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Wednesday and Thursday's Most Active Threads

by Jeff Steele last modified Nov 24, 2023 11:19 AM

The topics with the most engagement since Tuesday included weird things that in-laws do, Kate Middleton's legs, a father tracking his adult daughter with an AirTag, and redevelopment of the Chevy Chase Community Center.

Thanksgiving is traditionally one of the slowest days on DCUM as users are travelling, spending time with family, or, like me, spending a great deal of time cooking. Since I took yesterday off from this blog, I'll review the most active threads of the last two days. Both days, as expected, had much less traffic than normal days. The Gaza war thread was back at the top of the most active list, but with barely more than 100 posts a day, the thread is a shadow of what it once was, previously receiving more than 900 posts a day. The second most active thread, the one about Covid lockdowns, was also one I've previously covered. The third most active thread, and the first one I will discuss today, is mostly a repeated topic even though the thread itself is new. Titled, "Come here if your in laws do weird crap at thanksgiving." and posted in the "Family Relationships" forum, the original poster claims that her father-in-law flosses his teeth at the table. Based on the original poster's example, I assume that this thread was meant to highlight strange idiosyncrasies, but it almost immediately turned into a general complaint thread, mostly about mothers-in-law. One of the first examples — a mother-in-law who attempted to divide a rotisserie chicken with her bare hands, was not considered by everyone to be strange behavior and caused a long-running argument between posters. Disagreement about whether the mother-in-law was wrong was still continuing 13 pages later. Another example, serving ham slices rolled around a dill pickle and cream cheese, was also not seen as weird by all posters and actually inspired several posters to try it. Frankly, most of these posts could have gone into the "petty vents" thread that I discussed earlier this week because none of them really amounted to much. Another example that was not universally received as being weird, but rather funny by most who responded, involved a long-delayed wedding gift. Apparently, the poster's sister-in-law went down in her basement and retrieved a wedding gift that had been meant for the poster's husband's first marriage 30 years ago. The poster, in her own words, "pitched a fit" and made her sister-in-law take it back. Several posters wanted to know what the gift was, a question that could not be answered since the gift was not opened. Moreover, it later turned out that this happened last Thanksgiving, not even this year. I didn't realize that serving Thanksgiving buffet style is the current trend (at least according to this thread), but a number of the "weird" behaviors involved how food was served for the holiday meal with mother-in-laws often being found out of sync.

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