Thanksgiving Thoughts

Hope y’all have a warm and lovely Thanksgiving.  It’s just me and my wife this year, kind of sad and boring.  Kids are all living miles away.   

We visited two of our three sons in Los Angeles this week, and drove home to Northern California on Tuesday.  We were amazed at the massive amounts of trucks on the freeway, numerous caravans, or so it seemed.  This may reflect a reopening of the supply chain and a rush to catch up commercial shipments.  If so, we may be able to do Christmas shopping after all.

The hateful left is very angry that three of their felon foot soldiers were shot by Kyle Rittenhouse (clearly in self defense) and he was not boiled in oil for it.  The wart hogs on the View were especially rabid and irrational.  

I tested my commenting system, which is a Disqus system, and found it absurdly difficult to use. Few want to jump through many hoops to comment, and I don’t blame them. I will either fix it or replace it soon.

Happy Thanksgiving Fellow Turkeys

I have my scammer-damaged computer almost back to full operational strength.  All major programs have been reinstalled, following a clean reinstall of Windows 10.  Most of my critical files were backed up, if not all of them.  The only files I lost were music and video files, all of which can be retrieved from the Internet, though it will take some work.  I will just pass on retrieving those, or retrieve them on an as-needed basis.

Which reminds me, my music fake books were backed up on a different external hard drive.  I'd better retrieve them right away.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Turkey, Turkey, Turkey; a Seasoned Citizen Looks Back

Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday that warms my oldest and fondest memories of home, family and food.  I have a lot to remember:  I'm a senior citizen.  I was a college sophomore when JFK was assassinated fifty years ago.  I saw the Beatles, Janis Joplin and the Jefferson Airplane perform live (to clarify, not together).  The Beatles in '64 and '65, and Janis Joplin in 1966, with Big Brother and the Holding Company.  I saw Jefferson Airplane the same night that I saw Janis.

My first recollection of a presidential election is when Eisenhower was running for president.  I was a cub scout, and we were given silvery (plastic) medals to "get out the vote, 1952."  I decided I liked Ike, was a Republican in a Democrat household, and never looked back.  I was shocked to learn my father was a Democrat, and he was equally shocked to learn I was a Republican.

I supported Nixon against JFK in the election of 1960, but later became smitten with JFK, as he was a strong anti-communist, as was I, and for a while, I fancied myself a liberal Democrat.  However, I never voted that way, as I was too young to vote.  My first presidential vote was for George Wallace in the 1968 election, as I believed he would have the gonads to win the war in Viet Nam.  I regretted my vote on election night, when Nixon was neck and neck with Hubert Humphrey, but finally pulled ahead to win by a slim margin.  I thought Humphrey would be another liberal disaster.

Yes, through the decades, I always loved Thanksgiving:  turkey and dressing; no school; getting into mischief with my cousins; football on television; and naps.  If only all my departed relatives could be resurrected to join me once more around the table:  grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, and even a cousin or two, all of whom are now in the next world.

Fall Scene #Photoshop

Another Fall scene.

Fall Pumpkin #Photoshop

This was an experiment from a tutorial on the web.  Use as you see fit.

Asinine Professor Robert Jensen Calls Thanksgiving a "White Supremacist Holiday" (Yawn)

Robert Jensen, another politically insane professor of "higher learning" has revealed that Thanksgiving is actually a White Supremacist holiday and that the original crowd at the First Thanksgiving had views "virtually identical to that of Nazis."

Jensen pollutes the air at the University of Texas at Austin, where he pretends to be a scholar while marinating young minds in Marxist propaganda and other forms of sheer nonsense.

There was a time when such asinine pronouncements like this really irked me.  Now I can barely stifle a yawn.  According to far-left whack-jobs like Professor Jensen, every rock and tree is racist, every blade of grass and wildflower pregnant with fascism, and the whole world is tap-dancing in white Klan robes to a racist remake of a Busbe Berkeley extravaganza on steroids.  This new spectacle would make "Springtime for Hitler" look puny by comparison.

Robert Jensen is a bad joke, a caricature of a completely out-of-touch moonbat.  It will be wonderful if some day such non-serious, unprofessional and undeserving "academics" are given their walking papers and actual scholars once again hired to teach in our colleges and universities.

Thanksgiving 2012

Happy Thanksgiving

Even in these troubled economic times, my wife and I have much to be thankful for:  we live in a nice home in a nice neighborhood, our bills are current, the fridge if filled with good food.  There are many Americans who are much worse off than we are.  Our three sons are all employed or otherwise provided for, and none of them are suffering any kind of privation.  Everyone is in good health.

