Thanksgiving is a garbage holiday. We should have a holiday where we all morn that all life on Earth has yet to be extinguished.
And after that, we can mourn the decline of spelling.
Since I don't have family anywhere near my only thanksgiving tradition is to listen to this when you post it, Heebie.
Thanks Heebie. I was looking forward to your traditional Thanksgiving post despite it being such a shitty year.
48 consecutive motherfucking years...after the zombie hippies and draft-dodgers have become incomprehensible ghosts in a forgotten landscape, we no longer understand the tragedy of the earthmother standing on the steps of a converted church staring out for guests that will never arrive.
Or maybe not. Broderick is the one who talks of auld lang, Quinn is all befuddled gioconda. Maybe Quinn is thinking if not those, why not others? Why don't the strangers drop by? It isn't as if the family was advertised.
Wikipedia:
Guthrie identified as a registered Republican in 2008. He endorsed Texas Congressman Ron Paul for the 2008 Republican Party nomination, and said, "I love this guy. Dr. Paul is the only candidate I know of who would have signed the Constitution of the United States had he been there. I'm with him, because he seems to be the only candidate who actually believes it has as much relevance today as it did a couple of hundred years ago. I look forward to the day when we can work out the differences we have with the same revolutionary vision and enthusiasm that is our American legacy." He told The New York Times Magazine that he is a Republican because, "We had enough good Democrats. We needed a few more good Republicans. We needed a loyal opposition."
Commenting on the upcoming 2016 election, Guthrie identified himself as an independent and said he was "equally suspicious of Democrats as I am of Republicans". He declined to endorse a candidate, noting that he personally liked Bernie Sanders despite disagreeing with Sanders's platform, and he admired Donald Trump's ability to not rely on campaign donations but did not believe Trump has the best interests of the country in mind.
About once a month, Guthrie posts short writings to the Announcements area of www.arlo.net, often expounding libertarian themes.
We have a little Thanksgiving with North Americans here every year. This year I keep inventing reasons not to go, all of which translate to "I would rather curl up in a ball." We're guaranteed to talk about the election, and what is there to say, other than evil has won?
Hippies and other revolutionaries always were kinda country. Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro born on farms.
10, 11 Awesome. It isn't a true Thanksgiving without the traditional family fight.
11 Yestheywere. Rich farms is farms
Quote from whocareswhere, ca 1881
"Just as men driven to straights will put their last pittance into the lottery instead of the savings bank"
What ya think, is "strait" a disappearing word?
You know who else grew up on a farm?
No they weren't. Lenin was born in Simbirsk where his father was an inspector of schools.
You know who else grew up on a farm?
Superman!
I'm a traditionalist because I don't click on the links in the post.
Okay, mostly wrong about Lenin. I checked the other three, and could have sworn Vlad lived on a manor. He just wished he did. And Astrakhan and Kazan State University ain't Kiev.
Wasn't close to everybody born in 19th century Russia born on a farm anyway?
16 I was thinking Ed Gein but that'll do.
Close to everybody born before about 2000 was born on a farm anyway.
East Coast Brother and family are visiting. A text message conversation starting last night, ending this morning:
Me: Specific recs for wine to have on hand? Heading to store.
Me: Times up! But I got help at the wine store, should be fine.
ECB: Delete this. In flight. Hope u got Pinot Grigio - big mess up on my end not to ask. Don't know our plan.
So things should go splendidly! Everyone sounds super relaxed.
17: I'm a traditionalist in that I don't read all the comments before responding.
You should know by now that no one clicks the links on the OPs Heebie.
23. Pro tip: go back for some Pinot Grigio if you haven't go any.
I'm drinking a Belgian-style ale already and I'm in heebie's time zone.
Protip: if 27 isn't an option tear the label of the wine bottle and write pinot grigio with a sharpie on the bottle.
I am thankful that I don't have to deal with family today.
I am going to a friend's house which is alcohol-free, because her brother is an alcoholic. No wine for me.
Our liquor stores and supermarkets aren't open because of the holiday, so no last-minute shopping.
