I'm not a chicken, you're a turkey!

Happy Thanksgiving! Today is the day when we celebrate how a group of pilgrims broke away from a repressive church, and came to the New World to start an even more repressive church. In honor of this occasion, I give you Jack Chick's take on the holiday. I have to wonder what school this is where kids aren't allowed to say the word "Thanksgiving." Presumably the same one where teachers force students to dress up for Halloween, ask whether kids "believe in evolution" (and get really mad if they don't), and encourage animal sacrifice. [1] I kind of have to wonder why Chick is using Thanksgiving as the source for a tract, when it's not really a religious holiday. Yes, it's God to whom the Puritans were giving thanks in the first place, but the holiday is really a national one based on a more-or-less natural one (i.e., the celebration of the harvest). Of course, Chick can sometimes be just as much a nationalist as he is a fundamentalist, as when he bashes the United Nations, or talks about Islamic terrorism. I don't know whether that article was written by Chick or just approved by him, but the writer says, "The European nations, that refused to go with us to strike at terrorism's roots in Iraq and Afghanistan, are now staring it in the face in their own cities." The thing is, for all the intolerance and offensive stereotyping in the tracts, I can't recall any of them encouraging violence. In the Chick Tract Universe, violence is always something perpetrated by godless heathens against humble, pious, turn-the-other-cheek believers. Yet this article is blatantly pro-war, and hence pro-violence. I mean, I know Chick is a World War II veteran, but it still comes off as rather inconsistent. But then, opposing violence against individuals while supporting it against nations seems to be a pretty common attitude.

The book that bethje gave me for my birthday, Lies My Teacher Told Me, has a chapter on the myths surrounding Thanksgiving. It was pretty interesting, I thought. There was a mention of how Squanto knew English because he had lived in Europe. The thing is, when I was in elementary school, one of my teachers read us a book about Squanto that mentioned that. But when I asked about it in Social Studies class, that teacher hadn't heard of it. Maybe that was due to how I phrased the question, rather than the teacher's ignorance, though. I've been known to phrase questions poorly, after all.

Let's see. What else? Well, last night, Beth and I went out to eat at Red Lobster for the first time in a while. Unfortunately, we missed the Endless Shrimp, but I was full enough from the shrimp meal that I did get. In fact, I had to get a box for the leftover shrimp pasta. I'm not sure when I'll end up eating that. Probably tomorrow, since I have some kind of big holiday meal to eat today. {g} The restaurant wasn't very crowded when we went there, and the service actually ended up being a little too fast. That seems like an odd complaint, and it's certainly not something that I hold against the restaurant staff, but it's kind of annoying to get the main course when you haven't even started the appetizer.

After dinner, we listened to the commentaries for both Cry-Baby and the Family Guy movie. Neither of us had heard any Family Guy commentaries in the past, so it was kind of weird to find out that Brian's voice is basically Seth MacFarlane's regular speaking voice. Both movie commentaries had a fair amount to say about the weird and seemingly arbitrary standards held by the censors and ratings boards, like how you can only say "fuck" once in a PG-13 film. John Waters mentioned how there were two different edited-for-television versions of Cry-Baby, both of which took out certain material, but then added in scenes that had been deleted from the theatrical release. I've never seen Cry-Baby on TV, but I do remember seeing TV versions of Blazing Saddles and The Naked Gun where they did the same kind of thing. I wonder if they still do that nowadays.

By the way, I added a few new points to my review of the Wizard of Oz DVD set in this post. Probably nobody even read it in the first place, but just in case anyone did and wants to see the edits, I thought I should let people know.

( Hey! There's a quiz result behind this cut! )

[1] That last tract makes a big deal out of how the family's house number is 742, right down to having it on the roof (in case someone needs to air-drop a package to them, perhaps?). I wonder if this is a reference to something. 742 is the Simpsons' house number, but would Chick know this? And even if he did, how is that relevant to this comic?