(In no particular order.) I’ll be posting songs on the tumblr for the next ten days.

• Early in the year, my brother exposed me to Bon Iver, whose debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago is a one man show of Justin Vernon, a proud Wisconsinite who wrote and recorded all the songs on the album over a three month span one winter in the North Woods. It’s a phenomenal album, and he’s got a new one coming later this month. We recently saw Bon Iver in concert at the Barrymore, and we saw him last April at the Orpheum Stage Door theater. Both shows were great, though it’s hard to top the intimacy of that April show.
• Another highlight of our concert-going for the year was the Hotel Cafe tour, which swung by the High Noon Saloon this fall. It featured five artists (Jaymay, Alice Russell, Meiko, Thao Nguyen, and Rachael Yamagata). Though Rachael Yamagata was the headliner, Thao definitely stole the show. Yamagata’s introspective songs were nice, but failed to command the attention and passion that equally quiet artists (like Ray LaMontagne or Bon Iver) can. Thao’s energy, on the other hand, was uncontainable and infectious, and her songs, from a release this year called We Brave Bee Stings and All were catchy and original.
• We missed out on Vampire Weekend’s stop through town (too late in trying to get tickets), but I personally enjoyed their album. It’s hip these days to call them overrated, and who knows? Maybe they won’t have much staying power. But one particular song of theirs, M79, is so good, I have to include them on my list.
• I also have to include Flight of the Conchords, who released an album of their hits from season 1 of their show, which is without question one of the best comedies currently on TV. The music is not only funny; it’s quite clever in its nods to different musical genres, and it’s often pretty catchy stuff. I don’t typically go for musicals. They’re not really my style. But Flight of the Conchords manages to offer enough satire and comedy that it doesn’t feel like it’s a musical.
• The movie Once also didn’t feel like a musical, though it most certainly was one. The accompanying album, by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, is a beautiful piece of musicianship that stands alone without any of the film plot associations it conjures. But the fact that the film’s story was so wonderful certainly helps.
• Eileen and I discovered another Irish gem when we visited Ireland this past summer. It was a children’s choir called Cor Na nOg that we heard on the Irish equivalent of NPR. When we heard them on the radio, we were immediately impressed, but we didn’t catch their name. So we went searching in music stores, asking people about the RTE children’s choir. No one knew the name. But back in the states, with the help of the internet, I eventually found them out. I sent an email via the contact form on the website, asking if any CDs were available for purchase. I got a response from a woman named Norma who said the following: “Any CDs we have produced are ‘freebies’ to be sent out with our TV Guide. If you give me your address, I’ll see if I can dig one up for you.” She sent me two. From Ireland. At no charge. I love the Irish.
• I also remained enthralled with Yann Tiersen, the composer responsible for the Amelie soundtrack, and I went on a binge, collecting music of his. This year, he put together a soundtrack for a documentary called Tabarly about a famous French sailor. I haven’t seen the film, and to tell the truth, I’m skeptical it can do the soundtrack justice. It’s mostly piano music, and mostly wonderful.
• Tiersen’s Amelie soundtrack makes me wish I could play accordion. Not that I could really do anything as impressive as, say, the shirtless accordion guy, but perhaps I could do something minimal like Beth Tacular, who is one half of the duo that makes up Bowerbirds. Their album of avian-themed lyrics is decidedly indie, and/but it’s really creative stuff.
• So is Girl Talk’s album, Feed the Animals. Girl Talk is another one man show, made up of Gregg Gillis and his huge vocabulary of popular music. He’s a mashup artist, who juggles far more songs per track than your normal mashup artist. Though it can be a little exhausting to listen to the album in its entirety, the musical samples are so fluidly juxtaposed you’ve got to remind yourself to close your gaping mouth as you listen in disbelief. The album is available online for whatever price you decide to pay, and there’s a good wikipedia page which lists all the samples in each track of the album.
• Last but not least is Australian Xavier Rudd whose song Messages I stumbled upon while listening to Pandora one day. He’s been compared to Ben Harper, Paul Simon, and Jack Johnson. All of them are apt comparisons, actually. He’s a pretty versatile artist with lots of different sounds. This year’s release, Dark Shades of Blue, is a little harder and darker (evoking even more comparisons — to Lenny Kravitz and Pearl Jam), but still has some good stuff on it.

