Looking for some art work to illustrate today's post and was taken with this. I imagine someone told the kid to try drawing a hand and then put feet at the wrist and a face on the thumb and voila! You got a turkey!

A HISTORICAL, CHEMICAL, GASTRONOMICAL, LIMERICKAL, CINEMATICAL, MUSICAL THANKSGIVING POST.

Food, family, and imaginary friend-free!

My favorite (next to Festivus) cause there’s no religion.
And is there a more heartwarming compound word in the language than the one that combines gratitude with generosity?

But before playtime resumes, let's examine the historical record.
Like most long-standing tradition based holidays, we celebrate despite having to view it through a haze of hype, and end up mything the point.

The facts surrounding life in and around Plymouth Rock circa 1621 are sketchy, but no doubt about fact that the Pilgrims didn’t create the Thanksgiving tradition, or even celebrate it in the manner we were taught.



They just got the credit many years later in 1863 when Lincoln (urged on by writer/editor and author of Mary Had a Little Lamb--Sarah Josepha Hale) initiated the first official thanksgiving holiday to boost the nation’s morale and instill some much needed sense of national unity amidst the bloody carnage of the civil war.




But if there’s any kernel of truth to the tale of the Pilgrims, it would arise from the assumption that they would have been foolish not to practice some degree of diplomacy with their native hosts or risk being regarded as godless heathens given their surprising and uninvited arrival. And considering their lack of experience and skills at providing for themselves in their new found primitive predicament, it certainly behooved them to show some gratitude to the Wampanoag Native Americans for helping them learn to plant seeds and fish.



Unfortunately, it’s mostly wishful thinking that they behaved any better than any other entitled European paternalistic “white supremacist ” invader, despite their self identification as outcasts and victims of oppression. I only recently discovered that all were not “separatists” on the Mayflower by a long shot, and approx. half of them were just tagging along for various reasons of their own (including providing protection and labor for profit) and not affiliated with their religious freedom seeking shipmates. Wonder if these others were the one’s who chilled peacefully and broke bread with the natives-- and history recorded it all wrong and credited the less tolerant party with the now legendary hospitable gesture.

But enough politics, let’s talk turkey.

This is tryptophan and I’m not showing it here to boast of any understanding of chemical structure, but to share with you the irrefutable evidence that the structure appears to resemble a turkey!

AND…according to Wikipedia, Triptophan has been unjustly accused and is not the chief culprit responsible for post -thanksgiving meal malaise :

"…feast-induced drowsiness"—and, in particular, the common post-Christmas and North American post-Thanksgiving dinner drowsiness—may be the result of a heavy meal rich in carbohydrates, which, via an indirect mechanism, increases the production of sleep-promoting melatonin in the brain.”

…AND THE TURKEY COULDA BEEN A CONTENDA!

From Adam Gopnik in last week’s New Yorker…

Benjamin Franklin disliked the choice of the bald eagle as the national bird, and it was in a letter to his daughter, in 1784, that he proposed putting the turkey in its place. The eagle, Franklin points out, is “a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. . . . He watches the labor of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him.” Truly, a one-per-cent kind of bird. The turkey, however, represented to Franklin the best of bourgeois Philadelphia values. The turkey is not only a native; “He is besides, though a little vain and silly, a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.”


TIME FOR A LIMERICK INTERLUDE

There were cousins and uncles and aunts
Turkey, stuffing, and wine made in France
Then a shot from the sky!
Diving into the pie!
Went the top button off of my pants



From a web site: Today I found Out.

“Due to the white meat being the most popular part of the bird, turkeys have been bred to have huge breasts—so much so, that today’s domesticated turkeys are unable to mate cause those boobies get in the way of male attempts to mount the female. Thus, most hatcheries use artificial insemination to fertilize the eggs…”

Wow…just like the humans in some areas of Los Angeles.


I FOUND A VIDEO ONLINE THAT GRAPHICALLY DOCUMENTED HOW TO LIBERATE A TURKEY FROM THE BONDS OF ITS MORTAL COIL--BUT DECIDED IT MIGHT INADVERTENTLY CONVERT A FEW READERS TO VEGETARIANISM AND DISAPPOINT THE MANY HARD WORKING SOULS OUT THERE WHO HAVE WORKED LONG HOURS PREPARING THEIR FINE HOLIDAY FOWL. BUT FOR THOSE MORE CURIOUS THAN EPICURIOUS...CHECK IT OUT AT:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-klein/how-to-kill-a-turkey_b_1104583.html


Returning now to a lighter and perhaps even trite tone of blog... here’s something shorter and sweeter than anything else you’re likely to see these days from these two altacocker’s...but Rudy at the end just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.



POFT:

Pilgrims ate popcorn at the first Thanksgiving dinner.

NOTABLE QUOTABLES

“There is no sincerer love than the love of food.” –George Bernard Shaw

“Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.” –William Faulkner

“I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.” –Jon Stewart

“Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.” –Horace


This has nothing to do with Thanksgiving. The Video is a blurry mess, though the sound is pretty good...and I have no explanation for why I'm posting it other than that it makes me happy and oh...what a band!!!

MAVIS STAPLES! vocals
DAVE SANBORN! sax
HIRAM BULLOCK! (RIP) guitar
JEFF HEALEY! guitar
DR. JOHN! piano
MARCUS MILLER! bass
BRENDA V. BROWNE! keys
OMAR HAKIM! drums (I think that’s him)

ENJOY AND HAPPY GOBBLER GOBBLING.