The Thanksgiving traditions that get all the press are the turkey and other foods, football, Macy's parade, and Christmas shopping. The authors of first major sociological study of Thanksgiving, published 21 years ago in the Journal of Consumer Research, identified those other traditions that everyone recognizes, but didn't realize that so many other families do the same things. For example:

2. The forgetting of the ingredient

Oh no! I forgot to put the evaporated milk in the pumpkin pie! As the authors of the Thanksgiving study state, “since there is no written liturgy to insure exact replication each year, sometimes things are forgotten.” In the ritual pattern, the forgetting is followed by lamentation, reassurance, acceptance, and the restoration of comfortable stability. It reinforces the themes of abundance (we’ve got plenty even if not everything works out) and family togetherness (we can overcome obstacles).

Oh yeah, that happens every year at my house. So do the other six traditions you can read about at mental_floss. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user TheCulinaryGeek)

Chalkboard paint allows you to put a handy chalkboard anywhere you want -the only problem is that it only seems to come in black. How booooring. If you want to have the convenience of chalkboard paint but don’t want it in black why not try mixing your own? With only a few simple steps you can have chalkboards in every color of the rainbow! A tutorial at A Beautiful Mess explains how to do it.

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If you have quite a few empty jars lying around, you probably feel like you should do something with them instead of just tossing them in the recycling bin. Why not try finding some new uses for them? Here are some fun ideas  of what can be done with your empty jars, complete with tutorials so you can try it yourself.

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The holidays are here! Do you have your ugly Christmas sweater ready? You can find some really tacky sweaters for sale, and that's just what Collector's Weekly did, for the second year in a row. They've ranked the 12 ugliest Christmas sweaters on eBay. This flamingo-with-candy-cane-legs creation is only garish enough to make it to #7, so beware the horrors in the full list. Link

How many of us would love a chance to read a script from a future episode of our favorite TV show? What if you found the chance in the back of a taxi? What would you do? A student in Cardiff got the chance to peek at an unaired Doctor Who script, but decided not to take it. Good call, I would hate the spoilers.

Hannah Durham stumbled upon the script for a forthcoming episode of the sci-fi show during a night out with friends.

Producers, scriptwriters and fans of Doctor Who thanked her for returning the missing script and preventing precious plot details from being leaked online.

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(Image source: ScienceFiction.com)

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The Peanuts gang has a TV special for every other holiday; Jimmy Kimmel figured why not for Black Friday? -via Tastefully Offensive

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Neil the puppy has a good time at the park. This delightful video proves that anything can be made extra-dramatic with the proper effects, editing, and of course, soundtrack. -via Tastefully Offensive

John William Lewin was a naturalist and wildlife artist who documented different species 200 years ago, before the aid of photography. He was intrigued by the tales of exotic wildlife in Australia and went there to see for himself. Lewin's artworks became the first by a European to illustrate the wildlife Down Under. See how he showed the rest of world what Australia had in a collection at BibliOdyssey. Shown here is his painting of a platypus, from 1810. Link

The Thanksgiving holiday Americans will celebrate tomorrow is based on a historical feast from 1621. However, the idea of expressing gratitude for a bountiful harvest with a celebration is an idea that goes way back -probably as far back as agriculture itself. Geeks Are Sexy takes a look at some of the ancient harvest festivals that celebrate the accomplishment of reaping enough food to last until next growing season, and the evolution of the way we celebrate today. Link

It's been more than a half-century since an NCAA basketball player scored over 100 points in one game, but it happened last night as Grinnell guard Jack Taylor scored 138 points. In fact, Taylor blew those old record-holders away.

Taylor scored 138 points to shatter the NCAA scoring record in Division III Grinnell's 179-104 victory over Faith Baptist Bible on Tuesday night in Grinnell, Iowa.

Taylor, a 5-foot-10, 170-pound sophomore from Black River Falls, Wis., made 27 of 71 3-point attempts, was 52 of 108 overall from the field and added seven free throws on 10 attempts in 36 minutes.

"It felt like anything I tossed up was going in," Taylor told The Associated Press.

