House of Eratosthenes

You have to de-bone the turkey if you want to do Turbaconducken. My girlfriend took care of de-boning the chicken and the duck, but the turkey was up to me. The hitch in the giddy-up was that as of this morning I had not yet shed my turkey-deboning-virginity. It’s pretty damn dismal when you’re asking Google how to do it. What can I say. Mom always crammed the turkey full of traditional stuffing, so there was no de-boning…or maybe there was…but her two sons weren’t involved in that process. How the turkey was to be stuffed, was never anything that was put up for debate. There was no call for it, none whatsoever, believe me. Turkey stuffing. One of Mom’s culinary victories.

Well, I’d say the turkey was 60 or 70 percent de-boned. Packing the bacon-wrapped meat into it was considerably quicker and more fun. Now it’s cooking away, and it smells awesome.

On this morning, sitting side-by-side with the wonderful woman who was allowed to sleep in because of my masculine (which means awkward) struggles — and Lord knows she’s earned it — watching some airheaded chick-flick drivel on cable…I am…

1. Thankful for family.
2. Thankful for friends.
3. Thankful to be alive in interesting times. Yes I know it’s a Chinese curse. But when you’re on your deathbed, really, who wants to look back on having lived in uneventful times?
4. Thankful for California’s climate. Yes that new blog makes the brilliant, accurate and irritating point that this is the only reason people don’t leave in droves, and he could be right. But what the hell. It is what it is. We’ve got our seasons, or lack thereof.
5. Thankful that Folsom, California, although imbued with a with an unmistakable social undertone of “I’m never in the way and you always are,” and people drive their cars like complete assholes, at least isn’t another liberal shithole just yet.
6. Thankful for President Obama’s election. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that we have to see what this looks like every now and then. We will always make the mistake of electing it if we haven’t lately seen what it looks like. And I’m thankful He’s doing such a splendid job of feeding all the passion that will yank us out of this part of the cycle, like a golf ball out of a sand trap, the sooner the better.
7. Thankful for Russian computer hackers. They just might have saved the world as we know it. They certainly stand a chance of having saved us trillions and trillions of dollars, and probably millions of lives.
8. Thankful for our fighting men and women, their readiness for their missions, their willingess to volunteer, and their ability to kill people and blow things up. I’m thankful for the ones that come back whole, and I’m thankful when the ones that don’t come back at all, are respectfully remembered as the heroes they are. And for the ones who make it back and leave something behind, I’m thankful we have foundations like Wounded Warrior and Soldier’s Angels so we can show them we appreciate their service, in a way that will really help them.
9. Thankful for Palin. Hope she saves us from all the nonsense.
10. Thankful for Beck.
11. Thankful for Limbaugh.
12. Thankful for that “great American” Hannity.
13. Thankful for Coulter.
14. Thankful for all the other wonderful columnists that people don’t hear about, because it would be far more difficult to “tar & feather” them as teabaggers, homophobes, racists or sexists…Krauthammer, Hayes, Tyrrell, Simon, Blackwell, Sowell, York, Milloy, Hanson, Chavez, Elder, Saunders, Williams, Stossel, West, Barone, Monckton, Meister.
Thanksgiving 15. Thankful for my blog and all the nobodies who don’t stop by to read it. Which, by extension, means when I’m told “everybody agrees” on something, when the rubber hits the road it seems there are always lots of exceptions to “everybody.” Also thankful for all my blogger-friends; Rick, Gerard, Cassy, Buck (from whom I shamelessly copped the image), Neo-Nocon, Phil, Andy, Daphne, Melissa Clouthier, Sister Toldjah, Old Iron and KC. Especially the ones like Cassy, and John Hawkins, who continually approach me for “guest-blogging” stints so I can gum up their sites with my loquacious bloviating. Hey now that I think about it, I’m thankful for words like “loquacious” and “bloviating.”
16. Thankful there are still some women in the world who don’t lie awake at night thinking up ways to denigrate, abuse, neglect, short-change, snark at, scold, nag, and generally disrespect men. Sweetie pies. Women who pride themselves in how happy they make him. A- and B-Girls. And that, actually, their numbers seem to be increasing and they’re beginning to outnumber, or have outnumbered for quite some time now, their unfriendly, brittle, shrewish, churlish, griping, high-drama, sour, dour, vituperative, vengeful, perpetually jealous, perpetually unhappy, perpetually dissatisfied, perpetually complaining sisters. The ones that have long ago doomed themselves to a lonely death in a house full of cats.
17. Thankful to have been born here, so I can torture myself wondering what small part I can play in keeping the country great, rather than torturing myself about why some mysterious cosmic plan stuck me in just another filthy socialist mudpuddle.
18. Thankful for my wonderful girlfriend who cooks my dinner, puts up with my weird-ass kid, covers up my Turbaconducken experiment with foil properly so the bacon grease doesn’t all evaporate, her heart of gold, her (mysterious) willingness to work such long hours for so little pay, and those quick phone calls I get asking me if we need more beer so she can bring home a box or two.
19. Thankful my son brings me a bottle of it when I yell for him to do so.
20. Thankful his mother isn’t one of those ball-busting termagants and doesn’t get in the way of me raising him like a real man should.
21. Thankful for health; thankful I’ve gone ten years without barfing, that I’m well over forty and my eyes work more-or-less perfectly, that I almost never seem to get sick, that I’ve never had any cavities, that in spite of all my physical adventures I’ve never broken a bone, that in spite of all the time I spend sitting on my fat ass I actually have some physical endurance, that I don’t have a tumor wrapped around my caratid artery, a brain aneurysm, a conjoined twin, that I’m not allergic to peanuts, that I don’t have plantar fasciitis, haven’t lost any limbs or digits, haven’t had to have any intestines removed, or…you know what, let’s just bring this list to an end right here and now.
22. Thankful that the institution of marriage is slowly but surely pulling out of its half-century side-trip metamorphosis into an institution of legalized theft. Maybe once it’s returned to its roots, it’ll work for me again, who knows.
23. Thankful the society in which we live is decorated with all these amazing resources that are necessary to fulling this vital task of spoiling ourselves so superlatively rotten. That a grown, slaughtered, cleaned, sterilized, sanitary, skinned, filleted, inspected, certified and competitively plump cut of chicken is one swipe of the debit card away. Just think about it. When this country got started, if you were a lawyer you did your lawyer-ing after putting in fifteen hours growing your food. Now we swipe a card. How fucking anesthetized and stultified can we possibly get.
24. That I have all the fruit, soda and coffee I can possibly consume at work, free of charge. Because let’s face it, I’d be quite the asshole if I didn’t include that on this list.
25. That my commute is 3.1 miles, from key-on to key-off.
26. That nobody is trying to bring me down, to the best of my knowledge, like at the last job…therefore I don’t have to ask myself that ageless question “does it make me paranoid to think so, when it’s demonstrably true?”
27. That my mini-notebook doesn’t overheat, take ten minutes to boot up, shed plastic key caps like a sheepdog in molting season, suck up viruses off the Internet wherever it can find them, or sit there giving me dumb looks when I’m expecting it to do something.
28. Thankful that people are inherently greedy. Whenever some communist or religious-leftist tries to monopolize a dinner table conversation and insist everyone should take a vow of poverty, it seems all I have to do is murmur something to the effect that that guy should go first, and before you know it someone’s changed the topic in a great big hurry. Which means I won and he lost. Because in a society where everyone really believed it was virtuous to starve one’s own family to death, it wouldn’t be so easy to make that point. In this one, all I have to endure is people putting their voices behind a bunch of bullshit they don’t really believe anyway.
29. Thankful my kid’s school does not seem to be one of those that are indoctrinating the students to worship President Sort-of-God.
Casual 30. Thankful for the DVR and all the crap I can put onto it. Saturday Night Live (although I erase the episode right after the opening monologue), Tales from the Crypt, Tales from the Dark Side, Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, South Park, Old Star Trek. And I’m very thankful for the people Mike goes out to interview in his respectful way, that they’re out there doing what they do, being so deserving of this overdue respect. We need them more than they need us.
31. Thankful for Netflix.
32. Thankful we don’t have any pets and I’m not being ambushed with that insipid conversation every goddamn day.
33. Thankful I can wear jeans and a tee shirt to work.
34. Thankful we live in a society in which someone, somewhere, needs to figure out how to make things work…and that it is therefore possible to earn a handsome living doing this…however much energy we may expend pretending this is not the case and that charisma will getcha everything you or anyone else could possibly need or want.
35. Thankful I spent the time and effort learning how to type, because life would be really awkward otherwise.
36. Thankful for Context, TreePAD, Subversion, WordPress, Google Docs and that I can still buy Microsoft Excel from way back in the olden “97” days before they screwed it all up.
37. Thankful the ocean is two hours away. Thirty minutes would be a lot better, but I’ll take two hours.
38. Thankful Lake Tahoe is also two hours away.
39. Thankful for my good fortune with cars that do what they’re supposed to do. Of course I deserve a lot of credit for that. But hey, if the car’s a piece of shit, you can drive it and maintain it as wonderfully as you want and it’ll still be a piece of shit and a money hole.
40. Thankful that cop didn’t show up. It was only a two hundred dollar ticket, but I wouldn’t have been suprised to see that whole thing get out of control because I was really, really aggravated…and I don’t have that much self-control. Not for situations like that one, I don’t. Scandinavians can have temper tantrums too, ya sure yoobetcha we do.

