Gallery of Bad Christmas Presents

Now that Christmas is over and we've all survived spending time with our families, it's time for the roundup of useless crap received as Christmas gifts. I have to say, I got much less crap than usual this year, and most of it was easily returnable. In the category of "making sure my son never has sex again," the boy's Mom got me a velour loungewear set. It's a step up from the ankle length lilac fleece nightgown she bought me last year. My parents countered nicely with terra cotta wine art and ugly art in a clashing lime green frame. For future reference, IKEA takes returns without a receipt. Also returned was this book, which I exchanged for this one. Otherwise, I made out OK.

Your turn. Can anyone top this stuff?

Nothing says Christmas like a colonoscopy.

In honour of the far too rapidly approaching Christmas season, and inspired by Elf (man, Jon Favreau has really gone downhill since Swingers), I'm starting a list of bad Christmas movies, some of which will no doubt be making an appearance on TBS later this week:

- Jingle All The Way, starring Arnold The Governor and Sinbad, two years after Houseguest and maybe six months before his retreat to obscurity and occasional appearances on Hollywood Squares, as bad dads who waited 'til Christmas Eve to go looking for the It Toy of the moment.
- The Santa Clause. 'Nuff said.
- Moving down the list of Home Improvement alumni, there's I'll Be Home for Christmas. The scmaltzy tagline says it all: Somewhere between L.A. and N.Y. Jake found the meaning of Christmas. Hopefully he found it right before dying in a fiery car crash.
- They may not technically be Christmas movies, but the pair of "reincarnated as a snowman" movies, both coincidentally titled Jack Frost, deserve mention here. One of the snowmen is a bad dad given a second chance to be a good father and the other one is a serial killer out for vengeance. They should have combined these two and had the snowdad snap and go on a killing spree.
- Ernest Saves Christmas. The IMDB user comments say it's an excellent Ernest movie, which really isn't saying much.
- Possibly the best bad Christmas movie ever, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. How can anything starring Jamie Farr and a young Pia Zadora be bad?

Bicycles will be banned in Shanghai next year in order to ease congestion. Ummm, if you're trying to ease congestion, you might want to think about banning cars, not bikes. Yes, I read the whole article, and I know that they have also taken steps to reduce the number of cars in the city centre, but banning bikes seems completely counter-productive. The fraction of the cyclists that can actually afford cars will end up driving instead of biking, and even if that's a small fraction it's still more cars on the road, plus a whole lot more pedestrians. But I guess the communist party limousine takes precedence over 9 million cyclists.

What's with all these keener high school kids making important scientific discoveries? When I was in high school, the science teachers made us all participate in the science fair, and everyone did lame experiments like making crystals (which we had to do in chemistry anyway) or growing plants under fluorescent lights. I think some kids just did library research on clouds, but maybe that was the elementary school science fair (in which, I might add, my best friend and I won second prize for our experiment on the effects of different kinds of soda pop on nails - yeah, that's right, we stuck a bunch of nails in various glasses of pop for a few hours to see what would happen). We weren't really discovering anything that real scientists didn't already know, and we certainly weren't winning thousands of dollars.

It's great that they're making important contributions to science. But I can't help but think this is just another example of kids trying to grow up too fast, and I wonder if some day they might look back and wish they'd spent their childhood goofing off, like kids are supposed to do.

Plus, you have to wonder: the kid is working in the lab of a former Nobel frickin' Prize winner, and no one thought that perhaps he had a little help on his amazing project?

Last week was an interesting week in science. Cinnamon was found to be good for your blood, clinical trials started on the Orgasmatron, a Florida company announced plans for an under-the-skin implant that makes credit card payments via radio signals, and it was announced that trials of a spray-on female contraceptive would start in 2004.

The leadership of Thailand's ruling Thai Rak Thai Party are planning to ban MPs from having mistresses (known as "mia noi") or visiting brothels, and the MPs are furious. "To have a mia noi is an individual's right," said Thirachai Sirikhan, one of the MPs. I'd really like to see the part of Thailand's constitution that says you have the right to have a mistress.