Into The Void, Boys

I'm Not Sick, But I'm Not Well

Below please find my Larry King™ style column, fashioned after the infamous blurb-o-fest the CNN celebrity nitwit used to publish in his column every week in USA Today.

This is actually a rather slapdash and poorly constructed creation meant to make up entirely for the last two weeks of non-productivity in this space, which can be attributed either to A.) a serious and deeply reflective reconsideration of faith and family and values during the Thanksgiving holiday just past, or B.) a whole lot of serious dicking off on my part. Take your pick.

One thing is for sure; it is time to back up the semi with the big order from Ellipsis 'R' Us loaded on it, because I'll need it now, for sure.

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You know the commonly-accepted urban myth that the meat of a turkey contains some natural sedative, a sort of generic Quaalude™ which renders one laggard and soporific all Thanksgiving afternoon, unable to do anything much except take one or two or fifteen naps and watch some pointless NFL football game with one eye open and one shut? Well, in scientific terms, Bullshit. Turkey meat is lighter than most, and is actually considered 'heart-healthy', remember? Now, let's think; what else does one eat only on Thanksgiving which might also possess sedative qualities? Here's a hint: A big pile of crumbled-up, starch-laden cornbread, moistened with fatty turkey juice and gravy, and often fortified with the ground-up organ meat from the otherwise nutritionally beneficial almost national symbol (instead of the bald eagle, had Ben Franklin had his way.) That's right. Why accuse turkey of inducing somnolence when we have the aptly named "stuffing" as an obvious suspect? I'm telling you, the dignified Meleagris gallopavo, a cousin of the pheasant after all, has been slandered all these years. . .

Want to know why emu is considered an even healthier alternative meat than turkey? I don't know, either; but it might have to do with the fact that when the market for emu meat totally collapsed 20 years ago, all the farmers in the area who had invested thousands in set up costs and breeding pairs, thinking they were about to strike it rich, suddenly couldn't give their emus away; and rather than continue paying for the birds' feed and upkeep, they just let them loose indiscriminately all over the wilds of East Texas. So now to eat an emu, if you can even find one, you have to chase it for miles first, through swamp and/or forest and across open range. Now that's heart healthy. . .

Speaking of oddly-configured feral fauna, did anyone notice in the bustle of the holidays that CNN dingbat Nancy Grace was recently sued by the family of Melissa Duckett for wrongful death? Grace is the wild-eyed, Georgia-drawling, former prosecutor turned pundit with the oddly-shaped, vaguely Picasso-esque head who appears nightly on CNN Headline News, her primary function apparently being to beat some insignificant-in-the-overall-scope-of-things true crime story to death; and the sleazier the better, too. The Duckett case is a good example: As best I can tell, an infant was kidnapped from his home in Florida while his 20-year-old mother partied in the next room. After suspecting everyone in the extended family and eventually most of south Florida, police scrutiny eventually fell on the mother herself. This was where Nancy Grace jumped in. She flogged the story every night for months, while meanwhile all hell was breaking loose in Iraq, the U.S. appeared to undergo a fundamental political change in the mid-term elections, and Tom and Katie gave birth to a daughter, goddammit. I'm telling you, if during that period an alien mothership or even Jesus Christ Himself suddenly appeared on the south lawn of the White House, Nancy Grace would have lead her show that evening with another obscure angle on the "Trenton Duckett Story". What she finally did do was get Melinda Duckett, Trenton's mother, on camera and then proceeded to do a pretty hardcore ambush interview, broadcast nationwide in early September. The next day, Ms. Duckett committed suicide by 12-gauge, and then her family filed suit against Ms. Grace, for causing the girl considerable stress which led directly to her subsequent suicide. I don't know the merits of it, but I think I'll find this lawsuit more compelling than the case that ultimately caused it, and hope that if nothing else it will cause Ms. Grace to squirm a little - in a moral sense, I mean. But I doubt it. . .

Over the holiday I saw the A & E special regarding the pilgrims who settled the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts and started the whole Thanksgiving thing in the first place, or at least inspired it. Two things I found most interesting were 1.) many of the myths one associates with that group's crossing of the Atlantic and subsequent settlement in New England are largely based in fact; and 2.) Squanto (Tisquantum), one of the native Americans who was friendly with and aided the Pilgrims early on had spent close to fifteen years in Europe prior to the Pilgrim's arrival in Massachusetts. I knew he had been kidnapped by an earlier expedition and could speak English, but I had not realized how extensive his travels abroad had been. It must have been startling, or it would have been to me at any rate, to land in this 'wild' place after such a long and treacherous voyage, now fearing among other things the 'savage' inhabitants thereof; only to have one of them march up to you one day in full regalia and begin discoursing in the King's English (with a 'Bah-sten' accent, perhaps?) My only beef (so to speak) with Squanto is he missed his opportunity to alter history; when instructing the Pilgrims in planting corn, he should have buried the turkey in the hole with the seed corn for fertilizer, and saved the fish for the feast. Just think, for all these years instead of a bland turkey with cornbread dressing and cranberry sauce for dinner, we could have been having a crabmeat-stuffed broiled flounder, with french fries and hush puppies, tartar sauce on the side. Dammit.