Opinion

Every year retailers across the country hold sales the Friday after Thanksgiving ("Black Friday") in order to usher in a new year of profitability.

This year was much the same, except for Jdimytai Damour, 34, a temporary worker at a Wal-Mart in Long Island who was trampled to death by rabid, greedy consumers.

In the wake of our current financial crisis, the American public's desire to finger the guilty party resembles a poorly played match of Milton Bradley's "Clue."

In 2004, the Bush Administration strengthened the Cuba embargo first put forth in 1963. The 2004 ban was focused on higher education: Study abroad trips shorter than 10 weeks were declared illegal because they did not provide opportunities for genuine academic study or exchange of ideas about democracy, according to a report from the U.S. State Department. A group of academics had challenged this ban, which was recently upheld by a federal appeals court.

Breaking free of the quarter's strong current, nearly at the surface, your lips can almost taste the freedom's fresh air. But before you can even take a half-breath, you are jerked back beneath the waves.

Thanksgiving Break was just a decoy.

One of my items under the proverbial "Things to do Before I Die" list is to get into a fight. And I mean a real good fight, maybe in a bar, with broken beer bottles, a "What the f*ck did you just call me?!", lots of punching and hopefully a few gashes on the arm. I want my fight to basically have everything that makes a fight awesome (except hair pulling, kiddy pools filled with chocolate pudding and bikinis, those are no-nos).

Maybe it's just my mom's sensibilities being passed on to me, but I'm a firm believer that not only is there a bit of good in everyone, but everyone is good at something. Nobody's stupid or useless.

Maybe that's the reason some recent McDonald's ads have gotten under my skin. If you watch TV regularly (or watched any football on Thanksgiving) you've probably seen the ads I'm talking about. There's one for men and one for women.

When it comes to giving thanks on Thanksgiving, most people I know focus on the big things in their lives.

While I cannot even begin to give enough thanks for all of the wonderful things I have in my life, I have decided that this Thanksgiving I will really try to pay attention to all the little things that make every day worth getting up for.

That's it. I can't go another week without asking. How the hell are we allowing this to happen? Slice by slice, the American pool of taxpayer cash is being doled out to billionaire boardroom sops while those of us not belonging to the wealthiest 1 percent watch gas prices baffled and count up our expenses with increasing worry.

It's getting to be like clockwork - another year, another wave of student fee increases. In these troubled economic times, this year's increase could be over $600 annually per student if the government doesn't close the funding gap.

This Thursday when we sit down to gorge ourselves with turkey feasts and our subsequent food comas conjure thoughts of happy-go-lucky natives breaking bread with jubilant Pilgrims, let's not kid ourselves. Just as modern German and Japanese textbooks downplay the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking, the U.S. has altered its history through the Thanksgiving story to erase from our collective memories what really happened.

Sometimes, I envy guys. They have a better handle on solving problems dealing with interpersonal relationships among friends of the same sex than girls do.

Take how guys handle cleaning the apartment. When a disagreement about who should vacuum the living room arose between these guys I knew, it escalated to a lot of screaming and finally a physical altercation. All over vacuuming (OK maybe I take it back, boys are lame sometimes)! But six minutes later, everyone apologized to one another, someone ended up vacuuming, Call of Duty was played, and everything went back to normal.

In the closing thoughts of my last column, I predicted that I would receive a deluge of hate mail in response to publicly voicing my opinion of President-elect Barack Obama. As the week went on, and my inbox was slowly filled with commentary referring to me as "a morally despicable, selfish, un-American egotist," it seemed as if things were going exactly as I had expected.

My undyingly dedicated readers (hello mom, dad, big sis in Israel … love you all), might have noticed that last week I spoke about the seventh item on my Cap and Gown List even though last week was week six of my column. Oops.

Imperfection is inevitable. While it might be nice to dream of a world with no accidents, no wrong decisions and excellence as the norm, reality is far less tidy.

Since the entire country has boarded the midnight train to Doom-and-Gloomville, it should come as no surprise that magazines are rocking the Troubled Industry look.

As I've said before in this column and as you are no doubt tired of hearing, print media in general seems to be dying a slow and painful death at the hands of the Internet and a poor economy. Magazines are no exception.