I come from a family of dog lovers and we watched the dog show too! In fact we plan the meal around it and sit and watch it reverently and only when it concludes does anyone get up and check on the bird and cook and heat up and what have you.

I’m (well) over 40 and spent Thanksgiving with a lot of college students (relatives and their friends) and I loved it. I was a college student during the Reagan 80s and even some of my friends were assholes, let alone people I wouldn’t befriend whose assholery was off the Lotus 1-2-3 charts (that’s the Flintstones era…

I was actually up in MA for Thanksgiving and I saw a news report that was really interesting: someone in law enforcement pointed out that if you’re high you’re impaired and you shouldn’t be driving, but unlike with alcohol there are no limits, and even if there were the testing is notoriously unreliable, and even if…

Do the French still require handwriting samples on job/school applications? That I never understood, but I know people who had to do it well into the 1990s.

Or a hot dish.

Well, your name and avatar made me cheer up, and just in time for Thanksgiving, so topical!

I have expressed my admiration for your posts before. You really, really, really need to become a photo researcher, if you aren’t one already. Any Creative Department would be lucky to have you.

If this cheers you up at all: The last known rescue dog died fairly recently, definitely this year, and s/he lived to be about 16, which is a good long life for a large-breed dog.

Did you ever see her perform “Wishful Drinking”? At one point she rolls out a chalkboard and diagrams her parents’ affairs and marriages, and her own, and her boyfriends’, and their genealogies, and there are lots of criss-crossing arrows. It’s a very funny bit.

RIP. A great writer. All his stuff is worthwhile.

I think this is unprecedented. Mary Todd Lincoln (and the kids) stayed in the White House during the Civil War, when the capital itself was often under siege and it was a struggle to keep enough of the Maryland roads and the Potomac ports secure so that the residents didn’t starve to death. And Civil War aside DC…

The only thing that really bugged me about “Downton” (what am I saying? So Many Things bugged me about “Downton”, including the bit-part actors chosen to play George V and the man who would go on to become (briefly) Edward VIII, I’m not even British and I know they looked nothing like their characters) was that they…

Needs more shiplap.

Your sister and I are twins of a different mother. I had an elderly spaniel that I used to take everywhere and my family adored him, and my family are all huge dog lovers too. One Thanksgiving he got that familiar pained look in his eyes and I said, “I have to take him into the bathroom to express his anal glands. Do…

I was sneaking into bars at 16 and buying the beer for my pals’ parties starting around the same age. I wandered into a 7-11 type place to buy cigarettes and the guy at the counter asked me for ID. The first and only time in my long life I’ve ever been carded. Before I could come up with a response he said, “Look, I…

“Downton” (as we obsessives call it) gets incredibly tedious at points, but so does/did “Upstairs/Downstairs,” on which it is so obviously based and from which Julian Fellowes lifted more than a few plot points (who knew that every grand house in Edwardian Britain employed a gay valet?) Whenever one of them gets…

For the Canadian Contingent:

It means more like surprising, literally, out of the ordinary. Can go either way. “Your son’s Samsung mobile actually caught fire while he was standing on the platform at Waterloo? Extraordinary.” “Quite lucky that no one got hurt, actually. Extraordinary.”

No mention of being “sans culottes”? I suppose you would be wearing short shorts if you were sans culottes...

Maybe the cat was named after Kiki Dee.