So there you have it. My top ten of 2008. Bon Iver, Thao, Vampire Weekend, Flight of the Conchords, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, Cor Na nOg, Yann Tiersen, Girl Talk, and Xavier Rudd.

Tember got a callback from the Madison Repertory Theater. She got the part as Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol! She’s been hobbling around the house, though, for the past day, reciting her line: “God bless us everyone.”

Well, it officially started today at 6:04 am, but it’s already one of the more intense winters I’ve ever experienced. Here’s what my street looked like this morning:

You can see how the snow banks lining people’s driveways are taller than the cars parked along the road. That and the fact that I got frostbite taking the picture leads me to believe we’re in for a whopper. It’s was -8 degrees and the wind chill had it dipping below -30. When I came inside, I had to amputate three fingers.

I used my remaining seven fingers to search for some climate history for Wisconsin. The coldest temperature ever recorded was -55 F on Feb. 2 & 4, 1996, near Couderay (Sawyer Co.). Never heard of that town.

I have heard of Milwaukee, though. That’s where a blizzard shut the city down for two days when it dumped 23.6 inches of snow on January 29th and 30th, 1947. Apparently, winds blew drifts to the height of 10 feet.

Some other snow records:

• Greatest daily total - Neillsville, 26.0 inches of snow on Dec 27, 1904.
• Greatest single storm total - Superior, 31.0 inches Oct 31-Nov. 2, 1991.
• Greatest monthly total - Hurley, 103.5 inches Jan. 1997.
• Greatest seasonal total - Hurley, 301.8 inches in 1996-97 winter season.
• Deepest snow on ground (excluding drifts) - Hurley, 60.0 inches on Jan. 30, 1996.

Looking at averages instead of extremes shows that January and February are typically colder than December. February was clearly the coldest month on average in 2007, but January is the coldest month if we go by “normal temperatures.”

So it would seem logical that we’re in for even worse weather for the rest of the winter.

But I don’t know if that’s how it works. Nor do I really want to research it anymore given that it took me about an hour to find all of the above. Researching weather history is a black hole: the information is so plentiful and is organized by such a wide variety of search criteria (extremes, averages, climate, precipitation, deviation from normal — it just doesn’t end), you end up navigating through years’ worth of data and charts. Like this one, which shows average snowfalls by month:

Again, it seems plausible to predict that we’re in for even more snow this winter. But who knows? The only thing that’s clear is that enduring a certain amount of weather oppression is actually good for team morale, so to speak. It makes small talk easy, and it gives people a common enemy. In the past two weeks, I’ve had some of the easiest, most fluid conversations with strangers that I can ever remember having. And there’s a certain excitement in the air, the same kind you feel when your local sports team is doing really well in the playoffs or whatever.

So I’m choosing to look on the bright extreme bright side. Thank God I don’t live in California. Or worse yet, Jamaica. That would suck.

Last year’s winter was impressive. We had total snowfall amounts that exceeded 100 inches, which was a record for the Madison area. We also had three snow days, which may have been a record for Madison’s School District, notorious for not shutting down. But the result of all that fun was that we had to add nine minutes to every school day from March or April onward, since the rule is that snow days #1 and #2 are freebies, but any number above that needs to be made up.

This year’s winter is already on track to top last year’s, and with today’s snow day, the second of the season, we’re headed toward that third one, which will mean longer days. A fourth and fifth snow day would probably lengthen the school year.

Today would have been an easy day. Nothing much happens on the final day before winter break, and it’s not like we really needed relief since we’re on the eve of a two-week hiatus anyhow. Plus, given a choice between working today or working an extra day in June, it’s a no-brainer. Students today would have been light-hearted and happy. Students in June will be obnoxious. And in June, they won’t wear enough clothes or enough deodorant.

Not that I’m really complaining. But imagine if you were only allowed 10 pieces of candy throughout the course of a year. In mid-October, you might deny the offer, what with Halloween right around the corner.

Sure, you’d eat those sticks of licorice or gummi bears or chocolate raisins, but as you’d do so, a solitary tear would stream down your cheek.

Eileen and I stumbled across a list of strange Christmas traditions recently, which introduced us to Caga Tio, or “Shit Log.” It’s a Catalonian thing, ya’ll wouldn’t understand. I know I certainly don’t.

