Carl Pettit
Carl Pettit is a columnist, editor and writer working for an array of colorful publications. He specializes in cultural and social issues, as well as East Asia, politics and satire.
Christmastime should be about family, generosity and good cheer, but sometimes there are a few baddies lurking about to spoil everyone’s fun. We’re talking about nasty Christmas villains here. Thankfully most of them are merely figments of some storyteller’s imagination. But not all of them. There are always a few real life Yuletide rogues out there just waiting to make a mess of the winter holidays.
Most people are familiar with the massive, and very impressive, Christmas tree that graces New York City’s Rockefeller Center every year. This tree has come to symbolize the holiday season for millions of people, and is something of national icon, appearing as a backdrop in countless movies and television specials.
This week, families will come together from all across the nation for Thanksgiving. They will stuff themselves full of turkey, side dishes and desserts. Some will laugh and joke with relatives, while others renew old feuds and bicker with their cousins and siblings. No matter how your particular Thanksgiving winds up, you can thank the American Pilgrims for starting this long-standing custom.
Thanksgiving is a time for the family to come together, tell stories, then sit down and feast on some tasty, belly-expanding deliciousness. Turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie are all Thanksgiving staples, but if you want to really spice things up a bit this year, we have some ideas.
These days, most of the turkeys people gobble down are fattened up on farms. They’re only pale (under their feathers) imitations of the lean, mean turkeys roaming through the woods of North America
The universe is a pretty amazing place, from the unimaginably large, right down to the incredibly small. There’s an awful lot going on in this field we call "existence."
If you’re a TV and cinema buff, as well as a barfly, you just might be able to combine your passions together. The characters inhabiting our film and television fantasy worlds need places to hang out, just like we do.
"Canyoning" to the rest of the world, known as "canyoneering" in the United States, is a sport that combines the adventure of rock climbing and bouldering with hiking and orienteering, as well as rappelling, cliff jumping and some very difficult swims.
Everyone knows that vampires suck … your blood!!!! Seriously though, do you know the history behind modern vampire lore? These creatures of the night have been lurking around for a very long time, although the princes and princesses of darkness have taken on different guises and mythologies throughout the ages.
When the moon is full, do you have an uncontrollable craving for raw meat, or perhaps the desire to rip off all of your clothes and run through the forest screaming your head off? Get in line, buddy. But if twice a month you notice a lot of excessive hair growing all over your body, and you turn into a wolf, ummmm ...then you're probably a werewolf.
The search for Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster union boss who was purportedly murdered by the Mafia in 1975, still flares up from time to time — even though Hoffa was declared legally dead, absent his body, in 1982. It seems that good ol’ Jimmy just doesn’t want to go away: he still might turn up in (or rather, beneath) a Michigan driveway.
The United Nations deals with some pretty serious business, especially in a world climate as dangerous as this one, but even so, this august body of world representatives can get pranked now and again. It just so happens that two very audacious Canadian radio talk show hosts managed to pull a fast one on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Our comedic brethren up north called into the U.N. this week and pretended they had Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada, on the line.