Thanks

By Carl

I know, I've been one poor correspondent, and I've been too too hard to find, but that doesn't mean you ain't been on my mind...

2014 was a tough year for everyone. I feel grateful and fortunate that I skated past a lot of crap but what I did endure was enough for two years. 

I'm still not working but I have enough to live on. I haven't really pursued a job but then I've been working on other projects around my world.

I'm grateful to the Smithsonian for using seven of my photographs this year. I'm grateful to the Ocean Conservancy for using one to promote sustainable fisheries. I'm grateful to my old employer for being more than fair with me on my way out the door, and for the friends I made while in his employ. 

I'm grateful for my health and my extended family, which grew a little this year in the Old Country. I'm grateful for those closest to me who helped me bridge the gap from miserable job to the quietude of self-employment. I'm grateful for the opportunity to have stopped out and gotten some of the kruft out of my personal life: you know, the kipple that builds up because you get home from a job too tired to fix this, paint that, build the other. 

I'm grateful for the advice I've been gifted with and the motivations put in front of me. We all need a carrot or a stick and I'm pleased to say that I've eaten more carrots than splinters.

And finally, I'm grateful for you, gentle reader. Often, I'll see echoes of something I've written in some of the strangest places and I know that, while I have a tiny readership, you are influential. I feel good about you and about my contributions to this blog.

Thank you, all. And Happy Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving in the retail Earth

By Capt. Fogg

Stopped for gas yesterday, the kind of magnificent, glorious day that makes your heart sing and your body forget its age. 74 degrees, with a few little clouds, the bright sun shining off the newly waxed red convertible, air as fresh as it is anywhere wafting like the smell of jasmine off the blue Atlantic.

The advertising sign on the gas pump has a picture of bundled up people on a toboggan and snow. My neighbors have begun to put up fake icicles, fake frost, chrome caribou and sleds festooned with lights and other reminders that Christmas, a month away, is really a pastiche of ancient Northern European winter celebrations. It's jarring, a disturbing denial of reality as though all the world were northern. It's jarring like wearing a wool suit and wing tip shoes on the beach.

It's in the teens up North where I used to live and when I say live I mean huddle in the dark waiting for Spring, leaving for work in the dark, returning in the dark, spending hours each week shoveling snow in subzero temperatures, but you can't have Christmas without archaic imagery and the more modern but strictly above the 40th parallel iconography as given to us by such bards as the Coca Cola company, Montgomery Wards and all the commercial interests that have latched on to the holiday. The plastic fat men, robed in plastic furs -- the descendants of a skinny Nikolaos of Myra, will bloom on manicured green lawns bordered by bougainvillea and hibiscus and not an iota of irony will spoil the spirit unless the polystyrene saint is shattered by a falling coconut. 

Read more »

Happy Thanksgiving!

By Richard K. Barry

As an American living in Canada, I try very hard to get down for the Thanksgiving holiday. It's one of those unusual holidays for me because Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving in early October, and the fourth Thursday in November in Canada is just that and nothing more.

Unfortunately, the potentially bad weather kept me in Toronto this year, but I decided to take the day off anyway and with my wife have a nice meal at home. My colleagues are working. Everything else is a normal business day, but I've been watching the parades all morning on TV, with a log on the fire, and I'll watch football later and eat in the late afternoon.

And then I'll Skype the family in Central Jersey, which is how we do it these days.

I wanted to post some Thanksgiving music so did what I always do, which is go online and see what the Internet has to say about appropriate tunes for the occasion. I was rather surprised to see that some people consider the jazz standard "Autumn Leaves" a Thanksgiving song. Whatever. It's also one of my all time favourites, so I couldn't resist.

I'll even split the difference and post a version by Canadian Diana Krall.

To our American friends, from Michael and me and the Reaction team: All the best for Thanksgiving and the entire holiday season. 

Weather woes

By Mustang Bobby

If you’re going anywhere today or tomorrow in the Eastern half of the United States, it’s going to be a slog.

The massive Winter Storm Boreas, blamed for at least 14 deaths in the Plains and West, is parked over the East Coast and South Wednesday, halting Thanksgiving traffic with snow, ice, heavy rains, and even a tornado. In general its wreaking havoc on travel plans in the air and on the roads on the busiest travel day of the year.

“The timing of the storm couldn’t be worse,” said Chris Vaccaro, spokesman for the National Weather Service headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. “We are seeing numerous threats as the storm is beginning to develop and intensify.”

