Let’s all gather around the fake tree – the tattered Tannenbaum that no one will want to take down in January – and pretend we can’t wait to watch “A Christmas Story” for 24 straight hours on tbs. Fah-ra-ra-ra-ra.

It’s that time of year, when people stress out over their obligations to attend endless holiday traditions. A cursory glance at any local publication will reveal a festive season filled with so many freaking festive festivities that the Trans-Siberian Orchestra could barely hold a pyrotechnic laser beam to it.

How many festive open houses and festive holiday tours of festive decorated homes and mansions and historic landmarks can a person endure in three festive weeks?

How much spiked eggnog does it take to withstand another presentation of “The Nutcracker” or “Amahl and the Night Visitors” and God forbid your kid gets the part of a rapping Scrooge in the new drama teacher’s hip version of “A Christmas Carol.”  Has anyone ever not slept through “Handel’s Messiah?” Really? Bite me, Cousin Eddie.

What is the new holiday tradition this year? Flashing Santa. Yeah, Jerry Springer style. Then there is the “Ms. Santa Lingerie Fest.” And you can’t have your Christmas cookies without the pushed-up, wing-sprouting, Victoria’s Secret Christmas Fashion Show. No wonder the old fat man is so damned jolly.

There are so many Christmas parades the cops must be ready to pull out the 9 mm and uncork a six pack into Santa and his band of festive trolls waving to freezing families and hucksters selling inflatable candy canes and white, fuzzy-balled caps. Tensions run especially high at these parades. Do not pretend you have never elbowed a little kid so you could snap a shot of your old high school band playing “Deck The Halls.” I saw you do it.

Yesterday, in downtown Richmond, an angry guy with his sullen family struggled for a place beside Broad Street while and angry woman with senior citizen parents hogged the sidewalk, blocking his view. He finally yelled, “Go F#@! yourself!” His F-word was not “festive.” Nor was her response.

Of course every town has its own version of a tacky light tour where people who bitch about their electric bill all year try to max out the meter in one month while others who bitch about traffic all year happily endure snarls just to see an inflatable Santa swell up next to Rudolph humping a snowman out by the mailbox.

Just when you thought you had…oh, wait I have to go. Chevy Case is about to utter the most festive of holiday sermons from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation:

“Hey. If any of you are looking for any last-minute gift ideas for me, I have one. I’d like Frank Shirley, my boss, right here tonight. I want him brought from his happy holiday slumber over there on Melody Lane with all the other rich people and I want him brought right here…with a big ribbon on his head! And I want to look him straight in the eye, and I want to tell him what a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit he is! Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where’s the Tylenol?”

High school football is now on ESPN. I saw three games last weekend. This does not resemble the high school game I played back in the day when I spent most of my time pissing off one of the best coaches in Alabama high school football history. The players on my 55” Samsung last Saturday could have played for the Crimson Tide in the 1970’s. They were that big and fast and strong. I think one of them already had a shoe deal with Nike.

Which brings me to the reason I started writing this post 200 words ago: millionaires playing a game most guys would love to play for free, or did.

Go to B-Dubs on Sunday afternoon and look into the faces of any guy who has just spent two hours sucking down two-dozen Asian Zinged wings chased by 24-oz’s of Bud Light while watching his favorite team get beat. He would pay a month’s salary for the chance to suit up and get beat like that on any pro football field in the world – just for the privilege of saying he did it.

There is no shortage of millionaires playing pro sports. The minimum salary of an NFL benchwarmer is $325,000 a year. Try to pull down that much at the welding supply or plumbing company or climbing electrical poles in a hurricane trying to fix a broken power line. Few guys who own their own successful companies make anywhere near that much. And even fewer have as much fun as the kicker who just missed that 20-yard chip shot. Yet the average family of four will pay over $415 to attend a single NFL game (tickets, parking, food, etc.).

When it is time for kickoff, I still don’t care. I’m right there, spread out in my recliner, remote in hand, watching millionaires hit each other so hard they will look like extras in “Cocoon” by the time they are fifty. If they are honest, every guy in every sports bar in the country would trade his bass boat for just three hours between the sidelines wearing a helmet of his favorite team; and that is how athletes and owners become millionaires in the first place. Guys like me are willing to give them and their teams our hardest earned dollars for just a few minutes of wishing we were them. And sadly, on an orange-leafed autumn day under a porcelain blue sky, it is worth every penny.

