Legal Notice: This story, video and all the contents therein are purely for entertainment purposes. We are in no way affiliated with the actual Christmas, actual war, punditry, the extreme left, the extreme right, the extreme middle or any other group with any agenda other than humor. Joseph Coaler Productions did not set out to offend anyone, but sometimes, feelings get hurt. We hope it’s not yours, but if it is, we take absolutely no personal responsibility for your level of outrage.

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Several years ago, little Joe Coaler started noticing a trend that he thought was interesting. People in stores began saying “Happy Holidays” starting around December 1st and going through January 1st. (Some stalwarts started saying it in late November and continued until mid-January, but little Joe thought this was a bit extreme.)

Along with the greeting came bright lights, exciting and wonderful music with moving harmonies and extravagant instrumentation. There were brightly bedecked trees that smelled of lovely pine forests, large golden Menorahs with their nine flames, choirs in festive outfits, sculptures and dioramas in different sizes of an open stable filled with amazed animals and a small child in a straw bed, and everywhere he looked he saw the same large bearded man dressed in bright red. Snow, both real, plastic and flocked, lay everywhere.

Every movie, play, television show and radio program seemed to be either about the transformation of a fellow named Ebenezer Scrooge or a large green beasty called Grinch.

And shopping. Everyone was shopping. Money was being spent in amounts that boggled his little mind. He liked his mind being boggled, it felt all tingly, so he thought that this must be a good thing. The economy could always use the influx. The moving around of wealth from one to another. It made his tiny heart glow with pride in his fellow man.

But a darkness was lurking. People started talking about a war on Christmas. First in small whispers, then with louder and more strident voices. It frightened little Joe, but he could not see who was waging this war. He looked and looked, but there was no war against the season. No war against Christmas. No war against Hanukkah. No war against Kwanzaa, which had been born to Dr. Maulena Karenga in 1966. The season seemed completely unaffected by any kind of war against it. With a little study and research, he found that the warning had been being raised almost yearly since the late 1880s, but there had never been an actual war on Christmas. Little Joe was a good capitalist and realized, where there is such a need, there is a product, so he decided to take matters into his own hands.

The War On Christmas is being waged by Joseph Coaler Productions.

Joseph Coaler Productions is the brainchild of Steve Mancini and Geoff Hoff. It’s a problem child, of course.

Geoff and Steve have written the highly-touted, critically-acclaimed, laugh-out-loud-funny, satirical-serial novel, Weeping Willow and they’re currently writing the knee-slapping-hilarious, widely-popular, sure-to-be-a-legend, online-series, Poor Paul. They’re also exceptionally humble and despise hyphen abuse.

Happy Holidays to all and to all a good nightcap!

(Video first posted on http://www.WageWarOnChristmas.com in December, 2008.)

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

And then America went crazy and tried to retroactively stop a bunch of zealots who turned a jet into a very lethal weapon.

I made my peace early with the illogic and humiliation of having to remove my belt and shoes to join a friend for lunch in their office building or keep my appointment with my cardiologist.  I try to interact like a human with the poor people manning the portals of a system designed to be very inhuman and inefficient.  I talk and joke with them and most will talk and joke back, or at least smile.  Some just give me that bureaucratic blank stare to let me know this is not a time for levity, thank you very much, but I feel it is part of my job to bring a ray of sunshine into people’s lives whenever and wherever I can.  Okay, I also always wanted to be the teacher’s pet.  You might try it, though.  It makes my day easier than if I grumbled through them.  I must go through, I might as well do it with a smile on my face.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of flying to San Antonio.  At Terminal Seven of Los Angeles International Airport I checked in at the little computer console with my e-ticket.  Wonderful convenience, those, you do everything on-line, put your credit card in a slot, print out your boarding pass and you’re on your way.  The first console didn’t work.  Nor the second.  Nor the third.  Finally, one of the people behind the counter, whose load these consoles are supposed to lighten, came out, opened one of the consoles up, waved her hands voodoo-like over its innards and printed my pass.

