises, in which players try to form combinations of words from the cards in their hands.

Mindy won handily, which seemed to make her very happy. Or so I gather from the big “I BEAT KEN!” she wrote at the bottom of the score sheet. I added an ‘O’–now it says “I BE A TOKEN!”

There are cards in Quiddler for all 26 letters of the alphabet, as well as five two-letter combinations. There’s a “QU” card, of course, in the fine tradition of Boggle. There are also “IN,” “TH,” and “ER” cards–common English digrams all. But the fifth two-letter card, is mysteriously, “CL.” “CL”?!?! Why not “CH” or “ST” or “RE” or any number of other possibilities?

Anyone want to suggest why the Quiddlerites would choose “CL”? Are they the initials of the game’s inventor? Was he obsessed with clowns or clams or Clorox? I gots to know.

We’re visiting family in Utah this week, which means I spent most of yesterday morning in a series of airport restrooms with Dylan. And speaking of which: this morning, the AP reports that tourism is dying down around the Minneapolis-St. Paul men’s room stall where Larry Craig was busted.

I’ve been through MSP a bunch of times in the last year, and every time I’ve peed there, I’ve idly wondered if I might have been in the very restroom!!! that brought down the deeply closeted Idahoan. But that airport is huge! There are dozens of men’s rooms. And, despite the AP article implying flocks of sex-scandal tourists, I never really saw a commemorative plaque, statue, nothing. Not even a guy selling souvenirs. “Larry Craig has a wide stance and all I got was this dumb T-shirt.”

The airport PR guy in that story seems vaguely relieved, not disappointed, that attention is dying down. Well, I guess that toilet at least got something very few restroom toilets ever achieve: its own moment of, er, glory.

Most parents spend Christmas Eve assembling toys; I spent my Christmas Eve disassembling them. Dylan is a fan of vintage Lego sets, so I’d bought him some off of eBay. But they were pre-built! You don’t want to open Legos without the fun of building them yourself, so I painstakingly took them apart and put the pieces in bags and boxes, and printed out the assembly manuals from the Internet.

Inspired by Kurt Vonnegut, maybe, I daydreamed of a wonderful world where, every winter, I could take my kids’ toys apart, put them in boxes, wrap them, and set them under a tree. On Christmas Eve, a jolly, mythical figure would collect them, put them in his sack, and fly off. He could return them to the North Pole, or Toys ‘R’ Us, or China, or wherever he got them.

This Bizarro Christmas would clear our house out every December. Instead we’re buried under plastic junk, just like every year. The kids seem happy, though.

I forgot a beloved Christmas tradition on yesterday’s list.

Every year, the Nordstrom anchoring our local mall puts up a big lighted wreath-shaped decoration on its exterior, right next to the name of the store. The wreath looks like big letter ‘O’, so Nordstrom is effectively called NORDSTROMO all December.

NORDSTROMO! After the spaceship in Alien, I presume.

But I can’t attach a picture because the mall didn’t put the wreath up this year. Stupid recession.

1. Department store Santas tend to be jolly old men with beards nowadays, not college-aged temps with padded suits.
2. When the actress playing Sally adorably stumbles over her lines in A Charlie Brown Christmas. “All I want is wh . . . what I have coming to me. All I want is my fair share.”
3. The, uh, climactic finish to Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector (now out of print!)
4. Mindy’s eggnog bread pudding.
5. Bill Forsyth’s Comfort and Joy, about a Yuletide war between two Glaswegian ice-cream truck companies. “Hello, folks!”
6. Christmas comics! Carl Barks, Will Eisner, whoever. But stay away from Perry White at the Daily Planet Christmas party, that’s all I know!



7. The way our tree smells the first week after it’s cut.
8. When Jimmy Stewart fires the scheming Mr. Vadas at the end of The Shop Around the Corner.
9. All three versions of “O Come O Come Emmanuel” on Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas EPs
10. Christmas cards from absent friends. Speaking of Christmas cards, can you decode this one just sent over by Greg and Eric Williams?

Merry Christmas, everybody!

