The giving of thanks now dispensed with, the giving of gifts can begin. Or rather the buying of them. Just as we did last year, we enter the Think Tank today to present you with charming and unexpected gift ideas for the overthinker in your life.

Oh, who are we kidding, they’re for you.

As always, we are grateful for your continued readership throughout the year and hope you enjoy our ideas. And we hope you buy them (by clicking these links!).

And whether you buy the gifts listed here or some others, we hope you’ll use our Amazon affiliate link (oh, and here’s just the Black Friday deals) every time you shop online so that we get the kickbacks that keep our servers humming.

Now onto the good part.

Thursday Grammar is back! Did you miss me?

One thing grates on my nerves more than the the egregious examples of poor usage and idiocy I have tackled in this series: When people correct others incorrectly or, more bluntly, when people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and are snobs about it.

Case in point: “Xmas.” The nuns who taught my father in Catholic elementary school would rail against this abbreviation, claiming that it was a sacrilege worse than claiming you’re bigger than Jesus or something.

Apparently, they couldn’t be bothered to look in a dictionary. Here’s the American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed., 2000):

Xmas has been used for hundreds of years in religious writing, where the X represents a Greek chi, the first letter of , “Christ.” In this use it is parallel to other forms like Xtian, “Christian.” [Or Xtina. —Ed.]

But people unaware of the Greek origin of this X often mistakenly interpret Xmas as an informal shortening pronounced (ksms). Many [idiots] therefore frown upon the term Xmas because it seems to them a commercial convenience that omits Christ from Christmas.

OK, I added “idiots” in the paragraph above. But the dictionary wasn’t being snarky enough.

A funny postscript: As an adult, my dad decided, nuns be damned, he was going to write “Xmas”, figuring that because the letter “X” is cruciform it is an acceptable symbol of Christianity. This is an example of speculative folk etymology, something I’ve taken up before. Though you have to admire the brand integration: X, chi, the cross — they do all seem to fit together.

Merry Xmas!

In a recent discussion of Ghostface Killah’s new Christmas song (which is imaginatively called “A Ghostface X-mas”), the hip hop blog Straight Bangin’ offers an explanation for why there are so few holiday rap songs (compared with other musical genres):

An odd element of hip-hop’s ascendancy is that despite its mainstream appeal and mass audience, the genre has injected many “urban” and non-standard themes into the discourse without experience a mutual equilibrium, absorbing more of the standard fare with which it now mingles.

While this insight is generally correct, it is also an oversimplification of the multiplicity of ways in which hip hop engages with the popular culture. In reality there is a spectrum, varying from a very simple incorporation of pop cultural tropes as the building blocks for rhymes to a more complex negotiation and two-way assimilation of mainstream practices and discourses and subcultural identities and meanings. Although this tension has played over the nearly 30 year history of the genre, it is encapsulated in the surprisingly wide variety of hip hop Christmas songs that have appeared throughout the years.

A brief tour through three common hip hop holiday tropes (and no shortage of ho, ho, hoes), after the jump.

[Today, December 24, 2008, is Christmas Music Day on OTI. Here's a holiday guest post from Trevor Siegler. Let us know what you think in the comments! —Ed.]

Christmas is in the air, and that means one thing: Christmas music is back and in full force. No other season has as many songs written about it, and it’s almost like Satan sets his iPod on shuffle every year.

Many songs simply suck the Christmas spirit out of you, especially if you’re stuck in a customer-service job where it’s piped in 24/7 between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.

But there are some holiday tunes that rise above the pack, some golden nuggets in a field full of overdone horse manure. I’ll keep the disgusting metaphors to a minimum and simply list the six seasonal songs that always fill me with Christmas spirit no matter how often “Jingle Bells” is on repeat.

Popular musicians all belong to one of two categories: those that record Christmas songs, and those that don’t. A few examples:

Winger has a Christmas song: a fantastically bad cover of “Happy Xmas (War is Over).”
Metallica does not.