Thanksgiving is a special day for me and for millions of others.  I remember many Thanksgivings with family, going back sixty years or more, to childhood Thanksgivings in Joplin, Missouri or Stockton, California, surrounded by parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and siblings, with a big turkey on the table with all the trimmings.  The days were growing increasingly cold and short in a world multicolored by dying leaves and filled with the familiar smells of autumn:  the sweet fragrance of dying grasses, pungent wood smoke from chimneys, the musty smell of dead leaves raked into piles.

In school as children, we always marked the day with pilgrims and Indians and turkeys, cut out of construction paper and pasted together, or drawn with color crayons, the images pinned to classroom walls.  As wee lads and lasses in the second grade, I remember singing "Over the River and Through the Woods," a song that made the day seem even more magical:

Over the River and Through the Woods:

Over the river, and through the woods,
To Grandmother's house we go;
the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow.

Over the river, and through the woods—
Oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes and bites the nose
as over the ground we go.

Over the river, and through the woods—
and straight through the barnyard gate,
We seem to go extremely slow,
it is so hard to wait!

Over the river, and through the woods—
now Grandmother's cap I spy!
Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done?
Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!

******
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, and may it be as memorable and as special to you as it has long been to me.

The First Thanksgiving in the Romney White House (Photoshop)

I'm in a Photoshop kind of mood tonight.  Bear with me.

Happy Thanksgiving

Getting Ready for Thanksgiving: Home Made Tamales

Tamales

Wifey is making tamales from scratch.   Well, except for the masa, which she bought freshly ground from a bakery.  Masa is like corn meal, only much finer.  It is corn dough.  It's the coating around the meat in tamales.

I have loved tamales since I was a small child.  I was fascinated by the funny paper wrappings around them and wondered how they made it.  Years later I realized that the funny paper was really the sheaves from corn husks.

Wifey is making regular meat tamales, but also sweet tamales, with raisins and pineapple and brown sugar.  When she isn't looking I swipe a spoonful of the mixed sweet masa and eat it raw. Yum!

She's also making a third kind of tamale, cheese tamales, with Monterey Jack cheese and mild Jalapenos (big Mexican peppers).

We will take a load of these tamales to the family Thanksgiving dinner in San Jose tomorrow.  They should be a big hit!

The Real Meaning of Thanksgiving: the Triumph of Capitalism Over Communism

Always on Watch referred me to this excellent essay by the American Institute of Economic Research.  It's titled The Real Meaning of Thanksgiving:  the Triumph of Capitalism Over Communism. 

This essay recounts the collectivist experiment of the first American colonists and how it failed, leading to starvation and death among the English Puritans who came to Plymouth Rock in 1620.  After a couple of winters of want and privation, the colonists changed the system to one of self-interest:  each family was allowed to grow and keep its own crops.  The result was prosperity and plenty.  The reason is simple:  people will work very hard for the benefit of themselves and their families, but not for a collective in which the lazy and unproductive are given equal rewards with the industrious:

The Plymouth Colony experienced a great bounty of food. Private ownership meant that there was now a close link between work and reward. Industry became the order of the day as the men and women in each family went to the fields on their separate private farms. When the harvest time came, not only did many families produce enough for their own needs, but they had surpluses that they could freely exchange with their neighbors for mutual benefit and improvement.

These simple truths are well established, and are the reason why the "Occupy" movement will fail:  it is a movement of the lazy, spoiled and selfish, insisting that the world owes them a living and that it is the duty of their fellow citizens to provide it.

Read the entire essay here.

Thanksgiving With Stogie: The Turkey's Ready and the Table is Set! (Photoshop)

I just created a Thanksgiving motif for a blogger friend and will do the same for others for a small donation.  Here's the one I created for myself, a little early, but what the heck.  The Turkey's ready!  Let's give thanks and partake.  All images were taken off the web and combined to make the graphic below, including the Victorian wainscoting and wall paper and the red mahogany table.  I created the nifty old-fashioned needle point with a free font I got off the web.  Am I cool or what?

President George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation

George Washington’s 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me “to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness :”

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted’ for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have show kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand, at the city of New York, the 3d day of October, A.D. 1789.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving dates back to the very beginnings of this country when sustenance had to be forced from the soil by hand or hunted. For the early Americans, Thanksgiving was a celebration of survival in a harsh new world.

The spirit of those early days lives on. It is well illustrated by Michelle Malkin's Thanksgiving post, "Stop Before You Gripe." Do read it.