Vintage Thanksgiving Day Roast Turkey

You there! Am I to understand you feel yourself qualified to dine upon my roasted flesh? Pardon me, but it is to laugh!

Have you failed to take note of my breeding, my station? My top hat is cocked at a superior angle. My cape hangs off my shoulderless frame in such a way as to convey the pride of my lineage. My walking stick—purchased from the finest bird haberdasher on the eastern seaboard—is worth more than your great aunt Myrtle's trousseau.

That you should partake of me. Why, it strains propriety.

I shall wander these forlorn streets in search of the man who deserves this bounty. Today is my day, and I will have satisfaction.

Until then, good day!

(Thanks to Dr. Bea for the referral. You should know the good doctor has a knack for digging up turkey-themed horrors. "Enjoy" these posts about Spammy, Manny's, and the Turkey Hooker.)



Addendum: Visit with the ghosts of Thanksgivings past: 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

Spammy Fortified Turkey Spread

If there's anything less appetizing than a spreadable turkey paste, it's Spammy, the turkey destined to be enpasted, reminding us of his richness and nutritional value.

Glory be! Spammy Fortified Turkey Spread gives us both in one product!

The good-hearted Spammy, he of undeniable rico y nutritivo siempre qualities, was brought into being by the Hormel corporation to fight hunger in Guatemala. As such, he was born of the finest intentions. It's his motives we question. Is he driven to relieve hunger or merely to get himself eaten? Six of one, half dozen of the other, we suppose. Because either way, he winds up in someone's stomach. For Spammy, it's a classic case of doing good while doing well.

(Thanks to Dr. Bea for the referral.)

Turkey Terrific

When you look up terrific in the dictionary, this is the picture you see. (It's also what you see when you look up turkey, dictionary illustration budgets having been slashed.) The whole thing is strange because this is actually a mural from a West Roxbury, Massachusetts, restaurant.

This blissed-out bird, his cloacal sphincter nothing but a demure pucker at the end of his atypically legless body, is an instant icon.

The pig or hotdog self-applying condiments is nothing compared to this guy. Even the chicken spooning broth over himself is small potatoes.

This turkey has made relaxation his religion, the roasting pan his church. On his bed of rippling brown substance (?), eyes closed, he soaks. He bastes. He cooks. He becomes... terrific.

(Thanks to Dr. Brian for the referral and the photo.)

Bowman Landes

How to describe this turkey's pose?

Confident, surely.

Self-assured. Optimistic. Devil-may-care.

But in the winghands-on-hips stance, the disingenuous "Who, me?" look in the eye, we see something more. We see an attitude of entitlement. This bird knows he's good eating. The facts of his life, his curriculum vitae—from his hatching to his eventual mechanized death—suggest nothing less than the inevitability of his consumption. And he knows it.

Thus, the smugness, the superfluous plea for approval. He has their approval already.

His destiny, to be metamorphosed from living thing to lifeless product, is preordained. It is axiomatic. You'd be a little full of yourself too, if you knew the weight of an entire civilization were leaning on you, pushing you to become what you were meant to be.

Turkey Farmers of Canada

You know those hilarious "Eat mor chikin" cows? (Hold on. We have to stop laughing. Almost. Just a sec. Okay. We're good.) Those scamps are "funny" because they are desperate to avoid being killed and eaten. They're just like people, what with their instinct for survival and their fear of pain. It's adorable!

This tom here is humorous in a whole different way. A whole different way we've only seen about a thousand times before.

Like the cows, the Canadian turkey edits a sign to upend the status quo. Of course, the system he wants to topple is the barbecue orthodoxy, which holds that turkeys aren't suitable ingredients. So you can understand the urgency.

The turkey derives meaning only from his desirability as a foodstuff. His one-bird crusade may seem quixotic. Irrational. Stupid. Insane. (We could go on.) But it's really the logical outcome of living in greater Suicidefoodistan.

(Thanks to Dr. Ken for the referral and the photo.)

World of Warcraft Plump Turkey

In the subculture that is World of Warcraft, skilled players can acquire a "vanity pet" known as Plump Turkey.

We have, until now, been immersed in our own noxious subculture, so this one has passed us by. As far as we can ascertain, players who "do" such-and-such are "rewarded" with a ridiculous bird who sacrifices himself at the first opportunity.

Where's the fantasy in that? Brain-damaged animals are everywhere in the real world. This planet is, apparently, littered with them!

This shows us, sadly, that the worlds of fantasy and reality have collided. Neither can remain pure any longer. Neither is safe from the other. When institutions fail in one, they fail in the other. Illness and corruption travel freely.