And now, presented as a public service: a complete chronology to Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Most of the movie, of course, doesn’t take place during the Christmas season. It’s a series of flashbacks spread over 15 years of the life of the hero, small-town businessman George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart).

Nowadays, the whole movie looks homey and old-fashioned, but audiences in 1946 would have been acutely aware of the little clues showing the passage of time: changing fashions, cars, phones, slang, etc. Nowadays, Sam Wainwright’s flashy car looks as old-timey to us as the Baileys’ jalopy, and historical events like the Spanish flu epidemic, the Great Depression, and World War II all seem to take place in the same murky chronological Bailey-wick, but remember that this was all recent history for 1946 audiences. Consider: a 2008 remake of It’s a Wonderful Life (my treatment is called This Life Is tha Shiznit!), starring Seth Rogen, would start around the time of the first Clinton presidency and move forward through the rise of the Internet, Monica, 9/11, Iraq, and Obama. The angel would be played by Don Cheadle, doing that British accent again. This would be the awesome-est movie ever made.

But I digress. Capra’s version doesn’t often spell out the passage of time, so you have to watch sort of carefully. The movie is broken down into eight different time periods.

First, early spring 1919: 12-year-old George saves his scare-baby brother from drowning in an icy river. The angelic “Joseph” narrator tells us what year we’re seeing, which is later corroborated by Harry’s tombstone in that alternate universe in which Violet Bick is a hooker and Spock has a beard. We can’t be sure of the month, but the river is melting and the next scene, conclusively late spring, is implied to be just “weeks” later.

Next, May/June 1919. George prevents a drunken Mr. Gower from feeding rat poison to sick children and gets the crap beat out of him while his future wife watches. (Wow, this is sort of a dark movie.) He also puts coconut on her ice cream even though she doesn’t want any. Don’t you know where coconuts come from, brainless?

You might be tempted to place this scene on May 3, 1919, which is the date on the telegram telling Mr. Gower that his son has died in the international flu epidemic, then winding down. But there are a couple problems with this: first, the Saturday Evening Post next to the drugstore entrance (the fishing cover, below the Rockwell one) is the May 24 issue. Second, the calendar in the Building & Loan has been turned to June already. Is it really possible Mr. Gower has been drinking for a full month before George discovers the telegram?

We jump to Harry Bailey’s high school graduation, also the night his father dies of a stroke. (A light-hearted Christmas romp!) The banner at the dance reads “Class of 1928″–but do we know the exact date? We do! Bert the cop is holding a newspaper reading “SMITH WINS NOMINATION”–a reference not to Capra’s Mr. Jefferson Smith, but to Al Smith, the Democratic nominee for U.S. president in 1928. He was nominated on June 29, but it’s possible that the Bedford Falls Sentinel didn’t get the headline until the next day. If Harry’s graduation party is Friday night, this is June 29. If it’s a Saturday, it’s the 30th. Let’s call it June 29, 1928, since Uncle Billy and company are shown working in the Building & Loan.

The next scene, in which George cancels college to keep the Building & Loan board from voting with Potter (good one, board!) is set in late September 1928. “Peter Bailey died three months ago,” drawls Potter, though old moss-back George is still wearing a black arm-band. The date is corroborated by the calendar on the wall–you can’t see the month clearly, but the 1st is a Sunday, which definitely makes it September.

Next, Harry comes back from college having decided to weasel out of the Building & Loan in order to work in glamorous Rochester. (Harry may have shot down 15 planes and saved all the men on that transport, but he’s also a bit of a dick.) George is “four years older,” Joseph tells us, and Harry’s graduation was probably in late spring. Based on evidence in the next scene, I’d say this is May 1932.

Why not June? Because George first kisses Mary Hatch (instead of talkin’ her to death) the night of Harry’s homecoming, and they’re getting married in the very next scene–set in mid-June 1932. That was one short courtship! Maybe George Bailey should have lassoed some birth control.