I had packed my bags fulfilling all the regulations I was aware of for carry-on.  Not too heavy, not too big.  Only one suitcase and a shoulder bag.  They could both fit in the overhead or under the seat in front of me.  On the way to the main screening station at Los Angeles Airport, or at least at Terminal Seven, you must pass several mini check points.  It’s sort of akin to what I understand entering a country behind the Iron Curtain must be like.  Yes, there still is an Iron Curtain.  I joked and chatted with each person at each point and got my requisite smile, albeit sometimes patronizing, from most of them.

I was happy to travel and secure in the thought that this minor inconvenience was stopping a child, somewhere, from starving to death.

After the last checkpoint, where you present your photo ID and prove you have a boarding pass, there are four lines to choose from in order to wend your way up to the row of abattoir that are the x-ray machines.  All four rows looked to be about the same length, so I chose the outermost one.  You don’t actually see the screening stations until you wind around the line a bit.  It’s kind of like Disneyland that way, without all the cloying music.

I started realizing my line was moving more slowly than the others.

I chatted and joked with those around me, in my line and the one across the rope.  Finally I saw our x-ray station.  The portal.  The conveyer belt.  The man, staring at his little x-ray screen.  He was stopping at every second or third bag to call his supervisor over to examine some supposed piece of heinous contraband.  The supervisor let all of them through.  No wonder we were the slowest line.  All the other screeners were looking intently into their screens, but letting almost everything by.  Our man had a look about him.  He was big.  He was angry.  He was bitter.

I got my shoes off, my belt unhooked and unlooped, took the laptop out of the shoulder case, took my toiletry bag out of the suitcase.  All my metal, coins, money clip, neck chain, into the plastic bin.  I was ready.  I knew the routine.  After all my stuff went through, the fellow at the controls stopped the conveyor belt and opened my toiletry bag.  Uh oh.

He took out my tube of toothpaste.

“This is over three ounces,” he said.

I sort of didn’t understand.  “I’m sorry?”

“It’s over three ounces.  No liquid over three ounces.”

“But it’s half empty.”

“It’s over three ounces.  The container is over three ounces.”

I was flabbergasted.  It’s not like I was going to blow up a plane with toothpaste.  I doubted even an experienced demolition man could do that.

“I’m going to blow up an airplane with toothpaste?”

I actually said that.  And I didn’t get arrested.  At least we can speak our minds, still.

I insisted there was far less than three ounces of toothpaste in the tube, but he was adamant.  He finally told me I could go back and check it if I wanted.  I’d been in the line for this moment for over forty-five minutes.  A short time, granted, given the state of some airport screening stations, but still.

This is a man who has little or no control of anything in his life and wields his petite power like a demagog.  It never even occurred to me to try to bring a ray of sunshine into his life.  The ray would have been instantly sucked into the black hole that is his void.  A complete waste of a good ray.

“I’m not going to check a tube of toothpaste,” I said to him with a heavy coating of sarcasm that was lost in that same void, never to be seen again.  Hey, it was Tom’s of Maine toothpaste!  “Keep it.”  He did.

I gathered my stuff with quick jerks and snippily put my shoes and belt back on.  That’d show him.  I still haven’t bought a new tube, either, just for spite.  I’d rather brush with salt water.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

I just received a very elegant looking letter in the mail, “You’re Pre-Qualified for an unsecured personal loan of $500 to $3,000!” from the good folks at Brookwood Loans (a MetaBank company.) Wow. Cool. In looking over their offer, I notice several wonderful benefits, very well presented in their well written sales letter: Approval in 24 hours; Money the same day; Manageable payments; No Prepayment penalty and Fixed simple interest rate. And they make it very, very simple, log on, enter the code from the bottom of the letter, fill out your information and submit your request. “It’s just that easy!” they say in bold text. That is easy, I can hardly wait to get my money.

Then I read the exciting news under the “Fixed Simple Interest Rate” section: “Your rate of interest will not change. Loans have an APR of 96%.” 

Wait, what?

96%?

I actually had to read it three times before it registered as anything besides a misprint or a joke.  96%?  Are they insane? And they list this in bold as if it were a good thing for their customers. (Emphasis not added.)  And they actually have higher rates for approval applicants that choose their manual loan funding process, whatever that may be.

