Giving Thanks!

Wishing everyone a peaceful and relaxing Thanksgiving.

It is a good time to remind one's self the things they are grateful and thankful for.

Though, life can be trying at times, and in specific the last month or so have been rough, on my family and I. I am still thankful for the friends I have made this year, the friends I have had for many years, the friends I may make in the coming year, and in particular happy, that I am still friends with a peculiar individual even after all these years.

It's four years later, and you are on a Award Tour. The one person who I do not have to explain why each Thanksgiving is a small victory. Thanks for simply being there.

Thankful for getting to share in the weddings, of four the most beautiful people I have ever known (Ed & Kelly, Leigh & Louis).

Thankful for my family being relatively healthy, marginally sane, and somewhat accommodating of my weirdness.

Thankful that the world is a little bit more hopeful then I have ever seen it before.

Okay, getting a bit too touchy feely here. So I will kind of conclude here.

To my peeps far and wide, from St. Louis to France (Rock it X-tina), Chicago to Thailand (Get back to us safely M & K-Shave), Arizona to New York, Oregon to South Carolina and everything in between. You are in my thoughts* and my family's prayers. Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving.

Off to make the most evil potato casserole I can manage, sour cream, cheese, butter, whole milk, and bacon. I may try to deep fry it.

I will now turn it over to that melodious bard Bill Withers and wish you all:



* (Yes you all are even clothed except Tony, Ed and Boom-Boom! You know why!)

-Cheers

Just in time for x-mas!

Lots of people know I am huge John Legend fan.....so I have to post this....

John Legends Nutmeg:



"the only residue [he] wants you wiping off your face."

AWESOME.

Watch yo mouth....

Mike set the date, I will bring the popcorn....

I suspect another empty theater....filled to overflowing with Awesomeness!

Behold! Black Dynamite!

So maybe there is one out there .....

....Where I have superpowers! So discovery has an article up today on the idea that the universe is not a singular thing.

The Multi-verse in comic book speak.

I could go on and on about the topic, from Earth-1 and Earth-2 and it's various denizens, to Crisis on Infinite Earths, to the pictured Planetary. If you haven't had the pleasure of checking them out I would highly recommend it.

Planetary in particular can at times be a good yarn. Weaving in standard superhero tropes as well as combining that with sci-fi, hard boiled detective tales, western themes, super-spy drama, and horror tales of the weird. But the main reason I decided to invoke Planetary, is that it primarily deals with a group of "mystery archaeologist", who are attempting to map the unknown history of the earth. That goes through many twists and turns, but they tackle various alternate realities and the effects it may or may not have had on their own reality. So multi-verse spanning adventures are actually part and parcel with the ongoing story.

Good stuff.

Anyway, I would give this article from Discover Magazine a good read. It is at the very least imagination expanding.

-cheers

New dining frontiers....

That would actually be Nude Dining Frontiers.....

Some stories are just so eye catching you have to comment on them!

My favorite quote:

There are two types of people: those who look better dressed (Gwyneth Paltrow), and those who look better naked (Pamela Anderson), and one of the former was sitting directly across from me, a thin bank teller who was quite foxy clothed. But naked, she was thin and somehow unappetizing, and for reasons I can’t articulate, looking at her breasts six inches from the bread, I lost my appetite. I felt guilty about this.

Make sure to tip the waiter.

I know I am a prude. I would sooner give an ad hoc lecture on the nature of existential French expressionist water color at the Louvre, then be nude in front of a group of people. The thought of chowing down on some KFC with 12 other naked folks would make me absolutely apoplectic!

Besides I would just keep making jokes about passing the buns....or buttering the buns.....


-cheers

Programing note.....

Posting will probably be a bit sparse. A funeral to attend, and then hopefully I will wash that away with hours and hours of Wrath of the Lich King.

So you all will have to read your own news for a week or so!


-Cheers

Who knew....

Awesome!

Thoughts....

Where to start?

First my apologies for the light posting of the last week or so. Too much campaigning, too much drinking, too much reveling, and too little sleep are to blame.

Secondly, wow. In the oft repeated line of the week, what a historic event. I have been struggling to put words to what I have witnessed this past week, and I find that I simply have none.

