I think Thanksgiving is a great idea. A public holiday where all you have to do is count your blessings and be grateful. Here in Canada there's usually a big family gathering and meal. Our taxpayer funded state broadcaster CBC has a new, and usually crap, call-in programme called Just Ask Me in which dim members of the public phone in their opinions in the belief that they constitute a question to a subject expert. An interesting idea very poorly executed. Anyway, the expert was a woman and the subject was how to please everyone at Thanksgiving Dinner. The problem was she hated Thanksgiving and thought anyone who celebrated it was a colonialist fascist. With such a party pooper on the end of the line, hardly anyone phoned in. Whoever booked this fantastically stupid boorish woman for the call-in should have been fired. And whoever hired the booker, also obviously a stupid person, should go as well and quite possibly their boss too should be terminated well for being so  chronically incompetent. Whatever happened to the old The Buck Stops Here? 

I hadn't realised how brilliant Lord Mountbatten was until I saw the wartime information film Burma Victory. Not. The whole film was a Mountbatten vanity project. I'm not sure now that the real architect of the British Empire 's victory of the Japanese in Burma, William Slim, even got a mention. Slim at least knew his left from his right. Which is more than can be said for the odious Mountbatten. It has been said, with only some exaggeration, that Mountbatten's South East Asia Command headquarters in Ceylon, had more personnel than the 14th Army in Burma. But the Americans liked working with a Real Life English Dook. And maybe that counted for something. By the way, I understand there are two versions of Burma Victory. One celebrates the reconquest of Burma. The American version celebrates how swell they and their Chinese allies are.

I've seen a couple of photos of young women murdered in Scotland over the past few months - obviously plucked from so-called social media. I can't work out whether the girls have been victims of badly botched plastic surgery or have used some kind of creepy inadequate Internet photo filter that for some reason they think makes them look more attractive. Now, I know what's considered pretty changes from decade to decade but when did the bad botox horror look come in? Is there are crazy incompetent plastic surgeon working for dead cheap in central Scotland? I hope not. I hope what a saw was down to flawed photo software.

Several years ago I was forced to read a history of North American Indians called The Inconvenient Indian by an American writer based in Canada called Thomas King who was marketed as indigenous. By the end I thought I Could Have Written That. So, I decided to look into King's credentials as an indigenous writer. He turned out to be a privileged Greek kid from California who had been told his deadbeat dad was of Cherokee descent. OK, but if he hung out with his Cherokee grandparents during the school holidays.... Nope, no evidence of that even. King has just admitted he has no Cherokee blood. He gave the impression this "revelation" followed a report from a family tree specialist he had commissioned. In fact, a US group that specialises in exposing Pretendians had called him up to answer some questions raised by their research. Now there is a big fuss here among the chattering classes. But I can't understand why. I'm a great believer in nurture being more important than nature. Was King supposed to have some deep rooted racial knowledge buried in his DNA that made him indigenous? That's surely pure racism. Turns out he was just a little Greek-American who decided he was an Indian. Good career move. A number of what I consider Professional Indians have said King's confession has not come as a surprise. So, why didn't they call him out? Put it this way, people in glass houses know they shouldn't throw stones.

I think maybe perhaps it's time the Royal Family decided to implement a ban on sex with citizens of the United States of America. It often doesn't turn out very well. Edward VIII stopped being Edward VIII so he could marry the obnoxious Wallis-Simpson. Constitutional Crisis negotiated but the abdication tainted with later Nazi overtones. Did he really mean when he declared Something Must Be Done during a visit to some economically distressed part of England that all the Jews should be killed? Then we have the present family rift following Prince Harry's marriage to the toxic Meghan Markle. Yet another American divorcee - will they never learn? Prince Nice-but-Dim simply married someone just like his mother. Now Prince Andrew is no longer Prince Andrew because of sex parties in America set up by Robert "The Bouncing Czech" Maxwell's daughter and her creepy boyfriend. Double trouble mixing with a Maxwell and teenage American girls.