Happy Thanksgiving!
Hello, various other estadounidenses! As many of you even outside the US may know, today is Thanksgiving, an American holiday where we, the descendants of European settlers, celebrate the fact that the natives were generally better human beings than we were back in the 17th century, and refused to let the colonists starve no matter how stupidly unprepared for winter they all were. I know there are still many political and cultural problems with the traditional iconography, but I would like to think that all of us, regardless of where we come from and what has happened in the past, can appreciate a day dedicated to making three times as much food as anyone could possibly eat, and then lying around digesting for the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours. I have yet to see a society in which feast days do not occur, so I feel safe in saying that pretty much everyone on the planet as at least this tiny bit of common ground.
I do not attend family functions because of Reasons, and I haven't done since the tail end of college, so in years past I have made it a point to put on what I call "Thanksgiving of the Dispossessed". It was almost always on Saturday or Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, and I invited everyone who couldn't go home, wouldn't go home, didn't want to go home, or had to drag themselves back into town for an early work shift afterwards. Moggie, who is almost always complicit in the weird things I do, would help me stake out a dorm kitchen, and we would take advantage of the fact that virtually everyone including the dorm staff had fucked off for the weekend to cook things and watch random videos on her laptop with the sound up high.
Most of the things we cooked involved booze. There was the year we made bourbon balls with Chambourd, because it was on sale and we liked the shiny "pope ball" it came in. (Mog: "Tastes like jam, only burny!" There was still a bit left in the bottle by the time I threw a Christmas party, which resulted in Moggie sitting drunkenly on my floor, diligently reading the little recipe booklet that had been attached to the neck of the thing, on the grounds that "it contains information, I must absorb it!") There was the year we discovered that you can substitute Baileys for up to half of the milk in the lazy college-student fudge recipe, because if you used it for all of the milk content, your fudge would boil and explode all over the microwave. And there was the year we made a giant tiramisú in honor of a transplanted Italian kid, which contained ungodly amounts of both very strong coffee and marsala, while drinking mimosas for breakfast. The fate of the wine that didn't go into the dessert is fairly obvious, especially when I mention that by the time we got around to the mimosas, I sent Mog and one of our other friends out into the breezeway in front of the apartment to pop the cork on the champagne, and it took them half an hour to manage that and come back inside.
I think we may also have put some Amaretto in one of Mog's chocolate cherry cakes once (it's a great recipe for lazy people, you mix it in right in the cake pan), but if we did it was probably an accident -- Amaretto doesn't survive long around Moggie, especially if she also has ginger ale and gin.
We watched all kinds of random things while we threw shit into a pan and attempted to make it food. One year, Thanksgiving happened to be on Doctor Who Day -- the anniversary of the first airing, in November 1963 -- so I managed to pin Mog down and show her the very first episode, "An Unearthly Child":
Doctor Who s01e01p1 An Unearthly Child by BloodmageVII
Another one was the David Tennant/Peter O'Toole version of Casanova, which I can't find streaming for you guys, but which is at least out on R1 DVD now -- we were watching on a laptop with a kludged region-free DVD±RW drive, as Mog had ordered the R2 discs straight from the Beeb. I liked it better than the Ledger version, myself.
One year I think it was A Hard Day's Night, which Moggie had not seen. (You may notice a theme here. Moggie has not seen anything. She was in college before she ever saw an episode of Gilligan's Island. She was out of college before we realized she had not seen Back To The Future and fixed that tout de suite. I've seen her parents' house and can verify that she was not raised by wolves, so how she managed this is a total mystery.) It so happened that our university library had the special remastered edition discs in its collection -- no idea why, but I have the sneaking suspicion that it was the doing of the same person who unashamedly requisitioned the Ed Wood box set. There was much discussion of the utility of sidekicks in everyday life and whether there was actually such a thing as the Ringleader Gene, and Moggie called me "John" for about the next month.
This year, being pretty well by myself, I am resorting to TECHNOLOGY. I've gone out and bought myself booze and cheesecake and an assortment of other fun things, including some tiny bananas so the Box O' Rats doesn't feel left out of the festivities. I intend to spend Saturday night online with Moggie, and we are both going to be completely off our faces on whatever we have at our respective ends of the country, because we've decided we need to watch this:
I've seen Fielding try to describe this to people like Wossy verbally, and it does not work. The most coherent part of it is "I tried to make it like a real acid trip", and as he's normally shockingly good at giving art-school explanations of stuff that would really only make sense to an eight-year-old, I am thinking Luxury Comedy is not a thing I should be watching sober. (I've thought this about several things. I'm usually right. I've seen Yellow Submarine more than once, and I don't think I could recount the plot to you -- but it's loads of fun every time.) If nothing else, I'm dying to see how the hell Richard Ayoade manages to maintain that heroic deadpan through complete and utter finger-painted insanity.
