By Brian Williams, Anchor and managing editor

Judging by the early numbers for "Black Friday" and the traffic my wife and I encountered on the Jersey Turnpike yesterday, Americans were feeling robust (or at least marginally better) this weekend, where spending and driving were concerned. Then we came to work today and learned (officially) that we've been in a recession for some time. My friend who is an economist says there's a bright side to this: If we've indeed been in a recession for a while, and it started before we knew it, therefore it may end sooner than we're expecting it to. On the other hand, the Dow fell so far and so quickly this afternoon...we had to go on the network with a special report at the 4pm closing bell.

I hope you had a good, safe and family-filled Thanksgiving weekend. I hope you can join us tonight.

I can't remember exactly when I stumbled on the blog CalculatedRisk, but as a budding obsessive consumer of non-traditional financial media, I very quickly made CR my homepage, and found myself checking in with CalculatedRisk, his blog-partner Tanta, and their colorful gang of regular commenters several times a day. Tanta had a long career in mortgage banking and saying she knew her stuff is a massive understatement. She didn't just understand incredibly complicated topics down to the granular level, she could explain them to the layperson in an engaging way: she was quite simply one of the wittiest people to ever sit at a keyboard. Tanta's posts were always required reading, but I think I enjoyed watching her interact with readers in the comments section most of all, in threads that would go on and on. Sometimes it felt like eavesdropping on the most interesting dinner party conversation you ever heard, and the subject at hand was mortgage-backed securities.

Nothing I can say here would do justice to Tanta's writing, so I urge anyone who stops by the DailyNightly to go on over to CalculatedRisk and browse through the archives. Tragically, the archives are all we have. Tanta died yesterday morning after a long battle with ovarian cancer. I had a terrible time sleeping last night thinking of how much the world needs the kind of honestly and fearlessness Tanta brought to her blog. I never knew her "in real life" but I hope in hers-- which was much too short-- she realized how deeply she touched so many of her readers.

Doris Dungey-- Tanta-- was 47.