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Congrats, you crazy kids!

Happy day, and many wishes for a great year for you.

Thanks, all, for happy wishes and cute babies and Judy, for that hilarious iRish thing that I'm going to be forwarding to everyone I know... It was a lovely birthday weekend.

Happy day, sissssssssooie! And one for the baby:

Aww, thanks everybody! It's only 10am, and I've received so many nice birthday wishes already.

They were here last year, with Neil Patrick Harris! Oh, and also once with Will Arnett. Yeah, between them and the Second City folks, who needs the musical portions of the evening?

That was written in 1999. Pre-Ikea, probably.

Schaumburg Man Dimly Aware Of Shadowy, Non-Schaumburg World Out There

I'm also on the fence for that one. Let me know if you're going, though, it could be fun!

And also probably because it would just seem silly to have a Secretary of Commerce named "Penny".

One of these days we're actually going to meet at one of these shows. Any chance you're going to this?

I'm up to Iowa (it's arranged alphabetically), and while I've enjoyed many of the essays so far, I have only been wowed by Illionois. And thus continues my love-hate relationship with Dave Eggers.

Yeah, the number of ways that this thing can be picked apart... http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthcertificate.asp We're still talking about this kind of thing? Seriously?

Yes, people call them the Living Room Shows, so: LRS.

I liked the parts of The Riches that stuck with the concept. And I liked most of the actors. It seemed like a lot of time was spent wrapping the characters up in impossible situations, though. They never really got to just live the life.

A pumpkin cookie!

Happy day!!!

I always enjoy this, and I've gotten some great holiday tunes from VC over the years. Thanks for getting this started for this year!

This is kind of what I was getting at with Lola's body, representing both halves of the immigrant experience. Lola was involved in all the political groups at school, did not deny that she was Dominican, enjoyed her time living with La Inca, but still was not defined by that alone. She was able to move beyond the fuku, even while the rest of her family was trapped by it.

I really liked Yunior as the narrator. I loved the language, I thought he sounded like a real person, with just enough of Oscar's genre references tossed in to reflect the time he spent with Oscar and Lola, and that he's still thinking about Oscar. I also liked that he could be a reference, often in the footnotes, with his own take on Dominican history and culture. Because he was from a family like Oscar's, he could show us Oscar's life through that lens, through the Dominican-American experience.

I don't know if I would have said that the narrative is disjointed particulary, but the shift in narrators did catch me up a couple of times. In a few spots, I had to go back a few pages to the beginning of a section when I realized who it was that was talking. Also, there are a few things that just don't compute. Oscar and Lola have an aunt and uncle, but who are these people? We know that Beli's family is all gone, and it seems unlikely that they'd have their absent father's relatives hanging around the house. And then during Oscar's final return to DR, he says that Lola introduces him

I just returned a bunch of books to the library, but I kept this one. I'll be looking over my shoulder all weekend!

Sorry, to my American ears, it stills sounds wrong.

I thought it would be nice if we shared pics of our families enjoying the holidays. I'm posting this now because I think Thanksgiving is probably a good time for most people to take such pictures, but obviously that won't be strictly enforced. If you live in a faraway land that doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, or if you spend Thanksgiving with the family you were born into, but prefer to think of the people you choose to spend your life with as your real family, then just snap away whenever you get the whole group together. I'm not looking for older pictures, but of your family now, prefer