What a glorious Thanksgiving. A four-day weekend to eat, play, and relax. Best of all? No long drives from one far off destination to another. For the first Thanksgiving in a few years, we opted to spend it at home. My wife and sister-in-law would host a Thanksgiving lunch at their parents’ house, which is a fabulous 15 min drive from our house. 15 mins and I could be home again, full of turkey.

Nums & Anju, chefs extraordinaire

The cooking and preparation started Wednesday night, but the planning started days earlier.  The full menu is below, and it was absolutely tasty. While a few others provided one or two items here and there, and my MIL cooked the turkey, my wife and my SIL did the bulk of the cooking for a grand gourmet feast. We got to the house around 1:30pm, and didn’t leave until sometime after 8pm. The kids ran around so much that they pretty much conked out after we got home.  Is there anything truly better than sleeping children?

Appetizers:

• Chutney, apples, and cheese
• Red pepper jelly, cream cheese, crackers
• Stuffed Mushrooms

Entree & Sides:

• Sage Butter Roasted Turkey
• Cider Gravy Gravy
• Carrots and Shallots with sage and thyme
• Brown Sugar Baked Sweet Potatoes and Acorn Squash
• Green beans and lemon vinaigrette
• Thyme Roasted Apples and Onions
• Roasted Potatoes with bacon, onions and sage
• Toasted Sweet Corn Pudding
• Cranberry Orange Relish
• Stuffing

Dessert:

• Flan
• Apple Pie
• Pumpkin Pie

The rest of the weekend (Friday – Sunday) was also relaxing.  After I ran a few errands Friday morning, such as getting my 30K mile servicing on the Highlander, we relaxed. On Saturday, we spent most of the day visiting Num’s friend Barb and her handsome newborn son Jack (and being stuck in traffic.) On Sunday, we did a huge autumn cleanup in anticipation of setting up the Christmas tree and all the decorations.  We didn’t get the tree up as originally intended, but I hope to have it up my Friday.

I read this article on io9.com (one of my favorite new sci-fi sites for my daily fix of sci-fi) titled In Case of Monster Attack, Know Your Enemies’ Weaknesses. I think it’s very true.  If you end up trapped in a video game or monster movie, you better know what to do. See an example of an Olly Moss strategy poster below for what to do in this type of situation. He’s got a bunch more black and red posters on his website.

Olly Moss poster -- Know Your Weak Points Cheat Sheet

I’m sick of all this Twilight crap going on wherever I look.  I saw this online, and think it’s a wonderful idea.  What do you think?

How Twilight Should Have Ended

I know Dalia Dippolito was arrested earlier this year, but the brazeness of this con artist still astounds me.  I’m not saying the intended victim (her husband) has a clean slate, besides having met his future wife when he hired her as a professional escort…..

In 2003 a Broward County judge placed Michael Dippolito on 28 years of probation for organized fraud over $50,000, grand theft and false telephone sales, state records show. He served about seven months of a two-year prison sentence on those charges.

Reporter Raakhee Mirchandani & her fiancee

An article by Raakhee Mirchandani, a features reporter for the New York Post. I came upon a mention of the article (dated March 14 2009) from Anna John’s HERstory blog, and it took me some time to locate the original article — Melting Not – Why Young People Like Me Started Dating Within Our Race.

Interesting article, which is similar to, I think, a few others, and partly my own.  I was open to dating non-Indians back then, but I knew there was something in my heart a little special about that exciting, pretty, Indian woman who later became my wife.  Everyone has to find their own “someone special”, and I do believe that you can only be happier when that special someone shares some of your interests, understands where you come from, and what’s important to you.

Again, I’m not a person who subscribes or preaches that for “You have to marry someone from the same race!” for the ultimate relationship happiness. That’s something people from my parents’ generation has always chanted. However, if you are both coming from the same culture, you are already starting the foundation on a relationship from the same core value — be it spiritual, cultural, or whatever. For me, finding someone who could also appreciate some good gulab jamun or a masala dosa (not to mention being very funny) really hits you.

I think the same applied to my wife, but you can always ask her for her side of the story. She’ll tell you that I was a jerk, but she’s just talking about today.

I knew it! Those UHO jugs and hawkers begging for your donations is a scam! If you work or visit NYC, you will often see these people standing on street corners next to a large table with a banner for the United Homeless Organization (or UHO), collecting donations in large water jugs.  Supposedly, all donations were going to the homeless.  I’ve seen them since I started working in the city back in 1999, but UHO has apparently been around since 1985.

IT’S A SCAM!

Just in time for the holidays, state authorities are going for the jug-ular — seeking to banish forever the panhandling pests who clog Manhattan’s busiest corners with folding tables and plastic water bottles.

