Whamageddon 2020

One could be forgiven for going into Whamageddon this year thinking it would be a breeze. This year, 2020, was all about keeping your distance from other people and staying home as much as possible. If any year at all was given over to winning Whamageddon, this would have to be the one, so those of us who participate in it could feel fairly confident that this was finally going to be the year. Unfortunately, there’s a reason why Whamageddon became a thing in the first place: “Last Christmas” is a deeply enduring classic of Christmas-themed pop music. Its been covered by an army of pop singers; Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and Carly Rae Jepsen have all turned it into an ATM at some point during their careers. Despite the prominent number of covers and remixes, though, the iconic version of “Last Christmas” is still the original version from George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. 

Whamageddon is a fun little game which started up about 10 years back, and the object of it is pretty simple: You try to get from December 1 to Christmas without hearing the song “Last Christmas.” The second you recognize it, you’re out. The few rules of Whamageddon also say that only the original version by Wham! counts. When it comes to any or the remixes or covers, you’re allowed to knock yourself out. The rules also say that people who know you’re in the contest don’t get to troll you by playing it to your face – you get a pass if that happens. (This piece is the first time I’ve ever mentioned that I’m a regular participant.) I realize Whamageddon doesn’t sound like very much, but it does a lot to add some extra zest to the Christmas season because you don’t fully appreciate – or even realize – how ubiquitous “Last Christmas” is until you’re actively making a game out of avoiding the original version of it. I’ve been playing Whamageddon ever since it entered my consciousness two or three years ago. 

My first few goes through Whamageddon were thrown out in rather short order. I managed to get through a few days in December, but my problem is that I prefer to do my Christmas shopping in person rather than online. Online shopping leaves no room for inspiration and surprises. You have to have some idea of what you’re looking for, so you’re not able to go window shopping, and therefore nothing can catch your eye and make you exclaim, “Hey, I know who that would be a PERFECT gift for!” The downside of doing my Christmas shopping in such a way, though, is that it constantly exposes me to the possibility of the dreaded Whambush. You know how music in large shopping centers is nothing but background noise until that song you either love or that song you really hate comes on and your brain goes haywire? Then, no matter what you do, you can’t just let it slip into the background and get stuck hearing the duration of it? Yeah, that was my first handful of experiences with Whamageddon. THIS year was the heartbreaker. Entering my December on a vacation, I took walks through Downtown Seattle and happened to go into Pike Place at one point, where I happened to find some gifts which were excellent. After my vacation, I went back to work in my non-work-from-home, essential industry. Miraculously, by mid-December, I still hadn’t heard Wham!’s version of “Last Christmas.” When I really let that fact sink in, I knew I had a real chance to survive Whamageddon this year, so I started getting strategic about how to go about my day-to-day life while avoiding “Last Christmas.” I had a scare last week, when a visit to Fred Meyer exposed me to it, and briefly suffering a minor mental freak-out before realizing the version I heard at Freddie’s wasn’t the Wham! version. I started running errands in short bursts, and that seemed to work. So I came into Christmas Eve feeling pretty good about myself, but I was in for a quiet day at work, which meant that a lot of my co-workers would be blasting Christmas music. And my co-workers loved all kinds of music, including Christmas pop music, and the songs weren’t drowning each other out. Although I made a valiant effort to stay away from the main area for long as possible, at one point I made a detour and heard a catchy pop Christmas jingle… And, to my horror, I realized I had been Whammed. 

If the COVID-19 vaccine is dispersed as quickly as I’m hoping it is, that means I lost maybe my last, best chance at winning Whamageddon. If I had been able to get through just three more hours, I could have been safe declaring victory upon getting out of work. And my shift at work had ended early. 

See, Whamageddon requires careful planning if you’re expecting even a remote shot at success. And even then, you can still do everything perfectly and be on the receiving end of a solid Whamming. You might not have a radio, or access to a radio, but the possibility of hearing the original version of “Last Christmas” is always going to be strong because, like I said, it’s everywhere, and people love it. And the list of classic Christmas pop tunes hasn’t changed since Mariah Carey churned out “All I Want for Christmas is You” back in the mid-90’s. That’s not to say there haven’t been any efforts, but they all seem to have fallen flat. Even many of the Christmas songs getting played these days are just covers of older ones, hence all the covers of “Last Christmas” that are floating around. But the point here remains that every time you try to step outside during the Christmas season, you’re at serious risk of exposing yourself to the original version of “Last Christmas,” so even so much as making a deep run into Whamageddon requires some forward thinking and deep planning. 