And how do we know the date of the wedding? Because George skips his honeymoon to battle the Great Depression with that whole “Your money’s in Joe’s house” shtick. (We see Herbert Hoover’s picture has replaced Woodrow Wilson’s on the wall of the director’s office.) A newspaper on Eustace Bailey’s desk reads “SENATE DEFEATS BONUS,” a reference to the Bonus Army march of 1932. The Senate blocked the Bonus bill 62-18 on June 18–but that was a Saturday, and the bank and Building & Loan having to stay open until 6 is a plot point, so it can’t be June 18 or 19. The paper must be a couple days old; this is Monday, June 20, 1932.

The next scenes are never precisely dated. George has become a “nursemaid to a bunch of garlic-eaters” by plowing under the city cemetery to build low-income housing (nice!) and Potter tries to buy him off. Potter refers once to a meeting with “Congressman Black”–presumably Loring Black, of New York’s 5th (not Potter’s district, but whatever). This places the events before January 1935, but that’s not much help.

If we go by Potter’s assessment that George is 27 or 28 years old (George doesn’t disagree), it would place these events in 1933 or 1934. It looks warm enough in “Bailey Park” but Sam Wainwright is heading for Florida, so it’s probably spring or autumn, not summer. Mary also tells George she’s pregnant with their oldest son Pete in these scenes, and he will be cast as an eleven-year-old in the 1945 scenes. Best guess: this is spring 1934.

After a World War II montage (1941-1945), the movie ends on Christmas Eve. Wikipedia will tell you this is Christmas Eve 1946–making It’s a Wonderful Life a futuristic science-fiction tale, since it was released on December 20, 1946. No, these scenes are actually December 24, 1945. Harry is getting his World War II decoration from the president, for one thing, and those had mostly petered out by late 1946. Also, The Bells of St. Mary’s, a Christmas 1945 release, is showing at the Bijou. (Maybe it’s a stretch that a film would be showing in Bedford Falls just weeks after its New York premiere, but I don’t think it would still be showing in 1946 either.)

And does the movie end on Christmas Eve? Maybe and maybe not. The clock by the Baileys’ stairs reads 11:46 with less than five minutes to go in the movie…but then when Mr. Partridge gives Zuzu his gold watch two minutes later, it clearly reads five minutes after midnight. I like to think that the movie ends on the stroke of midnight. Maybe that’s why everyone’s singing “Auld Lang Syne”–not a Christmas carol, brainless!

In six (!) years as a parent, I thought I’d seen everything, no matter how horrific. But, today, for the first time, I saw one of my children vigorously eating pizza and throwing up pizza! Exact same orifice! Exact same time! My mind couldn’t quite absorb what it was seeing. Nicely done, Caitlin. Nothing kills your appetite. I don’t think we’re allowed in that café anymore.

My favorite thing about December is Christmas. But my second favorite thing (sorry Hanukkah!) is the Slate.com “Explainer” contest. Columnist Daniel Engber allows readers to choose one crackpot reader question he never got to during the year. Among my favorite queries this year:

“Is it just me, or do all national anthems the world over, no matter how rich and exotic the culture, seem to sound like European marching-band music? Wouldn’t one expect China’s national anthem be more ‘plinky’? Shouldn’t Iraq’s national anthem sound a little more ‘Arab-y’?”

“Who made up the rule that if you wore a shirt all day, went home, and washed it, you can’t wear it the next day?”

“Burma’s dictator has a chestful of bullshit medals. What’s up with that, Explainer?”

Was anyone watching earlier this week when a Price Is Right contestant guessed his Showcase prize down to the exact dollar? First time it’s happened in thirty years. But watch the clip: host Drew Carey seems shockingly blasé about the whole thing.

Instead of “blasé”, read “passive-agressive.” Internet buzz says that a diehard Price Is Right fan was in the crowd, feeding unusually well-informed prices to the contestants. (Well, more informed than the usual yelling idiots in the show’s crowd, anyway.) And that’s why Drew was pissed. But I guess the contestant says he won fair and square. Way to ruin the big moment, Drew!

So school is cancelled again–this time for realz. We have a couple inches on our steep-ish driveway. I’m heading out now with a shovel.

Speaking of snow, there’s a house near us that really over-decorates for Christmas. One of their usual displays is of a full-sized snowman manning a booth on their front lawn. He’s selling sno-cones. Is that disturbing to anyone else but me? He’s selling flavored servings of his own flesh and blood!