I don't promise to be coherent -- in fact, I pretty much promise not to be -- but I'm going to try to be on G+ Chat (miss.arabella.flynn at gmail dot com) for the evening. I'm in Boston, which I think is GMT-5 right now, and I expect festivities to commence at about 7pm my time, Saturday 24 November. Anyone who wishes to join the Thanksgiving of the Dispossessed is see what I type live while shitfaced is welcome to ping me and find out. Anyone who wants me to camwhore can fuck right off, but feel free to word at me.
I do not attend family functions because of Reasons, and I haven't done since the tail end of college, so in years past I have made it a point to put on what I call "Thanksgiving of the Dispossessed". It was almost always on Saturday or Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, and I invited everyone who couldn't go home, wouldn't go home, didn't want to go home, or had to drag themselves back into town for an early work shift afterwards. Moggie, who is almost always complicit in the weird things I do, would help me stake out a dorm kitchen, and we would take advantage of the fact that virtually everyone including the dorm staff had fucked off for the weekend to cook things and watch random videos on her laptop with the sound up high.
Most of the things we cooked involved booze. There was the year we made bourbon balls with Chambourd, because it was on sale and we liked the shiny "pope ball" it came in. (Mog: "Tastes like jam, only burny!" There was still a bit left in the bottle by the time I threw a Christmas party, which resulted in Moggie sitting drunkenly on my floor, diligently reading the little recipe booklet that had been attached to the neck of the thing, on the grounds that "it contains information, I must absorb it!") There was the year we discovered that you can substitute Baileys for up to half of the milk in the lazy college-student fudge recipe, because if you used it for all of the milk content, your fudge would boil and explode all over the microwave. And there was the year we made a giant tiramisú in honor of a transplanted Italian kid, which contained ungodly amounts of both very strong coffee and marsala, while drinking mimosas for breakfast. The fate of the wine that didn't go into the dessert is fairly obvious, especially when I mention that by the time we got around to the mimosas, I sent Mog and one of our other friends out into the breezeway in front of the apartment to pop the cork on the champagne, and it took them half an hour to manage that and come back inside.
I think we may also have put some Amaretto in one of Mog's chocolate cherry cakes once (it's a great recipe for lazy people, you mix it in right in the cake pan), but if we did it was probably an accident -- Amaretto doesn't survive long around Moggie, especially if she also has ginger ale and gin.
We watched all kinds of random things while we threw shit into a pan and attempted to make it food. One year, Thanksgiving happened to be on Doctor Who Day -- the anniversary of the first airing, in November 1963 -- so I managed to pin Mog down and show her the very first episode, "An Unearthly Child":
Doctor Who s01e01p1 An Unearthly Child by BloodmageVII
Another one was the David Tennant/Peter O'Toole version of Casanova, which I can't find streaming for you guys, but which is at least out on R1 DVD now -- we were watching on a laptop with a kludged region-free DVD±RW drive, as Mog had ordered the R2 discs straight from the Beeb. I liked it better than the Ledger version, myself.
One year I think it was A Hard Day's Night, which Moggie had not seen. (You may notice a theme here. Moggie has not seen anything. She was in college before she ever saw an episode of Gilligan's Island. She was out of college before we realized she had not seen Back To The Future and fixed that tout de suite. I've seen her parents' house and can verify that she was not raised by wolves, so how she managed this is a total mystery.) It so happened that our university library had the special remastered edition discs in its collection -- no idea why, but I have the sneaking suspicion that it was the doing of the same person who unashamedly requisitioned the Ed Wood box set. There was much discussion of the utility of sidekicks in everyday life and whether there was actually such a thing as the Ringleader Gene, and Moggie called me "John" for about the next month.
This year, being pretty well by myself, I am resorting to TECHNOLOGY. I've gone out and bought myself booze and cheesecake and an assortment of other fun things, including some tiny bananas so the Box O' Rats doesn't feel left out of the festivities. I intend to spend Saturday night online with Moggie, and we are both going to be completely off our faces on whatever we have at our respective ends of the country, because we've decided we need to watch this:
I've seen Fielding try to describe this to people like Wossy verbally, and it does not work. The most coherent part of it is "I tried to make it like a real acid trip", and as he's normally shockingly good at giving art-school explanations of stuff that would really only make sense to an eight-year-old, I am thinking Luxury Comedy is not a thing I should be watching sober. (I've thought this about several things. I'm usually right. I've seen Yellow Submarine more than once, and I don't think I could recount the plot to you -- but it's loads of fun every time.) If nothing else, I'm dying to see how the hell Richard Ayoade manages to maintain that heroic deadpan through complete and utter finger-painted insanity.
I don't promise to be coherent -- in fact, I pretty much promise not to be -- but I'm going to try to be on G+ Chat (miss.arabella.flynn at gmail dot com) for the evening. I'm in Boston, which I think is GMT-5 right now, and I expect festivities to commence at about 7pm my time, Saturday 24 November. Anyone who wishes to join the Thanksgiving of the Dispossessed is see what I type live while shitfaced is welcome to ping me and find out. Anyone who wants me to camwhore can fuck right off, but feel free to word at me.
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