The sun just set here, as you can see.  The guests have yet to arrive.  We are making sushi and fondue, and I will post more pictures after midnight.  Until then, enjoy the last sunset of 2007.  Happy New Year!  GLY!

It was a beautiful, bright, clear day in San Francisco today.  We’re watching a movie now, so I’ll just let the pictures and video do the talking.  Happy New Year! –Carey

The best of the rest

Patrick and Carey in the “back yard”.

Today marks my one year blogging anniversary.  Blogs are like clothes.  Sometimes you go back and look at your old entries and wonder “What was I thinking!!??”. 

Future Xangan

It’s all good though…I’m 42 years old and I’m still learning new things everyday.  Xanga has afforded me the opportunity to meet people I never would have met.  Lewis, James, Jin, Blake, Jad, Tony, Andy, Johnny, David, Kimiaki, Buhr, Albert, Jeff, Colin, Ryan, Lam, Steve, Leo, Gary and many other readers I don’t really know, but appreciate their comments!  It’s a great creative outlet for my pictures and my writing, and it’s always nice to know that people like what you do.

We drove to San Francisco today for our 10 year GLY New Year’s Eve reunion.  Though our entire group of friends can’t be here this year, we have seen each other all throughout the year, and as our GLY family continues to grow we find ourselves increasingly spread out.  So hello to all of you in London, Brazil, Germany, Denmark, France, Chile, Spain and points beyond.

Tom & Cathy live here in Pacifica.  There are definitely advantages to having a world famous astrophysicist who discovered a galaxy as a friend! 

There house is literally 20 feet from the ocean.  I’ll post more photos tomorrow, but this is their backyard:

 

We’re going hiking tomorrow, so I’ll post more pictures then.  I’m typing this by candle light, and everyone is asleep, so I should end now.  There’s nothing like falling asleep to the sounds of waves crashing just 20 feet away.  Night night!

What are the CAACCAS you ask?  No, they’re not some long overdue tribute to master blogger Cakalusa, nor are “The Caacs” (as they’re affectionately known in the industry…get your minds out of the gutter, it rhymes with yaks, not box), some Harvard bestowed scatological honor.  CAACCA stands for Carey Anthony’s Annual Christmas Card Awards.

So, without further ado, this year’s first batch of Caacs go to:  **

Best Merged Family Card

Best Illegal Domestic Bliss Card

Best non cyber card

Best Homemade Card

Best Fabulous Non-Christmas Card Received at Christmas

Best use of origami in Christmas Card


This one is my favorite, because….

The card above is from my friend John.  He was my next door neighbor in my college dorm in 1983-84.  I probably haven’t seen him since 1986, so over 20 years.  He married his college sweetheart, moved to Chicago, and raised two beautiful kids.  The only time we ever correspond is at Christmas.  This year, when the above card arrived, I thought to myself, “How’d the Spanish looking kid get in there!?”  LOL.  When I went to the website on the card, this is what I found:

It has been on our heart for several years to adopt internationally, and this was the year for our dreams to come true. We decided on Colombia and started the paper work in January. Thank you to all of you who helped us by writing letters/gathering paperwork. The first week in November we got word it was time to travel to Bogota, Colombia to meet our new son/brother, Edison. The five of us spent two weeks in and around Bogota. What a beautiful city and country. At no time did we not feel safe. The people were very kind and helpful. The weather was always perfect, between 60 and 80 during the day. We spent a lot of time playing at a park and touring the city.  We enjoyed trying various exotic fruits and native food. The taxi rides are something none of us will ever forget. We all made several new friends who will always be in our hearts and lives…

The best part though, was the part written by their oldest son, about traveling to Colombia and adopting a new brother:

Isn’t that just the best thing you’ve ever read?!

More awards later when I have time to photograph some more cards.  Night Night.

