Dec
24
Hallelujah Chorus: alternate lyrics
Filed under holidays, movies at 9:12 pm | Leave a Comment
As some of you may know, we’re currently living in the basement of my brother and sister-in-law’s house. It really has been great. One ramification of it, though, is that we’re living in one big “J” shaped room, so when Micah is sleeping, we need to be quiet. This includes while watching TV. As such, we’ve grown accustomed to watching TV with the volume down low and closed captioning turned on.
This weekend we were watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, 
which we do every year at Christmas (along with How the Grinch Stole Christmas, of course). This is the first year we’ve watched it with closed captioning enabled. At the point where Clark finally gets the Christmas lights on their house to light up, a snippet of the Hallelujah Chorus begins playing in the background. Instead of, “For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth” the closed captioning displayed, “Lord God Our God and King, Oh Let us praise Him.” After replaying it a few times, we could hear the similarities in how they sounded. We were amused.
“I hope this adds to your enjoyment of the holidays.” — Clark
Dec
23
Dan Fogelberg, the voice of Christmas?
Filed under holidays, music at 2:40 pm | 2 Comments
Let’s face it. When you think of Christmas music, you think of Dan Fogelberg, right? Yeah, me either … until this year. Like many people, I love Christmas music. This year has been no exception. I’ve been listening to Christmas music pretty much non-stop since Thanksgiving, either from my own personal collection or on a local radio station.
That station played a song that got my attention, mostly because of its cheesiness. It was one of those songs that shouldn’t count as a Christmas song, but it mentions Christmas Eve and snow, and thus gets played. The lyrics made me laugh, as they talked about meeting an old acquaintence in the frozen food section of a grocery store. The second or third time I heard it, the DJ announced it was Dan Fogelberg’s, “Same Old Lang Syne.” More than once I’ve had the song stuck in my head, much to my dismay. The tune is fairly catchy.
The first thing I thought of when I heard Dan Fogelberg is a game my friends and I used to play in high school whenever we’d drive somewhere. We’d put the radio on scan, and you tried to be the first person to correctly identify the artist of a song when it came on. Invariably, if no one knew the true artist, someone would shout out Dan Fogelberg. I’m not really sure why we chose him. Perhaps because Rhythm of The Rain was somewhat popular back then, or perhaps because he had a funny name and no one would every really know if you were correct or not when declaring him the artist. Even if you did, you wouldn’t want to admit it.
In an effort to redeem myself (and this post) a bit, I will say “Oh Holy Night” and “Do You Hear What I Hear” are probably my two favorite Christmas songs right now. I’ll even go so far as to admit I like Josh Groban’s “Oh Holy Night” quite a bit. Not sure if Dan Fogelberg sings that one …
Dec
23
There is no shortage of “holiday” parties at work. Last week was the official 
party for our campus. You have to purchase a ticket, and now that I think about it, it sounds a lot like other Office parties I’ve seen recently. I was informed several weeks ahead of time that our team had a tradition of going to our own off-site unofficial party. Fortunately, it always occurs at the exact same time as the official party. I must say, I never realized how tiring 3 hours of playing pool and eating can be. A good time was had by all.