Moe Lane

I normally don’t stoop to reporting tawdry celebrity gossip – unless, of course, there’s a political angle to it – but the story about Halle Berry’s ex-boyfriend getting the snot smacked out of him by Berry’s current fiance includes this, well, howler:

The fight took place during the American festival of Thanksgiving, traditionally the time for families to unite and celebrate their blessings.

HA! While the UK Daily Mail is not exactly incorrect about that, it is still being, shall we say, incomplete. Let’s just say that Festivus is not the only date on the American social calendar where there can be The Airing Of The Grievances, although I will admit that it rarely gets to the level of cracked ribs and stitches…

There may be another one tonight, but five and a half hour car rides tend to be draining.

Also: there is only one really noticeable improvement done to a turkey by deep frying it, but it’s a doozy: you get crispy skin everywhere. This can mean the difference between peace and war at the Thanksgiving table, so it’s nothing to sneeze at.

…aw, you know the rest. This is the greatest Thanksgiving moment in 20th Century American television.  Well, one of the top five, at least.

I’d link to the show on Amazon, only they were forced to gut the DVD. No rights to use the music past the original broadcast/syndication run, you understand – and it was done back in the day when VHS was just taking off, so nobody really thought that this would be an issue later.

H/T: Constant reader Herp McDerp.

There was one person back in the old days who posted the same anguished cry for help, or at least an invitation to dinner, disguised as a not-very-good and not-especially-scathing indictment of early American history.  I’d link to it, except that I don’t remember who wrote it and I have better things to do than look it up.  Odd how the wheel keeps turning like that, huh? – Mind you, if I stopped blogging I’d be utterly forgotten within six months, tops.  That’s the way the photons propagate in a wave function.

Anyway, I was going to be cruel (which is not unusual) and only link to @amandacarpenter‘s succinct summary of this Thanksgiving-tastes-of-bitterness New York Times op-ed complaining about how the President pardons turkeys but lets people be executed, but then I remembered that it is Thanksgiving tomorrow; and while it’s not as charitable a holiday as Christmas is it is one of those days where we share.

So let me share some traffic with Mr. Smith, here: and I certainly hope that he had somewhere to go for Canadian Thanksgiving… what?  Oh, yes, the fellow’s operating out of some university or other in Montreal.  Which means that he’s either Canadian himself, or a bitter exile.  In either case, it’s mean to hope that Smith is not enjoying his possibly solitary existence…

Moe Lane