Happy New Year from Rain

Ho Ho Ho!  I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas.  Fred & Susie had Christmas Eve this year for the first time in their new house.  There was SO much more space than we usually have and the kids had plenty of room to run around and play.  The only problem for me, was the 3 cats but I survived.  We did a grab bag this year, which was really nice.  I got a great leather camera bag and an extra camera battery from Sam. 

These are some of the little photo Christmas tree ornaments I made this year.  I thought they came out pretty well.  I still need to work on finding the right photo dimensions though.

Fred & Sue’s backyard is right out of Gilligan’s Island

 
There are even banana trees

And persimmons

And a tennis and basketball court (OK, maybe not like Gilligan’s Island!)  Damn, I should have been a sports photographer (not)!

Curtis, Kevin, Susie, Fred, Cody, Kyle & Kenny

Rob, Cole, Tressa & Jenn

Lisa, Andy, Tommy & Joel

Tressa, Tommy, Andy, Carey, Cole & Cody

Pre Santa

One eyed Buster and Roxy in their Christmas finest

We had the webcams going with our family back home in Chicago.  My brother was showing me the snow there, so I took my laptop outside and…

pointed the webcam at the thermometer

Which kind of reminded me of this photo of my Dad which was taken 30 years ago on  Christmas Day 1977.  We called out to my aunt and uncle in California and (the same ones I’m here with now) and they said it was 80° and they were barbecuing.  My Dad told them he was cooking out too…and this picture was born. 

Nice legs Dad!

Everyone seemed to really like their presents.  The girls got brand new Nikon SLR’s.  I got the new Stephen Colbert book, and a new Gorilla Tripod, a bluetooth mouse, the Hairspray “shake & shimmy” DVD, the Camp DVD, some toiletries, sweatshirts, hats, a crystal globe from Italy and a heated towel rack.  The kids all got new DS games, and were actually quiet most of the afternoon.  We took them to see Alvin & the Chipmunks tonight (save your money), and then I drove home to prepare for Bassam’s arrival.

As I watched my niece (via webcam in Chicago) open her presents this morning, I was reminded that this year she announced that she no longer believed in Santa Claus  (She’s 19.  j/k).    This is interesting to me, as I’ve had the Santa discussion a few times in the past month with friends.  We discussed it in Portland over Thanksgiving (is it OK to lie to your kids?).  Tyson and I discussed it after the God debate.  I personally feel the power of myth can be a good thing, and that the Santa myth is pretty darn time tested and solid.  I also found it interesting to note that my niece wanted to spend Christmas morning watching her little sister (who still believes in Santa) open presents, before going over to her Dad’s house (her parents are divorced).  So Santa or no Santa, God or no God, most of us can’t resist watching kids open presents on Christmas morning.

Children believe in Santa Claus. Creationists believe in creationism. But children eventually discard their belief in the Man in Red on the basis of evidence. So why don’t creationists? The issue here is not so much that creationism is bad science – though it clearly is and that is a serious issue. The issue here is that it is bad Christianity: blinkered, arrogant, literalistic, paranoid, pusillanimous, delusional, anti-truth, world-denying, and cringingly embarrassing Dawkins bait. (This is hardly the place to dredge through the overwhelming scientific case against creationism. It can be done perfectly well in one word anyway: fossils.)  But the parallels between these two beliefs, creationism and Santaism, are more extensive than you might have noticed.

Both start out as reasonable assumptions. Children are not fools, but believe in Santa on the authority of their parents, who have proved a reliable source of information. Just as Christians have found the Bible an invaluable source of information about the ways of God.

But new information makes children rethink their understanding of authority: not every story their parents have told them is literally true, but that does not make them untrustworthy in more important things. Likewise the mature Christian response grasps that God might have good reasons for letting myths be told with his seal of approval on them.  Read more…

And not to beat a dead horse, but Daniel finally responded to the fracas over the D’Souza debate, and seeing as he is one of my most learned friends, I thought I’d post his response here:

On the subject of atheism vs. Christianity there is much to be said. The subject will naturally submerge us into polemics of the most invidious variety. What it ultimately comes down to is this: there are those whose belief systems are culturally and emotionally grounded, and those that choose not to subscribe to what could be construed as anthropomorphic delusion.