The new high-end LED/LCD, 3D HDTV’s are ruining my old school eyes, but not in a painful way. It is delightfully devious retina ruination, an eye-opening bite of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, like in Genesis. Instead of a snake, however, you are tempted by a remote – four of them, actually. A machine like the Samsung 55-incher is a peek behind the wizard’s curtain, a look up a tragically famous celebrity’s dress. I was blind, but now I see, and what I’m seeing has caused me to question everything I knew about visual entertainment.

When a movie like Public Enemies pours across the screen in such clarity that your nose bleeds from the sharpness, you know you have stepped into the next La-Z-Boy existence, a reality where the old concepts of film and grain and light are altered forever.

Coppola’s re-mastered Godfather films on Blu-ray take on a clarity, lushness and thickness last seen by Gordon Willis (Coppola’s DP) in a dark screening room as he squeezed the film fresh out of the canister. It looks like a completely different movie.

Wrap 7 Klipsch theater speakers tied to a 3-D Onkyo 7.2 channel network receiver around your head and that anger you felt earlier in the day at the office melts into a little puddle under your chair. I am sitting here now, barely able to type these words, as the Corleone Family does their dirty business in the most beautiful images I have ever seen, and I have seen this movie at least a hundred times. Toto, we are definitely not in Kansas anymore. I have no idea where the hell we are, but I like it.

If you’re calculating what such a system will cost, just think about college football in 3-D. Just let that settle in for a few seconds before reading the next sentence. Think about Drew Brees throwing a tight spiral right through your living room, knocking over your beer and peanuts. There is Kobe draining a 3 in 3D from the top of the arc. Unspeakable imagery flows into my face from the screen and unexplainable sounds sneak into my ears from the speakers. It gets better – three years, no interest.  A few clicks on my Droid calculator assures me the whole set up costs less than eating fast food for lunch every day. So you get a great TV and feel better while watching it.

There is one drawback: the 3D glasses.

They work like a jacked-up border collie on a sheep farm, but I wear regular glasses all the time, so the idea of wearing two pairs of glasses is not exactly appealing, especially since the glasses I wear every day already help me to see life in 3D. With the digital glasses, I feel like LeVar Burton’s character, Geordi La Forge, on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Perhaps they will eventually have a 3D helmet where the entire visual/sound experience happens right around our heads.

I can see it now. We are all sitting around with our heads encased in brain cancer-causing 3D entertainment. I can’t wait.

The car-carrier hauling four sports cars to the tiny airport takes all afternoon. When he finally reaches the top, the driver’s shirt is off, sweat drizzling down his ample belly like a pork shoulder slow roasting at Extra Billy’s Barbecue. Curses spill from his snarl.

As the 300-pound man angrily unloads the cars, a 300-pound black bear roams one end of the runway, watching us warily. Planes landing here often buzz the runway first to scare of deer, bears or coyotes. In the opposite direction, a coyote tests the system, avoiding the bear and us. Deer sneak along the tall grass at the drop off into the valley towards Hot Springs.

We are here to put cars on HD for the Virginia Lottery’s Muscle Car Money. Later we will slice the images into 45-second, 30-second, 15-second and 5-second commercials riding on top of grinding, thumping drums and guitars.

The next morning, a yellow Camaro SS, charcoal Mustang GT, screaming red Challenger RT Hemi and a deep gray Charger RT Hemi line up facing the ceramic blue sky punctuated by clouds shaped like buttermilk drop-biscuits. Cameras aim at an S-curve in front of them.

These cars don’t just look fast. They are fast. Hundreds of horses hide under Detroit steel carved into retro sheet metal bringing back retro memories for anyone who lived in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.  The Camaro and Challenger turn heads. The Mustang turns wicked lap times. The Charger sits alone in this bunch, like a pimply boy at an eighth grade dance, it’s sporty pedigree diminished by four doors and a police car reputation. But even as the 4^th wheel at a three-wheel roundup, it growls like an angry colon after bean dip and beer.

