A Salt Lake City, Utah couple has been accused of stealing millions of federal grant money intended for textbooks. One example from the indictment states the school paid $93 for $13 books.

They say, “You can’t tell me how to live. ‘Judge not lest ye be judged.'”

But change the subject, and they say, “What you are doing is bad for you and dangerous to everyone else. Stop it.”

The worst possible thing happened at Thanksgiving, from a blogger’s point of view.

Everything went fine.

Moloch and his wife drove up on Wednesday night, so as to roust me out of bed early, to remind me that Turkeys Take Time. With their supervision I set about the mighty enterprise, le grande ouvre, den store gjerning.

And it was a total success. I followed Martha Stewart’s turkey instructions (brother Baal had sent me a link to her site), and the result was as perfect a turkey as I’ve ever enjoyed. I don’t think I’ll go to the extent of following her giblet gravy recipe again in the future (it was a lot of work and I didn’t like it any better than the kind we usually make), but even I, who live to make jokes about myself, can’t find any reason to quibble.

It was, in fact, pretty much the kind of holiday experience I’d hoped to facilitate when I bought a house that could be a central holiday gathering place for the Walker clan. Blithering Heights is a little cramped with more than five people in it at once, but we got along well in the close quarters. Not so much as a political or theological discussion arose to trouble the waters.

We laughed loudly when The Oldest Niece spoke to her boyfriend on the phone thus:

TON: “I’m here in Minneapolis with my family.”

BF: (Unheard)

TON: “Yeah, well, you don’t know my family.”

(Fill in the blank yourself.)

We also had some laughs when The Oldest Nephew brought out his newly purchased Wii gaming box and hooked it up to my TV. He showed us the games he had. Moloch’s wife showed remarkable enthusiasm playing the boxing game against Moloch. I averted my eyes, wounded by this gratuitous display of virtual domestic violence. But Mrs. Moloch seemed to enjoy herself a whole lot.

The best part of the Wii system, in my opinion, was the opportunity to create avatars of ourselves. We worked as a committee to caricature each one of us in turn, and we got some remarkable likenesses. My avatar, everyone agreed, was the most successful, largely because my hair and beard are fairly distinctive. Smooth-faced kids are the toughest.

I’m sorry that this report isn’t as entertaining as a “drop-kick the turkey” Thanksgiving horror story would be.

But not very sorry.

The 101 most influential fictional characters–I think Santa Claus and King Arthur would be in my top 10 list of most influential on me. Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, Hercule Poirot–I’m not sure who else to name. What about you?

The Paris Review, which I’m told is the literary journal everyone respects but no one reads, has special holiday offers. They proudly note the words of William Kennedy, “Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.”

They have also reprinted the first of three volumes of The Paris Review Interviews, which they say contains the “most essential interviews” from their collection. If you are unfamiliar with these interviews, you can get a taste for them here.