1st Annual Christmas Awards

Cutest Rendition of the BYU Fight Song: Eli Hansen



Blondest Hair: Miss Mindy Bergeson























Most frequent tear-shedder: Matthew Morris






Best Looking 8-month pregnant Mom: JoEllen Morris


















Most Graceful on the Ice: Susan Hansen


















Most Air: Talmage Bergeson














While I missed out on the ice skating and sledding, I am glad I got to spend some quality time with the Hansens this year. It was great to see all of the kids and get to know my in-laws a bit better. And Tyler, Welcome Home!

A Hansen Carol

Growing up as 1 of 7 I always thought we had a pretty large crowd at Christmas. After spending this Christmas with almost the entire Hansen clan I now think back to the McKinnon Christmases of years past as small, docile gatherings. Here's the guest list at Mom and Dad Hansen's Christmas Eve festivities (and I didn't even need Kent's help):

Mom & Dad
Grandma Ellen
Brian
Liesl
Tyler
Paula & Scott
David
Jan
Garrett
Lincoln
Everett
Susanna
Talmage
Mindy
Neil & Kristie
Anna
Lizzie
Maria
Martha
Eli
Abbie
Bruce & Michelle
Clyn
Thys
Lana
JoEllen & Mark
Felicity
Katrina
Matthew
Kent & I
Heidi & Aaron

I feel it necessary to say just how impressed I am with Mom Hansen's ability to organize such a night and not rip her hair out at the end of it. In fact, I believe she was able to actually enjoy herself. The program for the evening went a little something like this:

Dinner




























Nativity (written, directed, and produced by Heidi)






























Carol Sing-a-long

Top Songs

I've always been kind of a music nut, but not in the same way my brother Kurt is a music nut. He is more of a music walnut, where as I am a music peanut. Kurt loves classical music and ONLY classical music, everything else is complete trash. Although I was surprised that when he picked Mel and I up from the Kansas City airport he was listening to NON-CLASSICAL music, which pretty much rocked my foundation. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if Kurt can change, and you can change, everybody can change!

Kurt is the chump in the yellow footies here.

Anyway, I started off listening to Alternative around the turn of the decade (80's/90's), and my first favorite band was Pet Shop Boys/Erasure because they're pretty much the same anyway. Once I found out they were gay, well, that was the end of THAT.

This picture of me on the piano was pretty much the only time I played, and I'm sure it was a rousing rendition of "Bill Grogan's Goat."

In 6th grade KJQ, the only station I ever listened to, went off the air and was replaced by X-96, which I was not emotionally ready for. So that started my radio renaissance, where I started experimenting with other stations, even the despicable "Hot 94.9".

That reminds me of the time when we went to Burger King when JoEllen was still in elementary school, making me no older than 8. We went to year-round school, and we were "off-track", which meant 3 weeks of vacation at random times during the year. Mom "treated" us to one fast-food meal every off-track, usually at Skipper's, but sometimes Burger King. We chose the Burger King because of the awesome playground, which was over there by where TGIFriday's is.

Somehow JoEllen got a hold of a 97.1 KISS FM bumper sticker and there was this contest where if they spotted your car with a KISS FM sticker, then you can win 1000 bucks or something. So on the way home, JoEllen sat in the back of the brown station wagon holding up the sticker in the window, but Mom was outraged that Jo would be defiling our station wagon with such a trashy radio station. But Jo kept sneaking up the sticker, as if we would be spotted in the 15 seconds and win 1000 bucks. I was super excited, I was sure Jo was going to win!

Back to the radio renaissance: In 6th grade I started listening to R&B, which at the time was awesome with hits like "Everybody Dance Now" and "Good Vibrations". That lasted until 8th grade, when I got sick of the repetitiveness of R&B and started getting into KBER, which was your white trash Dad's favorite station. White Snake, Winger, Tesla, Poison, Saigon Kick, W.A.S.P., and of course the classic sounds of AC/DC and Metallica. That's when I first joined BMG and got my 10 free CD's for one cent, plus 4 bucks in shipping.

One of the CD's that came in that first shipment was Nine Inch Nails' Downward Spiral. JoEllen saw that I had purchased it, so she and her best friend Dawn took their righteous authority and broke it. I was super angry, but of course I couldn't tell Mom and Dad, because then they would've found out about all my other CD's.

That's when I took my music to the underground. Me and Baldwin purchased a PO Box at the local post office box so we could get our music shipped there, not having to worry about our parents checking the mail or any overzealous sisters stomping them out. That enabled us to sign up with all sorts of fake names (like Amanda Hugandkiss and I. P. Freely) and get the same deal from BMG again and again.

