Yay! I feel complete now. The harmony of universe is restored!
It is.
I used to listen to this every year at midnight on Thanksgiving on Bob Fass' Radio Unnameable free-form radio program on WBAI. The song actually had it's premiere live on his program way back in the day. It feels just as at home here. Some traditions are nicely transferable.
Thanks!
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Treating this as a music thread, I just found this version of "We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue and I'm digging it. It has some very funky sections (starting at 1:37) , and I like very 70s racial-harmony video. Sound cuts out at 5:50, but well worth listening to that point.
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Listening to The Seekers Sinner Man then The Carnival is Over because I feel like getting a bit weepy. Been listening to a weird combination of things today. The Bee Gees, King Khan, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, ABBA, Billy Joel, Bob Marley. So far my favorite has been King Khan.
No listening because I'm upstairs with the sleeping child, but book recommendations are welcome!
Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop is good.
Not awesome enough to show up in the palm of my hand. But I bought Nnedi Okorafor's new novella and am reading that, which works. I'm also enjoying the good gin I bought myself and generally trying to be less petulant. I got the first episode and a half of Jessica Jones plus a negroni plus an entire package of cocktail shrimp in they one that was mine, so I have plenty to be thankful for even today.
9: "in they one that was mine"?
The time, not "they one." Stupid phone, stupid me for not checking before posting.
There are now Alice's Restarant posts on the front page of Unfogged, Metafilter, and Reddit. Your move, 4chan.
thanks MOM now WHY DO I HAVE TO SIT AT THE KIDS TABLE.
Dude! you could be sitting around talking about stupid grownup bullshit about mortgages and school districts or you could be comparing notes on Star Wars and Dinosaurs and sharks and shit. Grownups are boring-ass poopyheads! Have you introduced them to Sabbath and Zeppelin? You have been chosen to lead the youth of America into a bold new horizon. Stop bitching and show them their destiny!
"Daaaaaaad! RT is talking about his boring old man music again!"
You talk about mortgages and school districts? One hundred percent of our Thanksgiving dinner conversations are about sports or politics, which is just sharks in ill-made human suits.
Using my in-laws new oven, there are different positions on the dial for bake, broil, and roast. Explain that one.
My dear mother-in-law finished roasting the turkey and lifted it up and out of the juices immediately, and set it on a cutting board, where it's been sitting for the past fifteen minutes. My heart broke a teeny bit.
Oh! And as she did, she commented on how she never bothers to let the meat sit, and that her turkeys never turn out good enough to bother. Oh well. They're lovely people.
We are having stuffed quails later, but the really important element is the brussel sprouts cooked in cream. And the celeriac purée.
Better half is home and i have many many new books in french to read once these briefs get written, v grateful! King tide was a bit meh out at ocean beach to be honest but it was still beautiful out there.
As per usual, we got takeout from Boston Market. Now I'm lying down for a while, feeling slightly bitter about the fact that I don't get high, or even particularly sleepy, from painkillers. I mean, it's probably good not to have that temptation, but if I'm going to have to put up with all the crappy parts of surgery I feel like I should get the benefits, too.
At least I got to gross out Heebie with a picture of where my drainage tubes enter the skin!
Delicious. Best 30 minutes of the year.
Happy thanksgiving to all you imperialists. This and the other thread have me thinking forward to solo expat christmas. Family honestly I won't be missing, but acquisition of fruitcake will be of some concern.
Thorn: I read this lately. Might be heavy with mental health stuff, but generally fluffy and interesting.
Thank you for posting this.
I am so full. Time to head home and then sleep. Amtrak, take me away.
Thanks, friends. I've had some low days lately. Sometimes it feels like everyone else can accomplish so much more than I can and that I'll never manage. Sometimes like now I'm just terribly sad. But I can compartments luxe that and make popcorn and start movie night and at least make things good for them, and that helps.
Boo. I'm so sick of this song! YOU'VE RUINED THANKSGIVING!
Oh thorn. I noticed you'd been around less lately and wondered. I'm so sorry.
A lot of the time things are great. I just don't want to complain all the time. I still read here all day every day. This is still the best thing that's ever happened and good for the girls and all that. I'm just lonely and sad and furious sometimes.
