Peace on earth.

Christmas at the family homestead is never dull. After a Christmas Eve dinner of pork roast and baked macaroni and cheese (a Bruno holiday tradition since time out of mind, don't ask me why, though I think the roast pork may be a Slavic thing), my brother Dave, my wife and I settled in for a night of movies on Ye Olde DVD Player. Saw Attack of the Clones for the first time since it came out last May, and I have to say that I'm still mostly unimpressed with this second installment of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. The special effects are interesting, but even then there's an awful lot that George Lucas should have done with models and live human beings, such as the sequences with his Clone Trooper army, so that the end result didn't look like a glorified version of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The funny thing is that the deleted scenes which come on Disc Two were actually interesting. Episode I's deleted scenes gave you an idea of how deeply Mr. Lucas was scraping the barrel in order to put The Phantom Menace together, whereas Ep II's would have gone a long way to fill out the plot and enliven the cardboard characters reading their way through the film. Oh, well. Then we watched Saving Silverman, which I have to admit is way funnier than it should be. Blame Jack Black and Steve Zahn for that. These guys probably could make C-SPAN watchable.

This morning we exchanged gifts. Maria and I got Dave a pair of Phillies and Georgetown ski caps, and three bargain-basement DVDs - The Cannonball Run, Transformers: The Movie (to go with his G.I. Joe: The Movie DVD we got him last year), and Killer Klowns From Outer Space, one of Dave's favorites from 80's daytime HBO reruns and one of the best "B" movies of all time. Dave got us a cool bust of Bacchus that doubles as a wine chiller that he found online, as well as a poster-sized blowup from a "glamour shot" photograph that I had taken as a high school senior. It's a truly hideous picture. I'm not sure where he found it - I think it may have been kicking around in the attic all these years - but I will have to take my revenge next Christmas. Consider yourself warned, Dave. Dad got a small television and a compact stereo system for the kitchen, but Mom took the grand prize this year, a robotic vaccuum cleaner which goes by the name of Roomba. Roomba, which is about the size of a Boston creme pie, was designed by iRobot, an MIT-spinoff company based in Somerville, Massachusetts, and word is the thing actually does work. However, since the battery takes at least 12 hours to charge, and we're due back in Beantown this evening, we'll have to take the family's word for it.

Oh, and just in case you're not done salivating over what the Ghost of Christmas Future will be bringing you in years to come, take a gander at this BBC News article about futurists' predictions for The Most Wonderful Time of the Year in 2050. From nanobot-cooked synthetic turkeys to "mood" clothing that responds to its wearers' emotions, the main thrust of the article is that Christmas fifty years from now should be more or less the same like the one we celebrate today, only with better toys. I'm not sure if that's supposed to be comforting, or not.