Although I would not purport to be a Christian per se, (despite my interest in Jewish literature and Church history) to declare myself an atheist would be both limited in scope and suggest I am seemingly indigent of imagination. An atheist believes there is no God. The problem with an absolute declaration like this is that it begs the question: what exactly do we mean by God? If by God we mean the God of the ancient Hebrews (and subsequently what some would consider the figure of Christ himself) then yes, I am an atheist on the basis that I reject the notion of a personal God. This is partially because I believe that neither the Hebrew nor the Christian weltanschauung has any right to sanctimoniously declare their self-proclaimed, respective apexes of the theological realm to be the center piece of world religions. Their rituals, which are by and large a hypocritical pre-occupation and overindulgence in sin and self-righteousness, limit the average parishioner’s ability to enter the realm of authentic spiritual ecstasy (unless you count those freaky quacks having fake orgasms on the Christian music commercials). Contrast their practices with those of the Hindus or Buddhists, and you will find that by comparison, many Christians don’t really enter into the true realm of spirit (not to level that those seeking nirvana or Krishna-consciousness would be). Buddhism and Hinduism spiritually engage their followers and encourage their quest while in the midst of life (I have witnessed this first hand). Granted, like the Christians and Jews, those religions likely mold, limit, and shape the views of their followers, but at least they are getting more spiritually advanced in the process. There is no waiting for the afterlife (which is why Marx called it the opiate of the masses) as the central focus of its tenets.

On the other hand, to deny any possibility that there is any mystery to the magic of the living realm and how it originated (as the atheist might purport) would be just as narrow-minded as the belief that missionary work is necessary because the whole world should be subservient to just one arrogant admonition (or the ethnocentric Ann Coulter imposistionist view). Empirical science should inspire awe and wonder in humans; not the close minded, fixed views that characterize the repugnant nature of many organized religions. 

Speaking of “fossils” and creation, get a load of this:

It’s an exhibit at the “Creation Museum” in Kentucky (I couldn’t make this shit up!), that depicts a “penis free” Adam naming a sabre tooth tiger in the Garden of Eden.  Nice kitty.  But wait a Kentucky minute!  “Genesis 2:25 clearly says that at this point in Adam & Eve’s life, “And the man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed.” If Adam courageously sat there unencumbered while he was naming saber-toothed tigers, then why, six thousand years later, should he be depicted as a eunuch in some family-values Eden? And if these people can take away what Scripture says was rightfully his, then why can’t Charles Darwin and the accumulated science of the past 150-odd years take away all the rest of it?” 

The first thing one notices when walking into this den of deceit is the dinosaurs.  Interestingly, they have saddles and are being RIDDEN BY PEOPLE!  I’m sorry, but I found this concept ridiculous at the age of 8 when I saw it on the Flinstones!!!  (This is like shooting fish in a barrel!)

Welcome to white trash (the woman in this picture is likely holding a Bic Mac and a cigarette in her other hand.)

As this excellent Esquire article points out:

The dinosaurs are the first things you see when you enter the Creation Museum, which is very much a work in progress and the dream child of an Australian named Ken Ham. Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis, an organization of which the museum one day will be the headquarters. The people here today are on a special tour. They have paid $149 to become”charter members” of the museum.

“Dinosaurs,” Ham laughs as he poses for pictures with his visitors, “always get the kids interested.”

AIG is dedicated to the proposition that the biblical story of the creation of the world is inerrant in every word. Which means, in this interpretation and among other things, that dinosaurs coexisted withman (hence the saddles), that there were dinosaurs in Eden, and that Noah, who certainly had enough on his hands, had to load two brachiosaurs onto the Ark along with his wife, his sons, and their wives, to say nothing of green ally-gators and long-necked geese and humpty-backed camels and all the rest.