Movie nights forever! And here's to being able to make smaller peoples' lives good even when you are feeling low.
I hope it is a really good movie and perhaps more importantly not one you've seen 117 times before.
We're watching HOME, new to all of us and maybe enough to convince Selah that her head of coils is a good look for her even if it isn't the "Annie hair" she wanted. Everything will get better and everything is already better.
Thorn, FWIW in the time I've been lurking here you have achieved infinitely more than I have in my whole life. Hope you feel better soon.
23 - If you're thinking of making it for yourself you should start now now now because the aging process is no joke. The cake will probably start out almost inedibly dry/crumbly, and it needs a good long rest with a teaspoon of booze poured over it every week or so to actually get good.
Also just remember, Thorn, if you're still keeping up with all the crap you have to do (in the even sort of minimal, not "super achiever!" sense which is what everyone else manages but does their best to keep up appearances of doing even better) while still feeling that way then it means you're still being kind of badass. I mean, sometimes not having anything to boast about doing (or even not complaining about stuff) is pretty good evidence that you're genuinely pretty strong in a lot of circumstances.
If you managed to get them all to happily watch something new you are indisputably a highly skilled parent.
Happy Thanksgiving, reprobates.
Kids' table is always the way to go. At my family's kids' table, we talk Sci Fi books and TV and poke fun at the things we overhear from the adults' table. E.g., we had much merriment when my mom explained that lingonberries came from plants (in her defense, I think she was meaning to contrast lingonberry production with cranberries from marshes/bogs, but we nonetheless had much fun with that utterance).
37: nooooo, please talk about things other than me. I was just trying to hide that somewhere with less traffic. Under the circumstances and in general I'm doing fine. I have days when I'm radiantly happy. Today isn't one, but that doesn't mean I need extra attention or anything.
35: Alas, no. I don't even have access to an oven at this point, so I'm probably doomed to something shop bought.
On one side of my family my sister and I are the oldest among our cousins by a couple of years, so graduating from the kids' table was a major gain in coolness. Now all the cousins have aged suffuciently that the coolness gradient has reversed. The circle of kife.
And life. That circles as well.
39: Too late!
But "under the circumstances" is an empty phrase. If you're doing fine generally and that involves a net benefit to other people around you* then maybe extra attention isn't needed but that doesn't mean that recognition isn't deserved. A lot of people have days of radiant happiness or whatever**, it doesn't mean that the other days don't exist or make them somehow different from other people's. Having them doesn't disqualify you from anything.
*And you've already talked about too much of your life, so, too late!
**Does this mean "drunk"? I'm going to go with that assumption, anyway.
I'm not drunk! Drunk might be an option after bedtime! Also maybe the bath I planned to take this afternoon? I'm just regular maudlin, though, and start therapy soon, so no one needs to be unduly worried. I have a ton of vacation in December that I hope will let me catch up with all I need to do around the house as well as sleep, since most of my weekends off involve one bedtime before 8 pm.
It's a little weird and hard that I don't seem to have the sad as (or weight loss, alas) that goes with standard breakups but instead have moments of incandescent fury or deep grief related to the parenting I think the girls should get when they're not in my care. But I'll get over being so dramatic or things will get better or they'll never be out of my card or something; things will resolve themselves eventually. I'm just raw sometimes through this middle bit.
Ok, but you could be drunk right? Because that's what I would associate with the phrase "radiant happiness".
I recommend a tsp of sugar, a bit of lemon peel and roughly equal parts scotch and very hot water. It's perfect for this time of year!* Either way though that does sound like something in the vicinity of the appropriate way of feeling about things as opposed to the dramatic! way of feeling about them.
*Heat up the mug/cup/glass first though. It sounds like a grace note, like keeping cocktail glasses in the freezer, but it isn't.
I like the way you think, and get paid today.
Hot scotch is one of the world's great consolations.
A statement that excels both in accuracy and in ease of wilful misunderstanding.
I'm not seeing the faux pas in 18. Letting the meat rest is a Best Practice, right? I'm not sure that sitting in a pan with the juices is doing it any good once it's cooked. (Aren't you supposed to be using the pan drippings for gravy?)