Listening to Interlochen Public Radio out of northern lower Michigan, they’re under a lake-effect snow advisory until tomorrow with snowfall of an inch an hour expected.

But even south Florida hasn’t escaped the weather; at least the rain. It’s been storming on and off since Saturday. It’s expected to clear off for tomorrow though, and become partly cloudy with highs in the low 80′s.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

(Canadian) Thanksgiving 2013

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians.

(And a Happy Columbus Day as well, if you happen to celebrate European imperial expansionism.)

For the occasion, here's that most Canadian of bands, The Tragically Hip, performing that most Canadian of songs, "Fireworks":

If there's a goal that everyone remembers
It was back in old seventy two
We all squeezed the stick and we all pulled the trigger
And all I remember is sitting beside you
 
You said you didn't give a fuck about hockey
And I never saw someone say that before
You held my hand and we walked home the long way
You were loosening my grip on Bobby Orr

Live at The Troubadour in West Hollywood -- yes, some Americans love them too -- on June 10, 2009. Enjoy!

President pardons turkeys, not humans

By Frank Moraes

I am very fond of turkeys. They are nice animals. So I'm glad that President Obama pardoned not one but two turkeys the other day. But this reminds a bit too much of Charlie Costello in Seven Psychopaths -- the guy who will kill another human without a thought but who dearly loves his Shih Tzu.

As I reported two weeks ago, President Obama has pardoned fewer people than any modern president. Out of 1,041 cases that have come to his desk, he has found only 22 compelling enough for a pardon. When you consider just how much injustice is done in our so-called justice system, the president's lack of action is an outrage.

Let me list a few of the people, via Propublica, whom President Obama didn't feel as deserving of his attention as the turkeys Cobbler and Gobbler:

• A former brothel manager who helped the FBI bust a national prostitution ring;
• A retired sheriff who inadvertently helped a money launderer buy land; and
• A young woman who mailed ecstasy tablets for a drug-dealing boyfriend, then worked with investigators to bring him down.

Read more »

Charlie Brown gets the Pilgrims all wrong

By Frank Moraes

With Thanksgiving comes not one, but two Charlie Brown specials. As I was cooking in preparation for today's thang, I watched them -- mostly. The first one was the traditional A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. This is an interesting film because Lucy is not in it. As a result, it seems that Charlie Brown is meant to act the part of the asshole. He treats Snoopy and Woodstock as though they are slaves. And then, when everyone heads off to Grandma's condo for dinner, the animals are left behind to fend for themselves. I was outraged. Really.

Snoopy has a turkey dinner all ready to go in his dog house, of course. But then, after all the animal slavery, something happened that bothered me even more. Snoopy serves Woodstock part of the bird and Woodstock eats it! I know this is technically not cannibalism, but it is close enough. This is supposed to be a children's show. What is wrong with these people?!

The second Charlie Brown special was so much worse. I didn't even make it to the first commercial. It is the first episode of This is America Charlie Brown: Mayflower Voyagers. It pissed me off right away. Here were Charlie Brown and Linus in their iconic modern dress. But the girls were all in period costume. Why? How the hell should I know?! One thing I do know: it was offensive for vaguely sexist reasons.

But the reason I turned away was that the show told the same lie that most people continue to believe: the Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower to find religious freedom. I'm so inspired. Wait! I feel a song coming on:

And the la-hand of the Freeeeee!
And the hoooome, of thhhhhe, braaaave!

Read more »

(American) Thanksgiving 2012

By Michael J.W. Stickings

We had ours. Now, by all means, go have yours.

To my American friends and family, to all of you Americans out there, and especially to my American editors, co-bloggers, and contributors here at The Reaction, as well as to my many American friends and acquaintances throughout the blogosphere, I wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you're all having a wonderful day.

And as for football today -- Texans at Lions, Redskins at Cowboys, Patriots and Jets -- all I can say is that I despise all of those teams with the possible exception of the Texans. But those are all interesting and potentially entertaining matchups, and of course there's also fantasy, so I'll be cheering for Calvin Johnson, Matt Schaub, Stevan Ridley, Jason Hanson, and Houston's D.

And, as a Steelers fan, contemplating our prospects on Sunday against the Browns, including the odd, and somewhat depressing, thought of Charlie Batch throwing the ball to Plaxico Burress. Good times.

-- Michael

Obama pardons turkeys, Romney goes to Disneyland

By Michael J.W. Stickings

BuzzFeed:

Fresh off a four-day trip to Asia, President Barack Obama pardoned the National Thanksgiving Turkey Wednesday, taking a shot at his former Republican opponent and cracking jokes about his reelection. 