(Faced with the obvious question of how to keep a three-hundred-by-thirty-by-fifty-cubit ark from sinking under the weight of dinosaur couples, Ham’s literature argues that the dinosaurs on the Ark were young ones, and thus did not weigh as much as they might have.)

“We,” Ham exclaims to the assembled, “are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!” And everybody cheers.  Read more about the broader dumbing down of America…

The Times of London, said this, when this creationist crap pot opened last May:  “The $27 million (£14 million) exhibition is funded by evangelical Christians, who apparently believe that by reclaiming dinosaurs and fossils for their literal biblical interpretation of natural history, teenagers are less likely to look at internet pornography or get pregnant out of wedlock.”

It’s 3 AM and I’m going to bed.  In the meantime, here are the rest of the photos and a couple of videos I shot.  The first one is of the kids opening their presents.  The second one is of me singing Darcy the Dragon to Andy & Tressa on Christmas Eve and for some reason it’s all jacked up.  I think it’s a codec issue, but I’ve already spent way too much time trying to figure it out and it’s still messed up.  You’ll get the idea though.  I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas!  –Carey

Christmas Eve Eve is the birthday of one of my oldest and one of my newest friends.  And they’re both divas in their own right.  So here’s to Hugo and Christine!!  Oh night divine , indeed!!  GLY.

I know I’m going to regret this one day…but here goes nothin…. 

---

Guess who’s feeling better!!!  I’m so happy little Colin is out of the hospital and will be spending a Merry Christmas in Hong Kong with his Mommy & Daddy.  Thanks for the “Jungle Bells” Colin.  You’re my Christmas angel. xoxoxoxo

Merry Xmas, especially to Ma me Ma, 公公, Mummy, Daddy and Uncle Carey!

媽咪媽，公公﹕

多謝你哋照顧我，陪我玩！雖然我成日玩媽咪媽，其他我都好錫你哋嫁，第日大個一定會好好孝順你哋！ merry Xmas!

Hello Uncle Carey:

Thanks
for your blessing again!  I’ve told others that you’ve sent your best
wishes to me on your weblog!  Thank you!  Hope you have an enjoyable
and lovely Xmas!  I’d like to send a song “Jungle bell” to you all!

Sometimes it’s hard to get in the Christmas spirit when it’s so warm and sunny outside.  But today really felt like Christmas, because everyone was so friendly and cheery.  It was such a beautiful day.  So clear in fact that I could actually see the snow on the mountains surrounding my house (and I rarely even see the mountains surrounding my house, let alone the snow). I took advantage of the 76° (25° C) weather and walked all around town to get my errands run and deliver some Christmas presents.  Later, Tyson and I went to see Juno.  We both really liked the movie, but neither one of us could articulate why.  What starts out as a sharp, albeit superficial comedy, becomes a poignant coming of age film with Oscar caliber performances.  And the soundtrack is just delicious!  (Listen here.)  I need to think about why it was such a feel good movie, as the the subject matter wasn’t exactly tidy.  Somehow it worked though.

After the movie, we went for sushi at this great local spot in Santa Monica.  Tyson knew the chef and he took good care of us.  We ate $50 worth of food for $20.  On the way home I stopped to take some photos of the Christmas lights at the Mormon temple.  I still didn’t get all my Christmas shopping done.  Oh well…there’s still 2 days!    Here are my pics from today:

Roscoe is growing into such a handsome dog!

Arielle enjoying Emo Elmo on my iTouch

This is from the top of my street, across from the House of Blues and the Mondrian

Homeless Santa in Beverly Hills. I gave him a couple of bucks and asked if I could take his photo

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If you’re a fan of British music, you’re probably familiar with an Irish band called The Pogues.   Perhaps their biggest hit is a “Christmas” song called “Fairytale of New York“  The song is consistently voted the #1 Christmas song in England.  This year however, there was a problem.