It wasn't really resting, I misspoke. It had been carved and was just sort of drying out. (I did think resting was about drawing up the juices back into the turkey, but maybe I'm wrong.) it tasted great, at any rate, but I slather everything in gravy and slop it all together, so why was I fussing in the first place?
I thought it was supposed to rest, uncut and wrapped, for ten or fifteen minutes.
You rest the meat out of the pan juices (while you turn the pan juices into gravy) so that the juices that are still in the meat redistribute themselves and don't squirt out all over everything when you carve it.
More or less.
So, you say now that the bird wasn't resting? I agree. It has passed on. Yum.
Just got back from Thanksgiving dinner with the Jamaicans. Lots of goat curry and breadfruit, yum. (There was turkey and stuff too, but, you know, priorities.)
I read elsewhere that this is the 50th anniversary of the Thanksgiving that the piece celebrates.
38 place settings at Thanksgiving dinner tonight. Yes, really. Some more distant in-laws came down (since this is likely my father-in-law's last one), including the one right-wing aunt. My brother was also there, whom she had never met and who is very similar in temperament and style to me.
RWAunt: "I think Ted Cruz is pretty good. What do you think about him?"
Brother: "There's something about his face that makes me want to punch it."
[awkward silence]
The conversation did resume but ended shortly thereafter with RWAunt shouting "If that bitch gets in, this country is done for!"
Also I will turn honest-to-god 47 years old Saturday, but I still have a full head of hair and have only lived in a basement apartment for one year from 1987-88, so.
You must all be torpid with gluttony to let pass the low hanging fruit of 50
59 I think they've moved on to the stuffing by now.
The circle of kife. Knife, surely. Those are the Unfogged meetups.
23 Are you thinking of moving overseas? Whereabouts generally speaking? Will we need a new geopseud?
This is surely a Spielberg biography waiting to happen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_McMath
A career involving successful battles against, seriatim, the Japanese Army, organised illegal gambling, Dixiecrat segregationists, Red-baiters, unregulated handguns, Du Pont Chemicals, and big tobacco...
62. Sound guy. I'd rather watch that movie than eat turkey.
62 They don't make them like that anymore. More's the pity.
re: 62
He sounds totally bad-ass, in the best way.
61.1
It only becomes the circle of knife when we sacrifice the elders beneath the mistletoe in the oak grove. That's a ways off yet.
61.2
Have already moved, to Taiwan. I submit The Roc, or perhaps Roc Nest, for the blog's consideration.
There's nothing like the traditional post-Thanksgiving breakfast of cold roasted Brussels sprouts and chocolate pie.
Stuck in the back of my head is a short scholarly essay - or more of a theatre programme note actually - analysing the seven plays making up Shakespeare's great Modern Histories cycle, viz. Harry Truman Part I, Harry Truman Part II, Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson Part I, Lyndon Johnson Part II, Lyndon Johnson Part III and Richard Nixon, collectively known as the American Plays or the Nixoniad. (I omit, of course, John Kennedy, once ascribed to Shakespeare but now believed to be mainly the work of Fletcher, with only a few speeches drawn from the lost Tragedy of John Kennedy which Shakespeare wrote in New York in 1971-2 to be performed by John Lindsay's Men.)
66.2 Cool. I've been planning a vacation there with Chani for next year. Being big fans of both Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang we've been wanting to visit the cinema and cafe each of them founded among other places. Maybe we can have a small Roc Nest meetup?
68 is brilliant. A novel in the form of a theatre program I should hope. Or an actual cycle of plays.
With respect to resting meat, I'd heard it's about letting the proteins you've been "stretching" with heat settle. Turns out people on the internet have serious opinions about this:
http://amazingribs.com/tips_and_technique/mythbusting_resting_meat.html
69: oh, hey, I missed the lead-up to this. Swift work, Barry. Good to hear.
73 Thanks. Assignation in Berlin in early November (and primarily in East Berlin for added Cold War frisson), mentioned on the blog. And going to meet up again for a film festival in the region for two weeks in December.