Vinnie must be visibly palpitating with orgiastic glee while doing the Snoopy dance all over South Dakota.

That means if you borrow $1,000 on a 36 month loan, by the time it’s done you will have paid back $3072.24. As the song goes, nice work if you can get it. Where is that carpenter who tumbled the building all over the money changers when you really need him?

I hope no poor, desperate fool falls for this scam, although I know there are all too many out there who will never realize they now owe their soul to the company store, which is run by Vinnie in his $5,000 dollar Armani suit and diamond encrusted pinky ring. The address listed for the bank is a P.O. box. I’m not surprised, they’re obviously too smart to want anyone actually knowing where their offices are.

I hope Brookwood and MetaBank fall into a pit somewhere and dissolve into useful molecular components such as nitrogen that can be used to replenish our ravished farmlands or do some other actual good on the planet. I hope Vinnie realizes loansharking will only end in tears and enters the clergy where the only harm he can do is to small children.

So, no thank you, Brookwood, I decline your kind offer of a loan. I’m good.

Hmmm.  Maybe I should move to South Dakota.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

There is one manufactured issue that crops up every year, (and has, I find from my study, for over a century, with some variance in particulars) and that is the supposed “War on Christmas.”  In the last several years, this banner has been hoisted mostly by a television commentator and pundit by the name of Bill O’Reilly, who is offended, OFFENDED, by the fact that some folks have decided to be more inclusive in their holiday greeting and say “Happy Holidays” instead of the more traditional “Merry Christmas.”

There is so much wrong with this stance that it’s difficult to know where to begin.  At a store, the time of year is, by definition, a buying season, not a religious one.  The more people you include in your greeting, ipso facto, the more people available who will shop.  Also, most of the Christmas iconography (Crèches aside) are pagan, or at the very least secular, not Christian.  It can be argued (and has, often, by many Christian scholars) that The Christ was actually born in the spring and that the day of Christmas was chosen to mollify locals in Northern Europe in the Great Conversion.

Okay.  Enough logic and seriousness.  Even I am susceptible to the need for outrage.  (Damn it, why, Lord?  Why?)  In the spirit of anti-outrage, we have created something that, I think, finally brings the War on Christmas home.

http://WageWarOnChristmas.com

Now.  Let’s see if we can all become angry about something that really matters.  Like wearing pants below your underwear to show off your boxers or combing your bangs straight up to show off your forehead.

Well. Seeing as how Americans can get up in arms so quickly about silly things as to send death threats (and, by the way, offers of marriage) for a humor piece about shoes and vociferously obscure reasoned debate over a manufactured misunderstanding, I figured the best way to become known in the general population is to piss someone off. And to do that, I must create a controversy. 

I realize I must choose wisely, not just any controversy will do. It would seem that it must go to the heart of some widely held, deeply felt ideal. On closer inspection, however, admiration of plastic shoes may be felt deeply, but is not very widely held. There are many options. Questioning the patriotism of a true patriot wouldn’t work, a true patriot wouldn’t need outrage, so there wouldn’t be any controversy. Questioning the patriotism of a rascal would do the trick. Samuel Johnson famously said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” And outrage, it seems, is the scoundrel’s idiom.

That, however, is too easy, too often used, and wouldn’t get me noticed at all. I could come out against broccoli, but that one was already taken and I actually like the stuff. I could defend the vegetable content of school lunches because they contain catsup but that barely raised a stir when a well known politician tried it.

I think I have it:

People who blog are idiots.

If that doesn’t bring the juices of the on-line community (the most virulently vociferous community around) to a rolling boil, I would be greatly surprised.

People who blog assume that the very act of blogging makes them an expert, that having a blog makes their opinion more weighty than those without blogs. Without benefit of any journalism school or experience, they assume their investigative techniques are superior to those of “mainstream media” (a pejorative for reporters who actually get paid for their opinions, and whose opinions are actually read by more than just a handful of like minded blog writers.) People who blog spend countless hours pontificating to their keyboards and monitors, mindless of the fact that keyboards and monitors are not enlightened by their infinite wisdom. People who blog are probably all impotent and have problem sweat. People who blog wear Crocs. I dare you to find evidence to the contrary, evidence that I couldn’t repudiate with a swift stroke of my ergonomic human interface device.

