Post-Christmas Open Thread

Well, it's Tuesday morning and we hope all our gentle readers survived another Christmas holiday relatively intact. For our part, we spent a wonderful day or three basically goofing off with family and friends. In short, our Christmas weekend was near-completely relaxing and enjoyable, with the exception of a few hours on Saturday, when we "joyfully" engaged for a couple of hours in our time-honored and traditional Christmas pastime -- frenzied last minute "full contact" Christmas shopping. As for goofing off, we definitely intend to do lots more of that, between now and the first of the year.

Still, we realize that we owe some obligation to those gentle readers who've become hooked on blogging at this site. And in that connection we set up yet another open thread for those gentle readers' out-pourings. Cold turkey will not be served up here, especially for gentle readers who may have found a new computer "under the tree" yesterday morning.

And to get the discussion going, we throw out two Standard-Examiner pieces, and one from New West Magazine. In keeping with our observation of the long Christmas-New Years holiday season, a couple of them even relate loosely to the extended holiday theme:

First, weight loss is a constant post-Christmas holiday topic, of course. And on that subject, what better place to look than MattGodfreyWorld for leadership? Boss Godfrey is of course the ultimate mayoral lightweight, a great source for guidance on the subject. So don't miss this Scott Schwebke front-page article explaining Boss Godfrey's program for whittling his minions and underlings down to size, and fattening their wallets in the process. Emerald City, you see, is not merely a municipal corporation that performs governmental functions -- it's also a Municipal Fat Farm, offering substantial year-end cash prizes. The photo of the elvin John Patterson removing his footwear for his weekly weigh-in is worth the price of the mouse-click, we think. We swear it's the very first time we've ever spotted him NOT text-messaging on his trusty Blackberry device

Then here's a great story of local interest -- A Hometown Boy: Ignored -- by WSU Provost Mike Vaughan. Thanks to professor Vaughan we learn that a couple of the weirdest films of all time were directed by an unsung Ogden native, film director Hal Ashby. (Ever hear of him? Us neither.) Unsung and weird; imagine that. Ignore Emerald City "homeys" at your peril, is something we ALWAYS say.

Last but nt least we link the obligatory (New-Years' oriented) locally-written piece, complaining about the dearth of State Liquor Store outlets here in the Land of Zion.

"Shop early and often" seems to be message we get from this article, as if we didn't already know that.

The floor is open. And we know the above isn't exactly the kind of "red meat political news" we like to discuss here at Weber County Forum. Still, we'll take what we can get.

At the very least, feel free to test out your new computer equipment here.