A Christmas song

My friend Carole and I have a theme we return to every Christmas and we'd like to bring you with us on a couple points. Can we all agree that the British feed-the-starving-African-children song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" is much better than the American feed-the-starving-African-children song "We Are the World"? Yes? Being so agreed, can we go on to say that "Do They Know It's Christmas?" is still a ridiculous song?

Let's take a look.

First there's the way the singers smoothly transition from extremely to not-at-all gay. Seriously:

Boy George (ridiculously gay) -> George Michael (gay, but slept with some women) -> Simon LeBon (just looks gay) -> Sting (straight, but maybe blew a guy just to check?) -> Bono (total cooter-hound)

It's like some sort of audio Kinsey scale. It's there people, you just needed us to point it out to you. Now let's move on to the lyrics.

"And the Christmas bells that ring there" [beatiful image, ringing bells] "are the clanging chimes of doom."

Doom? Really? I can't imagine chimes — you know cute little bells? — sounding any harsher than, say melancholy. But then "clanging chimes of melancholy" neither rhymes nor raises money. So perhaps Bob Geldof, et al. have a point there.

Aw, but now we get to what really gets Carole and I's collective goat. "And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time." And what's wrong with that?! There's never snow in Africa except on the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

"And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time / The greatest gift they'll get this year is life."

I think when you're starving you can take some small comfort in the fact that it's not snowing too.

Oh great. There's a civil war, I'm starving, and now it's snowing. Maybe a pile of smallpox-infected blankets will arrive next. Mommy (wet hacking cough, wet coughing cough), this is the best Christmas ever.