I now await my deservedly brutal thrashing. (And any proposals of marriage you may be willing to send my way.) As the son of a broccoli hater once said, “Bring it on.”

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

I have a friend, I’ve only known him a few years but we seem to have a history or connection that is centuries old.  I’ve written about him before, in my trifle on the theory of six degrees of separation.  I know him to be an actor, it’s how he makes his living, and, although he hasn’t hit as big as he hopes (he seems to end up cut out of more films than seems quite reasonable – I’ve suggested he stitch together all these cut scenes and post them on YouTube – “The Unkindest Cut” sort of thing), he lives well.  I’ve seen evidence that he is probably a wonderful director, both theatrically and cinematically, and suspect when he pursues that he will have a career on the heals of Jarmusch or even the Coens. I’ve read some of his writing.  It is compelling and odd.

He recently posted some of his music on-line.  I knew he sang, he’d told me as much, but I had no idea.  The breadth of his talent just keeps getting broader and broader.  I wonder what next incarnation he will thrust upon the unsuspecting world.

His influences seem to be all my favorite people, Laurie Anderson, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, The Beatles, Jacques Brel, Leonard Cohen and more.  His poetry is surprising, his music is refreshing and his voice is easy and rough with an edge that compels you to listen completely.  I had no idea. Where has this facet been hiding?

With the variety of songs he just posted, it seems probable he’s been recording them for some time.  Why have they been hidden?  Does he know how good they are?  He is?  Has he just recorded them to get them out of his head, then moved on, not thinking about them or how they might affect a listener somewhere in some small, provincial town yearning for the romance of SoHo cafés of a previous decade?  Has he not attempted a recording contract?  If so what idiot could have rejected them?  Him?  I had no idea.  I want the CD.  CDs.  All of them.  I want him in my collection, sitting on the shelf right next to Joni Mitchell and Simon and Garfunkle and Zoe Lewis.

So far, he has posted six songs.  Of these, my favorite is “A Little Less”, a heart-wrenching song written to a long time lover vainly attempting to analyze and explain his love that seems almost painful in its intensity but incomprehensible in its changing aspect.  Would that someone might write me such a song or loved me so well.  I also very much like “Crazy Hannah”, a Jacques Brel-esque portrait of a sad homeless woman, one like many we have all seen and from whom we have averted our eyes.  “Mouth of a Lion” – Laurie Anderson in male drag – seems to be about a gay wedding, but probably is not.  It’s dark and fun.  “When Harpo Blows the Blues” deserves its place in the pantheon of the best of folk-rock-blues songs.

He deserves a listen.  He deserves some notice.

Oh.  His name is Ezra Buzzington.  Of all things.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

I rarely say “dandy” anymore, although I’m not sure why. I have found recently that I answer that question with the word “fabulous.” A friend once said to me that he could tell how good I really was doing by how long I stretched out the first syllable. “Only two ‘A’s today?” he’d say. If it were a one “A” fabulous, it was merely a good day. A five “A” fabulous would likely send one into convulsions of ecstacy. I think I usually hover around three.

I like the word fabulous. Okay, yes, it sounds really gay, but so the hell what. And they called Frank Sinatra fabulous and no one would ever consider calling him gay. I dare you to say you’re fabulous and, at least for the few moments you’re saying it, not actually feel fabulous. It’s impossible. The vibrational tones of that particular combination of letters won’t let you. I challenged one of the tellers at the bank I go to to try it. The next time I was at her window, I asked if she had. She said she’d tried it once and it didn’t work. I said to try it one more time. The next visit I was at a different window. That teller asked me how I was and I simply said “Fine.” The first teller called over three windows to say, “well, I’m fabulous!” She smiled and so did I. She was, indeed, fabulous. It works, I tell you.

