Good evening, and welcome to the Voodoo Bungalow. Despite being described by, well, more than one person as "brittle," we're actually pretty relaxed tonight here at the bungalow. It's not hard to take it a bit easy on one's cushy suburban life when 18,000 people have just lost their lives in Pakistan. Kind of puts interior decorating disputes (do vases of tall flowers enhance or detract from the French abstract lithographs in front of which they've been placed?) in perspective. Anyone want to take bets on how long it takes Pat Robertson to blame Ellen Degeneres for the massive destruction? Or Islam?


Hosting Thanksgiving dinner here on Monday. In the spirit of suburban voodoo, here in the bungalow we've opted to make complicated cranberry sauce involving the crushing of green cardamom pods, the dicing of recalcitrant dried apricots, various sacrifices to the angry tiki gods and 22 minutes of nail biting to see if the concoction would "pop." Here to tell you that what we have in the fridge is cranberry sauce that tastes exactly like canned cranberry but without the thwacka thwacka fwoop we love so dearly. You know what I'm talking about.