Happy thanksgiving.
What a crappy year.
"I would rather curl up in a ball."
A Bartleby for our time.
Everybody else gone to study ultra-alien linguistics. Not so many Thanksgiving anime. Is obon close enough?
I got two pieces of candy, half a glass bowl and 2 1/2 joints of Durban Haze. Pulling up the spirit of 69 from the wine cellar, I give Guthrian thanks to the civilly disobedient everywhere, while I still can type.
Happy thanksgiving!
If I were doing Thanksgiving this year, which I'm not, because I live in a Thanksgivingless country and I'm busy as fuck at work, I don't think I could bring myself to go to a booze-free dinner a la 30 despite my best efforts to be a good sport about such situations. Not this year.
Thanksgiving is a garbage holiday.
I'm assuming you meant here the 'garbage' of "garbage pizza" and "garbage fries," i.e., everything good piled on top. Because Thanksgiving is like the only good holiday: eat, drink, fall over, no other expectations except maybe putting up with family, which is not actually required with a little creativity put into excuse-making. If only all holidays were so straightforward. Christmas can fuck right off.
I also basically like Thanksgiving, and find it easy to salvage a generic, kind message of thanks from its sketchy origins. I love the food and the other things Swope mentions.
37.2: You forgot the real meaning of Thanksgiving, which is the forced national admiration of America's Team and the glorious city that is their home.
Not Detroit.
Listening to Baden-Powell, Popol Vuh, Klaus Schulze, Sonny Stitt, earliest Dr John
Ate a microwaved Jimmy Dean thingy
I thought the real meaning of Thanksgiving was, "Hey all you Native Americans, how dumb could you get?"
Have another piece of pie, everyone.
I'm celebrating by propagating the fabulous tweets from teen vogue, highly recommend to follow. E.g. https://twitter.com/TeenVogue/status/801836646987689984
(I have a couple of friends who are very active in the nodapl movement, and them tell me this isn't a bad way to help out.)
I'm trying to stay buzzed until my sister shows up at 8 or so tonight.
If everybody stays asleep, I'm also going to bill some hours.
There used to be a big bottle of scotch in the lower cabinet. I can't tell if somebody drank it all or if they just moved it to keep the little kids from getting drunk.
I have a picky, generous uncle, to it was Chivas.
Didn't he love the kids enough to share the good stuff?
He left a 3/4 full bottle but I can't find it.
Watching Back to the Future II. A little too on the nose.
The Biff character is literally based on Trump.
My dad is off the vent and talking again and totally has no idea about the election so we're planning a Potemkin next four years where we just pretend it totally didn't happen around him. If anyone wants to join us.
51: Ah, now that you mention it I recall having seen that.
Way ahead of you. I've had to remind my mom at least a dozen times that today is Thanksgiving.
53: I attempted to ban all election-related talk today (everyone's basically on the same page, I just wanted some freedom from it) and it was mostly successful.
We've decided if he asks we'll just say "actually we just decided we were fine so just no election this time." That's the plan.
Clytie, you've watched Good Bye, Lenin!, right? If you can promise some East German accessories, is happily be a heartland correspondent.
I had been hoping Thanksgiving would mark when we were truly moved in and settled and we could host people, but that was pre-sprain. Instead I made a few easy things we took to a friend's drop-in dinner and then the girls and I went on a silly little riverboat cruise for dinner at night. I didn't make them say what they were grateful for or anything but having a holiday together meant a lot to me.
A couple of people have mentioned it and it seems very on-point, will review for tips. Right now only action item is keeping TV on ESPN Classic. He's starting to grab remote, too, so there is a physical challenge.
I guess I must be joking somehow, because how can I keep this up for four years, but I'm really not.
Happy Thanksgiving, Thorn, even if it isn't by the numbers.
Zomg good bye Lenin is amazing delightful or at least it was a decade ago. Now, you make your own history.
I'm sitting in a Chinese bar with my first exposure to ethanol in a week, so: you're all intelligent wonderful people and if you need help in the vague western PA area lmk. I appreciate you.
