More than 1,300 nutters participated in the Mother of all Goldberg Machines, the biggest chain reaction this side of Big Bang, the 11th Annual Friday After Thanksgiving Chain Reaction organized by the MIT Museum.

The event was led by famous artist and chain reaction creator Arthur Ganson, who counted with smaller Goldberg machines brought by teams from all over the country.

Doesn’t look like Black Friday escaped the sad face known as the US economy — the NPD Group just ran the numbers and found that overall sales during the weekend after Thanksgiving went down eight percent from 2007, which is the first decline ever.

Nielsen BookScan figures show unit sales up 6% in Thanksgiving week.

Just recently, I’ve started getting serious about using coupons and am finding they’re more widely available than I realized–and can save me quite a bit of money. The New York Times even reported on Thanksgiving that more and more online retailers are offering coupons to entice shoppers in this rough economy.

I’ve been enjoying nutritious, delectable pecans all month, thanks to a packet sent by the Georgia Pecan people (November is their big month). Here’s my favorite breakfast that keeps me going well into the lunch hour: Whisk 1 egg and a little milk in a shallow bowl, then add cooked brown rice, about 1/3 cup or so (not so much that it’s thick).

We’re still not over Sony’s trickeration — which led us to believe the version 2.53 firmware update was hitting prior to the US Thanksgiving holiday — but we’re not ones to turn down a free update under any circumstances. As of now (as in, right now), Sony’s PlayStation 3 can support full screen embedded Flash videos courtesy of the latest firmware, so there’s really no excuse for you not firing up the System Update and sucking it down.

Interviews with a dozen independent booksellers found business during Thanksgiving week ranging from surprisingly good to dismal. The runaway hit of the week, in the words of more than one bookseller, was “anything by Stephenie Meyer,” and several stores reported having trouble keeping her books in stock. Even with the generally good week, however, most stores said November was a down month and several said they moved up book returns from January to the fall.

As one of the joys of Thanksgiving, you’ll be eating turkey sandwiches for the next week. But what about the other fifty-one weeks of the year, when you catch yourself staring down a pizza box first thing in the morning? Before you simply cram that clammy slice into your mouth, consider these recipes for true [...]

I’m not going to lie: I have a place to go for Thanksgiving (my uncle and aunt’s house in Cape Cod). But there are millions of us out there right now that don’t have a place to go (home) to on Thanksgiving, and I wanted to say, “Friends, it’s really OK.

A man who allegedly threatened neighbors with a knife on Thanksgiving was beaten with a large decorative candy cane wielded by a bystander, Sacramento police said.