Scene & Herd - I’m thankful to have a job

The editors of this newspaper have a bunch of crazy rules that they force me to follow each week. “Use correct punctuation” and “Put down that knife, Andisheh” are two of the more annoying ones.

But the rule that’s been bugging me most over the past few days is how I have to actually work Thanksgiving weekend. The laziness and overeating associated with the holiday have long been two of my favorite forms of American patriotic expression. Writing a column gets in the way of expressing my patriotism — and that’s un-American.

The lights are much brighter there: Last week, the custodians of downtown’s Centennial Olympic Park rummaged through their metaphorical attics and decorated for Christmas. Along with Atlanta’s United Way, the park threw a party to kick off the holiday season. A steel drum band playing Christmas music (really, that’s not a typo) and a juggler on stilts entertained the crowd of children and families. Actually, I’m only assuming the juggler used stilts. Maybe she’s really 12 feet tall and making the best of a bad situation.

Sen. Max Cleland was on hand to rally a group of firefighters and police officers, dutifully call them heroes, and then assist UPS honcho Jim Kelly with the ceremonial light-switch flipping that illuminated the park. There was also a laser-light show, which organizers of the event repeatedly referred to as “world class.” I’m not familiar with the laser-light shows of Europe, Asia and Africa, so I can’t call what I saw world class. But this one was certainly on par with the Stone Mountain laser show, albeit smaller. So I declare that it was the best laser-light show in Fulton County last week.

Predictably, part of the laser-light show was soundtracked with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” President Bush, I’m proud to be an American and I know that this war is gonna last awhile, but please hurry up and win the war so I don’t have to hear that song everywhere I go.

All trivia is local: The night before Thanksgiving, The Local on Ponce de Leon was packed for team trivia. My team competed under the name Assthrax. Team trivia is a sport for sedentary nerds, and we get worked up about it in the same high-flying, profanity-laden way in which other people get worked up about sports. I’m ashamed to say that when the emcee announced that Assthrax had the lead at the halfway point, I stood up and taunted the second-place team by pointing at them and yelling.

In team trivia, the use of reference materials and phone calls to friends is expressly forbidden, and most people seem to abide by those rules. From now on, perhaps the trivia emcees at The Local also need to forbid looking at other teams’ answers, because that’s exactly what a moron at the table adjacent to ours kept doing. While teams conferred, this guy would walk around and look at their answers. His team lost, and despite (or perhaps because of) our confidence, we blew our lead and lost on the final question.

But Assthrax will be back.

Big bird: Thanksgiving, of course, was the social event of last week, so I need to talk about it at least a little. I apologize for the self-referential nature of my report, but people don’t typically invite newspaper columnists to their family dinners. Making do on my own, I watched a bit of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with the closed-captioning activated on my TV because the people who type out the captions usually make funny errors when they do live broadcasts. Unfortunately for me (but fortunately, I suppose, for the hearing-impaired), I didn’t catch any funny mistakes. I guess typing “Look at Willard Scott on the giant turkey float” isn’t much of a challenge for a professional captioner.

After the parade, I made a last-minute trip to Kroger, which was packed with twentysomethings doing their last-minute Thanksgiving shopping. Kroger didn’t have any tofurkey, so I had to make do with frozen meatless smoked turkey slices that tasted remarkably like the (alleged) real turkey they used to serve in my grade-school cafeteria.

Bigger birds: My other big Thanksgiving-related social activity was a trip out of town to visit my family. Security at Hartsfield is tighter now, and camouflaged National Guardsmen patrolled the terminal. Still, the metal-detector and X-ray machines were staffed by a lot of chatty teenagers. The boy working my metal detector wasn’t watching when I walked through, but he did stop me and ask to inspect my hat. I told him that the only thing he’d find in my hat was strands of my dog’s hair. That, for some reason, prompted him to reassuringly say, “No, G., you look cool.”

And so, for Thanksgiving 2001, I was thankful for my family, friends, my dog and the 16-year-old airport security worker who tried to make me feel better by telling me I looked cool.??