By the time high school hit, I was into Pearl Jam and the grunge era pretty hardcore. I mostly listened to X-96 and 107.5, but also still stuck with KBER. I can still remember my 6 preset radio stations in that crappy Toyota Tercel I drove, shown here in the snow:

1. X-96
2. 107.5 The End
3. Q-99.5
4. Star 102.7 (Hey-they didn't play ALL gay music)
5. Arrow 103.5
6. KOHS 91.7 (in the summer it was off, so I switched off between 105.7 and 94.1)

Delivering pizza throughout high school gave me a LOT of time to listen to music, plus I traded CD's with my buddies Erik, Jeff, and Dirty Dan all the time. I also DJ-ed at KOHS, so that gave me access to a lot of music as well. I even did an "internship" at 107.5 where I would sit in the studio with Dom Casual every day for a couple of weeks and watch him do his thang. Then Baldwin got jobs with various radio stations and me becoming a DJ after school became more and more a reality. By the time I finished high school I had pretty much completed my pizza system, so at that point I realized that I didn't want to work midnight shifts for the rest of my life, so instead I stayed in school. Good choice.

Anyway, here are my current top 20 songs. There's only one rule for these songs: I have to have heard them for more than a year. You can't just hear a cool song on the radio and add it to your top 20 and then get sick of it in a month. So it's got to last a year.

1. Brothers on a Hotel Bed - Death Cab for Cutie
2. Screenwriter's Blues - Soul Coughing
3. Longroad - Pearl Jam
4. Nutshell - Alice in Chains
5. Last Stop This Town - The Eels
6. Beethoven II: Arietta. Adagio molto semplice e cantabile
7. Bad - U2
8. Jackass - Beck
9. Wake Up - Mad Season
10. Heartbeats - Jose Gonzalez
11. The Adventure - Angels and Airwaves
12. Mad, Mad World - Gary Jules
13. H - Tool
14. Either Way - Guster
15. Blood Brothers - Bruce Springsteen
16. The City Sleeps - MC 900 Ft Jesus
17. Fool in the Rain - Led Zeppelin
18. Housin' - Rage Against the Machine
19. Staple It Together - Jack Johnson
20. Babylon - David Gray

A Day in the Life

Someone I work with sent this to me after a particularly trying day and I think it accurately reflects the job I do...

When In Rome...

There has been WAY too much football and "boy junk" posted on this blog lately. That's what I get for giving Kent my password...now he thinks he owns this thing.

As I sit here watching the snow pile up outside our sliding door watching the underpaid maintenance guys shovel us a path across the lawn to the trash dumpster, I figured it was the perfect time to add a little Christmas spirit to our humble blog.

Two weeks after Thanksgiving Kent and I made the annual trip to Home Depot to pick out our REAL (as in pine needles falling on the carpet, needing to be watered real) Christmas tree. Of course, the day we choose to do this happens to be the coldest day of the year. Not that Kent enjoys below-zero temperatures, but I think secretly, deep-down-inside, he was excited that it was so cold. It meant that I would be too cold to walk up and down the rows of trees trying to find the "perfect" tree, measuring height, space between branches, stability, overall health and beauty. He was right. As the doors to the Garden Dept slid open and the frigid gust blew past me, I looked towards the trees, pointed from 20 feet away and said, "That one is the one." Kent thought the one next to it looked a little thicker so I told him to grab it and run. Well, it was thicker all right. It is now filling one of the two rooms that make up our apartment.
But it does look fabulous and rather Christmas-y...

Recently I have become fond of cookie cutters and the idea of fun they represent and so earlier this week Kent encouraged me to make something of this obsession and actually make some cookies with the cutters. So after an extra long day at work we set off into the world of sugar plum fairies. That world is seriously overrated.

We rolled out the first round of dough and Kent did a superb job of arranging the cookie cutters to utilize maximum dough space. However, it got a little tricky moving them from the counter top to the cookie sheet, so after his first attempt the rolling, cutting, and baking was delegated to me.




Kent kept himself busy mixing the icing and creating a rainbow of colors. His first grade art teacher is beaming with pride right now...








It was all I could do to keep up with Kent as he iced and sprinkled everything in his path, and I mean everything. I'm still wiping up icing and sprinkles...But he was very creative and I am confident that our neighbors have never received Christmas cookies quite like these before.

All in all, it was a fun activity to do together, but I recommend it to anyone on a Saturday or day off when maybe you've had time to sit down and rest a bit beforehand. To all the supermoms out there who attempt this with small children, I applaud you. In fact, it's a standing ovation.

REAL LIFE WALK-OFF SAFETY

So my buddy Jason, aka Flex, aka Husband of DOB, aka Mahonri Moriancumr, was reading my last post and told me that he got an ACTUAL WALK-OFF SAFETY in Super Tecmo Bowl.

