When the newspaper showed up on the porch last Friday emblazoned with the date January 1, 2010, I have to admit I felt like I’d just emerged from a time machine. 2010? Is that even possible? That can’t be a real date. Real dates, as we all know, start with the number “19″. I might be inclined to include a few dates that start with “200″. But 2010? Not possible.

Unfortunately, it’s not only possible, it also actually happened. I didn’t emerge from a time machine or wake up from a dream. It is indeed 2010 and that can only mean one thing: it’s time to make some New Decade Resolutions. Forget about what you’re going to do this year. This year will be gone in a blink. No, let’s focus on the next ten years, which will last much, much longer. (Only ten blinks, by my calculations.)

I’ve thought long and hard about what I’d like to accomplish before December 31, 2019 and I’ve decided to share some of this with you now, primarily because I can’t think of anything else to write about at the moment.

• Finish the first draft of the next book.
• Read it.
• Delete it.
• Write it again, but more better.
• Submit it to a literary agent.
• Get a thank-you letter from a literary agent who tells me it’s the greatest thing he or she has ever seen and will be retiring immediately after selling it to a publisher because, obviously, his or her career as an agent has just peaked.
• Get a big fat check from a publisher who decides to cancel all other books currently in process in order to properly focus on this masterpiece.
• Go on a book tour and sign at least three copies per stop, hopefully to people who aren’t relatives or book store employees.
• Write the second book in the series.
• Repeat many of the previous steps.
• Get approached by many representatives of the film industry to make the movie version.
• Offer that Terry Gilliam is probably the best choice to direct.
• Cry a little that the studio picked Michael Bay instead.
• Go to the premiere of the movie. But in disguise, of course. (Damn paparazzi.)
• Return home from the movie to stare at my IMDb entry.
• Leave a comment on how they left out all the best parts of the book, completely misrepresented the villain, but overall it was still pretty good, much as I hate to admit.
• Finish the book series.
• Finish making all the movies.
• Make two brazillion dollars.
• Give 99% of it to charitable organizations.
• Take a well-deserved nap.

Oh yeah, and I almost forgot. I’m going to eat right, exercise, and lose weight. And I’m also going to go back to Jupiter to find out once and for all what happened to David Bowman.

So there you have it. How about you? Anything you’d like to accomplish over the next 3,647 days?

I remember way back in the day hopping in the car, flipping on the radio, and hearing a Christmas song. It was early December and I thought, “Hey cool, something to get me in the mood.” After the song finished another one came on. Then another and another and another. Now, some dozen or so years later, they’re still playing.

While it was kind of charming at first, I really hate to say it but it’s getting really old now. Yes, yes, I know. “Just don’t listen to it. If you don’t like it, Charlie, just turn on the All Britney Spears station in stead and quit wasted precious blog space on a pointless rant.” And I agree with you. When I first set out on this whole blogging thing, I promised myself I wouldn’t just randomly rant about stuff. So prepare yourself for the most controversial post in Back to the Fridge history.

My peeve? The fact that over the last seventy years or so of quality audio recording technology, the Christmas Radio Industry has selected just sixteen some odd songs. Sixteen songs which they play over and over and over and over. And then, when they’re done, they do it again.

I probably tune in for fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes on the drive home. Tops. That’s one forty-eighth of the day, what some might consider a small sample size. Yet in that tiny, tiny slice of time, I’ve heard “Feliz Navidad” about one hundred and seventy-two times. I’ve heard “Here Comes Santa Clause” almost twice that many times. What gives? Is it that hard to find a few rare gems out there? You know, something we’ve never heard before and might appreciate? Or is playing the “classics” just that much in demand that we have to hear WHAM!’s “Last Christmas” every twenty-two minutes for a solid month?

I guess I don’t get it.

So now, for your holiday pleasure, here’s the list of Christmas Radio Songs I don’t ever need to hear again ever (not counting the ones already listed above). In no particular order:

• All I Want For Christmas Is — Mariah Carey
• Do They Know It’s Christmas — Band Aid
• Anything with chipmunks singing
• Jingle Bell Rock -or- Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
• Home For the Holidays — The Carpenters
• The Christmas Shoes
• I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas
• Same Old Lang Syne — Dan Fogelberg (come on! It’s not even a Christmas song for Pete’s sake!)
• Wonderful Christmastime — Paul McCartney & Wings
• Blue Christmas — Elvis Presley

And just so you know two things: 1) I’m not a hater, and 2) I am a complete hypocrite, here’s a list of songs I don’t mind hearing over and over and over.

