Thanksgiving shopping

One of the aggravations of November is shopping before Thanksgiving. Especially if you are not planning to serve an extended family on Turkey Day, the unexpected crowds in the supermarket can be a bit daunting. 

Walking through the store I spotted an older lady looking at pies. I wanted to shout to her, "Your children don't want a pie from ShopRite, they want a homemade pie!"  Seeing the freezers filled with turkeys I thought "Thank goodness I don't have to buy one of those things." 

The cashiers were all encumbered with long lines of shoppers with full carts. I decided to take my chances on the self-check-out line. I inserted my bag in the slots and filled it up with groceries and toothpaste. The secret is you have to make sure the scale underneath the bag registers all of your stuff or they will think you are stealing something. I literally had to juggle items on the top of the bag to make sure they all registered. I thought I was finished.

Then I was faced with a moral dilemma. I had neglected to pay for a bag of cooked salmon. It was hidden underneath the slot on the cart. I purchased the item, even though I could have gotten away with quietly putting it in my shopping bag. I figured I just shaved off time on my future stay in Purgatory. 

Later that night I was reading Slate and there was an article on Thanksgiving shopping. It talked about stores and their Thanksgiving give aways. That reminded me to check my receipt from the store. I looked at it and saw that jumping jippiders I won a turkey! The salmon had put me over the top!

Since I had a Thanksgiving invitation, I called my hostess and she told me she didn't need another turkey but could use a ham. Hence the ham I am about to bake. According to the Internet, it will require 3 and half hours and cloves. I'm sorry but I'm not going back to the store to buy cloves.    

King may fire ladies in waiting

Looking through the news I see many horrific stories but the one that has upset me the most is the news that King Charles III, in a cost cutting measure, is thinking of making the ladies in waiting redundant. I have always looked at the job of being a lady in waiting as the one job I would most like to have, if only I was a posh English woman. How much fun it must be to kibbitz with the queen, advise on table settings, walk the horses at Balmoral and do other tasks. So much more fascinating than laboring along in a civil service job. Tempora mutantur. 

Why he won't be indicted

 

There has been a lot of speculation on what would happen if you-know-who is indicted. I suspect that is one of the reasons our Attorney General has appointed a special prosecutor to handle the case. There is a desire, a sensible desire, to keep our airports running, our interstates functioning, our state houses open and landmarks like Rockefeller Center making money off of tourists. A special prosecutor can delay things until he is somebody else's headache. 

You-know who is indicted. Thousands of white men in 18 wheelers converge and close the Capitol. Our interstates are closed as trucks block the entranceways and converge around the perimeters of our major airports. Armed male senior citizens men shoot down tourists at random in Times Square and Christmas markets nationwide. 

Its easier to let one guy get away with something than to cause chaos. To get along, you go along. 

Editor's note: William S. Burroughs describes this sort of thing in Naked Lunch. 

I voted!

One of the weird things I like to do that most people don't do is vote in stockholder elections. Today I was given the opportunity to vote my shares in the upcoming Microsoft election. I feel so powerful, influencing the makeup of a major worldwide corporation, even if I have an infinitesimal amount of shares. I like the sticking it to the man feeling of voting against the management recommendations. I voted to take the climate and staff diversity into consideration by the board, even though they were against it. The sixties still live on.