I did not drop off the face of the earth in the last 3/4 of a day — I joined the 47 million Americans who spend the day before Thanksgiving in an annual familial migration. I had to drive Daughter #1 and her sweetie-pie to Buffalo, Minnesota; then drive to Minneapolis to pick up Son #2, who’d had a long day on a bus from Madison, Wisconsin; then back to Buffalo to pick up Daughter #1 sans sweetie-pie; then to St Cloud to pick up Son #1; and finally, back home to Morris. For a time there I had my entire genetic output in a small car with me, in the snow, on a freeway (and I think all 47 million traveling Americans were on I94 between Minneapolis and Monticello for a time), and I was thinking that this whole family get-together thing was an opportunity for a major Darwinian catastrophe.
We made it safely back in the wee hours of the morning, fortunately. Now today I spend preparing mass quanitities of protein and carbohydrate to pack into the gaping, peeping maws of the younglings, which does make Darwinian sense, at least.
I hope you are all out reinforcing the social and familial linkages that enhance your inclusive fitness today, as well.
Happy Thanksgiving PZ. No rest for the wicked; I’m working all day. Just a Tuna sandwich and coffee for me.
Well, since I’m co-hosting a feast with my new sweetie it seems like I’m going to be increasing my DIRECT potential fitness with this little courtship rite. We’re hosting parents but they are unlikely to breed again so I don’t know if that counts for inclusive fitness.
Seems as a good a time as any for a first post: Happy Thanksgiving to all. And to be more specific, thanks to PZ and all of the contributors and commentors for providing a bountiful feast of info, reason and, more often than not, a chuckle or two.
We solved the having all our offspring together by sending the youngest half to the other side of the world to go to university. But don’t worry said offspring will be in the bosom of family for xmas (we don’t celebrate thanksgiving) as all the rest of my side of the family are there too. So we are genetically insured against even large asteroid impacts ;-)
For pure bliss, you have to be married to a pathologist. Not only did he cook enough dinner to last us for several days, he DE-BONED the turkey, made soup with the bones and scraps for the doggies. Alas, since I’m a vegetarian, its Tofurky for me!
Have a wonderful day!
SG
Happy Thanksgiving PZ, and to all reading here.
Spending the grey, dank, chilly day with two cats and two wee dogs.
I fed the animals and I guess they gave thanks.
And once the turkey is eaten and the can-shaped cranberry sauce units have been spooned away, it’ll be time to wrap the house in lights and set up the Squidtivity scene on the courthouse lawn.
Keep your stinking, rebellious holiday to your vile American selves…..
Oh no!
Wait!
Feeling of indescribable warmth, thanks and general milk of human kindness flowing over me….
In that case, I retract the first senetence entirely. Have a great Thanksgiving everyone over there in the US of A. Especially you Pharyngulites and associated Pharyngulites once removed, I, at least, am very thankful for you lot! Educated and educational. Able to be funny and funny to read. Reasoned and dammit occasionally reasonable! What’s not to be thankful for?
Bugger, I’ve gone and been nice again. Now I’ll never get that award for meanness.
Louis
Well, it’s sunny and 71 degrees F (that’s 22 deg. C) here in Pensacola. We might just go to the beach for a while before heading to the feast. :)
Have a great Thanksgiving, if you celebrate it.
Matt
Happy belated Thanksgiving to the Americans in the crowd (we sensibly do ours around harvest time)…
How you can stand to do the big turkey dinner thing twice more or less a month apart is beyond me, and I like turkey. :)
Glad to hear you made it back safe. Have a good one!
I hope you are all out reinforcing the social and familial linkages that enhance your inclusive fitness today, as well.
Doing exactly the opposite. I was in NW Iowa this week for my grandmother’s funeral, and today I am fleeing, flying back to Boston. Unfortunately, I’m sitting in the Sioux Falls airport, waiting for my link up to Mpls. The Mpls-Boston flight is already delayed. I can’t wait to get home and get to that bottle of beaujolais nouveau waiting for me.
I’m so sick of hearing Calvinist bullshit this week. Can’t wait to get back to MA.
Our family is not getting together this year, having just barely made it through my mother’s funeral. It gets to be too much. I am going to spend the day happily communing with my friends in the blogosphere!
Hello!
Hello?
hello
tap. tap. tap.
Oh, well I gotta go. Time to start the mac and cheese.
hope you are all out reinforcing the social and familial linkages that enhance your inclusive fitness today … fine family-friendly sentiments (though the linkage to Thanksgiving is tenuous), and based in biology too. Reasoning from biology to humans and our families isn’t often so simple, e.g. psychobiologist David Barash’s The Myth of Monogamy, 2002.
Reasoning from biology to humans and our families isn’t often so simple, e.g. psychobiologist David Barash’s The Myth of Monogamy, 2002.
But it’s not always so complex. For instance, it can be reasonably predicted that giving a copy of The Myth of Monogamy to your girlfriend with a cheeky wink will reduce your potential fitness.
