here are the bullet points of why I love Thanksgiving:

• It’s not commercialized because there are no gifts. Kay Jewelers has not yet figured out how to pimp-out American womenfolk for Thanksgiving (“every drumstick begins with second-base” never caught on as a slogan).

• It’s America’s only nationalist holiday. The Fourth of July, President’s Day, and even Veterans’ and Memorial Day are celebrations of the nation-state created by the American founding. In short, our other holidays are about patriotism, not nationalism. Thanksgiving meanwhile celebrates a pre-constitutional relationship with the Almighty. I wouldn’t quite say it’s a pre-modern or blood-and-soil holiday, but it is about Providence and the great gift being here, in this place, is. A little mystic nationalism is a good and healthy thing because it provides the emotional sinew that helps us hold onto our patriotism. This country is great and good for many reasons. But one reason for its greatness, too often forgotten, is that it is ours.

• It’s all about family, formal and informal. The Thanksgiving table is one of the few times every year where you can define your own little nation-state, your own little Hobbit warren, in your own little Shire. I’m not saying that we lose our concern for our fellow man, but we are reminded that life’s joys come not from abstract people, but real ones.

• Left-over turkey sandwiches are as pure a distillation of awesomeness as man has ever conspired to produce.

This does not make cheery reading.

[The following is taken from pages 12-15 of Lighter-Than-Air Flight edited by Lt. Col. C.V. Glines, USAF, published by Franklin Watts, Inc., 1965.]

The preliminary flights in a captive balloon were preludes to the next logical step in the Montgolfier experiments—free flight. But it was not a matter of simply cutting a rope and letting the intrepid aeronauts go with the wind. The King of France, Louis XVI, would not permit any such manned flight to take place. The Marquis François-Laurent d’Arlendes,an influential friend of de Rozier, interceded and gained an audience with the King. Pointing out that the first manned tethered flights had been successful and that the animals used in the free flight had all survived, d’Arlendes pleaded that two men should now be allowed to ascend for the glory of France.

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Oxford has gone online with a collection of WWI poetry here.

What is going on with Google? They often put up alternative graphics for a day commemorating holidays or anniversaries of one thing or another, but last week they started marking Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary and they haven’t stopped. On Wednesday, it was Big Bird’s legs. On Thursday, they were still at it with Cookie Monster taking our queries. One Friday, Ernie and Burt were up on the home page, perhaps doubling as a celebration of It’s a Wonderful Life. Over the weekend I had no need to search web pages, but today, Monday, they are still at it with the vampire who counts things. Which seven-year-old did Brin and Page leave in charge of the store? Probably one who no one has seen in thirty years.

I blame the Mormons.

Solomon Nunes Carvalho (1815-1897) was a Sephardic Jew born in Charleston, South Carolina who was invited to join John C. Fremont’s 1853-54 expedition as an artist and daguerreotypist. In February at Parowan, Utah, he separated from the expedition due to illness; the expedition had passed a rough winter in the Rockies, surviving off the flesh of their horses for fifty days. From Parowan, “I left for great Salt Lake City, in a wagon belonging to one of a large company of Mormons, who were on their way to ‘Conference.'” After three months convalescing, he traveled to Los Angeles, California with a party “consisting of twenty-three Mormons, missionaries to the Sandwich Islands, under command of Parley Pratt.”

Hoping all enjoyed a delightful Nevada Day this past weekend, here is a portion of Carvalho’s account of May 30, 1854 during their stay in Las Vegas:

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