Turkey (The Bird)

Being delicious.

That's the theory, anyway. Personally I think turkey tends to be dry and a little flavorless, and I'd much rather eat chicken, duck, or goose.

The president is presented with a live turkey for Thanksgiving. Then the turkey's life is spared by a presidential pardon, and the turkey is sent to live in a zoo, a farm or even as a honorary grand marshal in Disney's Thanksgiving parade.

The pardon is also used as a satirical roast on the scandals of the time.

Did he really say that? That sounds far too clever for him.

He did, but then immediately afterward he said "I don't know if I like that line." So it sounds like someone else wrote it for him.

Here's the source.

The two turkeys Trump pardoned this year were convicted of war crimes in Afghanistan, but Trump wanted to use his power to pardon just to make sure it still worked before he attempted again to obstruct justice and abuse his office by offering pardons to criminal collaborators in exchange for their silence and possibly to himself. He then bragged for ten minutes about how he had to go to the hospital last week because all of the nurses were dying to see his hot bod.

I'm not making as much of this up as you'd probably think.

I wasn't aware that Turkeys can fly!?

It's hard to imagine when you look at a photo of a big bloated turkey displaying its feathers. But they don't seem that gigantic otherwise. They're looking almost vulture-like.

The ones that have been fattened up for food production have a hard time. Just ask the guys at WKRP in Cincinnati.

"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly"

Fun fact.

In portuguese, the bird is also named after a country, but a different one: Peru

It is named after india in France and Turkey and after an Indian city in dutch.

Interesting. Which Indian city?

Kozhikode, formerly known as Calicut.

Can you add "Xmas" for christmas please?

One person's laziness is another person's efficiency. Full disclosure: we also like to type in UK for United Kingdom, DNA for deoxyribonucleic acid, and Congo for both the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo. It is truly a paroxysm of aspirational shortcuts. (I too hope that Xmas becomes a type-in for Christmas.)

Love the comments.

They are called turkeys because back in the day Europeans imported a similar bird from Turkey that actually came from India (which is why some countries call them Indian birds - including France) and some of them thought they originated in Turkey. The wild turkeys in North America resembled them, so they got called turkeys too.

I only know the snood as something that covers a woman's hair done up in a bun.

I learned today that the different names in different languages for a turkey are just one mistake after another. Their Latin name comes from a legend that refers to women being turned into guinea fowls. Which were the birds the Brits actually imported through Turkey not knowing they came from North Africa. So they called them Turkey. While the Turks saw a difference and of course knew that neither bird came from their country. They suspected the "other" bird to come from the "India" that the Spanish discovered aka America. While in other languages their name relates to the Indian city Kozhikode which was where Vasco da Gama started a colony. So they may have actually come through India.