Have some links before you hit the stores!!!

Good morning, y’all! It’s Black Friday! Yes, I’ll be going out later. Briefly. I do like getting out of the house a little on Black Friday, but generally the extent of my tolerance of the crowds is a quick jaunt to Barnes&Noble. Gotta start shopping sometime, right?

I hope you all had the very best Thanksgiving possible. Most people I follow online seem to have done all right by their Thanksgiving holidays, though I did see a brief discussion about meal times. When do you all eat Thanksgiving dinner, anyway? In my family, it’s always been an evening meal, sometimes hitting the table on the early side (between 4 and 5) or more regularly between 5 and 6; last night’s was around 6:15. It’s dinner, after all! I remember the first Thanksgiving I spent with The Wife’s family members (not her immediate family, who were too far away, but relatives who lived in Iowa) when we were first dating, and that aunt of hers had dinner on the table at noon. I didn’t know how to process this. It was a fine meal, though. I’m guessing this is why the “post-Thanksgiving meal nap” has never been much of a thing in my world.

A pre-meal nap is a thing, though: that lull in the action when the cooking prep is on hold while things bake, roast, or simmer. Also oddly, as much as I cook at home, I generally have little role in the Thanksgiving meal prep beyond lifting heavy items like the turkey itself. I’m not sure why it’s evolved thusly, but I can do other useful things, like walk the dog while others are cooking.

And now for some open-tab clearance:

::  I meant to link Roger’s list of songs about thankfulness earlier in the week, and then I forgot to. Hey, I had stuff on my mind! Who has time to be thankful when you’re digging out your house from 80 inches of snow! (OK, that’s the last time I’ll use that lame-o excuse.)

Anyway, I’m not one to complain much about Christmas music showing up before Thanksgiving (related post on that forthcoming), but it does seem to me that making more space for songs about being specifically thankful wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

::  What state is “Take Me Home, Country Roads” actually referencing? Apparently it’s not actually clear, even though the song actually specifically name-checks West Virginia! (I was going to link a piece from Defector.com here, but that site is aggressively obnoxious about paywalling its content, and I, for one, am getting very tired of everything being paywalled.) “Country Roads” is more than just a favorite song of mine; it’s one of the songs of my life. I literally do not recall a time when that song was not part of my personal musical soundscape.

::  Wine coolers are making a comeback! I remember wine coolers with…well, maybe fondness is a bit of a stretch, but in the late 80s, they were my main introduction to the world of, well, drinking. Especially in college, when I took my time transitioning to beer. I always figured that wine coolers were a fad product that vanished when the fad died, thus explaining their disappearance from the market…but it turns out that Congress played a big role in killing them. Interesting.

I’ve little to no plan to start sampling wine coolers again, but never say never, you know?

::  Cory Doctorow on the American right-wing’s new focus on killing libraries. You want to get me marching in the streets? Trying to kill my library might do it.

::  Toss your copies of Gibbon, folks: they’re worthless now! (No, not really, but it’s always amazing to me to see how many lives are notable in their time and are then lost to memory for centuries until a random coin or two show up someplace…and then those very coins are deemed fakes…and then those same coins are deemed genuine….)

OK, that’s all I got for right now. Enjoy your shopping or your staying home or even your days at work, folks!

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