• We are thankful we now have a way to make it up to Ned Lamont. Three years ago, Ned gave us an alternative to Joe Lieberman and we didn't take him up on it. Then Joe turned into more of a douchebag than we could have imagined. Thank you for running for governor, Ned. You can have the whole damn state. We owe it to you.

• We are thankful Jerry Springer is now hanging out in downtown Greenwich to prove that not all rich people are classy — if it hadn't been proven by all those Wrestling Lady for Senate ads.

• We are thankful Oprah is giving it up. Yes, in 1986 there was a serious need for a strong black female role model on television, but has this woman's career really left our culture with a net gain? There are the kooky health cures and weepy book club picks. There's Dr. Phil. Oprah's recent big scoop was the unveiling of the Stamford chimp-attack woman's face — and admit it, despite Charla Nash's enduring spirit, you were seriously grossed out.

• We are thankful that the 15 minutes of fame given to Levi Johnston and Carrie Prejean must be coming to an end. Both are these individuals have, in some way or another, done porn. Even in this tarty culture, is there anywhere to go from there? Johnston, the famed Alaska impregnator, is featured semi-nude in Playgirl (who knew Playgirl was still around?), following a year of siphoning off what little cultural worth Sarah Palin had to offer. Prejean, the ex-beauty queen known for her divinely approved fake tits and stance against "opposite marriage," dropped her suit against the Miss California USA pageant 15 seconds after the pageant's lawyers played a self-recorded video of Prejean dildo-ing herself, which she'd sent to a boyfriend — something that has to kill your career when you're a professional martyr for evangelicals. Forgive us for being inappropriate, Carrie, but it looks like you literally and figuratively went and fucked yourself.

• We are thankful Danbury area anti-immigration whack job John McGowan is making his downfall so entertaining. McGowan is known for his stone-faced support for the mass shooting of illegal immigrants on Comcast public access and was recently arrested for allegedly putting his girlfriend in a headlock and raping her up the behind. Neither of those are funny. What's hilarious is McGowan's repeated insistence to a Litchfield Superior Court judge that the court has no jurisdiction over him as a "natural man." Apparently, McGowan is the one who isn't a U.S. citizen now that he's looking at 20 years. Read a few courtroom dispatches at HatCityBLOG (which is something else we're thankful for).

• We are thankful the free press issue facing Fairfield University and its student-run newspaper The Mirror has gotten national attention. It slightly lessens the chances a 32-year-old publication will get squashed because of one crappy column about victimizing sluts and hoodrats.

• We are thankful John McCain has gone back to being someone we like, the old guy who feigns a smile and makes nice bipartisan-seeming remarks on Sunday news shows and then goes away.

• We are thankful that giant corporations sometimes don't fuck up the cultural icons that land in their hands. A reboot of Star Trek, Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox filmed by Wes Anderson, ex-Robin Dick Grayson taking over as Batman for a few months in DC Comics. These things all somehow managed not to suck.

• We are thankful for tea-baggers. Finally, a living, breathing representation of the horrors that exist within the id of the conservative movement. A throng of gun-crazy, fat white people screaming about living in an anti-constitutional, Nazi-communist New World Order because the president is a Kenyan Muslim demonstrates how Republican principles are a step backwards better than Sean Hannity ever could.

• We are thankful Garden Catering opened an eighth location, this one in Fairfield, because we can't get enough of that shit.

• We are thankful for Infestation, Ted Victoria's awesome public art display in Ridgefield. Have you seen this thing? Every night, beams of light are projected through tanks of brine scrimp aimed out of windows of the Aldrich Museum's administrative building on Main Street. From the outside, it looks like giant, shadowy brine are swimming through the building. See it before it closes Nov. 29.

• We are thankful Sarah Palin has somehow become less presidential than she was last year. After she quit the governorship of Alaska after two-thirds of a term, ignited the "death panel" hysteria via a Facebook entry and started pissing matches with McCain staffers over 2008 gaffes we were close to forgetting, the end of the world as foretold by the Mayan calendar seems more of a likely possibility for 2012 than President-Elect Sarah Palin.

• Nothing on President Obama's agenda is going well — closing Gitmo, leaving Iraq, fixing the health care system, restarting the economy, getting banks and carmakers back on their feet, or regaining focus in Afghanistan. Actually, a regular date night with Michelle is the only campaign promise Obama has managed to keep. But we are thankful to have a president that is addressing the issues that make America a super-sized third-world country.