"They say that life is all about second chances and this November I can't agree more," Obama said.

"So in the spirit of the season I have one more gift to give," Obama joked in apparent reference to Mitt Romney's claim after the election that Obama won by giving "gifts" to minority groups, Obama said he was going to pardon the National Thanksgiving Turkey, named Cobbler, and his stand-in, Gobbler.

"The American people have spoken, and these birds are moving forward," he added.

See, that's very funny. And really it's the least Romney deserves for proving to be a privileged rich douchebag as much after the election as before it. (Because that's what he is, period. Surely we all learned that, no?)

Speaking of the guy who will likely end up with a karmic 47% of the popular vote once all the ballots from the 2012 presidential election are counted:

There was another Mitt Romney sighting at Disneyland today, and several Twitter users have shared the disappointingly mouse-ear-free photos. (@michellekillzz reports, "Just met Mitt Romney. He's the shit.") In recent days Romney went to see Twilight and grabbed some pizza, pumped his own gas, and drank from a red Solo cup after going to the gym, so it would appear that he's on some kind of tour to see how the other 47 percent lives.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Must be nice, though, to have all that vulture capitalist money to fall back on, eh?

Black Friday as mythbuster

Guest post by Ramona

Ed. note: This is Ramona's fourth guest post for us. Her first three were on cruelty in America, abuse against women, and the creepiness of Herman Cain. You'll be seeing more of her here at The Reaction, and I encourage you again to check out her wonderful blog. -- MJWS

**********

Ramona is a freelance writer based in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Her blog, "Ramona's Voices," is liberal-leaning, with such a small amount of navel-gazing you'll hardly even notice. She is also on the masthead at dagblog, a gathering place for dissidents and reprobates and other friendly people.

After the Thanksgiving Day gluttony is over and after our teams have either won or lost (our biggie between the Lions and the Packers went horribly awry for my loved ones, poor dears) and after we've taken our tryptophan-induced naps, the next fun thing to think about, talk about, or plan for is Black Friday, our annual Big Huge Shopping Extravaganza. It's the day when primitive survival skills kick in and the absolutely-must-haves traditionally go nuts and stampede in scenes that make even NatGeo-watchers go "Wow!"

(Rumor has it that Black Friday is the one day of the year when the Chinese pay homage to us. They would make it a national holiday, except everyone is busy at work manufacturing things for our Christmas rush.)

There's a myth in this country that goes like this: America is broke. Aside from a paltry few tax-evading King Midas wannabes, nobody else has anything much. That's the story.

Our jobless, our homeless, our soup kitchens, our empty former homes, our overflowing ERs -- that's all real. Painfully real. But what's also real is the hefty percentage of 99 Percenters who spread out at the stroke of Black Friday to go whole-hog spending astonishing amounts of ready cash and pay-later credit on stuff.

It's an American tradition contrived and perpetuated by the merchant class and, really, who are we to tell people (other than Congress) how to spend their (our) money? But a group known as "Occupy Black Friday," an off-shoot of Occupy Wall Street, while admirably opposing the longer open hours that would take employees away from their own families on Thanksgiving and endorsing the efforts to buy locally, took it one step further and came up with the idea of boycotting, instead of occupying, the major chains on That Day.  (The Occupying part wouldn't work at all, you see, since millions of shoppers would already be camping out and milling around, waiting for the doors to open.) 

Attempting to show the strength of the masses by boycotting major retailers on that all-important shopping day is one of those ideas that seems okay on the face of it, but which, in reality, is doomed from the start. It's a whisper in the wind, a dusky dot in the night sky, and here's why: I've been boycotting "Black Friday" for years now and nobody has ever noticed. Multiply me by, say, several hundred thousand and we still wouldn't be noticed. It's a happy tradition, the official start of the Christmas shopping season. Even in the worst economic downturn in decades, it's still a force bigger than all of us.

Okay, granted, this year, for whatever reasons, it seemed more intense than fun. A woman took to pepper-spraying other shoppers threatening to get too close to the prize she was after. A man slipped a DVD under his shirt, not to steal it but to prevent it from being stolen from him, and got himself shoved to the ground and bloodied for his efforts. People were knocked around and bruised. There were grim reports of shootings and parking-lot robberies. But to the victors went the spoils and it's those success stories that make it all worthwhile. (More to come the day after Christmas. Another happy tradition.)

