Tag, I'm it

From the marvelous Mr. Summers, a Merry Christmas meme:

1. Egg nog or hot chocolate?

Hot chocolate, made the real way with Hershey's Cocoa, milk, vanilla extract and a large Kraft Jet-Puffed marshmallow. If there's a way to get a shot of bourbon into that, even better.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree?

Santa wraps them, but does so in paper that doesn't prompt your five-year-old to say, "Hey, Mom. Santa uses the same paper you do."

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white?

White lights on the tree, and large retro colored C9 lights on the house. On the treehouse, I prefer blue. For Hanukkah.

4. Do you hang mistletoe?

On Miles' belt buckle.

5. When do you put your decorations up?

Since I'm always off work the day after Thanksgiving and I can't wait any longer, I do most of it then. I have an awesome, single-girl, pre-lit plug-n-play tree. I could leave it up all year if I wanted, but I've been told that's a little much.

6. What is your favorite holiday dish (excluding dessert)?

I'm a fan of the glazed, spiral-sliced ham accompanied by a chilled vodka martini with bleu-cheese-stuffed olives.

7. Favorite holiday memory as a child:

It's more of a feeling than anything. I remember how those Christmas Eve nights felt, where I'd try and try and try to stay awake, even though I knew Santa wouldn't come as long as I wasn't sleeping, but I was always straining my ears for reindeer sounds and jingle bells. I always wanted PROOF of Santa. And then I'd fall asleep anyway, and wake up to presents.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa?

My "best friend," who was a year older, told me. Bitch.

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve?

The kids do. Once I was past 12, the "night before" present stopped. But I let the boy open one on Christmas Eve, same as I did.

10. How do you decorate your Christmas tree?

Since I have a cheater tree, the lights are already on it. But once it's plugged in, we hang the normal ball ornaments first, then the special ones, and the angel topping goes on last.

11. Snow! Love it or dread it?

What is this snow of which you speak? I live in Las Vegas. Always have. It's snowed here three times in my whole life, and none of those have been on Christmas.

12. Can you ice skate?

What is this ice of which you speak?

Kidding. It's weird, because I can ice skate. I can skate really well, forward and backward. Stopping, though, is a problem. That's what walls and rails are for.

13. Do you remember your favorite gift?

When I was eight, I got a bike. It was the most rockin' bike ever made, too. It was pink, with a white banana seat, tassels on the handlebars and a white faux-wicker basket with plastic flowers on it. That bike was freedom to me. I tried to take it out front and ride it even before I'd unwrapped my other gifts. When I finally could take it for a spin, it wasn't long before I was jumping it off the curb.

Yeah. I was a tomboy.

14. What's the most important thing about the holidays for you?

Love. Just the celebration of love, whether it's with my family or my friends. It's a time, for me, to realize the gifts we have. To me, the love of those closest to me is the best gift of all. And I love to give more than I receive.

15. What is your favorite holiday dessert?

My mother's candy cane cookies. They're cookies shaped like candy canes, made out of stripes of red and white dough and topped with crushed peppermint candy. My second favorite holiday dessert is Hickory Farms Beef Stick, hung from Miles' belt buckle.

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition?

Isn't it funny -- there are things we do every Christmas, but I don't really consider any of them to be traditions. Maybe I should start one. I wonder what I should do with Miles' belt buckle?

17. What tops your tree?

A golden-robed Victorian angel. Unlike Ken, I have no trouble stuffing shrubbery up an angel's ass.

18. Which do you prefer, giving or receiving?

Definitely giving.

19. What is your favorite Christmas song?

Tonight, I was already talking about this! The Bing Crosby/David Bowie version of "Little Drummer Boy."

Peace on earth. Ba-rum-bumbum-bum.

20. Candy canes:

Totally lovely, especially when placed on Miles' belt buckle.

21. Favorite Christmas movie?

"A Charlie Brown Christmas." I love Linus' voice telling the Nativity story. It breaks my heart every time.

22. What do you leave for Santa?

Milk and candy cane cookies. It's the only time all year I'll actually drink a glass of milk.

Happy Birthday

To Miles.

My friend. My blessing. My Love.

Thank you for your laughter, your wit, your courage and your heart.

Thank you for the road trips and the Sunday barbecues and bottles of wine and quiet after-work nights on the couch. For pool and golf and Boulder City and Sinatra. For debate. For five-star dinners and chicken wings. For encouraging me to sing, to write, to be myself. For listening. For talking. For everything.

Thank you for you.

Snort

I am a virulent ball of goo.

Not three weeks after I had a flu shot, I have come down with what appears to be the fucking flu.

Flu. Goo.

Ew.

Salute

December 7. The day will forever live in infamy.

Today, my paper had a story that makes me both proud and amazed.

TIME TO REMEMBER

USS Nevada's Pearl Harbor ordeal recalled

Sixty-five years ago today, Woody Derby was sitting on his bunk aboard the USS Nevada finishing breakfast and reading a newspaper when a call blared from loudspeakers to man the battle stations.

"I said, 'What the hell do they want to do that on Sunday for?'" the 88-year-old former sailor recalled Wednesday about the historic Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Nevada.

In minutes, "the hell" would happen when the first torpedo and bombs slammed the ship, the first of many more that the 27,500-ton battleship would endure. The ship later survived a pair of nuclear tests in 1946.

Derby, one of about 20 remaining survivors from the attack on the Nevada at Pearl Harbor, spent seven years and two months aboard the ship.

In a telephone interview from Honolulu, he said he will place a wreathe [oh, for heaven's sake, can't you people spellcheck? - s.] today to commemorate the day. He is proud to note that the Nevada is the only ship in the Navy that was present for both the Pearl Harbor attack and D-Day, June 6, 1944, off Utah Beach, for the Normandy invasion.

