Happy Thanksgiving! I just got my daily Foxtrot comic and loved it (as I love most of the others), but this one just struck me as quite fitting because of my most recent post. So, enjoy the comic, have a Happy Thanksgiving, enjoy some turkey and football, and be safe this Holiday weekend!

URL: Foxtrot by Bill Amend

There's very few real traditions I adhere to and even fewer days I look forward to each year. Of course, I look forward to my birthday, Christmas, and friends' and families' birthdays, but other than those, there's not much else...except Thanksgiving. Each year I look forward to gathering with family, giving thanks for all we have, eating some turkey, and watching some football. Which is why, this year, when I learned we wouldn't be having a "traditional" Thanksgiving dinner, I was quite upset. I need my turkey. My mashed potatoes. My cranberry sauce. My warm dinner rolls. My pumpkin pie. How am I supposed to get through a Thanksgiving without these? How will it even be Thanksgiving? Sure...that's not the point of Thanksgiving, but it's a tradition. Just like watching the Lions & Cowboys play every year, eating turkey and mashed potatoes is tradition. Breaking tradition just doesn't sit well with me. Perhaps for Christmas, we'll open the presents on December 28th - who needs to follow tradition anyways?

URL: Thanksgiving.com

"A rogue's gallery of hucksters..." I realize that these are serious charges and even though I really do think that Michael Jackson has quite a few problems he needs to resolve, I'm unsure if this is the best family to use to press charges. From what I hear from former investigators, et al., there has been sexual deviance in the past and Michael Jackson just uses intimidation and payouts to make the problems go away, so, yes, something needs to be done...but why this family? I guess it's good we finally have someone coming forward, but without any concrete evidence, this case seems flimsy at best. It might come down to he said/he said and with the mother's integrity called into question, statements from the father about her using her child to try and extort others, and perhaps even drug use, this isn't going to be pretty. And even if Michael does get away with it...there's still going to be those people that believe he's never done anything wrong - those fans who continue to support him so he can live lavishly and continue to do whatever he does to the boys that visit his mansion - those people who believe that we should just leave him alone because he's a celebrity...

URL: Michael Jackson (the Official Press Room)

After spending a good hour today at Home Depot, trying to figure out the best way to concoct a mounting mechanism for my Sirius tuner for pristine bus listening, I finally came up with this ingenious plan:

Take one PVC pipe cap, one PVC hex/threaded pipe piece, two large magnets, garden hose washers, a 3/8" drill bit, and an electrical mounting plate and you've got the perfect magnetic mounting mechanism. I really had no idea where to start. First I needed magnets, so I found the best that Home Depot had. I was hoping for a wide, flat magnet, say 3 inches by 4 inches, or something like that - very high power, impossible to knock over once affixed to the metal bus dashboard. Unfortunately, all I was able to get were two 1/2" by 1" magnets, but they seem to be plenty strong and will do the trick. The next thing I needed was a metal plate. I also needed said metal plate to have a hole in it. I really had no idea how I was going to do this, but it dawned on me that an electrical box would work because they are a) metal and b) have mutliple holes in them. When I reached the electricity crap aisle, I found exactly what I was looking for - a round metal cover for electrical boxes with exactly one hole in the middle. The next step was to figure out how to mount the receiver on top of the plate.

I took a quick trip to the other end of the electrical crap aisle and found some nice copper fittings - a pipe with a hexnut on the bottom that went through the hole, but the hexnut kept it from going all the way through - then, all I had to do was cap it, but I had to get a 3/8" hole in the cap for the screw that is attached to the actual receiver. After taking my brass cap to the tools department and asking them if they could drill a hole in it, I was surprised to get an affirmative answer. However, when I asked for such a large hole - 3/8", I was denied in my quest. So...back to trying to figure out how to attach a receiver to the metal plate. Earlier in my questing about Home Depot, I had considered using PVC, but brass just looked so much nicer. When I found out I couldn't use brass, I went back to the plumbing aisle and got the same parts I had in brass, but this time in plastic. I headed back to the tools department, purchased a 3/8" drill bit and the guy there generously let me drill a hole (he actually did it, but it was nice of him to accomdate me as such).

Once I had all the pieces, I needed to make them all fit snugly as the magnets were wider than the hex nut thingie on the PVC pipe, so it would slide when weight was placed atop it. After learning that they don't make washers with 1/2" holes in them, I asked another friendly associate and he pointed me back to the plumbing aisle where they had some plastic washers that I was thinking about using. Conferring with yet another friendly worker, he told me that in the gardening section, I could get washers that would do the same thing for much cheaper (it was about $0.80 for two in the plumbing section and $0.98 for 12 in the gardening section). So...now that I've got all I needed, I headed home and put it all together and...success!! It all came together much better than I could have expected. I might make some minor tweaks over the extended weekend, but we'll see...

URL: sirius1.jpg (JPEG Image, 400x300 pixels)