As might be expected, the activities at "Occupy Black Friday" came to the attention of the folks over at Fox "News". Their idea of the perfect smack-down was to tell people to go out and shop 'til they drop. That'll show those damned Occupiers. Hah!

Now, I really hate to think Fox had that much influence, but this year Black Friday alone took in $11.4 billion, a 6.6 percent increase over last year, while the Thanksgiving weekend broke all sales records with a staggering $52.4 billion spent over four days. It was a jump of 16 percent over last year's sales, with record numbers of shoppers spending even more bucks on average.

No stats yet on the sales outcomes of Small Business Saturday, a truly sensational idea, even if it did come from American Express.

Yesterday was Cyber Monday (designated by the online merchants who felt left out, no doubt), the lead-in to Cyber Week (because why stop the momentum of a very good thing?), and on to Christmas, the Big Kahuna of cash-heavy, gift-giving holidays.

So about that whole "America is broke" business. We're looking into it. We'll have to get back to you on that.

An antidote to Black Friday: Barry Levinson's Avalon (1990)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So it's Black Friday, the day, at least in the U.S., our consumer impulses are meant to run wild, the day the economy needs to get the holiday shopping season going lest it collapse in on itself, the day we see most clearly what modernity is really all about.

The desire to acquire, Machiavelli, the founder of modernity, called it. But instead of political acquisition, today is all about acquiring shit in one form or another.

Don't get me wrong. I like my stuff, my material goods. I like to acquire as well. But today is the day the lid comes off, the day humanity, or at least American humanity, turns wild again. If you're at a Wal-Mart or a Target today, or pretty much anywhere shit is sold, you and your fellow consumers might as well be wolves fighting over a scrap of meat. It may be a cheap blu-ray player or maybe even a Hyundai. It hardly matters. You have been programmed to shop, to consume, to acquire more and more and more, indeed to identify your very soul with your worldly possessions. It's your drug. And you're being drugged, willingly, by a society, nay, by a civilization, that requires you for its very survival to be thoughtless consumers of shit.

Sorry, is that a bit too negative? Hey, like I said, I like my stuff. I just think that Black Friday, and indeed the whole holiday shopping season, now a year of shopping seasons (Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, etc.) bleeding into one another, is our society at its most fucked up.

So today, why not do something else? Like watch a good Thanksgiving movie. (I assume you were just too busy yesterday with family and football.)

There's Plains, Trains and Automobiles, of course, the very funny (and very touching) "road" movie with Steve Martin and John Candy.

And Woody Allen's wonderful Hannah and Her Sisters, one of his truly best films, the story bookended by Thanksgiving dinners, the first bleak and depressing, the second warm and hopeful.

And then there's Barry Levinson's Avalon, the story of a Polish-Jewish immigrant family in Baltimore. It's an amazingly beautiful film with rich characterizations and a remarkable sense of time and place. It is indeed the story of America: "They shared a dream called America... in a place called Avalon." To me, it's simply one of the best films ever made about what it means to be American.

And, if you've seen it (and even if you haven't), you may recall its famous Thanksgiving scene, when Uncle Gabriel (Lou Jacobi) arrives late and says, enraged and bewildered, "You cut the turkey without me?" It's a funny scene, in a way, with this highly quotable line, but through the drama that unfolds, as well as through the context in which it takes place, we come to see the tension at the heart of the movie -- and at the heart of the American experience.

Gabriel is late because he had to drive out to new suburbs far from the urban core that had been the locus of immigrant life. Avalon, you see, is about family but also about the culture of change and dislocation, the culture of American modernity, that ultimately threatens family, or at least the extended family that is so important to the Krichinskys as to so many others.

In this sense, perhaps, there's a continuum from America's earliest European settlers through the waves of immigrants who were to one degree or another assimilated into modern American life to today's rampant consumer culture. It should be noted that the Krichinskys own a successful appliance store. I'm sure they had, or would have had, Thanksgiving sales. They, too, well removed from their less consumerist origins, would have partaken of Black Friday in one way or another.

But no matter. It's a great movie. I remember seeing it in the theaters in 1990. I was in high school in New Jersey. That opening scene, with Sam Krichinsky arriving in Baltimore to Fourth of July fireworks, pulled me in right away. It's one of the best opening scenes in any movie I've ever seen. And by the end I knew I'd seen something truly special.

If you've seen it, go back and watch it again, because you probably saw it a long, long time ago. And if you haven't, well, you simply must. Here's the trailer:

(Canadian) Thanksgiving 2011

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians.

It's a lovely day here in the Toronto area.

