happy belated ribs-giving

i hope you all had a nice and food-ful holiday weekend, wherever you were. i celebrated my triumphant first-annual moving-the-holidays-for-my-personal-convenience, as mb and i were successfully able to convince both sets of parents to join us in chicago for thanksgiving rather than embarking on the usual drive all over wisconsin. for the record, there are excellent deals on hotel rooms around thanksgiving, should the need ever arise for you. we gave thanks for our health and safe travels, for brett favre's record-breaking season, for the nightly free happy hour drinks at our parents' hotel, and for thanksgiving dinner held at restaurants (weber grill) that serve both delicious turkey dinners as well as the traditional baby-back ribs that i'm sure our forefathers would have eaten had they had a good dry rub.

over dinners and drinks, our conversation turned to the myriad of excellent but fake stories debunked on snopes.com -- i really think that something about those stories is so compelling that it's really hard for any of us to believe that they're false. mb was patiently explaining to his parents that no, starbucks is not refusing to send coffee to the soldiers in iraq, and no, microsoft is not sending out huge rebate checks for sending around junk email, and to soften the blow, told them that lots of us have fallen prey to myths. but as he opened with "this is not a true story, but it's funny and [my blogmate] was very sad to discover it's a myth:" and proceeded to tell the penguin story. my mother hung on almost every word... except the several parts where he said it wasn't a true story. "wait - which aquarium was this at? how old was the child? how did he get the penguin in his backpack? what did the aquarium do?"

so it turns out that penguins are just so lovable that we can't believe that a precocious little child-of-a-friend-of-a-friend didn't steal one from the shedd. not so with senior citizens... nobody at the dinner table was willing to believe my story about the stds going around the villages retirement community in florida.