How do you express to your friends, the enormity of an event that has completely altered your perception of the world you inhabit? The only corollaries I can muster would be, it is the moment after Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the lunar surface, it is the instant after the first atomic bomb detonated, the wobbly seconds at Kitty Hawk when the impossible became possible. When improbabilities converged and were given he force of actuality. It simply is Before and After.

Our collective history has now be segmented between events that happened before Tuesday, November 4th 2008 and events that took place after.

Before Tuesday night, I honestly could not imagine an African-American ascending to the White House. This is coming from someone who did his level best to get that person elected. That is how deep the skepticism was. I exhorted people to vote and to register, not because I believed he could win (though I hoped that he would), but because I knew that each new person who felt a part of the system would move us closer to the day when some one like him could win. Or more to the point, someone who is not like him could win. A place where it is not so important that the person running for office is a woman, or Hispanic, or homosexual, they are merely a candidate.

So I am sure you could guess at my surprise when the states started falling in President-Elect Obama's (I smile just saying it, I am sure that will change, I am sure I will become hyper-criticalof him in time, but for now, it just feels good) favor. It was 9:30, and the weight of what was happening was beginning to sink in. The sheer size of the moment put a lump the size of a baseball in my throat. I was having trouble breathing, trying to take all of the moment in at once. Fighting back tears, I didn't know I had. I was never hosed in Birmingham, I did not march for equal representation, nor did I have to suffer under the blatant shadow of Jim Crow. I had not suffered in the ways that so many others had.

Yet there I was struggling to keep it together (though several trips to the bathroom and copious application of Natural Light did help!). All I could muster during those initial moments was the matter of fact statement, a koan if you will, "The world I went to sleep in, was not the world I have woken up in.".

That's it. One of the most historic events in our nations history and all I had was a fortune cookie response. Further away from the moment I am bit disappointed in my performance. It was like being struck dumb and blind. The waves of emotion were intense, immense pride in the Senator from the great state of Illinois, a sense of acceptance that I hadn't even known that I craved, when the American, in African-American, was finally the most important part. How do you put that into words, when you did not know it was even something you craved?

While the election did not change the problems I faced, bills still due, a cratering economy. Nor has it erased the injustices of old, racism is still well and truly alive, bigotry still is quite vibrant. I could look at my nieces and nephews and honestly tell them, that they could be anything their hearts desire. I could look look my parents in the eye and say, "All that you suffered, all that you have sacrificed and endured, was not for naught. Your sacrifices made this moment possible. You belong. This is your country too. You are home. You did overcome.". And to my own children, someday, I can say to them, "Though the world can be cruel, never forget this moment, when a people where finally embraced by their fellow citizens. Where the first shot fired at Fort Sumter was finally joined by a deafening chorus of 'Yes we can!'. Where we as a people took another step closer to the 'perfect union'. You can be anything you wish. The world is strange, and lets keep it that way.".

Though we still have all the problems we had on Monday, by Wednesday something was fundamentally different. I saw hope on people's faces, I heard it in their voices. It was not a magic wand, but people now seemed ready to join the fight. Our country, our world, our lives need fixing and we need to get to work.

So in closing, I am reminded of something once said by another famous Illinoisian:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations." Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865.

At least on this morning, those wounds look better bound, then they have ever looked before.

Anyway, that is all I got for now. I am sure I will edit and re-edit this thing multiple times.

Peace out,

Glenn

It's kind of like the inverse...

....of Christmas right now....there is excitement mixed with several layers of dread. Our collective futures are at hand tomorrow. I don't really have much to say at this point.

This has been an exhausting campaign, on so many levels. The arguments, the late night diatribes, the pedantic rants and polemic screeds....ahh...the memories.

Tomorrow, each of us has a choice to make. I will not presume to tell you who to vote for, instead, all I ask is that you think about where this country has been and where you wish to see it go, then cast your vote for that future.

Do so with a clear conscience, with out shame. Because then you have done all that can be asked of any citizen.

You have exercised our/ your right, and have made your voice heard.

A reminder of how some of us got to this point.