h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Wow! (Sits down and puts up feet!) Pass the medication...I need some spiritual healing!

I am a Pythonite.... I was attempting to lead on a running joke....

Did you at least feed it before you tried to lead it? If you don't, they'll just run off on their own and you'll never catch them.

It ran under that sofa! (Offer it some cheese...)

How about turkey? I've got plenty of that lying around.

Not "Thanks Giving" turkey.... isn't this some sort of religious cermony, eating a turkey?

It's more of an excuse for people to take the day off and eat too much. I think it lost all true significance about 1843 or so.

As an Englishman, would you please enlighten me as to the meaning of Thanksgiving?

The Pilgrims came to America to escape religious persecution. They failed to die within the first year because the Native Americans helped them out a bit. So they "gave thanks" and then proceeded to persecute the Native Americans.

It's just struck me that everyone in history is either incredibly stupid, incredibly manipulative or an incredible pack of bastards.

So this festival effectively celebrates the treachery of early settlers? I suppose they were only getting their own back by kicking downwards.

All I can say is, what about the mass murder of all these poor turkeys and do you eat them at Christmas also? Are there shares available in the turkey rearing industry in the U.S.A.? (I suspect the Christian churches have a few fingers in those "pies"!)

Thanksgiving is a celebration of the 3 hours or so that English settlers and Native Americans were able to get along. The persecutions didn't begin until there was enough crops that the Puritans were able to spend some extra time shooting at natives, and vice-versa.

I, for one, am disgusted with the lack of initiative displayed by the natives during that year. Rather than falling on them, taking their livestock and their women, the Indians foolishly made peace with the Puritans. The Puritans managed to survive, and their religious taint still echoes through the annals of US history, today in the form of televangelists.

That was very clever. Well done that human being!

Bravo. I applaud your tangential skills.

So do I. Most impressive. I have to say that if I were the native Americans that I'd have done exactly what you suggested.

The church has fingers in every pie... including the pie-making business, obviously. And finger manufacture, come to that.

A bold statement, and one I am not prepared to agree with. If I were a Native American, I would have to survey the situation first. Perhaps that was what the first Thanksgiving was all about, just a chance for them to see if the women were worth all that hassle. At the dinner, they discovered that all of them were tremendously ugly, or had the tongue of a viper, or some such thing. All the Pilgrim men were constantly being harrassed about their table manners, and the food was rather poorly prepared by the white women. The Indians excused themselves from the table early, and decided that it would be a greater torture to let them live.

Is that two fingers or just the one?

When you put it like that, I think I would change my mind and have them all exiled to Haiti, where they would have been viciously slaughtered as soon as the slaves took over.

In which pie?