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NMM to Carol Brady/Florence Henderson
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I'm celebrating Thanksgiving over here in my non-American corner of the world, because there are enough Americans around that the stores helpfully stock things like turkeys, and why not enjoy a good excuse to make and eat a lot of delicious food?
Of course we'll be celebrating on Sunday, because work, but I for one appreciate the opportunity to have an extravagant meal.
I keep thinking about how we almost moved to the US 3 years ago, and how if that were the case I would've spent the last few weeks curled up in a ball...
Happy Expat Thanksgiving, parodie!
Despite being here I still spent the last two weeks like someone close to me died. (And then SEK...).
At least the 8 hour time difference gives me a plausible excuse to avoid Skyping the Trump voting family.
Just got back from Jamaican Thanksgiving. I ate a lot of goat curry and drank a lot of sorrel. Good times.
Happy Thanksgiving to you too, Barry.
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Probably good news!
http://m.chinapost.com.tw/international/2016/11/25/484981/Colombia-signs.htm
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But we'll never know what it was because they've taken it down/firewalled it/crashed their server...
71 is a 404
Probably good to get that in before Trump's coronation.
Works for me. Maybe strip the 'm.'?
It did, and yes, it is good news, so far at least.
40: Depends on whether you date it from the 1621 Harvest Feast or the 1623 Day of Thanksgiving.
From the Smithsonian's website:
In 1623, the Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation, Massachusetts, held another day of Thanksgiving. As a drought was destroying their crops, colonists prayed and fasted for relief; the rains came a few days later. And not long after, Captain Miles Standish arrived with staples and news that a Dutch supply ship was on its way. Because of all this good fortune, colonists held a day of Thanksgiving and prayer on June 30. This 1623 festival appears to have been the origin of our Thanksgiving Day because it combined a religious and social celebration.
Thanks, TJ. I guess it was my seventh as a parent, these three girls for the last three years and me as solo parent for two of them, only the older two the one before that (though same riverboat setup), preceded by Mara with Val and Alex (though I was able to work it out so they spent the holiday with their family and I think I took Mara to her great-aunt's house the last year her grandmother was alive), before that just Mara, before that Rowan's first visit. So none of it is particularly conventional but I should maybe stop the particular moping that says I've done nothing with my 30s.
I should maybe can definitely stop the particular moping that says I've done nothing with my 30s.
FTFY.
Ah, Mossy! I could set you to editing all sorts of stupid hangups, but it's probably best not to. I already this week talked myself out of making a plan not to bother dating until I'm 40 because that's needlessly arbitrary, but lots of stupid self-talk remains. I've been contemplating Aing the M but it's all so pitiful it's probably not worth it and really it's just that I want a nonpolitical thread.
A lot of my grumpiness is that it's so frustrating to still have a sore sprained ankle. It'll be twelve weeks Saturday and I get another set of x-rays Tuesday so decisions can be made about what to do next. I hope that means that if surgery is the plan it can happen promptly now that I've already met my insurance deductible, but maybe the plan is just to be in a boot, unable to properly clean my floors or carry boxes upstairs to unpack them FOREVER in some sort of particularly bourgeois Greek curse. I will never get caught up on laundry, but that has always been true anyway.
It'll only be Greek if you can never reach the raisins on the top shelf. Ever.
Yes teen vogue gives hope! So awesome.
I made so much food yesterday: roast turkey; dressing; gravy; mashed potatoes; roasted carrots; cranberry sauce; pumpkin pie; chocolate cream pie. And friends brought bread and a couple of salads. Also, I bought some green beans with shallots from the deli counter at the local grocery, because I didn't want to prepare another veg myself* and I was afraid there wouldn't be enough food (what was I thinking?! there was more than enough food, and we have loads of leftovers...).
I love Thanksgiving, I don't care what anyone says (I still think of it as "American Thanksgiving," btw, because there's a Canadian Thanksgiving in October). I don't actually eat much of the food that I prepare, because I'm a vegetarian. But honestly, it just wouldn't feel like Thanksgiving without a turkey roasting in the oven (which means I'm not a very good vegetarian! but which also means that I live with carnivores and don't want to deprive them of the trad. feast).