State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed suit yesterday, charging the United Homeless Organization is a scam run by con artists who pocket most of the change they collect — hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The beggars — most of whom claim to be street people — say that the money tossed into their jugs goes to the homeless. And it does, the suit says. They just don’t bother to say they’re talking about themselves.

An unidentified man solicits donations for the United Homeless Organization on Seventh Avenue near Penn Station Monday, Nov. 23, 2009 in New York. (N.Y.Post/Chad Rachman)

The whole sham is run by these two individuals who collect a cover charge or rental fee for the material. It doesn’t go to help the homeless, except the actual person who is renting the table, banner, and water jug. This stuff makes me so mad. I read this, and my jaw dropped.  I suspected, much like I’m suspicious of anyone panhandling, yet I still couldn’t believe I was right.

For you long-time readers, you may remember my incident back in August 2003 (see the August 25 2003 entry) when a scam artist tried to scam me twice in the same month, at both Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal, in less than two weeks. Well, scammed me the first time at Penn and got $5 out of the goodness of my heart. Suffice it to say, I was shocked to see the same guy trying the same scam on me a week later. What are the odds?

I do not give out any money to people on the street. They are scam artists, and are not going to use it for food.  They are going to use it for booze or drugs.  That’s right. I said it.  That’s what I believe. I will continue to donate to regular charities, but never again in my life will I give a handout.

This is going to bite me in the butt later when my daughter Lily hits her teens, and I’m not looking forward to it. I really don’t understand that whole screaming and swooning.  Case in point – Recently some Canadian teen sensation Justin Bieber was due to show up at the Roosevelt Field Mall in Nassau county, NY (one of the largest malls in NYS.)  Mr. Beiber didn’t show up for a  while, and the mob of screaming women grew until it became a problem. He never showed up, and they had to disperse the crowd.  Watch the embedded video below. Aren’t teenage girls nuts?

Another example of my attempts to catch up on all the classic movies that I’ve missed and should have watched, I recently watched Empire Records. It’s an old 1995 movie starring a few big 90’s stars like Liv Tyler, Anthony LaPaglia, Robin Tunney, Renee Zellweger, Ethan Embry, and even Demi Mazar.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s a movie about a day in the life of some record store employees.  I just thought about how dated this movie is.  A record store? Mix tapes? I wonder how that FYE and those other record stores still in existence are performing?

I digress.  This movie felt like a retread of sorts of The Breakfast Club, or maybe a lot of these teenager/twentie’s movies are all the same. I didn’t particularly like this movie.  While I watched this movie, the words “So what?” kept flashing across the screen for me. I was interested in seeing the aforementioned stars when they were younger (geez, Anthony LaPaglia and Renee Zellweger look unbelievebly young.) I also like some of the background music. One of the reasons I wanted to see this movie was the “good soundtrack” I heard about, and I already had “A Girl Like You” by Edwyn Collins. I think I’ll check out the rest of the soundtrack on iTunes.

Empire Records (1995)

One of the features that I love about Windows 7 are the many desktop themes that are freely available. If you haven’t found them yet, Microsoft offers a Windows 7 Personalization Gallery that offers many free ones for download. Windows 95 and later offered theme packs for purchase, but if you were cheap like me, you had to look online to find free ones of varying quality.

Example free desktop -- Arches National Park, Utah

I recently read that when Windows 7 is initially installed, default themes are installed based on the time zone you select. For example, when you in the US install it from somewhere between the Eastern through the Pacific timezones, you automatically get the US theme. However, there are Indian, Korean, Taiwanese, South Africa themes and more free as well.

As a matter of fact, Computerworld recently published an article that Microsoft has opened up the development of desktop themes to advertisers. I don’t blame them, and think it’s a great idea. Consumers want high quality themes of their favorite products/movies/shows/etc, and corporations can provide that to them.

Check the link I provided to the gallery, open one that you like, and enjoy. I think the wallpapers themselves are absolutely gorgeous.

On my dayoff, I watched Hancock, the 2008 anti-superhero movie that came out in summer 2008.  Starring Will Smith, Charlize Theron, and Jason Bateman, it came out to mixed reviews.  It’s about Will Smith playing this drunk anti-hero with superpowers, and Jason Bateman as the PR man who tries to resuscitate Hancock’s image.

I’m not big on the anti-hero, as I like my heros….. well, to be heros, super or not.  It wasn’t a bad movie at all, and fairly entertaining. I’m not quite sure why it received negative reviews.  It was definitely nice to see a black superhero.  When’s the last time we saw one of those?  Jon Stewart as Green Lantern?  Luke Cage as Power Man aka the Hero for Hire?

Hancock (2008)