But it was Pearl Harbor, the ship's home port, that became Derby's yardstick for measuring death and destruction.

"There was tremendous damage," he said about a torpedo that struck near his turret. "We had water up to our waists, and it was still rising."

His battle station was below deck of a magazine that shot 5-inch shells, not ones designed for knocking out Japanese warplanes. Nevertheless, "they said send up ammunition. They wanted live ammunition, and we started gunning it up."

"We were hit by seven bombs and many near-misses from all the planes coming in," he said. "It was a desperate time."

In a heroic effort to avoid sinking in the harbor and becoming an obstacle, the Nevada steamed to beach itself in shallow water.

Derby, who at the time was a 23-year-old from Wapello, Iowa, spent much of the day on the third deck helping fight fires. That was not what he had expected he'd be doing when he joined the Navy on Dec. 7, 1938.

"Three years later was a bad day," he said.

"We moved right past the Arizona, which had blown up," he said. "The fire was so hot that when we went by, guys had to put their bodies on the ammunition and the shells that we were getting ready to fire to keep them from exploding." [emphasis mine]

Derby, who has stayed in shape over the years by running marathons -- 21 after age 58 -- said during much of the attack he was below deck and couldn't see what was happening.

Despite all the explosions, he said, "I wasn't scared because I didn't have time to be. The fire in the forward part of the ship was a very bad thing."

The Nevada, with the help of tugs, managed to make it to shallow water off Waipio Point.

"We beached it right next to the USS Shaw, which was hit by two bombs. .... (The Nevada) settled to the bottom," Derby said.

"That afternoon, about 4:30, they removed 57 bodies -- 50 sailors and seven Marines -- and 100 seriously wounded," he said.

Derby stayed with the ship while it endured salvage work and temporary repairs and steamed to the West Coast in April 1942. After a year in dry dock, the vintage-1916 Nevada, equipped with a new anti-aircraft gun battery, was off to combat again during the Attu landings in May 1943, according to the Naval Historical Center.

Derby said the ship's crew size grew from 1,350 sailors to 2,500. After the Attu landings the Nevada sailed to the mid-Atlantic where her guns pounded Normandy during the invasion in June 1944 and southern France two months later.

The ship returned to the Pacific to help with the Iwo Jima and Okinawa invasions in 1945. It endured a kamikaze attack on March 27, 1945 and an artillery shell on April 5, 1945.

After World War II, the Nevada was painted red, Derby said, and put at center stage among other dilapidated ships used in a pair of nuclear bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Though damaged and heavily tainted with fallout, it survived both the airdrop Able detonation on June 30, 1946 and the underwater Baker blast on July 24, 1946. A month later it was decommissioned.

"It sat radioactive hot for two years at Kwajalein," he said.

The USS Nevada was later towed to the deep waters southwest of Oahu and purposely sunk by gunfire and torpedoes on July 31, 1948.

All those boys. All that chaos. No matter how many accounts of the day I read, no matter how many times I read them, my amazement and respect are never diminished. What on earth compels a human being to throw his own fragile body over live ammunition to keep it from exploding in the heat? How would you even know to do such a thing?

Every day of that war saw acts of heroism. Some days inspired more than others. To salute every last one would take the rest of my life.

So today, I simply thank Woody Derby. And I thank all those who served with the Nevada. You helped make this world, imperfect as it may be, one that I am grateful for.

If it bleeds, and all that.

I may have mentioned this before, but I believe my local daily newspaper is absolute crap. Miles has a fabulous saying (it was actually something he said at his first agency job to his Creative Director, just before he was fired): "I wouldn't wipe my ass with that."

Maybe that's not something you say about a TV ad script that your boss wrote, but it's something I feel totally comfortable saying about my paper. Because I rarely get any news or insight. The "Nevada" section usually reads like a police blotter.

Except for today. Yesterday must have been pretty slow, death-wise. Going down the list on today's local page, the focus is on a nurse walkout, homeless issues, public health and updates on existing court cases. The editors must have been upset. Twitchy. Desperate, almost. They must have began to collectively sweat without the promise of a good police shooting or grisly murder-suicide. They were grasping - begging for something, anything to keep their readership up. Because really, they're the only daily paper in town - but given the choice between reading them and not reading at all, people seem to be opting for the second choice.

Then something caught the editors' beady eyes. It was Nevada-related. There was a tidy amount of death (either by vehicle or shooting) - 32 in just the last year. So they went with it:

Bears' death rate on rise around lake

Whew. Crisis averted. And hopefully, today will bring a fiery, multi-car, alcohol-related fatal crash that shuts down a major highway AND a bumfight that ends in a scuffle with police and a taser-related heart attack. If the news gods are good.

Boy, Britney's getting around.

Billboard Awards a spectacle of music, livestock

I'd encourage you to read the article, but my hometown newspaper is such a blazing piece of crap that they succeeded in making the night sound boring.

Fun with tutus

It's been tough to post lately, just because I've been at turns too busy and then uninspired. But this, THIS, is worth taking the time:

“Paris took Britney upstairs where she fitted her in a blue tutu, and then Paris put on a matching tutu,” a source told the London Star. “They then went downstairs and danced at Paris’ in-house stripper pole. Britney loves her new moves and can’t wait to get a fella and test them out.”

It's like one of those "Find Eight Things Wrong With This Picture" games. Only this time, you get to count the things wrong with the sentence. It's almost family-friendly . . . much more so than the old, passé "Find the Cooter In This Picture" game.

I'm so glad we can move on and do something new.