Obviously, the giant box retailers like Walmart and Target need to be avoided. Now, that SHOULD go without saying, and not just for Whamageddon, but people suck and need to be told to avoid those places for all kinds of reasons. But for purposes of Whamageddon bragging rights, those are the places most likely to be playing family-friendly soft radio hits, which also means there’s going to be a flood of Christmas tunes during the holiday season. Now, the EASY way to do this would be to get all your Christmas shopping done between Thanksgiving and December and go into immediate lockdown, even having your food delivered. But you’re stupid and think box retailers are okay. So the best way to go would be to know what you’re after, plan your route through the store, just grab everything, and head right for the checkout. But hey, if you lose Whamageddon because you’re an asshole who decided to go to a box retailer, you fucking deserve to lose Whamageddon. Shopping centers are much the same way, but I’m willing to grant a lot more leeway there because they often have local stores interspersed among the billionaire retail giants. Even so, the routine applies: Know your way around, just grab everything, and head straight out. Check online first to see if the stores there have any items you’re looking for. And know where the music is weakest in case you end up window shopping. 

A shopping district like Chicago’s Magnificent Mile or Seattle’s University Way has stores that are a lot smaller, and a lot of them just won’t be playing any music at all. But if it’s a very exacting type of gift you’re looking for, you stand a good chance of not being able to find it. Districts like those feature a lot of offbeat independent stores, and they’re more the kinds of places you visit in the hopes of running into that perfect gift rather than a place you visit to find something specific. And if you MUST use retailers, at least make sure they’re retailers with specific themes, like REI. The best option remains shopping online, but the same specific problems exist there: You HAVE to know what you’re looking for, and online shopping wildly reduces the chances of you finding the perfect surprise item. 

So let’s say you’ve gotten around Christmas shopping problems in an ordinary year. You’ve still got the other major obstacle: Errands. If you’re shipping, just do it by Post Office because not only is it cheaper, you also won’t have to worry about the family-friendly radio stations potentially destroying a good Whamageddon run. But about the little things like groceries, well, the best way to do that is in short little bursts rather than a long run once a week. Unfortunately, despite everything, you’re still subjecting yourself, and it WILL require as much luck as skill to avoid hearing the original version of “Last Christmas” for Whamageddon. 

At some point, you may resort to plain, simple hearing blockage, but earmuffs and earplugs are just cheating.

The 2020 Acid Martini Award

Its been a terrible year. I don’t even have to say that. I know it, you know it, and it’s pointless to go over the ways in which the year sucked. As I write this, I’m fighting another extended bout with my depression which has discouraged me from writing. But this being the end of the year, there’s one thing I want to hand out: The Acid Martini Award, which I use to celebrate egregious use and various abuses of the English language. 

It’s a happy thing to report that Joe Biden won the election, so we’re not going to become the property of the Chinese and Russians. But even so, many, MANY people who voted for Biden’s opponent, Donald Trump, are of the ilk that keeps telling us that everyone in the country needs to learn to speak English. Are they worried about someone stepping into the country and invading the land and infecting the language? Hm. But the fact is, they don’t have anything to worry about because THEY are the ones destroying English. Hell, their demagogue on Earth, Trump himself, is not exactly known for his sesquipedalian loquaciousness. Mr. Has-The-Best-Words has gotten by mainly by using only enough words to create a small paragraph. Immigrants should learn to speak English? Your bigoted ass needs to learn how to fucking speak it FIRST!

Thus, we managed to create a language full of unpleasant words and redundant phrases which are frequently exacerbated by a bunch of Nazis who dropped out of school in the third grade. The Acid Martini Award was created by none other than myself, named after the drink I would like to serve to anyone using certain words or phrases. I mean really, what’s worth trying to preserve about a terrible language? So before you start railing about how dem daggone Cajuns gonna kill English wit dat fancy-schmancy French, you need to learn to wash your own mouth out with soap if you get caught using this year’s phrase: 

It Is What It Is

Yes, but what, exactly, fucking IS it? It is what it is has become the go-to phrase people use when they decide something can passively be written off. It is what it is says something is of no concern to me. It’s the passive-aggressive way of saying fuck you, why should I care? In short, it gets used to write off every major injustice seen – or possibly even committed – by the world’s Karens. 

Yes, there have been many other ways of doing that before. But none of the others have ever carried the sense of privileged indifference that It Is What It Is seems to have. This is something you hear from rich white suburbanites telling you that everything is just fine as long as more room can be cleared out for their own exorbitant personal museums and other tributes to themselves. The sort of passivity heard in It Is What It Is resembles the same sort of defeat you hear from moderates. No, they can’t POSSIBLY be bad, but they’re just grateful their (token) minority friends aren’t like all the OTHERS! It Is What It Is has come to mean there’s contempt. Not HATE, but the sort of underlying contempt that says the person using it is trying to gaslight.