This will be short, if I have anything to say about it. I’m not feeling very well. One swollen gland (on the left side of my jaw, in case you’re making a diagram), and feeling run down. I chickened out of work a little early today, and hope to spend the evening on my back.

My renter has moved in, and so far he has made himself almost invisible. That’s how we like our renters around here. He’s even found a couple things in the house he thinks he can upgrade for me.

Of course that’s how it would start, wouldn’t it, if this were a slasher movie? The quiet, helpful tenant moves in and proceeds to gradually take over the house, and then my life, until the moment when he finally reveals his horrid, unspeakable plans for me…

However, I’ve noticed that real life generally resembles horror movies only in this regard, that if you feel under your seat you’ll find dried gum.

Dennis Prager had a guest on the other day who’d written a book on grammar. One subject they brought up was the common “John and I” mistake, where the person says, “He delivered the pizza to John and I.”

In fact it ought to be “John and me” in this sentence. You can figure out what to do by simply dropping John (and believe me, honey, you should have dropped the bum long ago) and seeing how the sentence goes without him. “He delivered the pizza to me” is obviously correct. Adding John to the mix does not change the matter.

But I know where the problem comes from. It comes from overextended rule-following. I remember even today my mother hearing me say, “Moloch and me went out into the grove,” and she corrected me. “It’s ‘Moloch and I went out to the grove.’”

She failed to add (and I probably wouldn’t have understood it if she had, at that age) that this only applied to the objects of sentences, not the subjects. (Or is it subjects, not objects? I always get them confused. Look it up? I’m sick, you sadist!)

Anyway, many people never get past that lesson and believe that “X and I” is correct in all situations.

Thus do we try to apply as absolutes rules which are only conditional. No doubt there are many such situations, in grammar and life.

But I’m too tired to think about it.

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?