Actually, it turns out it’s not the turkey meat responsible for tryptophan and subsequent postprandial napping, it’s the carbohydrates. Still, we’re going to take the weekend off.

Happy Thanksgiving, fellow USians. As is customary on this day, I will pause and consider what I’m thankful for.

I know: I’m thankful I don’t have any of the turkey fryers that the Underwriters Laboratories got to burst into flames.

Have a safe and non-fire-filled Thanksgiving, everyone.

I was surfing randomly through Wikipedia, which is something I do because shut up, I just do, and discovered that it has a list of harvest festivals, the US Thanksgiving included. I’m extremely pleased that in the UK it’s just called a Harvest Festival. No Solung or Chuseok for them.

I wonder what a rebranding of Harvest Festival would be. “Harvest Festival Sponsored by Weetabix Ltd”?

Since we have family in the Florida panhandle, we’ve spent Thanksgiving week at the beach for years now. Eli’s been coming since before he was born, and in the past he’s not thought much of the beach. When he was a year old, he didn’t like how the sand felt under his feet. When he was two years old, he would dig in the sand, but he preferred more interesting hobbies like playing indoors and pestering his grandparents. Last year the water scared him, and that was before I told him about sharks and jellyfish and the Undertoad that was waiting to drag him to a watery grave — you know, the kind of thing all responsible parents tell their kids. I figured this year would be the same.

It’s been around 65 degrees F (18 degrees C), but the Gulf of Mexico waters have been around 50 degrees F (OH GOD THE COLD IT BURNS degrees C). That doesn’t deter Eli. He dashes in, splashes around, and runs back out before doing it all again. Worse, he demands that we all come in with him. We can tell when he’s been in there too long because his chattering blue lips are covered in snot. See? The beach is healthy!

I’m excited that Eli has learned to love the beach. I’ve been coming down here for over 25 years, and the smell of salt water, the sound of the surf, the feel of the sand beneath my feet, all relax me. I had worried that Eli wouldn’t enjoy it at all.

I’m so glad I was wrong.

Pushing Daisies has been canceled. Meanwhile, the Knight Rider relaunch has managed to shed nearly half of its cast and keep on goin’.

If I ever teach a class that covers theodicy, I’m using this as an example.

For anyone else having to use a hex string to access their encrypted wifi network over an iPhone or iPod Touch: put a dollar sign in front of the string. Instead of, say 2DBA7C, enter $2DBA7C. It looks like Apple used to let you choose between a passphrase or a hex key in version 1 of the software, but has since removed that option.

Hey, guess what I got today?

It looked a lot smaller in all of the commercials. And less glowing.

At any rate, now the inevitable question: what apps should I put on this thing?

Almost despite itself, Alaska didn’t send convicted felon Ted Stevens back to Congress.

You may not be familiar with Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™. Much of what you need to know can be summed up by him trademarking the phrase “painter of light”. He paints bucolic scenes, often of cottages that glow as if on fire, using a soft pastel palette. He also is frightened of hard edges.

Kinkade’s work is especially popular in my evangelical subculture because of his unabashed Christian faith and his sentimentality. The paintings themselves doesn’t bother me. They’re inoffensive sofa art, a commercial commodity and delivery vehicle for bucolic blandness. Kinkade’s paintings fill the same niche for a lot of people that Norman Rockwell’s art did, even if he lacks Rockwell’s eye for capturing life around him or his social conscience. You might as well make fun of Wonder Bread. I’m far more bothered by how he runs his business. Kinkade and his company use Christianity as a selling point. Presenting the chance to run a Thomas Kinkade gallery as a spiritual and religious opportunity is odious.

That’s why I’m a little surprised to be defending him. Did you know there’s a Thomas Kinkade movie? Neither did I. That’s because Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage ended up with a straight-to-video release. Vanity Fair got their hands on a memo from Kinkade to the crew listing sixteen guidelines for creating “The Thomas Kinkade Look”. The guidelines include darkening corners of the film for a self-described “cozy” look, simplistic color changes to match scenes’ moods, and a shallow depth of field (mis-described as a short focal length) to blur the background.

They’re not very good suggestions, but it’s not surprising to see a painter with a specific style giving tips better suited to his paintings rather than film. If you’ve not worked in a given medium before, you’re more likely to use cliché elements. In college, our drama and communications department collaborated on a short film, with one person from each department helping direct and produce. At one point the theater guy asked, “Hey, in this scene, where Jane’s roommate is talking to her, can we have the roommate talk directly into the camera so it seems more real and urgent?” He knew a lot about blocking and staging but little about film and TV conventions.

So hammering on Kinkade for confusing depth of field with focal length and giving art direction that is reminiscent of 1960s porn may be fun, but it’s silly to do so when there’s so much insipidness you could be laughing at instead.

Toby Buckell, one of my favorite new SF authors, is in the hospital for heart problems. He could use your thoughts and prayers.