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Thursday, November 26, 2015

Happy Thanksgiving!


11/26/201511/26/201411/26/201311/26/201211/26/201111/26/2010
Turkey Dinner At Home$50.11$49.41$49.04$49.48$49.20$43.47

Yearly averages from 1986 through 2011 at this site.

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On Thanksgiving Day, Thank You, John D.

Reposting from a few days ago:
There's a nice article in this month's issue of The Smithsonian: "Quakers With A Vengeance: How Nantucket Came To Be The Whaling Capital of America" by a most famous authority on the subject and best-selling author, Nathaniel Philbrick. It's a great article. If there was a shortcoming in the article, it was Philbrick's failure to give credit to the man who "saved the whale." John D. Rockefeller was singularly responsible for saving multiple whale species, maybe all whale species, from extinction.

From the linked article:
By 1760, the Nantucketers had virtually exterminated the local whale population. By that time, however, they had enlarged their whaling sloops and outfitted them with brick tryworks capable of processing the oil on the open ocean. Now, since it was no longer necessary to return to port as often to deliver bulky blubber, their fleet had a far greater range. By the advent of the American Revolution, Nantucketers had reached the verge of the Arctic Circle, the west coast of Africa, the east coast of South America and the Falkland Islands to the south.
In a speech before Parliament in 1775, the British statesman Edmund Burke cited the island’s inhabitants as the leaders of a new American breed—a “recent people” whose success in whaling had exceeded the collective might of all of Europe. Living on an island nearly the same distance from the mainland as England was from France, Nantucketers developed a British sense of themselves as a distinct and exceptional people, privileged citizens of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “Nation of Nantucket.” 
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Ring Christmas Bell, Ray Conniff Singers

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