It’s two days from the 50th birthday he thought he’d never see and Shane MacGowan is even more bemused and befuddled than ever. How, after a life of such famously bacchanalian excess that he was told 25 years ago that he had six weeks to live, has it come to this? It’s one thing to be best known for a sentimental Christmas ballad, no matter how esoteric, but it’s quite another to have Middle Britain rise as one to prevent Radio 1 censoring ‘Fairytale Of New York’.

If the Pogues’ larger-than-life frontman and chief songwriter has become something of an unlikely national treasure, it is mainly thanks to his bittersweet duet with the late Kirsty MacColl, which returns with Slade-like inevitability each Yuletide. But it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always thus. Nineteen years ago, the BBC banned another of his songs, ‘Birmingham Six’. “They’re still doing time/ for being Irish in the wrong place/ And at the wrong time” sang MacGowan as Patrick Hill and five innocent men served time at Her Majesty’s displeasure. They’re out now but the song is still off the playlist.

The same is not true of MacGowan: he’s back in vogue in a way he hasn’t been since the critical acclaim that greeted the revolutionary, high-octane albums Rum, Sodomy And The Lash and If I Should Fall From Grace With God made the Pogues one of the hottest bands in the world. Just yesterday, his toothless coupon leered from the pages of the tabloids as he stumbled out of actress Davinia Taylor’s Christmas party with fellow good timers Kate Moss, Sienna Miller and Sadie Frost.

Make no mistake, his consumption of alcohol and narcotics has been dizzying. MacGowan says he was fed Guinness from the age of four by the collection of aunts and uncles who raised him in Tipperary in an attempt to put him off alcohol in later life. It didn’t work: at eight he drank his first bottle of Powers whiskey, and he soon added drugs, smoking joints at 13 and taking acid at 14. By 17, he was hanging out with rent boys and junkies (he says he was once the former, although that seems unlikely given his trademark jug-eared plug-ugliness), and so strung out that his doctor threatened to have him sectioned unless he submitted to six months in the notorious Bethlem detox clinic, the first of four stints trying to dry out.

At one stage he claimed he was polishing off 50 LSD tablets and three bottles of whiskey a day and, as he came apart at the seams, his antics became increasingly bizarre. In New Zealand he painted himself blue, claiming he’d been ordered to do it by Maori spirits; back in London, the night before the Pogues were due to fly out to tour with Bob Dylan, he took so much LSD that his girlfriend came home to find him covered in blood after eating a Beach Boys album. He told her he was about to host a summit of world leaders to avert the Third World War. He missed the plane and never toured with Dylan.

At one stage in 1999, his friend Sinead O’Connor found him snorting heroin and called the police, leading to another spell in rehab which ended abruptly when he was thrown out for bad behaviour. But not all of MacGowan’s celebrity friends – they include Bono, Nick Cave and Pete Doherty – believe that he is totally out of control. Bono argued that his self-destructive behaviour is “a mask, his way of ignoring people he doesn’t want to deal with. Shane is more together than people imagine”.

Not that those people will necessarily include the other members of the Pogues, who fired their garrulous talisman after he disintegrated on tour in Japan in 1991. After falling out of a train door at a station and knocking out the few blackened teeth which hadn’t been removed in drunken fights, he then performed an unscheduled exit from a van at 50mph on the way back to the hotel. When they got there, the other members of the band sacked him, replacing him with Joe Strummer. All he had to say was “Thank you, you’ve been very patient with me”.

Bombastic yet with a deeply sensitive streak, MacGowan perceives himself as a latter day Brendan Behan; as a romantic Irish iconoclast with a ready wit, a free-thinking republican writer who suffered for his art, his convictions, his unwillingness to be shackled. Perhaps that is why he allowed himself to be typecast as a drunken minstrel in the Johnny Depp film The Libertine, or why he called his caustic memoirs A Drink With Shane MacGowan.