Rio Grande's Bevo Francis held the NCAA scoring record with 113 points against Hillsdale in 1954. In 1953, Francis had 116 against Ashland Junior College. Frank Selvy is the only other player to reach triple figures, scoring 100 points for Division I Furman against Newberry in 1954. The previous Grinnell record was 89 by Griffin Lentsch last Nov. 19 against Principia.

Link -Thanks, Duke!

(Image credit: (Cory Hall/Grinnell College/AP)

Internet old timers might recall the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness, in which Darren Barefoot posted technical writing and pictures that made your head hurt. Someone explained this to me once: the least competent person on any project is assigned to write the manual because he's not contributing much to the actual project. Other examples are due to lack of language fluency or an obligation to be overly explicit (like the above example). Anyway, the website went defunct in 2008. But Barefoot is now resurrecting it by posting the archives on Pinterest. The archive is not yet complete, and submissions are welcome. Link  -via Boing Boing

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Chow shows us how to make Buffalo Roasted Turkey in this all-singing, all-dancing musical video recipe. The turkey "dances so hard that it cooks itself." If you find the dancing a little distracting, you can access the conventional recipe at Chow. Link -via Laughing Squid

I know, you saw the title and thought "Star Wars!" Yes, the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special made the list, but it is far from the only bizarrely bad Christmas specials. Some are intentionally so, which doesn't make them any less weird. Others were an earnest grab for an audience that turned out strange, especially in hindsight. For example, check out Christmas Comes to Pac-Land.

With the success of the video game and animated series Pac-Man came the psychedelic 1982 special, Christmas Comes To Pac-Land. Pac-Man needs to save Christmas after accidentally crashing Santa’s sleigh, and does so by forming a temporary alliance with his famed ghost enemies and feeding power pellets to the reindeer.

Most of the shows on the list have some video evidence, and some are available on the net in their entirety. Link

Alfred Hitchcock made his first movie in 1924. The White Shadow was thought to have been lost forever, until three of the six reels were found mislabeled in the New Zealand Film Archive. Now the National Film Preservation Foundation has made it available online.

What made this a big deal is that "The White Shadow" is as close to being a Hitchcock film as a movie can get without actually qualifying. The director was Graham Cutts, a leading English filmmaker of the '20s. With that name, he should have been an editor. Instead, it was Hitchcock who edited it. He also wrote the script, based on a novel by the English dramatist Michael Morton, and was assistant director and art director. (Right: Hitchcock in the '20s.)

"The White Shadow" is the sort of hokey melodrama that flourished during the silent era. The plotting is shameless. The settings are overblown (an English country manor, a Parisian cabaret). The emotions are excessive.

Compson plays twins: naughty Nancy and good-girl Georgina. Nancy seems more high-spirited than evil, and Georgina's kind of a drip. Compson's pleasure in playing the two parts is palpable. It almost compensates for Clive Brook's very evident boredom as an American playboy who falls in love with one and ends up mistaking the other for her.

Read more about The White Shadow at the Boston Globe. Link

See the 42 minutes that exist of the movie at the National Film Preservation Foundation. Link

Jennifer O'Connell reports on a string of correspondence between the Hasbro toy company and her 6-year-old who noticed something odd about the game Guess Who?

 

Dear Hasbro,

My name is R______. I am six years old. I think it's not fair to only have 5 girls in Guess Who and 19 boys. It is not only boys who are important, girls are important too. If grown ups get into thinking that girls are not important they won't give little girls much care.

Also if girls want to be a girl in Guess Who they'll always lose against a boy, and it will be harder for them to win. I am cross about that and if you don't fix it soon, my mum could throw Guess Who out.

My mum typed this message but I told her what to say.

Well yeah, even though I am not familiar with the game, I also wondered why there would be such a disparity between male and female. Hasbro answered by trying to convince the child that the number of boys and girls in the game does not matter. O'Connell herself replied to the company's message, calling out Hasbro on not only their confusing explanation, but also:

Why is female gender regarded as a "characteristic", while male gender is not?

But you need to read the entire saga to understand how very confusing their logic is, including a second response from Hasbro in which they exercise damage control. Link -via Daily of the Day