In the spirit of the day, this old pre-Thanksgiving cartoon is from 2002. Today’s retro cartoon running in newspapers (This could get confusing!) is, of course, an allusion to the movie Jaws. My old journalism professor Paul Burnett always said literary allusions are risky, because it will be a given that a significant portion of your readers won’t know what you’re talking about. That’s never stopped me. Cable TV and DVDs have at least given movie allusions longer shelf life. People not born when Jaws was made stand a fair chance of understanding.

The books seem to be arriving across the continent by now, and before the day is out, all preorders will be in the mail, including the international orders. Remember, the book will be available generally at this Web site on Monday.