A Lite Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 26, 1998 by Dave Winer.

Thanksgiving 1998. What a strange idea!

Next year, we'll be on the cusp of the year 2000.

We'll be looking back not at a single year, we'll have to summarize a thousand years, and look forward a thousand years.

Who wants to make our New Millenium Resolutions? A heavy responsibility. Heavy heavy.

And who will be the Person of the Millenium? Thomas Jefferson? Muhammed Ali? Mahatma Ghandi? Deepak Chopra? Bonnie Raitt? Alan Greenspan?

No such problem this Thanksgiving, no weighty pronouncements today, that's the first thing to be thankful for.

Hey it's a 'lite' year. Seems to be a happy time. That's good!

Maybe next year and the year after will be OK too?

Thumbs up!

Properly done 

Of course Thanksgiving is about giving thanks.

Properly done, Thanksgiving is also about giving people a break. Loosen the ties, cut some slack. No one's perfect, even on a major holiday. Of course. Especially not on a major holiday.

I'm already gorging myself with my best friends today, and I thought I wouldn't write this morning, but I was mistaken.

In my mind I'm going to Carolina. That's the song on the player today. Can't you just feel the moon shine? I might have heard the highway calling! Signs that might be omens. Hey babe, the sky's on fire! Ain't no doubt about it love's the finest thing around.

Oscar night 

Thanksgiving is like Oscar night. Thank you thank you. Thanks to all the little people. And thanks to all the teachers, and thanks to all the people who are missing. And especially thanks to the people who are gone.

So today I'd like to thank my friends and teachers. And thanks to Frontier users and developers and all the great people at UserLand.

A special thanks to Alan Greenspan for bailing out the US stock market!

Thanks to Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Anne Tyler and Douglas Coupland for influencing me as a writer.

Thanks for the folks at mozilla.org for believing in a two-browser system.

Thanks to our platform vendors, Microsoft and Apple, for providing easy to use systems that are inexpensive and popular with the people we develop software for.

Thanks to the inventors of TCP and HTTP and HTML for freeing us from the tyranny of the platform vendors!

Thanks to XML for providing hope of compatibility across platforms, operating systems, and economic systems.

Friends 

Thanks to my friend Bernie DeKoven, for being chaotic and fun-loving (all my friends are!) but also being systematic about it. ;->

Thanks to my friend Marc Canter, for inventing multimedia and having the courage to build a digital city in Italy.

Thanks to my friend Bernd Steffan, for being the Abraham Lincoln of my own personal growth movement. (Lincoln freed the slaves.)

Y'all come now! 

I'm playing a little game on the Scripting News home page this afternoon. It's open, you can play too. Scroll to the end of the page for the question. Who or what are you thankful for today? Be giddy, contrite, gushy, silly, any fun or loving way you like..

http://www.scriptingnews.com/1998/11/26

It's open to everyone who reads DaveNet. If you're in Europe, Asia, South America, Africa or Oceana, or in the parts of North America where today is not a special day, and want to have some Thanksgiving fun, y'all come now. And if you're in the USA, celebrating or not, you can come play with us today too.

See you on the web!

Dave Winer

PS: Thanks to all the people I can't thank publicly. I wish I could!