Suicidal life forms from other planets are already well known to us (as here and here). Now the contagion has spread even in the worlds of imagination!

All hail suicide food, the Universal Constant!

(Thanks to Dr. Kim for the referral. Plump Turkey table from warcraftpets.com.)







Addendum: The pigs of Angry Birds are also electronic gaming-related suicidal misfits. Not only did they steal the birds' eggs in a deliberate act of wanton destruction sure to bring vicious reprisals upon themselves. No, they have also made hams their totem! Look! They go to such lengths, erecting massive, Byzantine structures, all to house the hams that used to be their own! How do we know the hams are theirs? Look at them! The hogs have been reduced to spherical, limbless, hamless heads!

Stew Leonard's Naked Turkey

We've seen it before, the "food" animal troubled more by being seen naked than by his impending death.

Still, we're confused when we come face-to-face with such disordered thinking. "This is what you're worried about?" we want to scream. The turkey's flushed cheeks, ripe with embarrassment, sum up everything that's wrong with suicide food. Clutching the barrel that masks his nudity, he spares not a thought to what is about to happen to him.

And maybe the blushing is a statement of a more generalized humility. All that "as served at the White House" business. It's like any fuss made on his behalf (while he's living) is just too much. It goes right to his head and he protests meekly. (No surprise there. Everything the bird does is meek.)

Either way, this is some poultry with messed-up priorities.

1. Get some dang clothes.
2. Let the fellas know that my family and me are nothing special.
3. Vacuum.
4. Get those bills taken care of.
5. Oil change.
6. Clean out the mud room.
7. Return the netflix.
8. Fix the toilet.
9. Call Gramma.
10. Avoid getting killed.

(Thanks to Dr. Trent for the referral.)

Festival of Cruelty 15: Forcible Testicle Removal

For those of you unfamiliar with our cringe-inducing Festival of Cruelty series (the last official entry was three and a half months ago, but there was also a Festival of Cruelty special report recently), here's the gist:

Suicide food is all about deception. But some meat-promoting imagery is so nakedly honest in its depiction of pure contempt, its expression of such hatred for animals, that we find it almost refreshing. (Almost.) This is stuff that could stand a little camouflage, a little lipstick, a little stagecraft. At least a few bandages to hide the wounds. This isn't suicide food. It's murder food. And it's instructive to dive into the cesspool now and then. What it teaches us, exactly, we have long since forgotten.

So! Hold your nose and jump in and try not to drown in our newest, themed Festival of Cruelty.

Huntley (Illinois) Turkey Testicle Festival: As it turns out, some turkeys object to castration. This one clutches his savaged loins. He gapes in wordless horror, as though petitioning Heaven's vacant throne. But most of all, he advertises an event whose foundation is the consumption of turkeys' private parts. Do you see what we mean about cruelty? They don't even bother dressing this up in the same old clichés of subservience, compliance, and victims identifying with their predators. It's just shock, pain, and anguish.




Olean (Missouri) Jaycees Testicle Festival: We "love" the disdain implicit in this one. "Our volunteers make the difference," they say as they show us this maimed cow wearing a button that identifies him as one of those volunteers! "No, no," they proclaim, "that one's a volunteer. He signed up to have his stuff hacked off! You saw the button, didn't you?" It's the most half-hearted disavowal in the history of people caught in the act, the equivalent of "Honest, officer! The dead guy was on the floor when I got there."



Minnesota Testicle Festival: They call it the home of the Minnesota Tendergroin, because if there's one thing people like more than eating an animal's testicles while it watches, it's making puns while they do it. (You should know that testicle festivals are hotbeds of suspect humor as well as viciousness.) Featured here is a former bull—he's a steer now—who can only snort in impotent agony.

While people laugh at him.




Thirteenth Annual "Calf Fry" Testicle Festival: The newly castrated can also take the stoic cowboy route, hoping to numb the pain with nothing stronger than beer and nicotine. But it won't soothe the searing sting of degradation.

Notice the barren landscape, the single tumbleweed an errant mark on a blank sheet of paper. It all serves to emphasize the castrato's loneliness. He went from vigorous to victimized just like that, with no one to witness his turmoil but the uncaring sky.



Rock Creek Lodge: More craven snorting. This steer's got a haunted, hunted look in his eyes. Which is only fitting, seeing as he's been hunted down, and the aftermath of what they've done to him will haunt him the rest of his days. Which—let's look on the bright side—won't number too many.







Outdoorama Turkey Testicle Festival: Is this turkey warding off the knives? Are his hands thrown up before him in an "Out of my way!" gesture? Either way, there's no stopping them. There's no getting between the hungry hordes and the poultry testicles they crave.




