"The turkeys are hitting the pavement like bags of wet cement!"

It's kinda sad that there are only two real memorable Thanksgiving-ish quotes in the American consciousness -- Malcolm X once noted "We didn't land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us." And I'm not sure that counts as a Thanksgiving quote, but close enough for flag football.

The second, and my favorite, belongs to grizzled station manager Arthur Carlson of fictional radio station WKRP in Cincinnati. After essentially bombing a shopping mall with turkeys from a flying helicopter and facing the redirected wrath of the surviving poultry, he delivers one of the great lines (and perfect delivery and timing) in American sit-com history: "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."

Edit: Someone YouTubed the episode, in chunks. Glorious. Here's the dramatic crescendo.

Playing Carlson was Gordon Jump, later known as the perpetually-lonely Maytag repairman, but also significantly an alumnus of Kansas State University's journalism program, who worked in radio in both Manhattan and Topeka. He was never less than a generous patron of both journalism and theatre (once it began at K-State), and visited several times before dying in 2003.

It's a pity that music rights have kept DVD releases off the shelves and reruns wretchedly edited -- the show wasn't perfect, but when it was good, it was very, very good. (The revival series? Not so much.)

Picspam, Excessive Turkey Consumption edition

Me, I can't eat turkey. After nothing but unimaginable permutations of turkey for the better part of a month in 1991-1992, I just can't develop an appetite for it. So today it's chili, cornbread, coffee, ice cream cake -- all the good things in life. ( 44 pics below.... )

Civil War: I'm with mightygodking

This has been out there a while, and made the rounds of both scans_daily and most of my comic-lurving friends, but it's too awesome not to pimp further.

Civil War is Marvel Comics' big crossover event this year. It's an interesting premise taken to outstandingly out-of-character extremes, with the writing degenerating from "bizarre" to "laughable" to "simply impenetrable" as of Civil War #5.

But lest you think all dat purty art has been wasted, mightygodking has rewritten the dialogue in an attempt to redeem the issue. It's an improvement, of course, because inserting lorem ipsum would be an improvement, but moreso, it's hysterical. Stop reading this and go read it now. Someone in the industry give this man a job already. We were right about Gail Simone -- we're right about mightygodking, too.