I’m hosting Thanksgiving this year. My first time hosting it, ever. I cooked my first turkey last Christmas and it was not pretty (don’t ask me how you can screw up a turkey. All I can say is that when it came time to carving it, it was something of a bloodbath). Anyway, I’m scouring the net looking for advice and I found this recipe guide (Into the Woods) on Yankee‘s web site. It’s cute and all but not all that practical. Here is part of the “game plan”:
Saturday or Sunday before Thanksgiving: Take a nice walk in the woods, looking up — and down — for handsome, unusual decorations that are Not Sold In Stores: striped-ivory fans of velvet-tooth mushroom growing stepped along a birch log; curls of wild grapevine; tawny fronds of cinnamon fern; fallen leaves in mottled shades of sandalwood and fawn. Think about how these things would look grouped with honey-colored beeswax candles, a few pale gourds, and the golden plumes of asparagus that are still waving over the sleeping garden.
I didn’t ski once last year and that’s a crying shame. I plan on making up for it this year, though. 
Fog
by Amy Clampitt
Sam Shepard’s new play, The God of Hell, opened off-broadway yesterday and it is getting raves. It sounds as though, Shepard, in typical fashion, has his eye on the real America and not the hype we are fed through the media (from usatoday.com):
The American heartland that Sam Shepard has evoked in his plays is very different from the one that politicians tend to extol in campaign speeches. And the moral values that inform Shepard’s latest effort are clearly of a very different nature than the ones that reportedly played a key role in the recent presidential election.
I’ve loved Sam Shepard ever since one of my drama profs told me that he and Patti Smith once holed up in an apartment and for an entire weekend wrote a play on gum wrappers. Oh, and I love him because he’s a fucking fearless genuis (okay, so he was in Baby Boom, but I liked that movie and his character in it and, hey, everyone’s got to make money somehow).
Hail Mary, full of cheese, the miracle whip is with thee. Blessed art thou among sandwiches, and blessed is the heat of thy grill. Holy Mary, Mother of Reuben, pray for us dieters now, and at the end of our lunch hour. Amen.
(Special, special thanks to my husband Allen who not only sent me the link but rewrote the prayer. He’s a keeper!)
Great short story, Sandman by Kevin Durden, reprinted from Ink Pot Issue #5
I can’t really add any commentary to this story because it speaks for itself and when it speaks it makes me desperately sad and fearful for the future. Anyway, read on–A City in Ruins, Sky Thick with Smoke: ‘Let’s Kick Ass … the American Way’ By Lindsey Hilsum:
‘I guess there are some good people – it’s jus’ that we don’ have nothin’ to do with them,’ mused a marine as he and his colleagues sorted their kit and cleaned their M16 assault rifles. ‘I see the little kids in the cars and I feel sorry for them, but when they turn 16 they’re evil.’
and:
Despite reports of ‘heavy fighting’, the overwhelming majority of the firing has been one way. Twenty four US soldiers have died and more than 200 injured. An unknown number of Iraqi soldiers have also died. But the resistance in Falluja was sporadic. Insurgent leaders probably fled several weeks before the onslaught. The marines will claim this as a major triumph in the war on terror but if the insurgency merely shifts elsewhere, they may find Falluja is an empty victory.
The Concrete River
by Luis J. Rodríguez
Here’s an interesting story found on t r u t h o u t:
Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader set in motion the hand-recounting of ballots in New Hampshire, wiring a mandatory, $2,000 deposit an hour before a state-imposed deadline Friday.
Admission, Children’s Unit
by Theodore Deppe
myfanwy collins 