The Holy Grail Press
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Word of the Every So Often
ninekiller: (noun) another name for a shrike, a songbird known for impaling its victims on thorns, barbwire, or what have you, and then eating them at its leisure. It is believed that the shrike (also known as a butcher bird) had to impale nine victims before eating. Ergo the name.
Everyday History
On November 6, 2020, the movie My Dad’s Christmas Date was released, starring absolutely nobody you know, showing in a real theatre maybe for a day, while also going straight to video and streaming platforms. Why do we care here at the Press? Trust me. We don’t.
Christmas movies are a big industry. Every year anywhere from 100 to 140 new Christmas movies are released, mostly on channels like Lifetime, Hallmark, Great American Family, and Netflix. They generally start rolling out in mid-October, peaking about now – in November. By Christmas they’re all but done. Seriously, who wants to watch a Christmas anything in January? So, yeah, if you’re just starting now, you have right at 50 days until Christmas. If you watched three a day, you could get them all in... but that’s only for this year’s releases. If you want to watch every Christmas movie ever made... that’s what Purgatory’s for.
Sure, the big theatre feature films make a lot of money for studios. Take the 2018 version of The Grinch. It’s the biggest seller of all time, raking in around $553 million and counting. It’s right up there with Home Alone (both one and two), The Polar Express, and Elf. And every year we’re sure to see at least one big production, such as this year’s Ebenezer starring Johnny Depp. That won’t go straight to the Hallmark channel.
But the schlock movies, those Christmas movies that pretty much go straight to cable, they make millions as well. They’re low budget, high return, especially because a lot of them include advertisements – commercials, which the big block busters don’t have... well, if you don’t count the 15 minutes or so of nothing but commercials before the movie ever begins.
And because people keep watching those god-awful movies year after year, they’re the gift that keeps on giving. Well, maybe not My Dad’s Christmas Date, but somebody probably thinks that’s the greatest Christmas movie ever made. And it may be. But I’m not going to watch it.
Cartoon of the Week
Stuff
The History of the Future: The Sanity Shift
It was the 2030 Census that verified, indeed, that there were now more people in the Untied States who were clinically insane than those who were not. And it was in 2032 that the Supreme Court ruled that, by definition, “normal” was decided by the majority. Therefore, what once was considered to be crazy, was now the norm, and those who once were considered sane should now be considered extremely dangerous. Institutionalization was recommended. Speaking for the majority, Chief Justice Bidwell stated, “Shut up! I’ll kill you all! What are you looking at?”
Few “insane” people were ever locked up, though, because they quickly went underground. After all, it is a lot easier to pretend you’re yelling at somebody who isn’t there than to pretend you’re not. They learned to identify each other with secret signals, and would often meet clandestinely, so, as one member recalled, “We could just sit around and be quiet without anybody yelling at us or trying to take away our socks.”
One of the things that the new majority insisted on doing was driving, which had long been a privilege of the sane. By 2037, mostly because of all the people who had been run over, many of whom where indoors, it was determined that those people who had recently been in the majority no longer were. And once again, the definition of “sane” was revised to the pre-2030 status.
See, as well, the Shift of 2088, 2129, 2173, and 2222.
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