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The Real Housewives of New Jersey – Season 3, Episode 4

So Melissa and Joe are off to Corrado’s market to buy turkey, “mutz,” hot and sweet sausage, six loaves of bread, and a million other food items for the gang they invited over for Thanksgiving dinner. The butcher shows them a whole pig and they tell their kids that the pig’s just “taking a nap.” “Then why are his eyes open?” one of the kids wants to know. My Uncle Donooche was kinda like that. He could sleep with his eyes open right at the kitchen table after he downed a jug of his homemade wine that he kept by his feet all through dinner. Joe goes a little crazy though with the food shopping. He wants to get pineapple. Really, Joe? You think Don Ho is coming to dinner? So then he goes and gets a stack of pies to put in the shopping cart but Melissa nixes them. What kind of Italian stoonad buys pies in a supermarket for dessert on Thanksgiving anyway? If you can’t make the dessert yourself, at least buy it from it a decent pastry shop. Fortunately, Kathy steps up on the dessert front and winds up making mini apple pies, mini pumpkin pies, three types of tiramisu, and a giant cannoli. Not a bunch of little cannolis like a normal person would make, but a giant cannoli like a Horn O’Plenty filled with ricotta and chocolate chips. As she’s whipping up the mascarpone, her Middle Eastern husband, Rich, licks the spoon and asks what she’s making. She looks at him in disbelief with those owl eyes the size of – well, giant cannolis – and explains to him that it’s tiramisu. Rich makes an excuse for his ignorance by explaining, “I’m not Italian.” Are you for real, Rich? You live in the New York/New Jersey area and you don’t know what tiramisu is? Why don’t you just go out to Thanksgiving dinner with Donald Trump and Sarah Palin at the Albanian owned pizza franchise La Famiglia, and use a fork to eat your slice? Then you can tell everyone like Sarah Palin did that she had “real New York pizza.” Meanwhile, Teresa and her zeppole husband, Joe, are hosting their own “Friends Thanksgiving” shindig so they’re on the hunt for a fresh turkey. Driving in the car, worldly Joe explains to his airhead wife that “In Italy, turkey ain’t even a holiday.” Teresa seems surprised -- not that an animal can’t be a holiday because, after all, we do have Groundhog Day, right? -- but that a European nation wouldn’t celebrate a day when Pilgrims and Native American Indians got together to party.

Frog on the Pumpkin: Today is toy shopping day

These cute little vamps are actually highly-portable 2-watt speakers known as Fangs and Howl – and they’re here just in time for Halloween. You can plant them like sentries outside your house to pipe spooky sounds at approaching tykes – or dangle them on your keychain and freak out passers-by as a scream comes from seemingly nowhere . Man, remote control toys have definitely improved since I was little. This anti-gravity runner uses air suction to run on the walls, floor and even the ceiling. Ithas fully functioning articulated legs, glowing red eyes and can move over smooth surfaces in any direction. This toy would definitely freak out any arachnophobe guest – or puppy – wandering around your house.