Now we can go straight

[austin_dern]

bunny_hugger set her video recorder to catch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. I'm confident she had, as we'd talked about it the night before and I watched her searching for the Macy's parade and selecting it from the upcoming schedule. So there was a little mystery: how did it record instead Detroit's Thanksgiving parade?

We don't know. We likely will never know, not least because whatever station was recorded took the broadcast from Detroit's channel 4, occasionally remembering to cover up the Detroit station logo with a Lansing station logo. I'd like to say which stations, but broadcast TV has grown dangerously lax in providing actual station identifiers.

But there were benefits to this mysterious change of parades. For one, it meant we were watching what had been the Hudson's Department Store parade, the one she grew up watching. For another, this is clearly a more local affair, which is to say it's filled with the nutty of the relatively small town. Here I'm talking about the precision businessmen attache-case drill team. It's a pack of businessmen who march in their Grey Flannel Suit attire (although it's upgraded to black), holding briefcases and marching and moving in imitation of drill rifle squads.

So it's endearingly nutty, in a way that something high-profile just won't achieve. It also had the advantage on the Macy's parade, from bunny_hugger's perspective, that they didn't have celebrities or have commercials expensive enough to cut away from the marching high school bands. Macy's treats marching bands as damage and routes the telecast around them.

We split some of the chores of getting the house ready for Thanksgiving Dinner, too. Most of this came to dusting, particularly of the bookshelves stuffed full of tchotchkes. I used my chance dusting these off to sneak the little squirrel figure I'd picked up the previous week onto her shelves; I like sneaking little gifts into bunny_hugger's house. It turned out she would spot this one in record time, later that day, as she sat beside the shelf and noticed one of the squirrels was unfamiliar.

What I didn't try hiding was a piece of jewelry which she had looked at and thought about but turned down a couple weeks earlier. This was a ring with a jewel bird attached, admirably sparkly and a bit silly --- she mentioned that she hadn't anywhere to wear it, since she isn't going to the prom --- but it looks neat, or just pretty.

Her parents arrived long enough after we finished cleaning that it didn't look like we had just finished cleaning. And I was able to provide besides my presence and the vague noises that pass for conversation around me a last lingering box of salt water taffy. It was rather harder than the box which had wowed them earlier in the year, but it made up for that by being much easier to take out of the wrapper; I suppose the less intense heat of this time around made the texture stiffer but more edible.

Nearly all the food was popular, this time around: not just the roll gotten in place of the meat loaf, but also the cranberries, the vanilla ice cream gotten to top the pecan pie. There was a split opinion about the pecan pie, but I think it did very well at being (a) pecan and (b) pie, and with (c) vanilla ice cream on top it just turned out better. Also, with the enormous piles of firewood brought in the previous day there was no trouble starting a fire that kept going all afternoon and evening and indeed kept on until past midnight.

This time there weren't any surprising or unsettling developments, no broken dishes, nothing but an emotionally tranquil day with family. It's a good sort of Thanksgiving.

Trivia: In 1838 Massachusetts enacted the ``Fifteen-Gallon Law'', prohibiting anyone from purchasing less than fifteen gallons of alcohol at once. Source: The Spirits Of America: A Social History Of Alcohol, Eric Burns. (It was intended as a prohibition law.)

Currently Reading: 2100 Needed Inventions, Raymond F Yates.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

It was intended as a prohibition law.

Can't imagine any possible way for that to backfire...

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

According to Burns, the main evasion modes were (for home consumption) people pooling their money with their friends to buy an absurd amount through one person and split it up back home, and (for public consumption) buying, say, fifteen gallons plus a pint from the tavern owner, drinking one pint, and selling the fifteen gallons remaining back, perhaps without the fifteen gallons or the cash for that ever bothering to trade locations. He doesn't offer citations for this, unfortunately, but those do sound quite plausible.

[moxie_man]

"how did it record instead Detroit's Thanksgiving parade?"

Perhaps the local station that was affiliated with the network that normally carries the Macy's Parade opted to pre-empt it for the Detroit one, but neglected to inform whoever maintains the cable tv guide info of this move?

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that's it. I'm glad because I actually wanted to record the Detroit parade and couldn't find a station that had it in the listings, and I managed to accidentally hit on the one that did.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I should maybe mention the listings were really excessively complicated. The search for the parade turned up several hundred matches, some of them on local stations and some of them apparently on the nationwide network station feeds you have to pretend you can't get local stations on to receive over the satellite.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's fine enough, although if the Macy's Parade were what was selected, and it never came on, then how'd it know the right time to start recording?

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

The businessman drill team sounds quite fun. Indeed. parades work a little better at the medium-size, and Detroit's, which I have seen before, is nice.

Sounds like a pleasant holiday. :)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The parade did have this wonderful homemade quality to it, not ridiculously so like an SCTV parade might have been, but still kind of conveying the sense of they didn't quite have everything planned out before the parade started.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's quite fair. It's one of the oldest Thanksgiving parades and I wouldn't say it's less than professional.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You're right. I shouldn't have suggested it wasn't professional.

It does feel like it has a greater tolerance for quirk and eccentricity than Macy's, though, with the businessman drill team an example. I feel like if I and fifty of my friends had a comical idea for doing something, there would be a plausible if still small shot of it getting into the Former Hudson's parade, and no shot of it getting in the Macy's.