72: It's not that I am disengaged. This is just my resting meat face.
69 Sure. We can organise closer to the time. And congrats on the new squeeze.
I have held, heretofore, that ajay's magnificent Boy Named Storm achieved the Platonic ideal of internet mashup culture; but I submit that said triumph may, and indeed must, be surpassed by the exegesis in full of 68.
When I get round to doing stuff on this, it will be at nixoniad.blogspot.com.
Am cheering drunkenly in anticipation!
Great intro. I look forward to reading the commentary.
90: You'll have to try harder than that.
If Duquesne is going to win this thing they're going to have to step it up.
It's not even on the tv in a local bar.
They exist. They were an officer training unit in WW2. And, really, where else would Marlowe have gone?
My dad was in the Artists Rifles before the war when they were a normal territorial regiment, except to the extent that they recruited heavily among writers, journos and artists.
This is glorious. I want to learn more about this world.
The Nixioniad is seriously cool.
So what changed history can we conclude? On a macro level, at a minimum the Spanish-American war and World War I didn't happen, or at least happened in a very different way--Spain is still a colonial power and Germany still a monarchy. We can probably go further; since the US nuked Batavia, either Spain captured the Dutch West Indies--or more interestingly some or all of the Netherlands are still a Spanish possession.
So far, I don't think we've seen any differences that would require history to change before the time of historical Shakespeare.
Shakespeare in this world is different from Shakespeare in ours in that he writes about current events: when he starts the Nixoniad while he's in New York, Nixon is still in office. If he started writing in '71, he doesn't know how it's going to end, so while he probably knew he was going to do a lot of foreshadowing about Nixon anyway he didn't yet know that Nixon's trajectory would work so well with his established themes (but he could've guessed).
Glad you're enjoying it! To clarify one minor point: "The Nixoniad" is what subsequent Shakespeare scholars have called the plays (just as "The Henriad" is used for Richard II, Henry IV parts I and II, and Henry V). Shakespeare himself didn't call them that...
I'm kind of curious as to why all the comedies (or at least all those mentioned so far) are still the same: not an It Happened One Night among them.
I'm enjoying it a lot too, but one comment is that I have a hard time balancing the AU-threads of (a) Shakespeare doing history plays on our 20th-century presidents with (b) a world history that's different in other ways, even if analogous. It would be cleaner for me if the only AU aspect were the presence of Shakespeare and those around him. But I imagine it's going to contribute in some way I haven't seen yet. (Part of my problem is just my brain stubbornly refusing to suspend disbelief and insisting there must be a historical cascade effect where that different a world history must mean different US presidents.)
Speaking of enjoying things read: I've started in on Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series. Fun!
105. Yes, I want to see Shakespeare's Design for Living.
Missed this over my unexpectedly quiet Thanksgiving. We wound up canceling due to fevers going around my Aunt's family, and my cousin's new 1 year old.
I was bummed to miss out on the gathering, but was more disappointed at my wife's glee over the cancellation. I deceived myself that she enjoyed the food and social, but missed only her electronics at home when she'd complain.
I'd rather have Thanksgiving than a generic 4-day weekend, and am even looking forward to our trip to her Kansas relatives next year.
That's sad. Does she just not like big crazy family events generally, or is it specifically about interacting with your family?
In fairness to her, sitting around a packed table with a bunch of moose does sound dangerous.
Particularly the antlers. One family member turns their head sharply to the left, and it's like dominoes watching everyone else spin around.
110: In fairness, an element is that we do most of the holidays with my family as they're within an hour's drive instead of flying at the holidays.
Her previous job (newspaper) prevented much time off at the holidays. Those years broke her of the habit of attending even her family's Thanksgiving or Christmas; when I first met, she told me that she celebrated and cherished New Years, since that was the holiday she was able to get off consistently.
And yeah, she's pretty introverted and needs battery charging time after working with the public.
Moar Nixon. (I should probably stop plugging this stuff now.)
114: Excellent; I enjoyed the beginning.
Particularly the antlers.
They don't have antlers! They have whiskers and beady little eyes!
And coats with gold frogging and a friend named Clara!