Tattooed crew – some wearing headbands, all carrying grip tools – mount high-def Canon 5D cameras with expensive lenses to hot, metal roofs and shiny fenders. One by one, the cars peel across the tarmac toward the runway looking for the perfect shot. Inside, some of the cams point at tachs, some at shifters, some at steering wheels. A large cinema camera called a Red is bolted to the rear of a Ford F-250. In its lens, muscle cars blow past, dropping back, then blow past again, over and over until it is exactly the way the director wants it. This dance goes on for two days.

The Challenger chases the camera truck over a slight arch in the runway that ripples the horizon. Out of sight, we hear tires screaming and gears shifting and V-8’s oiling cams and cylinders. Next the Mustang gets its turn in the barrel followed by the Camaro and Charger. It is a thing to behold.

This is a guy’s shoot. It is car porn, starring wicked RPM’s, sucking every guy’s metal dream into its exhaust-flavored vortex. These cars are designed to touch that reptilian part of a male’s brainstem housing the internal combustion engine. The rest of a guy is not much else but worthless decoration. That little spot between a man’s ears, however, is the driver’s seat. Muscle cars live here, not on the road. And today, our inner reptiles are smiling.

Virginia Lottery Muscle Car Money Behind the Scenes

Sabol is 67 now. He became famous by turning football into art (according to Joe Posnanski in Sports Illustrated his week). It is a great story if you haven’t read it in the Scorecard section.

Sabol put cameras at every angle, shot super slo-mo, put microphones on coaches, hired John Facenda to be “the voice of God,” and hired former music school teacher, Sam Spence, to create music that made the sport feel like a noble act of war.

Joe Namath jogging off the field pointing to the sky claiming a championship. Sabol shot it. Dick Butkus’s muddy hands. Sabol shot it. Steam coming from Ray Nitschke’s mouth. Sabol shot it. Franco Harris’s Immaculate Reception. Yep, Sabol.

Every famous moment we remember from the NFL is in our memories because Sabol put them there. ESPN may be in business because Sabol created the genre. So when you watch the Saints and the Colts and the Who on Sunday, think about Steve Sabol and NFL Films.

Then, for just a few moments, remember Tom Brookshire, who died last week at 78 from cancer. The former Philadelphia Eagle All-Pro became even more famous for his insights as he sat in a TV booth for hundreds of games with partner Pat Summerall telling us about this game we have come to treat like royalty. In case you are under 35 years old, John Madden replaced Brookshire in 1981. Some of us remember those days. But it is a game, after all. Sabol and Brookshire just made it seem a hell of a lot more important.

Whoa, dude. Who doesn’t want those side effects? Unusual dreams? It sounds like Woodstock. What is a usual dream? Being chased by snakes on skateboards? Your neighbor parking the space shuttle in your front yard? Going to work naked, but not realizing it until you are there? Flying through walls and hooking up with aliens? Eating a pizza the size of my house? My dog talking to me and sounding like a guy I worked with at Chiat/Day? Sigourney Weaver from Ghostbusters asking me if I am the key master? Outrunning bad guys wearing black robes and brandishing brass knuckles in the restroom at Grand Central Station? I’ve had all of those dreams, yet I have never taken this medication. Damn.

My dreams are normally so unusual, I wonder what kinds of dreams I would have? What is unusual for me? I can see the dream now. I’m sitting in a chair. The light is on. That’s it. That’s the entire dream. Just sitting in a chair with the light on. For me, that is an unusual dream.

My first B-52 experience happened in the early 1980′s at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas. Before it closed in 1994, Carswell headquartered a lot of the behemoth bombers. They were going day and night, it seemed. I never knew where these things went all day. They took off and roamed the skies of America and then return like massive, metal birds to their nest next to Lake Worth. A B-52 Stratofortress coming in low overhead is not something you forget easily.