I’m also thankful there’s a little bit more coffee left, and now I’m going to go fix that.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, Morgan. We DO have much to be thankful for.
- bpenni | 11/26/2009 @ 09:14
Happy Thanksgiving, Morgan!

I’m thankful for you and your dear friendship, you’re a wonderful man and I’m so grateful to have you in my life.

I hope you and your loved ones have a great day.
- Daphne | 11/26/2009 @ 11:25
Happy thanksgiving to you as well Morgan, and your family!!!

That turkey sure smells good, or so I would assume!!!! Indeed there is much to be thankful for… and for that, this crazy world keeps going ’round and ’round and ’round… often with dizzying consequences… LOL!!!

OK – the drugs I’m taking for my head cold have officially kicked in… so again… thank you!!! And no need to split Old Iron & I up… we have a continent or two keeping us from each other’s throats!!! (kidding… he’s totally awesome!)
- KC | 11/26/2009 @ 12:46
Feelin’ is mutual Morgan… thanks again friend…
- Rick | 11/26/2009 @ 18:54
Thankful I still live in a (relatively) free country. It’s not paradise on Earth, but I’ve been to a few other nations that one would call “third world” and gotten a glimpse of how the other half lives. I wouldn’t trade this for that, not for a million dollars.

Peace, good health, and prosperity to you and yours, Morgan. Keep up the great work.
- cylarz | 11/26/2009 @ 23:31
Sorry for the lateness, I’m out of town right now. Happy Thannksgiving, and I hope the TBDucken was everything it promised!
- Andy | 11/27/2009 @ 09:16
Emach.

My God. I didn’t know Ted Nugent blogged!

(Damn, that was some funny and honest writing!)
- philmon | 11/30/2009 @ 14:31

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Thanksgiving Morning 2009Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Thanksgiving Morning 2009
Thursday, November 26th, 2009