The Steelers won yesterday, crushing the Titans, and may (or may not) be back on track, my football and hockey fantasy teams are doing well, we're relaxing at home, and we have a nice dinner planned for later this afternoon: roast chicken, mashed potatoes, squash, sauteed brussels, stuffing...

Oh, and the Habs got back on track as well yesterday, beating the new Winnipeg Jets after a tough opening-night loss to the hated Leafs. And there's baseball, too, though I don't have a horse in the race... go Brewers!

Overall, not too bad.

I'll get back to blogging later. Right now, I think I'll have a beer out on the deck.

(Oh, a Happy Columbus Day as well, if you happen to celebrate European imperial expansionism.)

Thanksgiving turkey

By Capt. Fogg

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes it's just what it looks like. Sometimes, when the fat man sucks on it, all hell is smiling. 

The true story of Thanksgiving is how socialism failed,

said Rush to a caller, and President Obama is hiding that fact behind an honest account of history. No, that's not just a cigar, and of course we didn't get tobacco from the Indians -- what are you anyway, a communist? 

Rush Limbaugh has long since run out of relevance, run out of ways to prove that president Obama is a Kenyan, anti-colonial (would he rather have him be a pro-colonial?), Muslim-Christian extremist who hates white people and is an avowed communist, atheist, trotskyite, racist, anti-Christ, ultra-liberal fascist. He's exhausted every epithet of every stripe -- and it seems he's now reduced to the even more pathetic state of turning the most mundane acts of traditional presidential sentiments and statements into fuel for his bonfires.

Lapel pins, terrorist fist bumps, leave that to the Girl Scouts. Rush Limbaugh is the Big League. What would have been, to anyone else and by anyone else, a tepid, ritual recognition of the long-standing American myth that the Plymouth colony was helped in adapting to the harsh climate and unfamiliar environment of 17th-century Wampanoag territory by some of the native people living there, the myth taught to schoolchildren for at least a century, filled with inaccuracies, and covered with a sloppy whitewash, turns in the cigar-sucking mind of Mr. Limbaugh from a third-grade pageant into a damnation of Mr. Obama. In the White House thanksgiving proclamation, the president says: 

A beloved American tradition, Thanksgiving Day offers us the opportunity to focus our thoughts on the grace that has been extended to our people and our country. This spirit brought together the newly arrived Pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe -- who had been living and thriving around Plymouth, Massachusetts for thousands of years -- in an autumn harvest feast centuries ago. This Thanksgiving Day, we reflect on the compassion and contributions of Native Americans, whose skill in agriculture helped the early colonists survive, and whose rich culture continues to add to our Nation's heritage. We also pause our normal pursuits on this day and join in a spirit of fellowship and gratitude for the year's bounties and blessings.

Jesus Christ. No, really -- Jesus Christ. this could be a Sunday Sermon preached somewhere in Middle America to a pastel congregation painted by Norman Rockwell. To the Palm Beach tycoon, however, it's occasion for a racist sneer about Indian casinos:

So, we were the invaders, we were incompetent idiots. We didn't know how to feed ourselves so they came along and showed us how and that's what Thanksgiving is all about.

Tell that to every school kid who had to make Pilgrim and Indian costumes complete with anachronistic flintlock blunderbusses and buckled shoes -- the America hating little bastards. 

He says nothing about the Constitution in his Thanksgiving Day proclamation because he's got a problem with it,

Limbaugh continued to rant, and in the absence of any supporting information for it, failed also to tell us how a document written nearly 170 years afterward would be have any relevance to the Thanksgiving holiday other than one only obvious to a malicious, neurotic saboteur grasping for any wrench he can toss into the works of truth, honesty, and human decency. 

But, of course, thanking a long-ago vanished tribe, acknowledging the cultural tributaries of our nation, and being grateful to whatever name one attaches to providence that our country ever came to be, is no more a qualification for venomous condemnation than saying good morning or asking what time it is. Failing to mention the Constitution of 1789 means no more than failing to mention the Emancipation Proclamation, and it says nothing about Obama or the United States of America founded so many years later and mostly by other people.

The only uniting element in this or any Limbaughean argument is the desperate attempt to make Obama an "America-hating" alien in order to make sure we continue making the same arrogant, ignorant mistakes we pridefully ignore. If the president came out against slavery and wife-beating we could be sure Rush would show us just how this was the one-way door to communism and the terrifying notion that Rush may have to earn an honest living. But Rush reveals so much with every word:

Somebody is toying with me. Somebody is seeing if they can get one past me. Somebody is trying to take advantage of me being not as focused on the day before Thanksgiving and falling for this prank.

That's right, it's not about an alliance of convenience between the Wampanoag and a ragged group of Englishmen who had suffered serious losses in the previous winter, it's about Rush. The president isn't following tradition, isn't being aware of history, isn't telling the truth, isn't being a general good guy in that love thy neighbor and let's work together and can't we all get along mold. He's trying to trick Rush, take advantage of Rush, and interfere with Rush's millions, with the profits of his betrayal of my country, the malignant, hyperbolic fabrications intended to sabotage everything good and decent and true. 

No, it's true, Rush. You're right. The long, slow, and erratic movement toward freedom and responsibility and justice you're trying to retard is only something designed to get around you and your mission. There's nothing else behind it but an attempt to "get around" you, and Obama's not the only one. We're all trying to trick you, and in fact history is trying to trick you, the truth is trying to trick you, and, come to think of it, Satan himself is trying to trick you into thinking that's just a cigar.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

(American) Thanksgiving 2010

By Michael J.W. Stickings

We had ours. Now, by all means, go have yours.

To my American friends and family, to all of you Americans out there, and especially to my American editors, co-bloggers, and contributors here at The Reaction, as well as to my many American friends and acquaintances throughout the blogosphere, I wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you're all having a wonderful day.

Go Lions. (The Patriots are a key Steelers rival.)

Go Saints. (I despise the Cowboys.)

Go... oh, the Bengals, I guess. (I despise both them and the Jets, but the Jets are another AFC rival for the Steelers this year and are ahead of them in the standings.)

-- Michael

Woolgathering

By Carl 

Every so often, I start down this odd path of thinking about stuff that's piled up in my mind. Today is one of those.

First, to the people who have made my blog, Simply Left Behind, as moderately successful as it is, thank you. It's been over six years since I first put fingers to keyboard in anger. I have Katrina to blame.

Not the hurricane, the writer.

Thanks, Kat. A bigger drain of energy I've never experienced.

To my friends at The Reaction, thank you for welcoming my words on an almost daily basis. Whether I agree with my co-bloggers and readers or not, I've enjoyed the chance to develop my thinking and to be challenged on my positions. I may not always come away with a changed mind... OK, I'm almost always right, so hardly ever... it is in these discussions that I learn the flaws in my arguments.

It's Thanksgiving in America, so it feels right to acknowledge how important this part of my life has become. I vowed in January of this year to work harder at being right on a story and to work less hard on being someone who grabs eyeballs. I felt like I was selling out in 2008 and 2009. This year, not so much.

To you all, I wish a happy and healthy and safe Thanksgiving, and to my international readers, well, have a good Thursday tomorrow.

The beauty of the Internet is that I can speak with people from Colorado to Colombia to Canton. The fact that always amazes me is how much people outside the US know and even understand about America, and how little we know of them. OK, there's a law of large numbers involved: if you live in Spain and focus on America, that's different than living in Spain and trying to understand America AND Sweden AND Dubai AND Malaysia, all at the same time.

Still, I'm really impressed by people who post things like "Well, I live in Clapham, and..."

Doubly so as a New Yorker. I've lived here all my life, and am a child of the streets (as anyone who's followed my Flickr account can tell you), and just when I think I know it all, I'm surprised by what I find. I envy tourists one thing: the first impression. I walk the streets near my office and am jealous of the folks who pull out a camera and snap a photo of Grand Central Terminal or the Chrysler Building. For them, that's a lifetime story to tell people.

For me, it's another building that I have to walk around to get from A to B.

Every so often, I get that same thrill, though. I rode my bike in Red Hook this summer and found these little vest pocket parks with these adorable little names, and marveled. And then I started to notice that parks all over the city started these cutesy names.

It got a little annoying, in fact. Maybe it's because I've become so feminized.

I realized that this morning when I was catching up on Time magazine, and found this article on the "Sheconomy". Women, you see, make or are involved in 85% of the purchases around the house, including some surprising things, like home theatre systems. Companies are only starting to notice this in a way that is meaningful. Marketing designed for women has finally gotten past "paint it pink and slap a flower on it," to understanding better how women buy something.

In the course of the article, the Midas corporation example was brought up. It turns out, Midas markets to women not by selling them a service, but by making them a customer, getting them to buy into a process by explaining things to them.

You know, you need a new alternator. Rather than gruffily say that, the technician will sit down with the customer, pull out a diagram and explain what the alternator does, how it charges the battery as the car moves, and explain precisely what broke down.

As they tell their technicians, "Explain it to your customers like you have to explain it to your mother."

And so here I am, thinking, "Wow, that's how I would have done it!"

And that's when I realized just how feminized I had become. See, men -- or rather as I term them in my next book, "guys"-- walk into a repair shop and presume that they have to have the appearance of knowing everything there is to know about cars. so the mechanic sizes them up, looks at the car, and pronounces his judgement that the car needs an new alternator.

The guy nods in agreement, grunts, and pulls out his wallet.

There was a time when this might have been the case, back before fuel injection and computers. Hell, I used to do all sorts of repairs to my engine as a kid. Now, I open the hood and go all Tim Allen, grunting and bug-eyed like one of the monkeys in front of the monolith in 2001.

And I've done that, to be sure. For whatever male vanity reason, letting a mechanic know I have no clue what he's talking about seems comforting.

Maybe to him, but why is it comforting me? 

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

(Canadian) Thanksgiving 2010

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's been a lovely day here in Toronto. I was out in the yard this afternoon, doing some gardening, dinner is just about ready, and I'm looking forward to relaxing this evening in front of the TV. Jets-Vikes! Go... oh, I despise the Jets, so I'll go for the Vikings, even with the fairly despicable Favre. (As long as Harvin doesn't have the game of his life, I should win my fantasy matchup this week, making me 5-0.)

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians.

I'll get back to blogging later.

-- Michael

Me and Roger Waters

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Good evening, everyone. After heading down to Buffalo for the Roger Waters concert on Friday, I decided to take a couple of days off from blogging over the long Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada.

Yes, it's Thanksgiving here, in case you weren't aware.

Anyway, I'll get back to blogging later today, Monday, on my day off.

In the meantime, here are some photos I took at the concert. I'll have a lot and I'll post more later. These are from the first half of the show, with the fifth one taken at intermission.

We had floor seats, 13th row. I've been a Pink Floyd fan for a long, long time, and I can't really explain how amazing it's been to see The Wall performed live after all these years. Twice -- opening night in Toronto and again in Buffalo. Of course, I wish it were with Gilmour and Mason (Wright, alas, died a couple of years ago), but it's still an awe-inspiring and deeply moving show. Truly and utterly incredible.

(American) Thanksgiving 2009

By Michael J.W. Stickings

To my American friends and family, to all of you Americans out there (the overwhelming majority of traffic to this blog comes from the U.S.), and especially to my American editors, co-bloggers and contributors here at The Reaction, as well as to my many American friends and acquaintances throughout the blogosphere, I wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving, and I hope you're all having a wonderful day.

-- Michael

Thank yous

By Carl

There's not much to be thankful for this year, and maybe that's the thing to be thankful for. It throws years like 2008 into sharp relief when the comedown off the high, and the hangover, are as fierce as 2009.

Before I get to the maudlin bits, let me thank you, my readers and friends, for putting up with my crap for yet another year. My blog has grown surprisingly so that I am now considered by the ranking service Technorati to be a "large blog," meaning a lot of people read this stuff.

Oddly enough, this comes on the heels of my vow for this year to specifically not pursue the popular stories.

And ThumbPer, who has been my faithful companion and blogging partner (he's sitting on my lap, paws on my computer stand, as I type this).

I'm sure I'm giving short shrift to a lot of people, places and things, and as they occur to me, I'll note them at the end of this piece. I refuse to turn this into one of those treacly columns where Mom, apple pie and the Boy Scouts feature prominently.

I'm thankful that I'm safe, for one more year, from the ravages of this horrible economic crisis. I sit insulated and isolated safely in a warm house, with at least two turkey meals ahead of me, and warm clothes to put on. And I sit here, I remember that I'm safe but others are not.

Brother, don't you walk away. Food pantries are bare nationwide. Hunger is creeping across the land like a dark plague, picking off the weakest, poorest among us. People who can only afford a candy bar because the local grocer charges $1.50 for an apple, a browned, bruised battered one at that, are dizzy with need, aching for a real meal. They need comfort and food and comfort food.

More and more people sleep on grates and subway benches. It's hard to tell if they are derelict or destitute, but this is America and they deserve the dignity of our compassion and assumption of destitution. We cheer heroes in sport despite their cheats and crude behavior, so why cannot we not find it in our hearts to look past a drinking or drug problem and reach out to cheer these folks on as well?