But the ritual surrounding Caga Tio is so fascinating that I really want to understand it.

Let’s start with what I do know after some minor research: Caga Tio is a log with a face painted on it. He’s often propped up on one end with a couple of stick legs. A quick Google images search will give you all sorts of pictures. Here’s one of them:

A couple weeks before Christmas, Caga Tio shows up in the dining room of the house and the family feeds him things like oranges and crackers. I’m not quite sure how this is done, since it doesn’t appear that Caga has an actual mouth. But it’s a daily ritual.

Weeks pass, and sometime closer to Christmas day, the log is moved to the living room, where they put a blanket over him to keep him warm. On Christmas Eve, then, the parents sneak some presents under the blanket and the kids beat the log while chanting a strange incantation in Catalan, which translates as “Log, log, shit candy! If you don’t shit for Christmas, we will whack you once more!”

There are lots of YouTube videos of this sort of thing, but I can’t understand a word that’s being said since they’re either speaking Catalan or they’re talking too quickly for me. The videos usually involve just a few children surrounded by a lot of overly enthusiastic adults who are all doing their best to be amazed by the magically gift-wrapped shit that appears once the blanket covering the log’s ass has been whisked away.

Observe:

Eileen and I spent a good half hour this morning watching various Spanish families beating the shit out of happy-faced logs. It’s immensely entertaining. It’s also extremely weird. But I suppose that many of our traditions are weird. Boiling unfertilized chicken eggs, painting them in pastels, and hiding them around the house (sometimes in bookshelves, where they can go for months before they’re finally discovered because they smell so bad) is just one such odd ritual that comes to mind.

Still, there is a difference between eggs and shit, isn’t there? I fully understand how funny poop is (in fact, contrary to my previous beliefs, I find poop only gets funnier with age), but to elevate it to the realms of magic, miracle, and holiness I find strange.

Such ruminations led me on a search for the origins of the phrase “Holy Shit,” which I actually couldn’t find (try Googling “Holy Shit” — not helpful). But I did come across an article about “Divine Excrement” in ancient Mexico, which begins with a very concise overview of how polar opposite to holiness poop is in Western culture.

“In Western culture today,” it explains, “‘Holy Shit’ functions as an exclamation of surprise or dismay precisely because it has no reference beyond itself; its power as a profanity derives from the paradox embedded in it. For us, excrement is never divine.” Exactly what I was trying to say.

So how is excrement possibly divine? And is such holy-making truly what’s going on in the case of Caga Tio?

The first question has an answer. According to Cecilia Klein, author of “Divine Excrement: The Significance of Holy Shit in Ancient Mexico,” various indigenous meso-american cultures had a complex relationship with poop. Filth was often associated with sinful activities like drunkenness and sexual promiscuity; such offenders were said to wallow in excrement. However, it was that same excrement that provided some purification. Consider that soil, specifically humus, is pretty literally the filth of worms and small organisms. Gods like Tlazolteotl functioned in the same way as such nutrient-rich soil and were thus the means of offsetting transgressions by “converting them into something healthy and fertile” when the transgressors confessed to her.

Another pretty cool story involves the god of syphilis, who got together with some other gods in the dark days before the sun existed and burned incense as they were trying to figure out how to light the world. Unfortunately, the god of syphilis didn’t have any incense, so he burned his own scat and then set himself on fire “in order to rise as the sun.” The Aztecs viewed gold as the excrement of the sun and as a result prescribed gold dust as a cure for syphilis.

Thus, excrement comes to be ambivalent in its associations. Sometimes it means the same as our concept of moral impurity; sometimes it’s more redemptive.

Now, whether the Caga Tio is some sort of spillover from a Catalonian pagan ritual similar to the Aztecs, I have no idea. But there’s a certain value, perhaps in including a hint of something less desireable in the Christmas tradition.

I mean, let’s face it, Christmas is a little whitewashed. It tells of Jesus’ beginnings but it doesn’t like to think about how that story ultimately reaches its ugly end. Christmas is the story of Christ made easily digestible. So why not remind ourselves that the candy that magically appears on Christmas Day arrives to us via a path that isn’t paved with pretty things exclusively?