
If you want to be first in line to buy Christmas presents for your loved ones for nickels on the dollar, even if they’re worth pennies at best, you need to be prepared.
Last year’s new fad was for stores to reopen at midnight Friday instead of waiting until Friday’s been up and running for a few hours first. This year, many stores think midnight is too long to wait for shoppers to come fork over all the monies, and are reopening Thanksgiving evening, around the same time that some families are accustomed to holding their Thanksgiving. On the bolder end of the spectrum, Old Navy plans to open on Thanksgiving at 9 a.m. I’m sure they’re not alone in rejecting the holiday’s existence altogether.
Clearly if one wants to win at two-day Black Friday, the old single-day Black Friday playbook needs to be shredded and competitive shoppers need to rethink their strategies. Because, like Black Friday, this new tradition of Black Thursday isn’t just about Christmas survival. It’s about Christmas victory.









If the stakes were catastrophic enough, the training techniques were sufficiently intensive, and the world were just that unforgiving, who’s to say preteens couldn’t be accelerated to maturity and transmogrified into hardened soldiers like today’s eighteen-year-old American military volunteers?

On tonight’s new episode of The Tom Neville Show, “Dead Man Walking”, the best scene was shockingly not a Neville scene. Near the very end, a new character rides into the town of Willoughby, a mysterious Dr. Horn whose high-level connection to the Patriots implies big trouble ahead for our man Neville and his gang. I’m excited because, even though all Dr. Horn did this week was literally ride into town and wave hi, he’s played by Željko Ivanek (at right in the above photo), a recurring supporter from the great Homicide: Life on the Street who’s popped into dozens of movies throughout my lifetime and made them better places to be, for at least the span of his own scenes. If Revolution is adding him as a Big Bad, then…well, between him and last week’s strong episode, I may consider being excited about the frequent scenes that don’t have Giancarlo Esposito in them.
A fake reader lurking within my subconscious writes:


