Tis the season for out-of-control shoppers

The Christmas shopping season kicked off with three deaths in two separate incidents at stores holding early-morning sales on Black Friday. Merry Christmas, everyone!
A worker at the Wal-Mart store in Valley Stream, N.Y., was trampled to death by out-of-control shoppers who broke down the doors at a 5 a.m. sale. Other workers were injured as they tried to rescue the man. Shoppers stepped over the victim on the ground and streamed into the store. Customers shouted angrily and kept shopping when store officials told them the store was closing because of the death, the Associated Press reported.
At the Toys “R” Us in Palm Desert, Calif., shoppers ran for cover when two men shot and killed each other in the store, press reports said. Joy to the world! (Photos by AP, see links.)
Last year, there were only sporadic conflicts and violence among shoppers on Black Friday, according to Cnet. But in 2006, there were numerous reports of crowds getting violent at post-Thanksgiving sales.
Good news for shoppers who didn’t get the big deals on Friday: Many stores are planning doorbuster sales on Saturday too.

Black Friday deals could mean a blue Christmas

Retailers have baited their hooks with tempting after-Thanksgiving sales, but the question is whether consumers will bite.

With Americans worried about the economy, their investments, home values and jobs, many aren’t in much of a buying mood this holiday season. But stores like Best Buy and Wal-Mart hope to change their minds with one word: doorbuster.

Doorbusters are those super low-priced items, available in limited quantities, at early-bird sales. They get their name from the mobs of crazed shoppers who practically bust down doors to get inside a store to grab bargains when it opens.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s hot in electronics at this year’s early-bird doorbuster sales on Black Friday, the traditional kickoff to the annual Christmas shopping season:

• Blu-ray Disc players and movies: With Blu-ray Disc now established as the high-definition successor to the DVD, consumer electronics manufacturers and Hollywood studios are driving down prices to encourage mass market adoption of the blue-laser format. Wal-Mart is selling a Magnavox Blu-ray Disc player on Black Friday for $128. (A year ago, the cheapest Blu-ray Disc players were about $300.) Wal-Mart also is selling a Samsung Blu-ray player for $199. Plus, the discount chain is selling several Blu-ray movies for $15 each, including “Iron Man” and “Transformers.” (Blu-ray Disc movies usually cost $20 to $40.)
• HDTVs: Retailers are sitting on a glut of flat-panel LCD and plasma high-definition televisions ordered before the economy turned south. Add to that struggling and bankrupt retailers like Circuit City and Tweeter liquidating inventory and forcing other retailers to drop prices to stay competitive. For more details, read the article in Investor’s Business Daily. Wal-Mart is selling a Samsung 50-inch plasma HDTV for $798 and a Polaroid 42-inch widescreen 1080p LCD HDTV for $598.
• Portable GPS navigation systems: Faced with competition from GPS-enabled smart phones and factory-installed car navigation systems, portable navi device sellers like Garmin and TomTom are breaking the $100 price barrier. Wal-Mart is selling a Garmin Nuvi 200 with 3.5-inch display for $97. RadioShack is offering a TomTom One 125 with a 3.5-inch screen for $99.99.

Low-cost notebook PCs and video game system bundles also are popular doorbuster deals this year.
For more deals, check out:
http://blackfriday.gottadeal.com/
http://www.blackfriday.info/
http://www.blackfridayads.com/
http://www.theblackfriday.com/

In times of economic gloom, consumers turn to whoopee cushions

Internet audience measurement service comScore came out with its October data the other day and it showed that one of the fastest gaining Web properties was Spencer Gifts. That's right. The same Spencer Gifts that you see selling tacky gag gifts at the mall.

The top gainer by percentage change in unique visitors was TheStreet.com, the financial news Web site. That's not surprising given the state of the stock market and the economy. The number of visitors to TheStreet.com rose 155% from September to October, reaching 10.6 million visitors.

No. 2 was Spencer Gifts. Its audience rose 144% to 5.1 million unique visitors in October from the previous month. It even beat out BarackObama.com, which grew just 59% to 8.5 million visitors during Sen. Obama's historic victory in the presidential election.

Looking for clues to the surge in interest in Spencer Gifts, I checked out its Web site.

I can only surmise that it was some hot gifts that drove the increase in online visitors. Perhaps it was the Insulting Parrot for $14.99. The motion-activated toy bird squawks insults and rude comments to anyone who comes near it. Among the classy quotes: "Polly Want A F*ckin Cracker," "Hey Baby, Show Us Your T*T's!" and "Go F*ck Yourself."

Or maybe it was the Sex Alert Door Hanger for $9.99 or the Beerpong Table for $69.99.

Nah, it was definitely the Insulting Parrot. That's a must-have.

Top 10 worst Christmas songs

Here’s the flipside to my recent list of the top 20 best Christmas songs: the 10 worst. I could’ve done 20, but thought I’d concentrate on the biggest stinkers.

1. “A Soldier’s Silent Night” (circa 2004) by Ted Berndt


2. “Santa Baby” (1987) by Madonna


3. “Frosty the Snowman” (1964) by the Beach Boys


4. “Little Saint Nick” (1964) by the Beach Boys


5. “Feliz Navidad” (1970) by Jose Feliciano


6. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (1944), recorded by various artists


7. “Christmas in Hollis” (1987) by Run-DMC


8. “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” (1979) by Elmo & Patsy


9. “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” (1958) by Alvin and the Chipmunks


10. “Dominick the Donkey” (1960) by Lou Monte

I can’t argue with the sentiment behind “A Soldier’s Silent Night” by Ted Berndt, but it’s stagey, heavy-handed and interminable. I switch radio stations every time this comes on. Father Berndt sounds like a great man (proud Marine and WWII Purple Heart recipient), but I can’t listen to his recording of a soldier’s poem in heavy rotation over the radio. You can read more about the story behind the recording at soldiersilentnight.com.
The cloying narration reminds me too much of Mason Adams from the old Smucker’s jams TV commercials or worse yet, Garrison Keillor.
Madonna does some things very well – electronic dance music, for example. But she’s one of the worst actresses to get work in the modern age. Her performance of “Santa Baby” is an extension of her lousy acting. She’s playing a character, some kind of spoiled young lady who would exist only in an old movie. Picture a gangster’s moll who works as a stripper, cracks her gum and is dumb as a box of rocks, but sexy hot. Suffice it to say that her rendition of “Santa Baby” is fingernails-on-blackboard grating.
The Beach Boys are responsible for two clinkers from their 1964 Christmas album.
Their version of “Frosty the Snowman” is just plain awful. They try to jazz up the clunky tune with horn flourishes. That’s like spraying Febreze on a skunk.
“Little Saint Nick” is just a lazy reworking of the group’s 1963 hit “Little Deuce Coupe.”
Jose Feliciano’s “Feliz Navidad” is a catchy little diddy, but it’s advertising-jingle deep. It’s just four lines of 20 words repeated over and over and over again.
I put “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” on the list because the conversational duet between a man and a woman gets annoying after repeated listenings. I also like to make the argument, in jest, that the song condones date rape.
The female voice in the song is called “The Mouse” and the male “The Wolf,” according to Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia. Wikipedia cites Susan Loesser’s “A Most Remarkable Fella: Frank Loesser and the Guys and Dolls in His Life; A Portrait by His Daughter,” a book about the song’s writer.
The lyrics consist of the man attempting to convince the woman to stay with him at the end of a date. He plies her with alcohol. “Well, maybe just a half a drink more,” she sings twice.
At another point, she sings, “Say, what’s in this drink?”
Today the answer might be GHB.

Windows Vista a flop; Numbers tell the story

Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system, launched commercially in January 2007, is “a flop,” says Janco Associates. Windows Vista has only 17% of the market for personal computer operating systems after almost 22 months in release. Its predecessor, Windows XP, had garnered 37% market share during the same time period, according to Janco, based in Park City, Utah. See the article and charts in the Nov. 24 print edition of Investor’s Business Daily. What’s worse, Windows Vista has only 15% of the OS market share of business and enterprise users who browse the Internet. Vista is proof that large companies can make “huge blunders in technology,” Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis said in a press release. “In the case of Microsoft, they no longer can count on moving users to new products as quickly as they want.” Windows Vista has been knocked around like a ragdoll by Apple’s Mac advertising campaign. Critics say Vista is slow and bloated and not an improvement over Windows XP. No wonder the seven-year-old Windows XP still has 70% market share.

‘Dow 30,000 by 2008’? That’s a good one

For the investor in your family, a humorous book for Christmas might lift their spirits. Amazon.com has many, such as “Dow 30,000 by 2008” by Wall Street pundit Robert Zuccaro. Published in December 2001, the book predicted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would climb to 30,000 and the Nasdaq Composite would exceed 6,000 by the year 2008.
As of Thursday the Dow was at 7,552.29 and the Nasdaq was at 1,316.12.
Not a big enough missed prediction? Then how about “Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market” by James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett. Published in October 1999, shortly before the dot-com bubble burst, it predicted that the Dow would rise to 36,000 within a few years.

My top 20 favorite Christmas songs

It’s a truism in print media that readers love lists.
So, in honor of Christmas, here are my top 20 favorite holiday songs this year:

1. “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen/We Three Kings” (2004) by the Barenaked Ladies, featuring Sarah McLachlan


2. “Christmas Canon” (1998) by Trans-Siberian Orchestra


3. “2000 Miles” (1983) by The Pretenders


4. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (1958) by Brenda Lee


5. “A Holly Jolly Christmas” (1962) by Burl Ives


6. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” (1943) by Bing Crosby


7. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (1944) by Judy Garland


8. “White Christmas” (1947) by Bing Crosby


9. “Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas)” (1950) by Bing Crosby & the Andrews Sisters


10. “Christmas in Killarney” (1951) by Bing Crosby


11. “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy” (1977) by Bing Crosby & David Bowie


12. “Last Christmas” (1984) by Wham!


13. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (1994) by Mariah Carey


14. “Our Love Is Like a Holiday” (2001) by Michael Bolton


15. “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” (1987) by U2


16. “Linus & Lucy” (1964) by the Vince Guaraldi Trio for “A Charlie Brown Christmas”


17. “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” (1987) by John Mellencamp


18. “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” (2001) by Bruce Springsteen


19. “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957) by Bobby Helms


20. “Oi to the World” (1997) by No Doubt

Some thoughts about this mix of picks:
“God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen/We Three Kings” by the Barenaked Ladies and “Christmas Canon” by Trans-Siberian Orchestra are great examples of how songs in the public domain can be reinvented by other artists to great effect. The public can benefit tremendously when works go off copyright and talented artists are free to experiment with them.
“God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen” is an 1827 English traditional song. “We Three Kings” was written by John H. Hopkins Jr. in 1857. “Christmas Canon” is based on Johann Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major,” written in or around 1680 in Germany.
Not all Christmas songs are cheery and uplifting. Two of my favorites are melancholy: “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
Also, don’t look down on me for having Wham! and Michael Bolton on this list. Those songs are catchy.