Thanksgiving

That would be today, unless you live in Canada. Everyone in my family has spent time in the USA and been present at a Thanksgiving Dinner, so we know what the score is: a lot of food. I'm sure that everyone is sincere when they give thanks for all their blessings, before they bib up and tuck in to an extra inch on the waistband. It's not clear why being grateful should involve so much stuffing but it cannot be right that a large part of the dinner ends up in the trash without passing through even the dog's digestive tract. According to the not-for-profit National Resources Defense Council NRDC, last year saw 6 million turkeys so discarded. This month accordingly they are putting out a Guest-imator, to stop families over-catering for the unexpected guest or because their eyes and bigger than their stomach. The NRDC claims those 6 million discarded turkeys are a wasted $293 million, and I said that cannot be true.

And it's not: CNBC reports that a standard 16 lb 10-person turkey can be had for $22.50 this year down 1.6%.  The whole dinner [cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, corn-pone, grits, peas, gravy, pumpkin pie, cream, ice-cream, lard-sandwiches] costs $49.12 and that's where NRDC got their inflated incredible $293,000,000. This kind of lazy-arsed innumeracy makes me chew my beard so I won't need any dinner. The Guest-imator is for people so simple that I doubt if they could click a mouse: if you tell it that you're planning cake as well as pie for dessert then it reduces the quantities. It seems like a daft and unnecessary bit of faux-tech. A bit like the gorn-viral hack last month of rolling out peanut butter; freezing the pancake and cutting it into sandwich sized squares to speed the process of making school lunches each morning.

It's 50 years since Arlo Guthrie sang about a thanksgivin' dinner that couldn't be beat at Alice's Restaurant.