Well, it's that time of year again, when folks are in the late stages of digesting their Thanksgiving turkey and fixins (we hosted again this year...lovely party and wonderful food, but the digestion part, the prep and the cleanup and of course the needle number on the old bathroom scale, should you dare to get on it, can cause a fleeting frown or two). But the point is that Thanksgiving inevitably heralds the SEASON OF RUNAWAY HOLIDAY COMMERCE, FABULOUS, ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME DEALS AND SKY-HIGH CREDIT-CARD BALANCES...and your bucks don't buy as much as they used to, do they?

Naturally we want to get in on this maelstrom of monetary opportunity like everybody else with something to sell. Only we missed BLACK FRIDAY entirely on account of we were still recovering from Thanksgiving (uurrrp) and, by the way, "the black" is something you will no longer be "in" if you let all those super-unmissablke Black Friday deals get into your pocketbook.

As if that wasn't enough, today, for any of you who have retreated into your well-stocked, concrete-and-steel Survival Shelters or got in arrears on your cable bill, is officially known as CYBER MONDAY, when all sorts of state-of-the-art electronics, gadgets, aps, programs, games and 3D "alternate reality" goggles that will make your real life seem terribly, even suicidally dull are put on sale--for one day only (or so they'd have us believe)--so you can get even closer to the poorhouse.

I'm proud to say that we don't indulge in such things. Firstly because we're about as tech-savvy as a three-toed sloth, and secondly because we love and revere ze olt dayz when your new American Flyer electric train came with a soft-plastic ampule that puffed wisps of most-likely carcinogenic smoke out of the engine's smokestack. Wow-Eee, eh? Or that very first go-kart (see image below) that had drive to just one rear wheel and came from the mail-order company that built it with just a single brake on that same rear wheel. Then again, it would have been quite a handful if the drive was on one rear wheel and the brake was on the other, n'est ce pas? (and, yes, that's me below, working on my carburetor's air cleaner with a pair of vise-grips)

In any case, we surely want to get in on the ground floor of the Christmas Rush but, since we're mired in the past and don't do or understand "cyber" around here, we're instituting "DANGEROUS OLD BRITISH FLOOR JACKS MONDAY" (see images below) in hopes that you will spend money with us (we could sure use it!) and give gifts that will take your friends and loved ones back to a simpler, more agreeable time.

It looks like some sort of horrid torture device from The Inquisition, doesn't it?