It’s Thanksgiving Day in the U.S.A. which means that our colleagues at Yankee are off for the week, leaving Johnny and I free to muck about on our own.

By coincidence, there are three particularly interesting “of the day” items running on Almanac.com today:

• What’s the best way to get rid of athlete’s foot?
• Is it difficult to grow your own saffron?
• Advice of the Day: Soak pine cones in a solution of 2 pounds Epsom salts and 1 gallon of water. When the cones are thoroughly dry, toss them into your fireplace for colorful flames.

Truth be told, Thanksgiving Day was well timed for us this year, as I’ll likely be spending a fair amount of the rest of the week assembling the digital infrastructure to support the plebiscite results tabulation on Monday.

And just to ramble off completely, let me mention that, as presaged by millions of Tivo users, the presence of an Motorola 6412 DVR from Eastlink in our house for the past three weeks has completely changed my relationship to television.

First, I haven’t seen a commercial in a long time — I just fast forward through them (this isn’t a good sign for advertisers; at the very least they’re going to have to design ads that still convey a brand message when broadcast at 4x speed).

Second, because I’m not watching commercials I can watch three shows in the space of two (an hour long show is 44 minutes of “editorial”, and I tend to fast forward through the boring “establishing the scene” segments now).

And finally, I don’t need to stay up to midnight to watch Charlie Rose any more — I just set up the show as a series recording, and watch it the next morning over breakfast (last night’s interview with Maureen Dowd was a classic).