It’s Christmas Time! That means movies and music (and more). This is a special episode – it’s live and we discuss our favorites for Christmas.

To start we cover a most important topic – what is the difference between a Christmas movie vs a movie set at Christmas?

We quickly delve into our favorite movies and traditions that revolve around movies. A list of movies is below.

Iron Man 3

Die Hard

Lethal Weapon

Krampus

Great British Baking Show

The Grinch

Santa Claus is Coming to Town

Prep and Landing

Klaus

Rise of the Guardians

Cosmic Christmas

White Christmas

Holiday Inn (warning it’s considered not PC nowadays)

It’s a Wonderful Life

Miracle on 34th Street

Hallmark Christmas Movies and the Alicia Witt movies

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

Christmas Carol

Christmas Card

Christmas Visitor

Christmas Heart

Very Merry Mixup

Hogfather

Charlie Brown Christmas – The Piano Guys (Charlie Brown and Angels We Have Heard on High)

MacGyver – Titus – X-Files – MASH – Bob Hope – Doctor Who

Disney Christmas Sing-a-long

Star Wars LEGO Christmas Special

Christmas Story

Polar Express

Christmas with the Kranks...

Joel Narlock

Our discussion today starts with thoughts, ideas, and how we think. The connections between our thoughts may seem jumbled, but we have connections and different ways of cross-relating our thoughts. This leads to the masters of creativity, those that can be superb beyond a normal ability to learn a skill.

Creativity extends into baking, also. With Thanksgiving behind us, there is a good talk about how there is kitchen creativity and mastery in cooking like in any creative art.

America’s Test Kitchen

Aztec Hot Cocoa

Oxo kitchen tools

It’s Thanksgiving time! We talk about a lot of our holiday traditions and cooking. This year may be different, but we have a lot to discuss including how telling ghost stories used to be a tradition.

We discuss a bit about getting guests on the show at times. Some good people out there that we know. We are open to suggestions if you have any nominations.

Why the Heck Does That Christmas Song Talk About Telling Ghost Stories?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-do-ghost-stories-go-christmas-180961547/

M.R. James

We talk about Alex Trebek and the sadness of his passing. Alan has appeared on Jeopardy and met Alex. According to Alan, Alex was a great human and helped make the show experience wonderful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Trebek

https://www.jeopardy.com/

https://time.com/collection/100-best-fantasy-books/

Discovered Wordsmiths Podcast

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamp_Thing_(comic_book)

What else would we talk about a week after our elections and the first episode after our live broadcast episode?

It wasn’t really our intention to discuss the voting, but that’s how things go sometimes. We look at different aspects of the voting and from multiple perspectives.

We have discuss health in the past, but the scary disease for brain people is Alzheimer’s. Alan’s mom has been diagnosed, and Alan has delved into the topic. So we talk about it and what you can do.

We celebrate Halloween with a live broadcast!

For the annual Chicago Hallo-weem, we do a live discussion of our favorite Halloween-ness.

We start with discussing what makes something scary and the different sub-genres of horror.

There are a ton of movies talked about: Halloween, Get Out, Evil Dead, Exorcist, Children of the Corn, American Werewolf in London and many more.

We also discuss favorite scary video games like Doom, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Alan Wake and more.

The discussion runs longer than normal because we have some audience questions. Hope everyone enjoys the discussion and look for our special live Christmas broadcast where we’ll talk about our favorite Christmas movies.

We have a couple issues with connectivity on this episode, but we persevere.

Digitization is part of all the conversations. we talk a bit about computer backgrounds and screensavers to start. And now that almost everyone uses Zoom, we also add virtual call backgrounds to our personalization list.

Digitization also has affected a lot of our favorite music artists. Many of them have released their catalog digitally. This allows people access to their music that may not have been possible before.

Of course, since our whole talk is digitized as we go, there are some problems and we have to splice together 2 different sessions. That’s the digital life.

http://www.codev2.cc/download+remix/Lessig-Codev2.pdf – full book CODE by Lessig

https://podcasters.spotify.com/

We are gearing up for our big live podcast event happening Halloween night! For all those ‘going’ to Chicago WEEM – can’t wait!

We talk a bit about ergonomics of computer desks and how that’s more of a topic as you get older. This leads to discussing TV shows that we’ve come to appreciate more being older than we did younger.

The big question we discuss for comic book collectors is when to sell? Should you get rid of a book that is worth good money or not? And when is collecting too much?

Alan just had his eyes checked, so we discuss vision, lasik, and how our eyes can be tricked.

And since it’s fall, we discuss the activities we can still do this year – like camping and hiking. We have some skills that can save us from the apocalypse.

https://www.webmd.com/eye-health/lasik-laser-eye-surgery#1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion

https://ag.us.mensa.org/

We’ve been wanting to do this episode for quite awhile. The hold up was that Stephen had not actually read the comic. So, we’ve put it off for both of us to catch up on the comics, movie and the new HBO series.

Most of this episode has to do with talking about Watchmen. If you haven’t read it or seen the movie, spoiler alerts galore!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0409459/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7049682/