Thanksgiving is a time when we pause to BUUURRRP.  Excuse me.  Thanksgiving
is a time when we pause to remember the courageous sacrifices of BURRRRRRPP.
Whoo.  Sorry.  We pause to remember the courageous sacrifices of numerous
turkeys, and their ancestral foreturkeys before them, without which the
American nation would weigh about 15 pounds less per American.
    You probably have your own turkey recipe, but you have not had turkey until
you taste it the way I make it.  People will take just one bite of my turkey
and exclaim: ``Aren't you supposed to remove this plastic bag containing turkey
organs before you put it in the oven?'' Not me, pal.  Those organs are SCARY.
I'm not putting my hand inside a dark turkey orifice with them until I'm sure
they are DEAD.  So I recommend cooking the tar out of the turkey, then firing a
couple of machine-gun bursts into it just in case.  We call this ``Turkey Miami
Style.''
    Thawing is also important.  For best results you should start thawing your
turkey about three weeks ago, because your modern supermarket turkey is frozen
to the hardness of state-capitol floors.  In fact, thanks to genetic
engineering, many modern turkeys are actually GROWN FROZEN.  Yes.  They start
out as frozen embryos, and they are genetically engineered so they have no head
or feathers; they also have cooking instructions right on their skin.  You go
to a modern turkey farm and all you see are these rock-hard BREASTS running
around, bouncing off each other like bowling balls.  They have a public-address
system that does their gobbling for them.
    So let your turkey thaw out thoroughly, is my advice, and then cook it.  Or
throw it into the garbage.  We had to do this once with a turkey that had
thawed out a little TOO much and smelled like a pair of post- game rugby
shorts.  An important cuisine tip, which has been handed down through
generations of famous European chefs, is: MAKE SURE YOUR DOG CANNOT GET YOUR
TURKEY OUT OF YOUR GARBAGE.  We failed to follow this tip, and our large main
dog, Earnest, found the turkey and ate the whole thing, then capped off her
elegant dining experience by taking maybe 10 steps and throwing up the entire
turkey in the living room.
    ``Whoa!'' is the thought that at this point formed inside her brain, which
is the same model found in broccoli.  ``Am I ever going to get in trouble for
THIS!'' So she started walking the way dogs do when they're guilty of
something, wherein they hunch way down on the floor and creep along on their
stomachs, snakelike, using just their toenails for traction.  This caused our
small emergency backup dog, Zippy, to become confused and think that maybe HE
had done something wrong, so when I walked into the living room, there was a
semi-digested turkey carcass being slowly orbited by what appeared to be two
hairy, whimpering snakes.  Dogs would make totally incompetent criminals.  If
you could somehow get a group of dogs to understand the concept of the Kennedy
assassination, they would all immediately confess to it.  Whereas you'll never
see a cat display any kind of guilty behavior, despite the fact that several
cats were seen in Dallas on the grassy knoll area, not that I wish to start
rumors.
    Speaking of thawing and dogs and the warm glow that we all feel at
Thanksgiving, it seems appropriate here to bring up the matter of the 1,000
frozen radioactive federal dogs in California.  I am not making these dogs up.
Several alert readers sent me an editorial about them that appeared in The
Fresno Bee (Motto: ``Fresno's Most Comically Named Newspaper'').  It seems that
in 1958 the federal government, which as you know is always looking for
expensive new ways to appear ridiculous, began an experiment wherein 1,000
beagles were regularly injected with radiation to see what happens when you
inject beagles regularly with radiation.  The last beagle died in 1986, and all
of their bodies, which are radioactive, are being kept in frozen storage near
Davis, Calif., along with -- this is still true -- 34,000 gallons of
radioactive beagle waste.
    So far this project has cost $65 million, not including disposal, which is
expected to cost a lot more, although nobody has figured out how to accomplish
it yet.  My suggestion would be to simply Federal Express everything to Iraq
(``Large cold package for Mr. Hussein!'').  But I'm sure the experts will think
of something better.  That's why we have experts: so the rest of us can just
sit around, digesting our turkeys and being thankful.

	by DAVE BARRY
	(C) 1990 THE MIAMI HERALD
	DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.