The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Thursday November 24th, 2022 – Thanksgiving Day
Thanksgiving Day is a harvest festival celebrated primarily in Canada and the United States. Traditionally, it is a time to give thanks for the harvest and express gratitude in general. While perhaps religious in origin, Thanksgiving is now primarily identified as a secular holiday.
The Brain Game by Jan Sand
This is an attempt of an amateur to explain my own view of the nature of what I am and how I function. I make no claims of validity or expertise in this area, merely indicate it is what makes sense to me and invokes no elements of other than what seems necessary and logical. I have been involved with various discussions in this area in different internet sites and have discovered that much of the speculation wanders off into cultural and even metaphysical prejudices which seem to me to be illogical and unnecessary.
As an exhibition designer I became involved in assisting, back in 1960, in supplementary side exhibits of the nature and functioning of the brain for a New York firm. At that time, I knew almost nothing in this area although I had been through several scientific courses in my education and had a very rough concept of some of the main aspects. Obviously, a great deal more is known today in neurological research since the tools are far better and more precise, but it seems to me that the field still has a long way to go to collate and comprehend the possibilities. In that sense this permits me to roam extensively in my speculations.
To aid me in my exhibit project I was privileged to be assisted by a neurologist who provided me with several preserved human brains and we disassembled them to reveal the various sections and how they integrated to contribute to the system. It presented the understanding that each of the sensory inputs for hearing, sight, touch etc. were allocated special areas of the brain for processing and tailoring the nerve inputs so that the more abstract analytical sectors could fit the information into an overall dynamic pattern that could be used to simulate the external world in a useful way.
Continue reading HERE!
Thanksgiving Dinner #poem by Dr. Lawrence Nannery
“Pennsylvania woods.
A grey day, in season.
Grey winds blow with mastery.
On the ground, in the clearings,
Mottled browns on brown.”
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Reflections on The Thanksgiving Turkey as Ritual Scapebird: An Unconventional Narrative by Dr. Emanuel Paparella
Since the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock the turkey has been tied to the American character and sense of national identity. Its transformation as mentioned in the second quote above, also hints at a transformation in the American character. To be sure, traditionally the bird has not been a respected figure in America. The turkey is ceremonially linked to Thanksgiving, the oldest holiday in the United States but at the same time it is culturally rooted in ambiguity. Benjamin Franklyn proposal to adopt it as the nation’s symbol rather than the bold eagle, was more in the nature of a joke than anything else. In 1984, Andrew Feinberg wrote in The New York Times that by 1873, “turkey” had come to mean an advantage or easy profit; soon the word came to refer to anyone who could be easily duped or caught. According to Wicked Words, students before and after 1945 used the term to characterize an incompetent person who continually makes mistakes.
Turkey bashing can be traced back in part to the “turkey shoots” of colonial times. In the turkey shoot, live turkeys were tied to trees or put in boxes to be shot in the head. The “sport” is based on the shooting of wild turkeys at roost in the trees. According to a writer in 1838, turkeys are “easily killed at roosts, because the one being killed, the others sit fast.” Thus a “turkey shoot” came to signify a simple task or an easy target. Surprising to many, the bird the early Europeans encountered was not the bird that dominates modern hunters’ discourse.
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Sceptic feathers #51 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas
For more Sceptic feathers HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
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