Holiday Romance

[Graffiti] In Sam Wellers’ book store this morning one sales assistant announced to a friend, “I’m skipping Christmas and going straight to New Year.” Given the economic climate and the weather you couldn’t blame her. And yet, damn it, it’s Christmas, a time of good cheer and faith in mankind.

As if in response to that sales person’s acerbic thought condemning the Yuletide to being no more than another day, someone in this great metropolis wrote a message in the snow just across the road from the bookstore. That message, for those lucky enough to witness it, just might have restored a little faith in our fellow human beings battered by the ennui and disappointment that seems to overhang this particular Christmas.

On one of the rectangular concrete slabs in front of KUTV 2, someone wrote this morning in capital letters, I AM IN LOVE WITH U. Was it a man or a woman who, heart in mouth, declared their passion to someone who knew nothing about their feelings? Or was it an act of confirmation when faced with questions or doubts?

Whoever wrote it and for whatever reason, it was a singular romantic gesture of passionate love announced and, dare we hope, reciprocated. A gesture that for a few fleeting hours was immortalized in the snow. And left there for the whole world to see. [Stephen Dark]

Happy Everything

[Joy] We at City Weekly are winding down for Christmas, signing off on our last few pages for our Dec. 27 issue. It's late afternoon, the Winter Solstice is upon us. The light outside our Main Street window is shifting; the snow is glistening with the last bit of daylight.

We're just beginning to drink shots of cranberry vodka. Soon, we'll pop corks on the champagne.

We started this blog a couple of years ago. It was mostly up to Web master Bill Frost and a few plucky writers to feed it. They worked hard. Now we're all trying to keep it going. But we may take a fews day off for some holiday cheer. We'll be back.

Thanks for hitting on us. Oh, that didn't sound good. Thanks for reading us. All the better if you write a few comments in reaction to our posts. We like social intercourse.

Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. All. Of. It. (Holly Mullen)

Beck the Halls

[Xmas] Time to face it: I'm not going to win tickets to the Glenn Beck Christmas show on Saturday night at the E Center, no matter how many times I entered via 570 KNRS. But at least now I'll have the unending joy of e-mail spam from "Family Values Talk Radio."

Good City Weekly liberals may or may not be aware of Glenn Beck, whose radio talk show airs weekdays 4-7 p.m. (and 9-10 a.m.) on KNRS, running right into his TV show on CNN Headline News at 7 p.m. He also has a new book (called An Inconvenient Book) and now a Christmas tour. He's a busy guy, as detailed in an exhaustive (and exhausting) story in Sunday's Deseret Morning News. Why the D-News? Beck's also a converted Mormon who only a few years ago gave up booze and drugs and became a conservative talk-radio guy.

Despite all this, Beck runs an entertaining, unpredictable radio show--unlike, say, Utah's "most-trusted newsman." Because, unlike most of the assclowns drafted into talk radio during the post-Rush Limbaugh boom of the '90s (consider yourself lucky if you never heard The Oliver North Show), Beck was a radio guy long before he cleaned up and turned to talk, and it shows. If NPR could come up with something even half as freewheeling and fun, they'd finally be onto something.

Don't know what his live Christmas show is like, but I doubt it's a typically maudlin yuletide snoozefest. Feel free to send me a review, you lucky-bastard winners. (Bill Frost)