Turkey Day

To all of the Americans on my f-list: Happy Thanksgiving!! I hope yours was pretty awesome. Mine, sadly, was not; I have become sick yet again. D: I've just been coughing a lot, mostly because the stress of the past few weeks has finally caught up to me -- this always happens when I come back home, and I don't know how to make it stop. :P I still had a good time, though; my dad's mom was over, and we had the usual: turkey (which I didn't have because I don't like turkey), stuffing, our carrot and turnip casserole, green beans, tortellini (my favorite kind of pasta 8D), mashed potatoes (didn't have that either), cranberry sauce, pickles, and rolls. It was actually a lot less than it sounds, and we finished with in a half-hour, lol XD With all that I had, in addition to a pretty big breakfast (turnovers FTW), and snacking on carrots and celery and cucumbers and ice cream and chocolate covered raisins and M&Ms before and after dinner, I'm completely stuffed now. Today wasn't eventful at all, but then again Thanksgiving was never really a "let's go crazy and party-wild!" holiday anyway. And I'm perfectly fine with that. ;-) (In fact, this holiday reminds me of the family of turkeys that used to live in our backyard -- one male, a couple of females, and somewhere between 10-20 children, all foraging together and generally being adorable. Alas, they don't come around much anymore. :(

(Ironically enough, this is my 200th entry. ^_^\o/ I'd want to celebrate my 1000th when it comes, but at the rate I'm going it'd take another five and a half years, and quite honestly I'm not sure if I'll be around LJ that long, lol XD But I'm not much in a celebrating mood, so....there ya go. :3 Maybe this meme from edge_chan will do: Reply to this entry with some random stuff that you find cool! Pics, links, videos, anything. Anything SFW is preferred but not required. Pretty please? <3)

Tomorrow morning we have to go to the Apple Store in Farmington to check out what's cause my computer's incessant buzzing/grinding noise -- it's been doing it all the time it's on, and quite frankly I'm starting to get worried (I hope it's not the hard drive; I don't suspect it is because the laptop is performing fine otherwise). Which, as I just realized, is Black Friday. @_@; Oh well, it shouldn't be too much of a problem if we get there early, which means I can't stay up late tonight. :/ So I'll be posting TWS sometime later tonight, when I can manage it.

That's pretty much it for right now. Now for some links I found interesting (haven't done this in a while, actually):

The '00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade From Hell

And so the decade retrospectives start coming out (we are, after all, a little over a month away from the end of the decade). I will say these were some weird times to come of age in, and that for the most part I agree with this assessment of the past ten years, especially considering the high we as a society were coming off of in the 90s and the celebrations ringing in the year 2000. Still, the article does a great job of pinpointing why things got as bad as they did, and if there's one thing I'm grateful of resulting from the past 10 years, it's our society's slow but growing awareness of the real problems facing us ("teabaggers" and their ilk aside), and the desire to see us tackle them in the near future. May the next decade be better than this one. (And just you wait -- it'll be 2012 or 2013 when VH1 starts showing "I Love the '00s," and '00s-themed parties will be the in-thing. XD)

Japanese cops cross-dress for bag snatch dragnet

.....You know, this would make an excellent anime or manga or J-drama, proving yet again that truth is stranger than fiction. (It explains a lot, actually......83)

Meet Brutus, the 800lb grizzly bear who likes to eat his meals at the dinner table

Yeah, it's cute, but......it won't end well. I've seen Grizzly Man, I've read Into the Wild, that's enough evidence to say to me this won't end well. :P

Doomed Dome: The Future That Never Was

I found this article just now. A very cool, if extremely implausible, plan in the 70s to dome an entire Vermont town. That it was conceived in Vermont explains quite a bit. ;-)

Libertarians: Making Sure That Self-Parody Is Handled By The Private Sector

I'm not going to say too much about this, except I had a hard time believing this opinion piece mentioned in the above link (about how Scrooge in A Christmas Carol was really a ~*~good guy~*~ all along, before he turned into a ~*~hippie pinko commie liberal~*~ at the end of the story) somehow wasn't satire. It isn't. And that's sad and hilarious at the same time. There is a reason why I call these people "lolbertarians" after all. XDDDDDDD

The Myth of the Million Dollar Challenge

Proving once again that so-called "skeptics" and supposed sticklers for logic and reason the scientific method are just as willing to buck the scientific method to confirm their own biases and preconceived notions, if not more so, than the people they constantly criticize. Not too surprising, really. (It's a long article, but the first and last sections should be sufficient.)

Deconstructing the Myths of "The First Thanksgiving"

I hate to be such a Donnie Downer about all this, but I can't mention Thanksgiving -- especially with my interest in Native American issues -- without mentioning this. I'd be lying if I said the plight of Native Americans and the whitewashed "history" of Thanksgiving taught in schools wasn't bothering me in the back of my mind all throughout today. And because I feel enough guilt over how this holiday (and Columbus Day, for that matter) is associated with atrocities and the like, when I finally live on my own I probably won't celebrate it at all -- it's the least I can do (and sadly the only thing I can do short of Donnie Downer-esque awareness-raising), especially since I highly doubt the holiday will be free of its fake "history" anytime soon. One of my cousins on Facebook said she wasn't celebrating this year, and instead only preparing turkey chili and beer; I might do the same, only without the chili and beer. :3 Still, I can't hate Thanksgiving 100%, because I don't spend enough time reflecting on what I'm thankful for, and I think it's important for us as a society to have that reminder once a year -- it's what holidays are for, after all.

OK, I'll end this with a meme from fegie in which you bold all the books you read in the list:

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