The moment of last-minute head counts and late-night runs to the supermarket has nearly arrived. But a small but proud segment of the population simply smiles and puts their feet up. They're having Thanksgiving dinner served to them in a restaurant.

Drugmaker Merck took the painkiller Vioxx off the market in 2004, citing an increased risk of heart attacks among people taking the medicine.

Today, seven years later, the Justice Department said Merck had agreed to pay $950 million to settle charges the company went too far in marketing the drug.

The congressional supercommittee announced Monday that it failed to come to an agreement on reducing the deficit. After three months of negotiating, the Democrats and Republicans just couldn't agree on how much spending to cut or how high to raise taxes.

But this is not a story about how the left and right disagree with each other. In fact, they actually largely agree.

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. --  Federal officials revised the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) reading downward today for the third quarter. Growth wasn’t as strong as originally thought.

The official GDP for the third quarter is now 2 percent, down by a half-percent from the earlier estimate.

The Middle Tennessee State Business and Economic Research Center has just released its analysis of Tennessee’s third-quarter economic activity.

NASHVILLE, Tenn.  --  Astro Cantus is an I-phone app that gives voice to the stars.

The musical app is the brainchild of Rocky Alvey, Director of Vanderbilt’s Dyer Observatory in Nashville.

The application uses sky charts to assign musical values to the stars that are passing overhead at any given moment. At present, musical values are assigned according to the star’s brightness, but Alvey says most any astronomical data could be used.

When Talk of the Nation's Neal Conan asks for callers on a given topic, there's no telling what he'll get. Today, the show followed up with NPR's Tom Bowman on his series about the tremendous sacrifices of the "Darkhorse" Battalion — the Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment. Lance Cpl. Jake Romo lost both his legs in Afghanistan with the battalion, and he spoke with Conan and Bowman about his tour.

NASHVILLE, Tenn.  --  A former Wilson County Sheriff’s Department Lieutenant is in jail today facing a long list of charges.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation served 39 year-old Mount Juliet resident John Patrick Edwards with multiple charges yesterday after he was indicted by both the Davidson County and Wilson County grand juries.

The charges stem from offenses going back at least five years that officials say Edwards committed while serving as a police officer.

The government is expected to shut down at least 3,000 post offices — and one hobbyist who visits post offices around the country has taken notice.

Evan Kalish collects hand-cancellation marks and blogs about it on Going Postal, where he posts photographs of each location.

Kalish, who's also a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in geospatial analytics, started his hobby right out of college — and he has run up an impressive tally of how many he's visited: 2,745.

When scientists brought the Bulbophyllum nocturnum back to the Netherlands, they were perplexed. They had found the plant on the island of New Britain, near Papua New Guinea. They knew the plant came from a rare group, but the orchid's blooms would die before opening up. At least that's what the scientists thought.

The orchid's uniqueness never became clear until one scientist brought it home with him. Here's how MSNBC tells the story: