NEW HUMOR AND SITES FROM GREG BULMASH

This may look like a real column, smell like a real column, possibly even taste like a real column, but it isn't. It's made out of tofu. In fact, it's Tofurkey, that wonderful cruelty-free turkey substitute that vegetarian parents will be inflicting on their defenseless children all over the country.

In the U.S. today, we commemorate the first harvest festival of the original European settlers. We sit down together, eat turkey until we feel sick, pretend that we don't hate yams, and put mini-marshmallows to the only other non-sexual use they have besides floating in hot cocoa.

But I won't be doing that. No big holiday family thing today for me. No sir. My father, my uncle, and I will be hitting the buffet at "RJ's - A Place For Ribs." We'll sit down at that festively decorated table, hoping that at least two seats face a TV that's playing a football game, and gnaw the flesh off of cow bones, just like the original settlers.

Okay, maybe it's not traditional, but what are you going to do? This isn't a traditional world anymore. In a traditional world Sally doesn't have two mommies with a deep committment to each other that is technically illegal to express in 28 states. In a traditional world, you don't go to a political fundraiser where there are two donation boxes, one marked "for the campaign" and the other marked "for attorney fees." In a traditional world we don't appreciate the fact that at least tonight we won't have to hear an update on the O.J. Simpson civil trial on the news.

But one tradition holds true, and that's giving thanks for what is important to us today. So today I give thanks for the internet which has helped me go from obscurity to mediocrity. I give thanks for the many readers who have given me support and love, and the other readers who have provided enough criticism to make me better appreciate my mother. I give thanks for the seventeen bucks I won in the lotto yesterday.

Thank goodness that big turkey-tryptophan cocktail in the mid afternoon usually puts most of us to sleep so we don't have to spend the entire day loathing our families. We can just drift off to sleep as Aunt Doris' spicy noodle casserole battles the cranberries in our bellies, giving us dreams of giant cucumbers chasing us into mine shafts.

Anyway... Happy Thanksgiving to one and all (even all of my readers in other countries who probably have the joy of going to work today)! See ya Monday!