With Thanksgiving behind us, there is a crispy clean feeling in the air. The kind of feeling that can only mean one thing: time to start capitalizing on other people’s feelings of lack of self worth, to rake in boatloads of cash. Rea$on for the $ea$on, right? Well rally the troops and calibrate your reindeer-seeking missiles, because I’ve made  a stunning turnaround in my thoughts about Black Friday mayhem.

Black Fri – day – noun – the overhyped, much maligned Day After Thanksgiving. A NY Times report from 1975 cites Philadelphia Police officers, frustrated by the congestion caused by shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving, derisively coining “Black Friday”. Retailers tried to rebrand it Big Friday” – didn’t stick. Then someone’s dad made up something about it meaning “in the black” and now that’s what it is.

For those of us who’d rather eat glass than be inside a store any time in the weeks before Christmas, the Black Friday experience is hard to understand. But I have come to see it not as some great scourge on society, but as another wacky American ritual, like Super Bowl Sunday, or arbitrarily moving our clocks back and forth, that we cling to in an effort t0o feel alive and connected.

Some of the more…” intense” scenes from Black Friday are reminiscent of a bustling ancient marketplace, maybe in Bangladesh – instead of dates and figs, it’s waffle irons and off-market toasters.

One day a year, the isolated, listless populace experiences an adrenaline surge and comes together en masse to participate in a competitive ritual, a sacred pre-Christmas tradition of lining up outside big box stores to snap up merch. Ordinary American people collectively participate in a ritual of their own making, with its own symbols and beliefs, experiencing that certain frisson that comes from simply being part of the crowd. It is part of their Thanksgiving tradition, and  they’re going to endure lines and  risk potential injury/death.

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The great thing about unchecked capitalism is that you can make a buck no matter how much you deceive people about pretty much anything your greed uses to get it’s fix.The more you milk ’em the less trouble you can get in. It’s The American Way – the dream lives on. Politics and religion really are the two greatest scams on earth and America is the easiest place to work ’em.

I’m not crafty, but I know people who are. Here are some resources:

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Among CNN’s 20 questions about the multilateral nuclear agreement with Iran:

“Is Iran the only nation with a nuclear program?”

“Who are these six world powers”?

“What’s a centrifuge?”

Ok, stop right there. Maybe I am an elitist, liberal snob…”maybe”…..okay, saying I am, may I suggest that if you don’t know the answers to these three questions you no longer get to have an opinion about this deal? May I suggest that if you don’t know the answer to these three questions, you probably ought to go back to reading about The Big Game, or Brian Griffin getting run over by a car, or Miley’s lip-synching cat, or Homeland’s further descent into asininity, or whatever else happened last night, and stop trying to pretend that you understand anything about the world that exists outside of your immediate vicinity?

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Mad (at) Libs(™), a phrasal template word game where one player – a Republican –  prompts another player – also a Republican –  for a list of words to fill-in-the-blanks, before reading the – often comical or asinine nonsense aloud.

OMFG!!That horrible Obama did ____________
OMFG! That horrible Obama did not ____________
OMFG!!That horrible Obama went to ____________
OMFG!!That horrible Obama did not go to ____________
OMFG!!That horrible Obama changed_____________
OMFG! That horrible Obama did not change ____________
OMFG!!That horrible Obama said____________
OMFG!!That horrible Obama did not say ____________

No president ever ever ever has been this ______________ (mean, uppity, attention-seeking, selfish, etc.).*

Just pencil in something new every day and off we go…you can use the same word at the same time in all the blanks and that’s completely okay, too. The only part that matters is “That horrible Obama”.

* Black. The answer is always “black.”

via gawker

…..of course you can.

To be fair, the boys – except for the cutie next to Rob in the Yankees jersey – all look terrible. The saddest part, for me, is that I looked worse than any one of these girls. They look great. The Gunny- Sax dresses, the shiny, flippy hair, the Candies. I will have to dig up a photo of me in middle school to show you how awful I looked. Every bit as terrible as Rob Ford, in my own way. I looked like a 9 year old boy. One foot shorter than anyone else, probably 70 lbs, snaggletoothed and metal mouthed. Always looked miserable hence the nickname”Encyclopedia Frown”. So I’m not really judging. At least Rob looks happy.