Happy Thanksgiving!

I won't waste your time by stating that I'm thankful for my family, friends, and loved ones, the food on the table, my extraordinary good looks, yada yada yada. I would hope that you'd know all that, and would be thankful for those same things in your own life. (Well, to the extent they apply, anyway.)

I would also hope that everyone is grateful for the American men & women who put themselves at risk for the cause of freedom around the world. That should be a given, as well. But I wanted to take this opportunity to list some of the little things that I'm thankful for; things that might pass under the standard thankfulness radar. I'll leave you with this short list, and then let you get on with the serious business of eating your yams* and pie. Have a great day!

Little Things I'm Thankful For:

• My acoustic guitar. (I'll bet you that if the mortgage industry CEOs would've had guitars to play when they felt stressed, we never would've had to bail 'em out.)
• Chocolate-covered peanuts. (Well, chocolate-covered anything, really, but I've kinda been on this peanut kick lately.)
• The SciFi channel. (The abysmal quality of their "made for SciFi" movies continues to give me hope that there's a writer/director slot out there for me somewhere.)
• Pepperoni.
• Pony tails. (Is there anything hotter than a good-looking runner chick with her ponytail flipping back and forth with each stride? No, I don't think so.)
• Political incorrectness. (I refuse to refer to idiots as "the judgment challenged", or to call a zombie a "heartbeat challenged citizen". And even though I've been accused of being overzealous in my recycling efforts, have all of my electricity generated by wind power, and love the idea of bio-mass fuel cells -- I am really getting sick of the term "Go Green". Slogans like that are for Kermit and the Hulk...just let the rest of us go about our lives without telling us what color to be, OK?)
• Weird Al.
• The wallet. (Think about it; how tough would it be to carry around all your credit cards and stuff without those neat little transparent pockets to put them in? Now if I only had some money to put in it...)
• And of course, YOU -- the great people who set aside your taste & maturity each day in order to read this column.

Thank you for your support! Enjoy your turkey!

* Seriously, does anyone eat yams on any other day of the year? Are there folks in, I don't know, New Hampshire or something, that come home from work and say, "Ah, it's Wednesday...YAM night!" and then sit down to a big plate of waffles, yams, and Jimmy Dean sausage? I'm just curious...