Top Five (or so) Christmas Movies

 In the grand tradition of holiday list making, I offer my list of absolutely go to every year holiday movies to watch, and when.  Brooke and I have differing tastes for these, so I (and she) end up watching a lot more that maybe wouldn't make our own lists, but here we go with: 

Top Five Christmas Movies!: 

1. Elf (this one lands near the top of both our lists)
2. 
   Love Actually (after some post Me-Too hemming and hawwing over this one, I've brought it back into my fold - of course not every character is fully virtuous nor all their actions blameless, but name me an interesting movie where that is the case! It's such an overall emotional build-up, absurd and completely unrealistic and I love it!)
   
   Both of these first two movies are ones that we often first watch early on in the season, and then again closer to Christmas Day (although Brooke's love of #2 has not recovered much after taking a hit around 2017...
   
   
3. Die Hard (Sorry, Obama, but this is definitely a Christmas movie, and it's a banger!)
4. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
5. The Holiday

I'll finish this post later, but wanted to get it up and running to start the conversation!... 

Star Trek - Ranked

I watched Trek Nation this evening... It was okay, but not hugely enlightening...

Essentially it confirmed my idea of the Trek mythology as a mode of world making.  The philosophy of WWZCD?  Make decisions based on which one is most likely to lead to the outcome of our world being most like the Star Trek world.  Because, what else would we want the world to look like in 200 years?  Anyone have any better ideas?

Source: http://lordOfTheWings.BlogSpot.com

Trek is a religion.  It's a collection of canonical (and some non-canonical) texts that create a world modeled after our own.  In a world of dystopic futures, Star Trek is uniquely positive - a vision of what we might be able to achieve.  It's blindly hopeful, and particularly in a leadership environment that we live in today, we have trouble imagining a way forward that produces positive outcomes, let alone working toward some sort of utopic end goal.  Of course, in the Star Trek canon, it takes an aftermath of a third world war to make the space for creating the imagined future.

But that's not really what this post is about.  Someday, I'll put those thoughts together, but this is a best of list, an attempt (incomplete until it's not) to rank the films and seasons of Star Trek.  There are other lists by Trekkers, I'm sure (including this one, which ranks series versus films).  To my mind, though, ranking an entire season at one quality (5th or 25th, say) doesn't make a lot of sense.  For example, Season 3 of Star Trek: Voyager has too much Kes for my taste, but season 4...


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January 2020
I don't think I'm going to do this anymore... I'm already in the midst of the chronology, and while i think this idea has some merit, it's just a lot to take on.  Maybe someday, but for now, i just wanted to post the pre-amble, which i like quite a lot...

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December 2020

I had a thought to finally post this, after having found just such a list (or almost) as I was intending to create only to find that I had already done so at the outset of this (clusterfuck of a) year...