Whoa!Totally #11: Bad Poetry Night

This year was the 5th Annual Buckalew Family Bad Poetry Night, the best Christmas night tradition ever! Unfortunately, I only have a small clip here because the flip camera was on the fritz at that point in the evening. But, trust me, nothing brings family & friends together like Knob Creek, Christmas berets, and reeeeallly bad poetry.

That's why Bad Poetry Night is today's Whoa!Totally.

Here's how it works: during the preceding year, participants collect the very worst poems they can find. Obviously, these are usually culled from the magnificent bad-poetry-sharing machine that is the internet. You can't write your own bad poems, but it doesn't really matter whether the poem you find was intended to be bad or not. We're all New Critics; authorial intention goes right out the window. That said, finding a poem that's prime material for Bad Poetry Night is trickier than it sounds. There are innumerable bad poems in the world, but most of them won't fly at BPN. They have to be more than bad; they have to be bad in an entertaining way. Of course, you're free to submit anything you want to bad poetry night, but if it's not funny enough, it'll get cut! By which I mean, it won't be kept in the rotation to be read again next year.

Every year, all our old and new favorites get trotted out again, and some of them have come to be associated with particular participants. For example, only Beau is allowed to read "Ode to Kai" (excepted in video above) and only my cousin Kristen gets to read "MacPh'rs'n's W'mb't !" But, normally, the stack of poems (a mix of old & new with the year and finder written in the top right hand corner) are passed around, and you have to read whatever the next poem in the stack is, which is hilarious, because you get people like my 8 year-old sister reading "God! Oh God! Why have you forsaken my cheeseburger, God?! The unbearble agony!" and then later, when the "blue" hour begins after the children go to bed, you get 80 year-old men reading things like "get out the hoover and suck dat shit up!"

A recipe for hil-ar-i-ty, I assure you.

Imagine your mother reading the following favorite entitled "Nazi's" (five years running and hasn't been cut!) by one of BPN's heroes, "Fritters":

The Nazi's

-by Fritters

I can feel the Nazi's
Here come the Nazi's
Oh God
The Nazi's
Hear there Feet pounding
Oh God
The Pounding
Here they Come
The Nazi's
Here they come
Oh God
Can you feel them
Can you hear them
Can you Taste them
Can you see them
Can you smell Them
Oh God
The Nazi's
Here They Come

I share this (the post, that is...not the Nazi's) in the hopes that other families will pick up and continue this awesome holiday tradition. Also, if you're reading this and you think you've got some really good candidates for next year's Bad Poetry Night, shoot 'em my way. I'll attribute them to you (as the finder, not the poet) and let you know whether they make the cut in 2009!

Whoa!Totally #7: Blow-Up Lawn Reindeer Rocking Out

This might be the type of thing you need to have experienced in person to appreciate, but I don't care. Adam, Beau & I saw this huge blow-up reindeer lawn ornament bucking in the wind as we were driving back from my parents' house on X-mas night. My parents live in suburbia, so their neighborhood is full of ridiculous Christmas displays, but for some reason we were all struck by the awesomeness of this particular display at the exact same moment. We came round a bend and there it was: rearing up on its back legs, surfing on its ice floe, and totally rocking out to the end of the Bowie song we were listening to.

That's why this blow-up reindeer is my first post Christmas whoa!totally.

Luckily, Adam had his little flip camera with him so he was able to capture part of the moment...before his batteries died. I particularly like Beau's commentary, which makes it seem like the "awesomeness" of this particular encounter had more to do with us pounding Red Bull & all night and watching extreme road trip movies (which I assure you we were not).