Early evening on Thanksgiving Day seems to be a good time to assess the state and nature of the holiday and the nation as this time. The most poignant feeling at the moment, is lethargic and if I lose focus may turn to comatose. This is a valuable learning experience pertaining to the tradition of the early holiday dinner. While it allows for relatives time to make it home, where does it leave the rest of us? Sitting around at 6pm, stuffed to the gills with nothing to do. There has to be a good reason for this kind of planning, but what? Sure there's football on, but not good football, Lions football. If you want a decent game, you're better off holding dinner off for an hour or two and forcing the kids to play a game in the back yard.

If you do stick with the early meal though, you get an opportunity to see what the true purpose of Thanksgiving has become, and become suspicious of your 3pm meal. Since it is the holiday season, between Detroit's fumbles, interceptions and defensive breakdowns, you're going to see hundreds of commercials. Roughly half of these are attempting to get you into a store tomorrow (the curiously named "Black Friday"). As the trend has gone of late, these stores have attempted to attract shoppers with increased convenience by opening early, and not normal early, but 4am, some even at midnight. 28 days before Christmas, and Merica buys into the fact that shopping cannot wait until the sun rises, which makes you wonder just a bit what the purpose of the prior days meal was.

Sure, we all know the story of the "First Thanksgiving". Pilgrims and Natives (are we still teaching the kids to say "Indians" so we can tell them it's derogatory later?) got together to share a meal for peace and harmony and blah blah blah. But what now? All but three Natives are dead, I don't think there are ANY pilgrims left (not even on a reservation!), and let's be honest, when you get the whole family together there is no peace and harmony. There must be a reason though, a reason to do it all. The answer reveals itself when you piece everything together. The whole purpose for Thanksgiving on Thursday is indeed Friday. It all adds up.

An early meal so you can get to bed early for your 3:30am alarm. A huge meal to provide energy for a long day of shopping. Turkey to give lots of tryptophan so you can fall asleep at 6 in the evening and awkward relatives and in-laws around for an excuse to actually go to bed.

Of course, those of us too lazy to get up that early, too sensible to think that shopping is that important on one particular day or too unprepared to know what we're getting anyone yet, will eat our dinners whenever it's served to us, enjoy the company of our family and hope we can stay awake long enough find room for another slice of pie. And Friday? If shopping does happen it will start a little after noon, because there is no way any of us would dare leave the house the day after Thanksgiving without having a leftover turkey sandwich. If there is to be no shopping, then the whole day really revolves around the sandwich.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Long Time, No Post.

Here's what you need to know, in brief:
1. Barack Obama -> President
2. Economy -> Worse like every day
3. Gas -> Kinda cheap
4. High School Musical 3
5. AL MVP -> Dustin Pedroia
6. Pistons -> Traded Chauncey and McDyess for Alan Iverson
7. U of M -> Worst season in (129 year) history
8. Paula Abdul -> No longer an American Idol judge
9. O.J. Simpson -> Going to jail
10. Lil Wayne -> Real popular
11. Christmas -> Started 3 weeks ago
12. Titanic -> Sunk
13. California -> Banned gay marriage

More to come.