Addendum: We have, of course, seen castrated animals before. There was a steer, a turkey, and a different steer from way back. Improbably, it's a motif that's been with us through the ages.

Live from the Turkey Necropolis

Just in time for just barely missing Thanksgiving comes this video sure to set your funny bone to tingling and your soul to throwing up all over itself.

On the stage in the teeming, maddening turkey necropolis, temple to the Soon-to-Be-Delivered-from-the-Horror-They-Loved-So-Well, the comic reaches right into his audience's hearts. For nearly three minutes, he nails his routine, calling out a string of phrases ("Christmas dinner," "I've got a carving knife," "Anybody got any giblets?") that send the turkeys in the packed auditorium into gales of laughter reflexive cackling.

It's like we've always said: turkeys might prefer their stand-up comedy tedious and juvenile, but they sure do like dying. They like everything about it, from the act itself to the implements that bring it about, to the sprawling deatharium that is their home until it happens.

(Thanks to Dr. Meave for the referral.)

Lil' Gobblers Turkey Bites

We've got some kind of garbled messaging going on. To wit, who are the lil' gobblers, exactly?

In a nod to the much-discussed doctrine of Ironic Aggressor Sublimation (last mentioned here), consumer and consumed are deliberately confused, creating a mish-mash of signifiers. That is, are the lil' gobblers the (no longer gobbling) turkeys or the little eaters in Mr. and Mrs. America's brood?

However we interpret the semantic muddle, the turkey's content. Waving a wing at the proceedings, the turkey is poised and cheerful. So what if the gobbler is to be gobbled? It's an accomplishment—is it not?—to be chunked and breaded thus, and fed to children.

Happy Thanksgiving to all the gobblers everywhere.







Addendum: Reminisce with the line-up of Thanksgivings gone by: 2009, 2008, and 2007.

Hillbilly Heaven

We are reminded of Egyptians killing their servants to wait on them in the afterlife, to lessen death's bitterness. Even in death, the exalted pharaoh, the wealthy man, the miscellaneous functionary will find life not so different from what they always enjoyed.

In the hillbilly's case, by granting his food a new role (that is, the same old role) in the beyond, he finds that he can go on.

And lo! It's not only hillbilly heaven. The pig, the chicken, the turkey, and the cow will be food forevermore, dawn to dusk, eternally, world without end. From their cloud, they smile upon us, secure in their spot in Heaven's blessed stockyard. They bear the hillbilly no ill-will. To the contrary: they owe him everything! Before he dispatched them, they were stuck in the reeksome, foul mire the rest of us call life. But now! Now, freed from the stinking burden of their existence, they attain the opportunity for the state most craved by "food" animals. Not life after death, but something even more precious: death after death.

Friskies Adventureland

We forget, awash as we are in praise, we forget that we are not the only beings on this earth deserving of adoration. The sense we have of ourselves—that we alone could inspire loyalty, reverence, even worship—is rarely challenged.

Cows and pigs and sheep and fish and chickens and all their lowly brethren march across battlefields, endure the obscenest of treatment, all for the joy of bidding farewell to this planet of miracles from the portal of our stomachs.

But no! It is not to Man alone the willing sacrifices aspire to offer themselves. Dogs also enjoy pride of place, and now we know we can add cats to the list. (And, as time may yet reveal, pet snakes and all other domesticated carnivores.)

Friskies brand cat food reminds us of this blessed fact, that there are consumable slaves for all. In the television commercial from which these stills were extracted, a cat receives the royal treatment from turkeys, from fish, and from baby chicks. All are pleased to fulfill their destiny as food for humans' pets.

The food welcomes the cat to the realm of the Omni-edible, a wonderland wherein everything exists for, and is assembled for the benefit of, the dominant beings. The ambassadors of this world—the seafood and the poultry—live (briefly) to serve and be served.

Manny's Has Great Legs

To seductive show-biz ostriches and chickens, we may now (at last!) add turkeys.

And take a gander at them (to extend the poultrypalooza)—so high-kicking, so shapely, so… so… great. We are left again to wonder at the response of the poultry peddlers. We can only imagine what inner dialogues they experience.

"The turkey legs we sell are so gosh-darned great. If only there were some way to get this point across to the leg-buying public. I've got it! If we have a kick line of dressed-up turkeys doing their thing Rockettes-style, everyone will understand!"

Sex appeal, the nostalgia of G (or maybe PG) rated burlesque, top hats... Manny, you have more than great legs. You, sir, have a marketing sense second to none.

(Thanks to Dr. Bea for the referral.)