the holiday thread

[billy rubin]

happy thanksgiving, folks!

for those of you who dont know about it, its a time in america that we celebrate by long distance travel by motorcar the day before, and by wasting vast amounts of money at the shops the day after.

in between we gather round a big table for a large communal meal and argue politics. afterwards the women folk clean up and go into the kitchen to talk about cooking and babies, while the men go into the living room to talk about cars and football.

for me, i just sleep late and plan on cutting and drilling a piece of plate aluminum to make the long awaited coil mount for my motorcycle. and i have a fifth of bushmills red bush i may work on periodically.

[Icarus]

Your plan is appropriate Billy.

My house has been abuzz for several days with turkey day preparation. Wife is big on that stuff. Alas here it is on Wednesday the night before the gastronomic excesses. She has unfortunately fallen miserably ill with some kind of stomach virus. There is no way we will be able to do the usual magna-chow-down. We have delayed the occasion until Saturday when she will hopefully be feeling better.

As for me, I will be just as thankful for my good fortune, by eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That's why the nearby relatives call me the Grinch.

With that I do wish all my fellow HAFers a happy and prosperous Thanksgiving.

Note: it is not necessary to say grace before you consume all that good food.........the Pilgrim and Indian thing, I suspect, is bullshit anyway.

[billy rubin]

lol

peanut butter and jelly sounds like yore destined for pilgrim hell

how can you be 90 something years old?

you make too much sense

[Anne D.]

Happy Thanksgiving, billy and Icarus. Hope your wife makes a speedy recovery, Icarus. Husband and I are avoiding cooking and long-distance traveling and are headed to a supper club and then a horror movie.

[billy rubin]

oh shitfire anne you make sense too.

i am planning on ejecting at least two cats from my lap directly and attempting to stand up without cracking anything.

if you never hear from me again remember that i love you all and there will be cats to adopt

[Dark Lightning]

Happy t-day everybody! I'm nursing a strained ligament in my right knee from a ton of up-and-down the last two days, running the new pipe for the CCTV cables. We had a new roof put on and the old pipes had been run behind a beam that was eliminated. It's on the ground, this time. Just taking it easy today.

[Asmodean]

We don't celebrate thanksgiving here, naturally enough, but we do have the black... Week? Month? I'm not even sure any more.

A celebration of consumerism, which I do not partake in nor particularly disapprove of. I would appreciate the mailman not practically having to use a mallet to cram the ads down my mailbox though... They do go straight in the bin unseen, so it seems like a bit of a wasted effort for all concerned.

[Anne D.]

Supper club turned out to be lovely. Nice view of a lake and great food & drink. Trip to the movie theatre was not so lovely. Theater was in one of the fancier ring suburbs. It's the kind with a full bar and comfy armchair seating. Got our pints at the bar and ambled down to the theater. Doors are roped off at 3 minutes to start time. Friend of ours ducks under the rope to see what's going on, which turns out to be several pools of vomit in the main walkway and a lone high school kid not attending to that but still picking up candy wrappers in the rows from the last show. We decide to just get a refund and finish our beers in the bar. Get a refund for the tickets and are visiting in the bar when we hear yelling from the concession area. Two groups of women physically fighting. A high school kid attendant trying unsuccessfully to break it up. We go back to talking thinking it'll peter out or they'll get a security guard. But no, several minutes pass and things are escalating. One woman appears about to get her head smashed through the glass candy counter. Lone high school kid still the sole employee "dealing" with the situation. Ticket taker guy watching from his station. Lady bartender looking on wincing. We decided to get out of there at this point. Bartender says if we're able to stay for a while she'll get us free tickets to come back another day. Thanks but no thanks. We live in what some consider the "bad" part of town. But we had to travel all the way to the "fancy" suburb to see our first public throwdown. Made for a weird day. Cops were pulling up as we got to our cars, so hopefully none of the women ended up too badly maimed.

[billy rubin]

jeez

[Icarus]

^ ditto Billy's jeeze!  What the hell has our society come to?

[Asmodean]

I think people tend to forget that certain... I don't know what, which the Japanese have "in their genes" - a certain... distaste for inflicting oneself upon others, especially when you are supposed to celebrate or have fun.

Still, there is a whole genre of YouTube comedy that arises from pretty much exactly that - with or without an alcohol level that long-since abandoned per-thousands and entered percents.

[billy rubin]

you heard it first here, folks

It may be the season of loving and giving, but doctors have warned against embracing this spirit too enthusiastically – at least where sexual relations are concerned. They have discovered that the Christmas period is associated with a significantly increased risk of penile fractures – a medical emergency in which the erection-producing regions of the penis snap, usually as a result of forceful bending during over-enthusiastic sexual intercourse.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/dec/20/risk-of-penile-fractures-rises-at-christmas-doctors-find?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

[Recusant]

Here's to midwinter/midsummer. 

[Tank]

Well that's something I will be mindful of!

[Anne D.]

Everyone make it through Dec. 25 unscathed?