Right now, today, there are millions of people working too hard at jobs that pay too little. I think of this woman in my neighborhood, she looks Mayan or Incan. Her features are sharp, as if they were chiseled onto the head of an axe, her long black hair kempt under a woolen cap. She could be forty. She could be eighty. Sometimes on the weekends, I see her with two young children. She stands just under five feet tall.

She pushes a shopping cart through my neighborhood each and every morning. She's done this for years, picking up deposit bottles, going through the trash and recycling bins. I make a point of it to neatly bundle my beer and soda bottles for her in plastic bags and leave them by the bins. I've probably made her a hundred bucks a year.

The cart overflows with her currency: huge plastic bags filled with empties, standing sometimes six and a half feet high. Seven days a week, which means that seven days a week, she has to go to a store and exchange them. I once estimated that this probably pays her twenty bucks a day. A hundred dollars a week for digging through stuff everyone else has discarded, the nasty smelly stuff. I don't know how many hours she logs doing this, how big a family she's struggling to assist, and if she even has a husband or other adults.

I don't have to know that. I see her dedication, and think to myself, there are people in this nation who would gladly have her arrested and put on a boat home. It wouldn't matter to them if she was legally here or not.

Worse for her, there are sharks in the water now. I've seen them: angry men who come by in the afternoons, turning over garbage can lids, looking for bottles to return. Angry white men, frustrated by the sparse pickings (she is thorough). This is a post-apocalyptic world for them, and their fear manifests to anger, and anger to rage, and rage to violence.

I only pray to God I can be there to protect her when these guys get the hint they'll have to roll out of bed early. Hell, they scare me and I'm bigger than they are. But they have anger, which makes them dangerous, but brother, don't you walk away!

Where are our Steinbecks, our balladeers? I pondered that question as my head lay on a soft pillow under a warm blanket. Who will write our Grapes of Wrath? You? Me? Who will be our Dorothea Lange? Our James Baldwin? Who will record this generation lost, so that the starkness of existence as most Americans live it can be contrasted with the moneybags of Goldman Sachs, so that accounting can be made and responsibility assessed?

Things to be thankful for:
Reunion. Old friends new once more. Life. Art. Courage. Wit. Compassion. Spirit. That I'm not Glenn Beck. Michael Stickings.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

For Thanksgiving

By Carl

We're often asked to reflect on this day, set apart to acknowledge whatever bounty we've gotten in the past year's harvest, and give thanks for our blessings.

This year, it's been pretty tough to come up with much.

First, let's thank America for waking up to what's happened to this nation in the past eight years and having the guts and determination to do something about it. And so long as we're thanking America, let's thank her for not tumbling into the abyss in the past eight years. Despite our loss of freedoms and respect, she has managed to provide us a bulwark from tyranny beyond that which Bush & Co. have managed to steal.

After all, we aren't forced to keep our two-way televisions on 24 hours a day. There's something to be thankful for there.

We should be thankful that America isn't going thru what is happening in Mumbai and if that means some petty minded bigot of low expectations wants to grab the credit for Bush, so be it. I disagree, of course: Bush has only inflamed a situation, and the only reason we haven't been attacked has been logistical. They *want* to attack us and want to, badly.

It has just been dumb luck they haven't bothered to try very hard. As I said, we should be thankful that George Bush didn't buck history and become the first President to have TWO Al Qaeda attacks on his watch, but it seems small beer to be lowering the bar that far.

So long as we're thanking Bush, I want to thank him for the past eight years, which have served as a reminder to the American people that we aren't that far evolved from the muck and mire that most nations have to live under. We aren't that superior, because our system only works really well when we put smart people in places of power. I'll have a post in January that details this more.

When we put venal, petty, partisan, short-fingered vulgarians in charge, we suddenly turn into a banana republic without the umbrella drinks.

We must thank Barack Obama, for making us see the possible again. Politics has been called "the art of the possible," so now let us pray that President-designate Obama (the electoral college doesn't meet for a few weeks) is a true artist.

Too, let us thank Hillary Clinton for pushing thru the glass ceiling that made Obama's candidacy and election less likely. 18 million cracks later, and we see a black man and a white woman standing as examples to our children that say "Yes, you can".

I want to thank John McCain, too, but I'm not sure for what. For selecting Sarah Palin and in one step rendering the Republican party irrelevant for decades? Possibly, but I think it's important to have two strong parties. Just look at the past eight years to see what happens when one party can dominate the other.

I guess, finally, we thank everyone in our lives who has helped us get to this day, alive and able.

And from me, thank you for reading this drivel on a daily basis.


(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)