A B-52 is hardly subtle. It is a blunt instrument, a club for pounding opponents not into submission, but into little fleshy leftovers. I watched the wings getting wider as the airplane descended like a raptor on a rabbit. I felt very rabbit-ish, indeed, as I watched the eight groaning, double-barreled, turbojet engines pushing toward me. A B-52 would give stretch marks to the largest stadium in the country. Standing at the end of the runway, I thought about just how many people had witnessed this view, followed by pain and torment of a flavor so violent, no one gets a second taste. A B-52 can carry 70,000 pounds of weapons, some nuclear.

As a child in Montgomery, Alabama, our house was under the flight path of Maxwell Air Force Base. I can’t recall a B-52 at Maxwell among the wickedly fast fighter jets bursting air above us day and night leaving the sound barrier in their wake. That is why I was standing beside the highway in Fort Worth waiting for the black beast to belly down and smoke its tires on the asphalt strip.

The sound assaulted my ears in a way that brought Dr. Strangelove to mind. The sheer magnitude of a thing this big being able to fly is dinosauric. I squinted into the sky at the shape that had defined fear worldwide for 50 years. I understood exactly what this plane could do. Watching it fly over me and land in the distance put a knot in my gut like the feeling after seeing an accident on the highway.

Tex Johnston flew the first B-52 in 1952. Some variation of the workhorse has been in continuous service for the Air Force since 1955. The plane I watched twenty years ago was flying long before I was born. B-52′s dropped hydrogen bombs on the Bikini Atoll in 1956 when Eisenhower was president and Khruschev was running Russia. In Operation Rolling Thunder, B52’s dropped enough metal and explosives on Vietnam to probably build a country twice the size of Vietnam. B-52’s kept the hated Commies at bay during the protracted Cold War. B-52’s dropped bombs on Iraq in the Gulf War in 1991 and they launched missles in Afghanistan and Iraq. The plan is for them to be in service until 2040, eighty-something years after production ended. Few things built by man last that long and none of them can fly. 

There are several versions of B-52’s: B’s, C’s, D’s, F’s, G’s and H’s. The planes have been modified for over fifty years. Today its jets suck alternative synthetic fuel making the monster sort of green in a deadly way. 

My sighting was years ago. There was a time when big, clunky B-52’s, plated with Detroit Steel had their way with entire countries and continents. These behemoths no longer rule battlefields, replaced by faster, more accurate planes, laser-guided weaponry and deadly precision drones. Even so, they are still on those battlefields, lurking over the carnage.

It’s impressive how we can find ways to kill each other.

(flipping channels)

I have seen how everything is made.

(flipping channels)

I have been lost.

(flipping)

I can whisper to dogs and cook like Rachel (not Maddow) and I hope the bachelor drowns in that 24-person hot tub with twelve clawing women.

(flipping)

I know that the catch is not that deadly.

(flipping)

I understand that stars can dance.

(mindless channel flipping one after another)

Who cares if the NFL is reloading millionaires while the rest of the country suffers layoffs? Where is the love for Larry King and Al Roker? Steroids in baseball. The Shawshank Redemption. Andy, Barney, Gomer, Lucy, Gilligan – it is a 500-channel desert at the end of my remote control. Geez there’s Jeopardy. I’ll take April Sucks for $1,000, Alex.

(flip)

Oh, here we go. CNN. Trillions here. Corporate greed there. The little type scrolls across the bottom of the screen: Iraq, stock market, ugh; A, I and G are three letters I hope I never see again. Too big to fail? What is the right size to fail? Is my live savings too big to fail? Nope.

Strangely, humans learn more from losing than winning. Coaches won’t admit that – until they lose. Considering that April is the month that hosts April 15th, losing seems like an appropriate subject.

It is spring. Flowers crank up. Leaves put out. April showers bring May flowers. That tells me, get ready for some quadrupulous rain in April. Hello Mr. Cantore.

Years ago, when we lived in Texas, April was the month when the sky turned greenish purple and the wind did its damndest to hammer our car with baseball-sized hail and blow the shingles off our roof, even when the sun shined. That is April.

This is what April means: Jim Baker married Tammy Faye in April. Marvin Gaye was shot by his father in April. CBS fired Brent Mussburger in April. Iraq started using mustard gas on civilians in April. Coincidence? Perhaps. Or maybe April just really sucks.