More people should say they were fabulous. The more they say it, the more fabulous they’d be. President Bush should say it. If he were fabulous he might not be so inclined to incite war and strife all over the place. Andy Rooney should say it. At least momentarily he wouldn’t be so grumpy. It probably wouldn’t last with him, but we can all savor moments.  We should start a movement. The Be Fabulous Movement.  “How are you? You’re fabulous, of course!” It would be the only acceptable answer.

I think it’s a dandy idea.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

Of course, how many people actually have the cash already set aside to purchase a car? (Or even a pack of gum these days, even that’s put on a credit card more often than not.) We usually don’t even have the down payment ready at hand. So, when a car costs less than originally expected, you don’t actually “save” money, you just don’t spend as much potential (read “imaginary”) money as you would have on the more expensive item. You can’t do anything with the money you saved, because in actuality it never really existed. Except in your mind. Which, now I think about it, is how most of my money exists.

Why do I bring this up so many years after the fact? Well, there is a new ad campaign now running from Hyundai, called Dollars & Sense, where the wide-eyed consumers, having fallen in love with the car, are admonished by either Larry Winget, Ray Lucia or Adam Smith (all presumed to be best selling authors of books about money) that they should “put the money they saved into an insured CD” or some such drivel. These renowned economists should be ashamed of themselves! What could it possibly do to an economist’s reputation to advise people to put money that never existed into savings? Isn’t that illegal? Would there eventually be a margin call? Would you have to give the car back when that happened? What if you’ve already spilled ice cream on the upholstery during your trip to Disneyland?

I don’t really begrudge these authors getting their truck load of money for giving this fictional advice in a commercial, it is good economics. For them – lead by example, I always say. Are Hyundai cars relatively inexpensive? Yes. (I didn’t say “cheap”!) Will you spend less money on one than if you buy a comparable car from another maker? Probably. Does that mean you’ve saved money? Theoretically. What are you going to do with that money? I’m going to invest mine in an imaginary gold mine in Argentina. Hey, I don’t even have to buy the car to do that. How much more money can I save, then?

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

I was not a picky eater.  Both my mother and grandmother were wonderful cooks and I liked almost everything they made, except fish (more to do with small bones than flavor), Brussel sprouts (everything wrong with a cabbage, condensed) and, of course, peas.  I ate everything put before me, I was, generally, a well behaved child.  I have fond memories of most meals: pasta with summer sauce, home-made ravioli stuffed with spinach and cheese or luscious Italian sausage filling, corned beef, venison, al olio, pasta con pesto.  The simple mention of these staples make me salivate.

But occasionally my dinner plate was offended by peas.

One morning when I was, perhaps, eight or nine, I “lost” my breakfast and had to stay home from school.  My mother had planed at day trip to visit our Aunt Lou, a two hour drive in each direction.  The other kids were in school and Grandma had the business to run, so I went along for the visit.  Shortly after we got there, it became obvious that I didn’t have a typical flu and Aunt Lou insisted we visit her doctor.

It was acute, gangrenous appendicitis.  I was rushed to the hospital and prepped for emergency surgery.  I was told that my appendix actually burst in the doctor’s hand as he removed it.  I’d been twenty minutes away from major complications or even death.  But I was kid from a large Italian family and all I knew was that I was getting individual attention from doctors, nurses, and even my mother and Aunt Lou.  It all seemed a fair trade.  

A day or so later I was lying in bed, one vestigial organ lighter, when the doctors started me back up on solid food.  The vegetable in my first dinner was peas.  But they were unlike any pea I had ever encountered.  They were bright green, almost shiny, a pat of butter was melting on top of the small pile, its edges taking on the contours of these tiny marvels.  I tasted one.  No smush!  No slime.  It actually popped when I bit down on it.  And the sweetness.  The wonderful sweetness.  I pondered this for some time, then finally asked my mother.

“Well, they were probably frozen,” she said.

Frozen.  We didn’t get frozen vegetables at home.  We either got fresh (corn or green beans from a neighbor’s garden) or canned.  It was a different time.  Even my Italian grandmother used canned vegetables.

I haven’t allowed canned vegetables in my house since I moved out on my own.  And peas are still my favorite meal-time treat.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend