The turkey menace.

Of course I'm not addressing the problem of our fair-weather ally, if we can even use that term; our NATO pal Turkey, under the villainous Erdoğan. No, I shall leave that to the State Department for now. I am looking at the calendar -- almost a week since Thanksgiving and some of us are still dealing with turkey.

The problem is that the turkey, like some houseguests, tends to overstay its welcome. The first meal is great; the second is lovely, the third okay... by the fourth meal of turkey one starts to wonder if there's anything else in the world to eat.

A friend of mine was expecting his grown son and son's girlfriend for dinner on Thanksgiving, but as callow youth will, they canceled after dear ol' dad had bought a 20-pound bird. There were other guests, so he had to make the damn thing, but without his trencherman offspring at the feeding station, he wound up with a lot of leftovers. Yesterday he confessed to the sin of wasting food; he had had enough of the damned turkey and sent it flying into the garbage. A mortal sin for a guy raised by Depression-era parents.

Last week the Great Lileks posted a few old newspaper items related to Thanksgivings past, including this one from 1934:

While we are saddened for Mr. Short and his loss of an eight-pound bird, we have to ask ourselves -- eight pounds? Turkeys today fall in the range of 12 to 24 pounds, according to Epicurious. My experience in the supermarket, looking over the standard Broad Breasted White turkeys, puts the vast majority between 16 and 19. We may have gotten too big a bird -- we ate it Thursday, Friday, and Monday, and then I stripped the carcass and froze the rest. By then the sides were all gone. There's a casserole in our future, but that's enough turkey for now. Last night we had pizza.

If we'd had a li'l ol'-fashioned eight-pound turkey, the kind they liked to steal in 1934, the size of a Perdue Oven-Stuffer Roaster ... we'd probably still have been eating it for three days. Funny how that works.

But some people are not sick of turkey. Another friend works with a church group and makes soup for a passel of seniors on Tuesdays -- but to his surprise, they had some turkeys handy, and the seniors wanted turkey, so they made a turkey dinner for lunch.

So some people are not sick of turkey yet. There may be hope.

P.S.: You know how some brands like Butterball tie the bird in a mesh or plastic bag and leave a handy handle tied on the end for easy carrying? Am I the only guy who would like to see a Streets of Fire type movie fight with frozen turkeys instead of sledge hammers? I am? Never mind.