Christmas in Cyberspace

I didn't spend Christmas in cyberspace this year. I stayed offline for all of the actual eve of Christmas eve and all of Christmas day, during time I spent time with family, friends, and members of my Unitarian church congregation marking the holiday with various rituals of the season.

That didn't mean that there wasn't a digital dimension to any of the festivities of the occasion. Driving around we listened to local "those darn kids" station KXLU, which sponsored a holiday concert by X and the New York Dolls (now nostalgia bands for us punk rock oldsters) and played eerie computer synthesized voices reading Christmas poetry and carol lyrics over dissonant holiday white noise.

Under the Christmas tree this year there was also an awesome Korg Kaossilator with a wide palette of sounds to play around with for fun for the whole family.



I'm also taking a moment to open my digital rhetoric holiday stocking, which was full of links from Virtualpolitik pal Jennifer Brancato. Goodies of electronic ephemera collected from her inbox during the 2008 election included Photoshopped images of Presidents in Drag, a PDF of a racist note supposedly sent to an Obama supporter by her neighbors, a database argument called "You Can't Fool a Baby" that shows Obama with happy babies and Bush and McCain with crying ones, and a much-forwarded e-mail about "What if Things Were Switched Around?"