Christmas parodies a dueling

Did ya catch Gus Lloyd's appearance on today's Catholic Guy Show? Well if you didn't, you missed a solid 15 minutes of good memories... including excerpts from their Christmas songs mocking each other that they put out two years ago. But who needs excerpts when you can listen to the whole thing? When we launched this site nearly two years ago we made both songs into music videos, and we re-present them now in their entirety for your viewing/listening pleasure!

First up is Gus' parody, The Catholic Guy Who Stole Christmas:

Not to be outdone, Lino put out a whole album mocking Gus entitled A Catholic Guy Christmas:

That Notre Dame Catholic Channel problem

Our friend dustin over at CatholicGuyShow.com posted a very well written piece this morning lamenting the intrusion of Notre Dame sports programming on the regular programming of The Catholic Channel. We couldn't agree more with his comments... Father Leo really got hosed when his new Advent show, Smoking Stirring The Pot, got unceremoniously bumped in favor of a basketball game. To the channel's credit, at least they aired it at 10:00pm ET after the game had ended. (And to Greg and Jennifer Willits' credit, it aired earlier today in place of the last two hours of their own show.)

But this brings up another problem that we've been pondering for some time: where's the promotion for shows like this? Sure, Lino, the Willits and some of the other hosts have been telling us that it was coming... but other than that, how do you find out about stuff like this? Maybe there have been commercials for the show on the channel... but we certainly haven't heard them. What about the Catholic Channel web site? Well, Edward Cardinal Egan's Advent-themed show is highlighted at the top of the page... but what about Father Leo's show? Nothing. Nada.

Well, maybe it's on the Programming Schedule page, you might think. So we looked... and what we found wasn't pretty. Not only was it not there, parts of the schedule grid were badly out of date. Daily Mass weekdays at 8:00am? Hasn't been that way since August... of last year. Weekend programming? With the two new shows airing during Advent, the schedule hasn't been changed one bit to reflect the inclusion of those shows. In fact, we tried to listen to the Sunday replay of The Catholic Guy Show because we were hoping to hear the parts of Wednesday's show that we missed because we were traveling for Thanksgiving. What did we hear at 4:00pm ET? The Busted Halo Show. A great show, but not what we were looking for.

This is just a symptom of a bigger problem: poor promotion of The Catholic Channel's seasonal shows... and to a lesser extent, their shows in general. During Christmas and Easter the Channel usually posts a page showing the schedule of programming for those days (Masses, music programs, etc.), but the schedules that were posted both last Easter and last Christmas had huge gaps where we couldn't figure out what was on the Channel at certain hours. What good is that? Why even bother airing anything if you can't figure out what's on at a certain time?

Also, there are two separate official sites for The Catholic Channel: one on Sirius.com (which www.thecatholicchannel.org redirects to), and one on XMRadio.com. The XM site is generally more descriptive... and its program schedule a bit more accurate... than on the Sirius site, but still doesn't reflect the two new Advent-themed shows and the moving around of other shows to accommodate them. C'mon, guys... how hard can it be to maintain one or both of these things on a regular basis so that it's accurate?

And don't get us started on some of the promos being broadcast on the Channel nowadays... Lino already took time on his show to lambast the current Fully Alive promo that's been broadcast for weeks without change. For goodness' sake, dig some old promos out of the archive and slap them on the Channel if you have to... just for the sake of keeping things fresh. Surely the Popcaks must have discussed some promo-worthy things on their show in recent days.

That's enough ranting for today about this... we'll see if anything changes if/when the Christmas programming schedule gets posted. But we're not counting on it. You'd think after four years of existence that The Catholic Channel would have stuff like this figured out by now.

Va, Va, Va, VOOM!

Check out this photo that Lino posted on his Facebook page of his new man-purse. Just think of all the expensive Product he can stash in that thing!

Give your fan clubs a freakin' break!

In the first hour of today's show, Lino took the opportunity to bash the good folks over at CatholicGuyShow.com for not bothering to post timely updates to their site despite the presence of his new daily poll, thereby making him look bad. In the manner of a four-year-old, he threatened to move the poll over to his own site at CatholicGuy.com... in essence, to "take his poll and go home".

Already in a fighting mood, Lino then turned his attention to our pithy little site for the first time in 15 months, chastising us for our new 40th Birthday countdown on our homepage. Apparently we're just being "mean" fans for reminding him how old he is, despite the fact that he's milked his advancement towards 40 for all it's worth since the show started four years ago.

Give us a break, Lino! The fact that you've got two web sites devoted to you speaks to how highly some of us regard you. Add to that a Facebook page where you've maxed out your friend quota, and a fan site Twitter feed that has more followers than your own, and that equals one hell of a hard-core fan base. Just because we don't post every day doesn't mean we don't care... we just do the best we can within our own personal circumstances.

Are we overreacting? Possibly. But at the very least it gave us a good excuse to post something so that Lino can't complain how out-of-date his fan club sites are.