A greater scientist than I wouldn’t have had to learn that the hard way.
Being as there were 7 in my family there were occasionally squabbles about who got a drumstick (turkeys being equipped with only 2). Now if someone could somehow breed a cross between a turkey and an octopus so there would be 8 drumsticks… Naw, forget it. Then there would be one extra and we’d fight over who got 2 drumsticks.
Happy Thanksgiving PZ and all Pharyngulites and thanks for all the entertaining and enlightening intercourse!
Brownian: heh!
The literary types already documented your insight: hogamus, higamus…
Happy Turkey Day, bon appetit, and bonne digestion from an expatriate. Some news from my hometown that will strike you as weird only if you are not familiar with the Southern Baptist mentality:
http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/local/11/16/1116hydepark.html
Thanksgiving Day: that designation is okay, but more explicitly defined by a day to appreciate living at this point in human history rather than at any other time and having been born, in this time, in a relatively rich country rather than in one that is poorer in resources.
So, don’t thank anything, just appreciate (savor) your circumstances.
And especially do not attribute that luck to you or your antecedents’ efforts to reinforce or change these lucky circumstances by wishful thinking.
We have what we have: appreciate what is satisfactory to you. If what you have is not satisfactory, do physical actions in an effort to change things: the result may be more satisfactory.
Appreciate both what you have now and your opportunities to change them to what you consider even better circumstances.
And empathize with the situations of those who were not born with your lucky benefits, and do something that will benefit one of them, that they cannot do themselves but that you are able to do, even though you do not have to do it.
Am so savoring this day!
It’s not having what you want, it’s wanting what you got. I’d go soak up the sun, but it’s about 0 C out there.
Have a great thanksgiving PZ, and all your American readers. Even though I’m Australian, I’ll be celebrating it too, due to my American friend that lives here, who puts on a great barbeque every year. It’s gonna be 30 degrees Celsius, perfect!
Happy Thanksgiving from the banks of the Willamette River. ’tis sunny and festive in Eugene.
PZ, I give thanks you’re the person you are, and that you do all this work. Practically every day I’m amazed that you keep Pharyngula online, and filled with new, interesting stuff.
I give thanks to YOU.
The rest of yez: From an unseasonably warm upstate New York, USA — Happy Thanksgiving!
Let us all praise the memory of Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme, creator of Turducken.
Everyone now please turn to page 113 in your songbooks, and join me in a rousing, devout rendition of “This Is The Day For Which Turducken Was Made.”
A Happy Turkey Day to you and yours PZ. And Carl, we hope to see some spectacular illustrations soon.
Happy Turkey Day fellow pharyngulaites!
Many happy returns of the day from the “last frontier” (frozen wasteland?) – Alaska. And a belated Happy T-day to our (slightly) saner neighbors on the right who celebrated last month ;^)
And lipids. And nucleic acids, for that matter. Why does everyone always forget the nucleic acids? We consume enormous amounts of DNA all the time without even realising it, and nobody ever talks about this. When will people start realising the dangerous nature of this practice, completely occulted by the agricultural-scientific complex, and organise to promote a DNA-free diet? ;-) :D
You should figure out how to stuff and roast an octopus or something for Thanksgiving. That would be cool! Whoop – I’ve got to go check on the vertebrate in the oven! Happy Thanksgiving, PZ.
You are responsible for 0.002% of the US’s GHG emissions for the day.
Hope you’re proud of yourself :)
While walking in an open area consisting of very tall grass next to a stand of forest last summer, I spooked 4 turkeys. I never saw them and they didn’t hear me until I was just upon them. Turkeys prefer running, but they’ll fly if startled. They have terrific eyesight and are extremely wary. Well, I startled them, as they didn’t see me in the grass and they flew straight up as they do when shaken, just like a helicopter. Their powerful wings lifted them above my head. I felt a strong rush of wind as I watched them lift 50 feet vertically, pause for a split second, then they redirected and flew horizontally over the trees to safety. I’m sorry I disturbed them, yet it gave me an even greater appreciation of their being.
It’s just one of the reasons I don’t eat turkey (though I like Thanksgiving) on “turkey day.”
Here’s another:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/george-bush-pardon-all-t_b_73574.html
Ben Franklin on turkeys:
“For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird
has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.
The Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America . . . He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red coat on.”
My daughter said the other day that she is going to become a “fourth degree vegetarian.” She won’t eat anything that casts a shadow.
Since it’s Turkey Day and all, here’s a turkey I saw wandering along Beacon Street in Brookline, MA a couple weeks ago. The previous weekend, I had seen him, or one like him, hanging out around the T-tracks.
OK, some fine sparkling wittery above, but you’ve really got to check Joe Bob’s link (#19). It’s darkly hilarious, and at one point I truly thought it was satire, like maybe the striking writers for The Simpsons wrote it just to stay on top of their game.