Tag Archives | Thanksgiving

Ask General Kang: Do you celebrate Thanksgiving on your home world?

Ask General KangNo, we have several holidays that are somewhat similar, but essentially we break your celebration into two components. And then we have one “thanksgiving” day which is totally alien to your world.

In the late months of the harvest time on Planet Neecknaw, we have a holiday that is probably closest to your Thanksgiving (which is really just a North American holiday, not a global phenomenon.)

Cram It!

This harvest festival is called Cram It! The name really explains it all. The focus is on the cramming or stuffing of things: delicate fruits and nuts into the hollowed-out abdominal cavities of tasty and unsuspecting foul; this and other foods crammed into the gullets of a glutinous simian horde; and for those monkeys who haven’t overdone the gastronomical cramming, there is a special “evening” cramming that happens when the little macaques are in bed, if you get my drift.

Famanguish

We then let the hangover from our Saturnalia-like Cram It! become a distant memory, before we celebrate Famanguish Day, which is when we force ourselves to spend the day with our extended family (whom we usually never see) and ask them to revive all of our crippling emotional traumas. Sometimes families are creative and come up with new traumas especially for that day. Sometimes many. Nobody looks forward to Famanguish, but everyone participates because, “you only have one family.”

Kangsgiving

Then when I was Overlord, I instituted Kangsgiving Day, which followed the day after Famanguish. Kangsgiving is a day of rest, in which you are supposed to sit at home and quietly thank me for not forcing you to go to work after the horrors of Famanguish. Also, you can drink as much coconut or banana liqueur as you’d like, as long as you agree to do a tour of duty in my crack Gorilloid Toilet Cleaning Service. This is a non-combat unit whose sole duty is to clean up after the Gorilloid Army. They can be messy — oh, let’s not mince words, the Gorilloid Army makes the Savage Pooflinging Brigade look fastidious — but hey, all the banana liqueur you want … and I send it to your house.

Next time: Last year you mentioned something about dark matter being a figment of my imagination. How do you explain the rotational speed of our galaxy then?

Other turkeys are being served at alltop. Originally published 2007.

I’m Thankful for Kurt Vonnegut

kurt-vonnegut-0910-01I have to say, it does occasionally strike me as deeply wrong that Kurt Vonnegut is no longer in this world, even if he still has a palpable presence. Vonnegut is one of the reasons why I became a writer, and some of his novels had an early and lasting influence on the way that I see the world. Thankfully, a new collection of unpublished shorts is now available, and Vanity Fair is previewing one of them on their website.

Here is an excerpt from a short story by Vonnegut, about a storm-window salesman, and a couple having problems dealing with their sudden infamy:

“Elsie—listen to me,” he said. “This man is one of the few living creatures who knows nothing about you, me, or the book. He is one of the few people who can still look upon us as ordinary human beings rather than objects of hate, ridicule, envy, obscene speculation—”

Elsie Strang Morgan thought that over. The more she thought about it, the harder it hit her. She changed from a wild woman to a gentle, quiet housewife, with eyes as innocent as any cow’s.

“How do you do?” she said.

“Fine, thank you, ma’am,” I said.

“You must think we’re kind of crazy here,” she said.

“Oh, no ma’am,” I said. The lie made me fidget some, and I picked up the sugar bowl in the middle of the table, and there underneath it was a check for one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. I am not fooling. That is where they had the check she’d gotten for the movie rights to her book, under a cracked five-and-ten-cent-store sugar bowl.

I knocked my coffee over, spilled it on the check.

And do you know how many people tried to save that check?

One.

Me.

Happy Thanksgiving All!

Alltop and humor-blogs.com also have problems adjusting to their infamy.

Carnival of Satire (#88)

The Carnival of Satire (#88)Welcome to the gobbler version of the Carnival of Satire. We didn’t receive many submissions this week, so we have stuffed this issue with a mix of the few submitted bits of satire, parody from the nuts on our blogroll and a few tasty nuggets of irony from bloggers at humor blogs.

We begin with this savory piece by the Electric Writer about the dangers of writing while drinking copious amounts of coffee. By the way, beer can also cause one to be toilet enraged.

If you haven’t graced your palette with some of the exotic fare at Ration Reality, then you are in for a treat, especially if you also think that Shirley Temple is Creepy.

Over at Point Five, they were shocked — shocked — to discover a dude enjoying a chick flick, but this is just a sign of the crisis of gynemovia sweeping North America.

And if you needed further proof of this crisis, look no farther than Hurty Elbow, who blows the lid off Phireblanks, the male contraceptive.

Mental Mosaic is convinced that James Watson has had a big scoop of jungle fever.

The Prezel has breaking news about the Hollywood Writers’ strike that you should not miss on this day of thanks.

This demonstration of a Venn Diagram, by Mr. Sun, while not holiday-related, is quite helpful.

And while on the topic of diagrams, you may find the wedgie-vs-fashion Venn at the brilliant blog, Indexed, a pinch.

What are those kids up to? Have they found makeup?

Blog D’Ellison has a satirical tour of art history with this 100-word take on Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory”.

And finally, we hope you have a much less harrowing feast than these folks: Dinner Guests Survive Unsolicited Tour of House.

And that’s it for the gobbler edition! If you have some satire to share, please consider submitting to the next edition. Thanks to these fine folks for helping us with webby-stuff: the Blog Carnival for their form; and the listings at the Ubercarnival, and at the Blog Carnival too.

Happy Famanguish

Happy thanksgivingGeneral Kang is not the warmest individual, but he got positively misty when I asked him about his strange Neeknabian holidays, Cram It!, Famanguish and Kangsgiving

This story is not about Thanksgiving, but it does feature a turkey, and our newest writer, Dr. Tundra: A Traditional ‘Christmas’ at the Tundra Household. (He’s going to kill me.)

And if all this wasn’t enough, you will find the Yanksgiving Edition of the Lost PowerPoint Slides here, including:

Items NOT supplied at the first Thanksgiving