*I sometimes make that mushy, retro, 50s-style green bean casserole that everyone at chowhound loves to decry, but which people in my household truly love to eat, but I just didn't feel up to it this year. I blame Trump. And though it's shockingly immodest to say so, my mashed potatoes are very good. I credit my mother.
83: I don't get the impression that Canadian Thanksgiving is quite as big of a deal. Falling on a Monday makes it less of a long weekend holiday.
I had sweet potatoes yesterday but no squash which, somehow, feels wrong for a New England Thanksgiving.
84: Canadian Thanksgiving is special to me, because my deceased mother's birthday (October 10) falls near or on that holiday. But that's personal and idiosyncratic, of course, and I believe your impression is correct: Canadian Thanksgiving is a nice dinner, whereas American Thanksgiving is a big deal and a major holiday.
On the other hand, the day after Christmas isn't much of a deal down here in the US; whereas, growing up in Canada, Boxing Day was a thing. My parents used to have a big party (they called it "keeping open house") on the 26th of December, with friends, neighbours, and family. It started at about 3 in the afternoon, but some hard-core party-goers (mostly, though not exclusively, blood relations) would end up staying overnight, and my mother would find herself cooking bacon and eggs for a crowd on the 27th.
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NMM to Fidel Castro.
Trump will probably take credit for this too.
(What are the odds on a Trump Casino being built in Havana in the next 4-8 years?)
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ATTEMPT 3,731: SUCCESS!
88. Will be missed, apparently. The dynamics of independence are always more complicated than they look from a distance.
84: Tim was born in Montreal on American Thanksgiving. His Dad had been transferred to New Jersey already and had to get a flight up on one of the most expensive travel days to make it to the birth.
86: Boxing day is definitely more of a deal there; except to a few Anglophiles it means nothing in the U.S. My in-laws don't seem to grasp how little time I get off and that I get no extra time around Christmas.
Boxing day means a feast of soccer.
Another brilliant revolutionary, seduced into the iniquities of power by the exigencies of Cold War proxy politics -- Florence Henderson, you will be avenged!
My brother's birthday is Oct. 12, often the day of Thanksgiving. The culture of the observance is the same, minus the emotional resonance. But then, we never had a year as traumatic as 1863 was here.
Remembrance Day, Nov. 11th, was in my childhood a much bigger deal in Canada than Veterans' Day is here. The name suggests why: the people remembered didn't live to be veterans.
Remembrance Day, Nov. 11th, was in my childhood a much bigger deal in Canada than Veterans' Day is here.
Oh yes, in my childhood too. We really did observe that moment of silence at 11 a.m., and I can remember my dad taking us to the War Memorial in downtown Ottawa to watch the laying of the wreaths.
The US has both Veterans Day (Nov 11) and Memorial Day (sometime in May?), of course, but I sometimes get them confused. I believe Memorial Day is more equivalent to the UK-Commonwealth Remembrance Day, in that it is meant to honour the dead?
Yes, Memorial Day (the last Monday in May) is specifically to honor those who have died while serving in the armed forces. It originated in the aftermath of the Civil War.
I understood Memorial Day as begun to honor the Union dead, so somewhat regional. The Grand Army of the Republic would process to the cemeteries.
Memory faded, and it began to be celebrated as the holiday that marked the start of summer. When the Indy 500 was inaugurated in 1911, the sacrilege was protested. The Civil War was more recent then than the height of the Vietnam War is now.
Canada's "contribution" (young men for cannon fodder) to World War I has been massively under-appreciated. The boys at Vimy Ridge don't even begin to account for it.
In 1914, the total population of Canada numbered just under 8 million souls. And Canada mobilized some 620,000 (roughly 8 percent of the total population!) for the war effort, and suffered about 67,000 fatalities, with another 160,000-170,000 in non-fatal casualties. Did that farm boy from rural Ontario even know what he was fighting/dying for? Something about God, the King, and our country, I guess. Those boys were so young, so innocent; and we made them suffer: before they died at 18 or 19 years of age, they were made to suffer.
