Am I Racist if I Stay Home on Black Friday?

Here we are in Nickname Week again: Thanksgiving Thursday followed by Black Friday followed by Small Business Saturday followed by Sleep It Off Sunday followed by Cyber Monday followed by TIMMY Tuesday et cetera, et cetera, advertisement nauseam.

Thursday is the actual holiday that is causing this moniker mayhem.  It is known as Thanksgiving, or as they say in Texas, THANKS-giving.  Of course, they say a lot of things in Texas you don’t really hear elsewhere, like PO-lice and GUN rack.  Be that as it may, I will try to arise from my turkey coma long enough to pass off as this week’s post a few reflective reflections to test your reflexes.

Thanksgiving was first declared a holiday by George Washington, but credit is usually given to Abraham Lincoln because he freed the slaves and wore a really cool hat.  Continue reading →

Save the Animals! Ban Environmentalists!

I remember as a kid listening to ‘Animal Stories,’ a regular feature on WLS Radio in Chicago whereon two DJs known as ‘Uncle Larry’ and ‘Li’l Snot-nosed Tommy’ would bring all the low-information voters up-to-date on actual happenings in and around the monarchial animal kingdom.  Usually, said stories consisted of how a certain animal came to meet its unfortunate and untimely death in a bizarrely humorous and/or particularly grisly manner.

For example, Uncle Larry might tell Li’l Tommy about how the key to the city was given to a cat for saving its owner’s life then at the ceremony, the cat scratches the mayor as it is being held up to the crowd and in painful surprise is subsequently dropped into an operating wood chipper; or maybe how a black bear was shot by a neighborhood-watching brown bear who was reported on the news as being a polar bear further fomenting the whole bear-relations situation to where it was unbearable. Continue reading →

Shouldn’t Veterans’ Day Be March Fourth?

This past week was Veterans’ Day here in America and, as always, it brought to the fore awareness of correct apostrophe usage.   Veteran’s Day was originally established as “Armistice Day” to commemorate the aptly-named Treaty of Versailles being signed in the Palace of Versailles outside the town of Versailles but was later changed to Ve’terans Day to recognize all the new and improved veterans after they realized that The Great War that was The War to End All Wars wasn’t actually that great and didn’t end all wars at all but instead caused a number of follow-on wars and thus created more veterans that needed recognizing.

And so traditionally on Veterans D’ay, the government shuts down in such a way that doesn’t even make the news and people get together to post gratitudinal platitudes on Facebook.  Being a veteran myself, I received a number of thank-yous for my ‘service’ that included keeping America safe for democracy, defending the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and seeing how many foreign-made beverages I could get past the customs agent. Continue reading →

One (More) Reason I Will Never Be a Marine Biologist

I will never be a marine biologist.  Those who are close to me know that I do not use flowery deodorants.  Less literally, those who are close to me also know that I do not like big things in the water.  And when I say big things in the water I mean animate, alive things like sharks or squids or Loch Ness monsters.  Boats and their ilk are okay, but anything that moves of its own will and is bigger than a Chipotle burrito will make me scream like Howard Dean in Iowa.

It doesn’t even have to be especially scary; it just has to be of significant size.  Even things that might be large, but absolutely harmless like halibut or tuna or Chris Christie; if they are big and they are in the water, they freak me out.  Out of the water I am fine.  If I were to see  Chris Christie or a halibut in Costco, no problem.   Continue reading →

Most People Just Celebrate Halloween for the Boos

It won’t be long now and the neighbor kids will be running across my lawn and, under the approving eye of their loving parents, practice extortion.  They call it trick-or-treating, but everyone knows it’s just a huge shakedown.  Here I am a grown man and I have to shell out a Jujube so some little six-year old brat doesn’t unload the leftover tomatoes from his grandpa’s garden on my screen door?  What kind of sick tradition is this?  I don’t even know what a Jujube is.

It turns out that the tradition of Halloween is one of those Christian origin things that people prefer to ignore the origin of…like science, or equality, or torturing people to get them to recant—oh wait; everybody remembers that last one.  It’s true, though.  Halloween is a religious observance; something about remembering all the saints and martyrs who died of hypoglycemia.  But don’t tell the politically correct secular police or they might get all hissyfitted into a new pair of whinypants and we’d have to start calling it Holidayween and kids would no longer be allowed to ‘cross’ the street to trick-or-treat. Continue reading →