I attempted to talk to a woman in a grocery store; get her April wisdom. Here is what she said:

“I have pepper spray.”

That is April.

May can’t get here fast enough.

The concept of food is simple: find it, prep it, cook and eat it. Tonight’s Iron Chef, like every episode, added yards to the process. One chef was painting with balsamic vinegar. One chef made little veggie sculptures with goop from a food processor. An engineering contraption was churning out dough or perhaps it was something else, I’m not sure. I lost track while Alton Brown tongue-wrestled sentences pontificating about kosher salt.

How do all of those chefs in Kitchen Stadium just rip into the secret ingredient so perfectly? How do they know what they’re about to be making instantly if it was, indeed, a secret just 18 seconds ago? The Bruce Lee fellow passionately unveils the star ingredient as if he is about to attack Jackie Chan and immediately, every person wearing a white uniform is playing their part like the same symphony went off in their heads simultaneously. I’m sorry but I think they’re not showing us the part where the head chef sits down with a pencil and paper and scratches his head and looks out the window and tries to figure out what the hell he’s going to whip up with that big, smoking table filled with supposedly secret whatever. It is just too damned perfect.

Tonight’s secret ingredient was basil. Basil. Are you kidding me? You can put basil in anything. One chef made ice cream out of the stuff. Are the producers of the Food Network running out of ingredients? Basil? How about salt? Perhaps pepper or water will be next. No matter, I’m a sucker. I watched it like it was North Carolina and Duke tied with a minute to play and the Tar Heels are about to nail the winning tre.

I didn’t even recognize the guy playing the Iron Chef. No Bobby Flay, no Cat Cora, no Mario B. Who was this guy? Maybe I have missed too many episodes lately. I’m loosing my Iron Chefishness. I feel like the first time I watched Deadliest Catch and said, “So?” I mean every week they are out on that boat in rough water, right? Crabs maybe? Maybe not? Some guy gets his fingers smashed. Another guy gets pissed off. There is bad weather. Forgive me but that’s not unlike making a show about some Nebraska farm guys plowing every week.

“Hey, Hubert, watch your hand or that combine will –“ Squish. “Oh damn. That’s gonna leave a mark. Grab that thing. Dust it off. If we get to the ER fast enough they can probably sew it back on.”

Next week, Hubert is up on the combine again, hand all bandaged up, couple of fingers lost to the gears. A storm is whipping the plains like Hulk Hogan after two pots of coffee. There is yelling and grimacing. Deep voiced announcer: “Next on Combine.” Cut to a big old boy standing on the combine. “Watch your foot, Hank!” Crunch. Damn, another one.

These shows have a pattern. Every week on “How It’s Made” they make something. You see what I mean? Every week on MTV, some beautiful twentysomethings pile up in a house together and we watch them bitch and moan and smite each other with insults, and after a few episodes, someone wins something and ends up in People magazine or on a website, wearing no underwear. That’s the pattern.

I want to see Iron Chef  pit two guys from Assback, Alabama in Bryant-Denny Stadium with 92,000 people and a Weber Grill. The ingredient will be a greased pig. One of them has to catch it. What happens next is not scripted.

Before you get upset about the cruelty of this heinous premise, there is a twist. If you have ever tried to catch a greased pig, you already know that the advantage goes to the pig, big time. So sans the escaped porker, the two contestants must square off in a best two-out-of-three wrestling match. The loser must grill and eat a football.

The frilly, little dishes served tonight on Iron Chef were no less preposterous. A dab of this, a sprig of that, a dollop of some green, syrupy plant matter squeezed from a Glad bag with a tiny hole in the corner.

Where’s the hubcap-sized slab of chicken fried steak as crusty as a scab on an elephant’s knee? Where’s a chunk of country-cured ham, salty enough to kill all three judges and Alton Brown just for looking at it? Where’s a mess of turnips and yams both hot and sweet enough to get you elected governor in Mississippi?

I’m waiting for the day when they uncover that table on Iron Chef and there sits nothing but a deep fryer. Who cares what they fry up in it? Pass the Lisinopril.