DAVIDBLAINE!

Hope everybody had a lovely Thanksgiving. I ate a lot. A lot. I'm still full. I'm boiling myself a turkey carcass to make soup today - "Waste not, want not", as the Pilgrims said - and trying to figure out what to do with fifteen containers of leftover sweet potato casserole. Thanksgiving is expensive. I'm not going to tell you what my free-range, organic, died-with-a-smile-on-its-face bird from Whole Foods cost ($55. It cost $55) but I will say this: It was damn good.

The only bummer was missing David Blaine spinning in a gyroscope near Times Square. Quick question: What the hell is wrong with that man? Remember when David Blaine did magic? He was pretty damn amazing. So amazing, in fact, that he just might be the devil - which is fine as long as he keeps doing really cool magic. The problem is, he's not doing really cool magic anymore; instead, he's doing these ridiculous feats of - for lack of a better word - retardation. FROZEN IN A BLOCK OF ICE! BURIED ALIVE! GROWING INCREASINGLY PRUNY IN A GIANT GOLDFISH BOWL! I mean, I guess it's interesting in a "look what his body can endure" kind of way, but I can't help thinking that instead of watching a true guru or even a fantastic showman, I'm just watching someone with a death wish. That said, if you think that that stopped me from hauling ass in the pouring rain to watch David Blaine dangling over Times Square in a gyroscope, you don't know me at all.

David Blaine (Or as I like to call him, "Davidblaine") had until 6 am to get unshackled from the dangling gyroscope so that a hundred needy kids from could win a shopping spree at Target. The big "ooh!" about it all was that he was chained to the gyroscope for two days straight as it rotated eight times a minute, twenty-four hours a day, clouding his brain and making the unshackling more dramatic. Because they kept making such a fuss about the Target-sponsored shopping spree (while keeping awfully mum about what would happen to the poor little suckers if a woozy Davidblaine failed), I couldn't help but think that this little stunt might be more than a little rigged. Not that I would know, since by the time we got there Davidblaine was gone. Apparently he got fed up with the cold and the rain and the lack of tasty eats and decided to get out of there ASAP, making for a less-than-spectacular spectacle, if you ask me. A father/son tourist team saw our disappointed faces and drawled that we hadn't missed much. ("It wudn't very excitin", I think was the sum-up.) My sentiments exactly.

What IS exciting is Casino Royale. Two words about the new Bond: Yum-my.