He has a razor sharp mind, even when addled with drink, and is incredibly well-read. MacGowan says he was reading Marx and Trotsky as an 11-year-old, and he references William Burroughs and James Clarence Mangan regularly, even if he doesn’t have a lot of time for Samuel Beckett (“a miserable fat old bastard”), WB Yeats (“an old fairy”) or even Plato (“basically just some Greek c***”).

An avid reader as a child, the moment MacGowan decided to channel his vast energies into music came when he left detox aged 17. “It was like fate,” he says. “The first thing I saw when I came out of the madhouse was the Sex Pistols, a bunch of people who looked like they ought to be in a loony bin.” He became Shane O’Hooligan, living the punk dream and fronting first The Nipple Erectors and then the Millwall Chainsaw.  Read more…

And so I present to you, a true Christmas classic

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won’t see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
I’ve got a feeling
This year’s for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

They’ve got cars big as bars
They’ve got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It’s no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing “Galway Bay”
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

You’re a bum
You’re a punk
You’re an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it’s our last

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can’t make it all alone
I’ve built my dreams around you.

I got a very nice email from Colin’s mom & dad tonight saying that he was feeling better, and was even able to go to his school’s Christmas party today (thought he still on a congee diet).  He had a blast at his party, and I know his friends were happy to see him.  His mom wants to thank everyone for their concern. 

Carey Anthony <careygly@gmail.com>

Here’s a video for you Colin.  It’s a song I loved as a kid.  Merry Christmas!

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Lisa had a rough day today, so a movie was in order.  We went to see “Atonement“.  It was a good film.  The early Oscar buzz is all about James McAvoy and Keira Knightley and I must say I enjoyed their performances.  The cinematography was breathtaking, though the film could have been edited better in my opinion.

Without giving too much away, let me just say that Lisa wanted to strangle the little sister in the movie.  So we let her take some anger out on the movie display:

I still have several Golden Globe nominated movies to see, but this might just be Mr. McAvoy’s year.

Why don’t any of my friends want to go see Sweeney Todd??  I admit, it’s not my idea of a Christmassy movie, and Johnny Depp looks even creepier than he did in Willy Wonka, but it does look like a good move, right?  Does anyone want to go tomorrow?

This is my friend Colin (the boy on the right in the first video).  He’s been sick and was in the hospital.  There’s nothing worse than a sick kid at Christmas.  His mother tells me he’s feeling a little better, but here’s hoping the little guy feels a lot better and is back to his incredibly cute self in time for Santa to bring him all that he deserves.  He is truly a light in this world.  I could watch this video FOREVER and ever.

Merry Christmas Colin, get well soon!!

Speaking of cute kids!!!  (I’m shameless).  My Dad has been scanning some old slides this week.  Actually, my brother’s the cute one.  I just got better looking as I grew into my ears and lips.  LOL. 

David, Dad, Mom & Me, Christmas 1969 (4)

Fashion forward at four

That robot was my favorite toy of all time.  There’s a story behind it, but it’s for another blog entry.  I’m tired.

Bassam had a conference at CalTech today, so rather than driving back to Santa Barbara tonight, he called to check availability at the Hotel Careyfornia.  Luckily, Posh & Becks had just canceled a reservation and we had an opening.  Bassam is a regular visitor at the HC this time of year, and now that he’s graced us with his presence, it really seems like Christmas time is here again.

 

We had tapas for dinner and afterwards Bassam needed a new cord for his iPhone, so we ran by Target.  He spent $20 on his cord, and I got myself my own Christmas present.  I justified it, because it came with a $30 gift card. (I really only got it because I’m sure Jennifer, Lisa & Dar will all get one soon, and I wanted to be first for once!)

I also got a new Dirt Devil broom, but the iTouch is more fun.  Short entry tonight…I’m going to go play with my new toy.  Remember, Christmastime is for everyone…even the Jews!  Enjoy the video!  Night night.  (P.S. Thanks to Ryan for the fabulous graphic design!!)