And in Newfoundland, July 1st is Memorial Day. Beaumont-Hamel looks like nothing much. It's still just a small farming village. Of the Newfoundland Regiment on the 1st day of the Somme, it's divisional commander wrote:
It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault only failed of success because dead men can advance no further.
Lot of interesting material here http://www.warmuseum.ca/firstworldwar/history/people/in-uniform/tommy-canuck-the-infantry-soldier/. Like the British army, the CEF was older than you might think - average age 26, ranging from ten (!) to 80 (!!) and the majority was not Canadian -born.
One lasting effect of the Somme was the deliberate weakening of the regional recruiting system in order to prevent another disaster of the kind that happened to so many small communities during WW1, of losing half their young men in a single morning. Recruits from one area were deliberately sent to different units; so a nominally Scottish battalion would still be majority Scottish, but would have a fair number of soldiers from elsewhere in the UK. I don't know if the same thing happened in the Canadian army.
Library and Rchived Canada has a very good oral history of WOW featuring interviews with veterans. There's three on Vimy Ridge at the link on the main page: https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/first-world-war/interviews/index-e.html
Library and Archives Canada that is
the CEF was older than you might think - average age 26, ranging from ten (!), to 80 (!!) and the majority was not Canadian -born.
Yeah, that's a bit older than I would have thought. In my family tree, we have a John Laurence Cleary who died of gas poisoning at a London military hospital at the age of 21. Also a Charles Alexander Sullivan who enlisted at the age of 16, but who said he 18 at the time of his attestation. He survived the war; and my dad remembered him as a bit of a wild card (those Sullivans, they were always a little bit wild, and "accomplished drinkers").
In Canada in 1914, you would sign up as a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Frenchman, and so on and so forth. It was Vimy Ridge that really helped to forge a national Canadian identity. Our boys; our cannon fodder.
103 Also WWI not WOW. Stupid autocorrect.
103 Also WWI not WOW. Stupid autocorrect.
105: well, a lot of them (a majority almost certainly) wouldn't have been infantry riflemen. Armies need clerks and store men and drivers and mechanics and so on, and older men were encouraged to sign up for those jobs and free up younger, fitter men for the rifle companies. The average casualty was probably younger than 26 for exactly that reason.
My dad, a trad. Roman Catholic of Irish origin, had a great a deal of animosity toward the British ("the English: those bloody bastards"), unless and until the point of comparison was the Americans, at which point he became pro-Crown.
(The British Crown: for all its folderol and frippery, not nearly as awful as the American alternative!).
My dad hated the Orange Order Lodge with a true passion, and he always felt uncomfortable with Canadians who were sort of "legacy Orange." But he also thought Elizabeth II was "a dear lady," who "did credit to her station."
Canada: way weirder than you thought it was!
Royalty are necessary because nobody else is willing to stab Ed Sheeran.
Canada: way weirder than you thought it was!
I find, and I expect you do too, that Canada's uniqueness, its national feeling seem hard for especially American liberals to grasp. Good-natured musing about annexation, such as here a few days ago, always seems to have behind it failure to appreciate how strongly Canadians feels about their country's independence, compromised as it has often been. Culturally, American regional differences seem on the surface to be greater than between adjacent areas of Canada and the US.
Perhaps liberals everywhere are a bit obtuse about national feeling, about patriotism.
So you hear liberals joke about annexing another country, and you think they don't understand national feeling?
After the revolution, "National Feeling" will be the name for the state-run massage parlors.
When the government tries to gain more business market-based reforms, they'll create a loyalty card titled "Once more, with Feeling". They'll have to let three copywriters and a marketing director out of the Gulag before they get that slogan.
101: Huh. I never put that together before that, because of a series of historical accidents, Newfoundland & Labrador celebrates Memorial Day and Canada Day on the same day.
Link to something? Is there a flood?
I googled and got something, i.e. a website that cheered up my idiot hipster heart.
