Hello, Everyone.  Hope you all had a really good Thanksgiving.  Ours was nice and quiet.  The temperature has turned colder and the skies are cloudy.  We are expecting a week of colder weather with the possibility of snow.

I found the coverage of the Hamas/Israeli truce interesting.  The local (Chicago) account mentioned Hillary Clinton but nothing about the Egyptian government which played a key role and nothing at all about the terms of the agreement.  The national news (ABC) did mention the Morsi government's role in negotiating and guaranteeing the settlement but again nothing about the provisions of the truce.  We got better coverage from Deutche Weile Journal and the NHK account on PBS that evening.  And the English language version of Al Jazeera and Deutche Weile on line were also far more informative.  Sad how totally uninformative our news services have become.

Good Morning America had only a snippet on this story before they went to the nonsense about the Black Friday shopping frenzy.  Mohammad Morsi seems to be a dictatorship that resembles closely the Mubarak regime and its 'emergency' measures.  Evidently, the protests have already and the offices of the Muslim Brotherhood in several cities have been firebombed.  I wonder how stable the Morsi government really is considering they have guaranteed the truce between Hamas and Israel.

Hey, Lois, welcome back. We haven't been much for turkey either.  I don't think we have had it  more that maybe five times in the last 12 years--when one of my siblings prepared a bird for a holiday.  But fixing a bird for just the two of us didn't seem practical.  Even a turkey breast provided was to much.  But our meat market has the breast tenders and the split breasts and that is manageable.  We do freeze left overs but the chicken we stewed a while back gave us two meals of soup (eaten right away) and two quarts of soup, two quarts of stock, and three parcels of shredded meat all put in the freezer.  Think of what we would have had with a full turkey or even a breast.  We already use every bit of space in our freezers.  I had to rearrange a good bit to get the chicken in.

From the Political Wire another entry in our file of 'Troglodyte Repthuglican Assholes.'

June Calendar at Big 7-0 and More has an interesting take on the Black Friday frenzy--it is marketed to create a mass addiction.  Anyone who has visited this blog this time of the year for any of the past several know how I despise the whole Black Friday craziness as well as the whole commercial culture of which it is a part.  You might wonder why I haven't been as acerbic in my commentary this year.  I have decided that there is only two sane responses to it: don't participate and ignore it as much as possible.