Here is what happened, in his own words:

"I was Detroit who has an okay defense unless I am playing with them. It came down to the last 3 minutes of the game, which in real time equals about 30 seconds. I was up most of the game, but somehow I couldn’t sack their QB enough so they were just driving down by passing. Their running game was futile. With about 20 seconds left they were on their 35 yard line. They launched a ball that clearly going for a big gain. Luckily my D tackled the guy on about the 30 yard line. I thought I was safe, except I was only up 3. They went for the field goal, and knocked it through the uprights. Ugh. OVERTIME. That wasn’t bad, except they got the ball first, and from what they did last series I was doomed. I kicked a whopper, all the way to the endzone and we tackled them on the 10 yard line. Anyone who has played it enough knows that the run the ball that close out of their endzone. Sure enough, I tackled them for a 5 yard loss. Next play play action, incomplete pass. 3rd down and 15. Run play again. I called it and BAM!!! Walk off sudden death safety. If I hadn’t been in the middle of class I would have been jumping and shouting about this one."

Wow! Isn't that just amazing? I'm speechless. I'm without speech. My arms are shaking as I type this, my heart beating a million times a minute. This is what heaven is like.

Bull Crap Series

It's time for my annual column against the BCS, or rather, against the NCAA. I can't fault the BCS, because it was a huge improvement over the bowls in the first place. What I CAN fault is the commissioners who stand in the way of a potential playoff system, namely, the Big 10 commish and the PAC 10 commish.

Of course, I'm extra angry after the seasons where the Cougs have won the MWC and I would like to see them with a small chance to win it all, instead of doomed to the next-to-worthless Las Vegas Bowl. Last year the Vegas Bowl was cool because we had a great season and we were finally back in a bowl game. This year, although our team was arguably worse, we are not satisfied to play UCLA, a team we lost to earlier in the season. And if we beat them, so what? We beat the 20th place team in the PAC-10.

I was watching the Missouri/OU game last Saturday, and after West Virginia had lost and it appeared that Mizzou was also going to lose, Brent Moose and Kirk Herby began to talk about the necessity of a playoff. I was enjoying it until Moose said, "Although we would like a playoff, it's NEVER going to happen." And Herby agreed. That set me off! Never? Really, never? Not in a million years? Ridiculous!

Many sports writers have written articles about playoffs this year, and every year the vast majority of people agree. The problem here is that football players/coaches/commissioners are VERY STUBBORN PEOPLE. Of course, I'm going off of a stereotype that I see in all the Hollywood movies where Coach X from Evil Big School Y is playing Coach Z from perennially-crappy-but-having-an-unpredictably-great-year school...um, I've run out of letters...A. Coach X is a big fat jerk and he steals the other team's playbook while Coach Z is a soft-spoken nice guy with a drinking problem that he manages to stave off for the duration of the season.

Coach Z's joeerrbb (job) is on the line this year so he pulls in Token Black From the Streets who happens to be the fastest player ever and he inserts in all these new plays and the team builds around what they have and now they have a great team, although the racial tensions between the old, slow, white running back with a southern accent and the new black running back result in a few altercations on and off the practice field, but when the white guy sees that the black guy lives in the ghetto they become best friends and start winning ballgames, because that's just what they do.

So when School Y plays School A, School Y gets up to an insurmountable lead of 71 to 0. But when School A's linebacker gives a great halftime speech about overcoming all of the odds, the team starts coming back. The song "Eye of the Tiger" plays through a montage of smashing hits and thrown passes while the scoreboard keeps updating the score: 71-7, 71-14, 71-21, and so on until the score is 71-63 with 23 seconds left and School A has the ball on their own 1 yardline. School Y's coach no longer has the smug "I've got you now" look on his face...he's now quite worried. Coach Z pulls out his Secret Playbook of Plays That Nobody Has Ever Laid Eyes On, and it turns out that it's a simple draw play to Token Black who ends up running 99 yards for a touchdown while dodging about 100 opponents. Coach Z decides to kick the extra point, and when the other coaches question him, he just says, "I've got a plan" while looking ominously off into the distance.

School A kicks it off School Y who runs it out to the 25 with 10 seconds left. School A has all of their timeouts and School Y runs it into the line for the first 3 downs, but only 6 seconds go off the clock. 4 seconds left and School Y goes into the punt formation but School A sends all of their players to block it and of course it's blocked! The ball rolls out of the end zone and School A wins, 72-71 with a walk-off safety!

The moral of the preceding story is that Coach Z represents all of the victorious coaches because he was open to change by bringing in the risky black dude and using new plays. This relates to the stubborn commissioners who are represented by Evil Coach X who have all the cards in their hand but are too stubborn to change and therefore end up losing in the long run.

So despite what Moose and Herby think, 30 years from now we will have a nice playoff system where every team in college football has a chance of winning it all, just like we do with basketball. We will laugh at how we used to have the BCS, just like how we laugh now about how we used to just vote on who should win the championship. It will happen eventually, it is an inevitability. Why am I so sure? Because EVERYBODY WANTS IT EXCEPT THE FEW STUBBORN TRADITIONALISTS THAT HAPPEN TO HAVE A LOT OF POWER!

However, it will take a very long time for the commissioners to die, retire, or soften their hearts, and they will be replaced by commissioners who don't care about meaningless traditions like always having a Pac-10 team in the Rose Bowl. In the meantime, I will complain every year with all of the other writers until it is changed.