• It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year — Andy Williams
• Christmas Eve (Sarajevo) — Trans Siberian Orchestra
• Wizards in Winter — Trans Siberian Orchestra
• Santa Claus Is Coming to Town — Bruce Springsteen
• White Christmas — Bing Crosby
• Sleigh Ride — Johnny Mathis
• Jingle Bells? — Barbra Streisand
• The Twelve Pains of Christmas — Bob Rivers

Of course, neither list is exhaustive, but in an effort to not exhaust you, I’ll just go ahead and stop here. Whew! And just to leave things on a happy note, here’s a re-run from last year. Rachel and I playing Carol of the Bells:

And with that, I bid you a Happy End of 2009! I shall be taking the rest of the year off, blogging-wise, and will see you back here on January 5, 2010 where hopefully my weight won’t be 2,010. Take care everyone!

Somehow–and I honestly have no explanation for this–it’s December fifteenth already. That leaves no doubt: we’re definitely in The Season. And if by “The Season” you think I’m talking about any one of the eighteen or so holidays that happen between October 31 and January 2, you’d better guess again. Nope. It’s Chex Mix Season.

Not coincidentally, I wrote my first Chex Mix post essentially a year ago today. If you need to catch up on what Chex Mix means to me, go read that. I’ll wait.

See? It’s a real problem area for me. Last year, I was doing pretty darn well diet-wise. This year? Not so much. Which means that this crunchy snack has even more calories than it normally does. The Chex Mix knows when you’re weak and doubles its efforts against you.

Now if I were to sit down with a full box of regular ol’ breakfast cereal and started eating it, I doubt I could get through more than a few cups of the stuff. Odd then, how by adding nothing more than a stick of butter and two pounds of sodium, one can turn it into the bottomless snack. You know how they say birds can eat their own weight in bird seed every day? Well, substitute “Charlie” for “birds” and “Chex Mix” for . . . oh, well, you get the picture.

I made my first batches of it just this past weekend. The first batch is nine cups of cereal, one cup of pretzels, one cup of goldfish crackers (a new addition this year!), one cup of peanuts, and one cup of cashews. That might sound like a lot, but I can actually fit that in my mouth. And at two hundred degrees too. It’s amazing. I should be on television.

The second batch takes longer to eat: upwards of eight minutes. The third batch finally gets distributed to family members, which was, of course, the entire purpose of the exercise. At least I’m making sure they get only the top-quality, personally-tested snack food available.

I mean, a guy’s gotta have standards.

Two video posts in one week! If you’re thinking this is a blogger’s cop-out because he wants to focus his time on NaNoWriMo, you’re absolutely right. But even if that weren’t the case I would feel compelled to share this with you anyway.

If you’re a true geek and don’t exactly consider yourself a spring chicken, then this just might be right up your alley. The concept? Take clips of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, run the audio through Auto-Tune, add a bit of creative video editing, and you’ve got this:

I can’t put my finger on it, but I found this extraordinarily moving. And the more I listened to it, the more I wanted to listen to it. It’s both haunting and hypnotic. And my inner artist/writer/musician is utterly fascinated how seemingly random prose can instantly be turned into poetry.

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise.
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns:
The rising of the milky way

Check out the creator of this ingenious little project here.

Okay, now back to NaNoWriMo!

While there’s plenty of bad food out there I enjoy eating, most of it is just that: bad. This would include everything from pepperonly pizza to Late Night Taco Doritos to Cheez-Its. These foods all have two things in common: 1) I really, really like them; and 2) if I eat too much of them, I get that awful, stuffed feeling, followed by deep regret, followed then by a long winter’s nap.

This is bad food. This is not dangerous food.

Dangerous food, on the other hand, is a whole different ballgame. True, dangerous foods also have two common traits. And, true, the first trait is the same as above: I really, really like it. But the second is quite different, and also what makes a food go from bad to dangerous: I can eat it on and on without end forever and ever.

Oh, granted, I’m sure that technically there’s some upper limit. All I’m saying is that I haven’t reached it yet. These are the types of foods I could turn professional with. I must tread around these foods with great care.

It’s not a very long list, fortunately. Here goes:

• Long John Silver’s Chicken Planks
• McDonald’s Hash Browns
• Cashews

This is the point where I’d normally say something rather witty and humorous about each of these things, but I’ve got to make some NaNoWriMo progress. So while I go write another couple thousand words over there, tell me what your dangerous foods are.