Weezer has several Christmas songs, including a great version of “O Holy Night.”
Radiohead does not.

R. Kelly has a Christmas song: “World Christmas.” It’s no “Trapped in the Closet,” but it’s totally passable.
Kanye West does not, but someone else clearly has thought that he should:

So what do Metallica, Radiohead, and Kanye West all have in common, besides their lack of Christmas music and the fact that they all take themselves too seriously? Are they all Jewish?

Obviously, some musicians would object to Christmas music on religious grounds (e.g., the Beastie Boys,  Matisyahu), but that reason aside, I suppose some “artists” see themselves as above the crass commercialism and cheesiness of Christmas music. That’s all fine and good, but I think the world deserves to hear Thom Yorke give us his rendition of “Blue Christmas.”

After all, he’s not above covering “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

[The "Musical Talmud" is our ongoing series that finds the true meaning behind pop music lyrics.]

Christmas Talmud? Oy vey. That’s our awkward way of wishing you a Happy Overthinking It Holiday Season. Let’s take a deeper look at John Lennon’s protest/ Christmas song, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” Since the meaning behind this song is already well known–it’s a protest against the Vietnam War–I’m going to use this as an opportunity to examine this song as an example of “earony.”

There is no TV with enough pixels to rival the experience of watching a great movie in an actual movie theater. Sorry Samsung, it’s true.  I first figured this out when Fenzel and I went to see Superman at a midnight showing years ago. I grew up with that movie, and knew it backwards and forwards… but I’d only ever seen it on VHS. Sitting in a real movie theater, hearing the John Williams score, and seeing that “S” logo ten feet tall completely floored me.

Anyway, last week, I got the chance to see It’s a Wonderful Life projected from a real print. It was scratched as hell and barely audible at times, and I still cried like a baby for at least a third of it. And I also managed to notice a few things to Overthink™.

The struggling cellphone/PDA maker Palm has a new ad campaign for this holiday season: “Santa’s Gone Centro“:

Notice how Santa’s changed:

• Close cropped facial hair
• Skinny
• Aviator sunglasses
• Knows how to DJ
• Walks around town with an unconventional pet
• Pasty white complexion (okay, I guess that part hasn’t really changed)

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, Santa’s gone hipster. Looks like Palm didn’t get the message that Hipsterism is dead.

Still, I do give credit to Palm in that a Centro is a fine phone choice for a hipster who cares about irony in his choice of gadgets. If a hipster’s goal is to ironically appreciate things that mainstream society finds little worth in (the aforementioned Thundercats t-shirts from the thrift store, trucker hats, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer), then s/he would do well with a Centro. It runs on the hopelessly dated Palm OS platform, it lacks Wi-Fi, and worst of all, the touch screen requires a stylus to navigate. Remember the stylus? Didn’t think so.

So kudos to Palm for cornering the market that ironically appreciates mediocre smartphone hardware. But what I really want to know is, what kind of gifts does Hipster Santa (excuse me, “Claüs,” with an umlaut) give to the good little hipster boys and girls for Christmas?

Carousel image blatantly ripped off from Busted Tees. There’s a link. Merry X-Mas.

Skynet –

Really excited to be working on the project! The Terminator line has been a tremendous success since its introduction, inspiring strong feelings of terror and hopelessness in our core demo (humans), and this new model ups the ante on all fronts. I’m a robot, and I’m scared of the thing!

First of all, kudos on having the savvy to round the model number up to 1000. Humans go nuts over powers of ten. However, I wonder if the whole “T plus a number” thing isn’t getting a little stale. Recall that the classic T-101 model became known as “Arnold” for some reason. If we don’t christen this new product something memorable, the humans will, and do you really want your $3 billion baby being called “Stabby McStabsalot?” Judgment Day wiped out a lot of things, but not the importance of branding.

Okay, let’s get into it! Here are three possible naming strategies: