Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

Everybody saw this coming.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

You cannot shame the shameless.

When we show up, we win.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Obligatory Thanksgiving Turkey Drop & Puppy Pics

Obligatory Thanksgiving Turkey Drop & Puppy Pics

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Obligatory WKRP Turkey Drop Classic

As someone mentioned downstairs, the funniest part of the show below starts at 17 minutes.  I dare you to be able to turn it off once you start watching.

Link to Mad About You Thanksgiving show

Did I miss any other classics?  I can add them to the post.

🦆

Well, we know what Suzanne is thankful for!

Looks like trouble to me.  The best kind of trouble!  (You can tell by the sideways look with the eyes.)

Anyone else thankful for anything?  Or just cranky because you didn’t get a new puppy?

Open thread.

Update at 6:30 pm. Thanksgiving Zoom reminder:  7-10 pm Eastern time tonight!   RSVP to WaterGirl to get the zoom link.

Reader Interactions

73Comments

  8. 8.

    piratedan

    The Carol Burnett sketch with Tim Conway is all kinds of awesome as is the WLIIA Scenes from a hat bits….

  9. 9.

    cope

    We are thrilled to be back in Western Colorado after 3.3 decades away. This will be the first major holiday with my family in all that time so there’s that.

    The Sun literally just came out though it’s bound to disappear as a front rolls through over the next couple of days. Our life in our bubble is good and I am determined to focus more on that than what’s going on in the larger world.

    Bon apetit.

  10. 10.

    Baud

    Anyone else thankful for anything?  Or just cranky because you didn’t get a new puppy?

    I was thankful for you until you reminded my that I’m cranky.

  11. 11.

    HinTN

    I am thankful that the Rombauer-Becker recipe for roasting a turkey is practically foolproof because it’s the fallback from the plan to follow Tamara’s spatchcocked turkey recipe, which foundered on the rock of not having a pan wide enough to accommodate that method. Cheers, jackals.

  14. 14.

    cope

    @Miss Bianca:  Absolutely. “Addam’s Family Values” and “Trains, Planes and Automobiles “ were the only Thanksgiving-centric movies I could think of when challenged on the subject yesterday.

  16. 16.

    twbrandt

    Lifted from below:

    My Thanksgiving tradition is reading my friend David Erik Nelson’s story on Michigan, Thanksgiving in Michigan, traveling on Thanksgiving in Michigan, and being Jewish while traveling on Thanksgiving in Michigan. It’s wonderful.

  18. 18.

    NeenerNeener

    Friends always went all out for Thanksgiving episodes. I still laugh at the one where they played football while they waited for the turkey, and the one where Monica put the turkey on her head.

  20. 20.

    Suzanne

    I will note that, last year, we kind of noshed all day before we had the real meal, and I felt disgusting afterward. So today I haven’t eaten at all, and I did an hour of Peloton. So I’m getting good and hungry.

  24. 24.

    geg6

    Yay, puppy!  Congratulations to the Suzanne family.  Looks like good trouble.

    In worse news, my sister just rushed her husband to the hospital as she thinks he just had a stroke of some sort.  Waiting on news right now.

  25. 25.

    piratedan

    for those that need it, there’s MST3K’s Turkey Day Marathon… some incredibly bad cinema and some awesome snarkiness.  For those of you streaming, there’s the MST3K network and the SHOUT! networks that are broadcasting it this year.Also, I’m pretty sure you can stream it online via MST3K’s own Gizmoplex.

  28. 28.

    Yutsano

    ZOMGPUPPER!!! I can’t tell how big she’s going to get yet but that could determine her heritage later. But who’s a cute doggo?

  30. 30.

    Anonymous At Work

    Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant.  Always a must-listen.

    Addams Family Values Thanksgiving is a close second.

  33. 33.

    dr. luba

    @twbrandt: Thanks for that.  I am a life long Detroiter (albeit now in the northern suburbs) and my brother has a hunting camp on family property near the middle knuckle.  So much of that rings so true.

  34. 34.

    Joy in FL

    I am thankful for my two amazing cats, Hermes and Zir. They are sleeping now and are just perfect to be with.

    Wishing all Jackals whatever kind of good day they want : )

  40. 40.

    Layer8Problem

    I’m thankful we successfully arrived.

    Gaaah, Jersey roads.  There’s a multidimensional quality that confounds Google Maps.

  43. 43.

    BretH

    Two extensive walks with our 9 1/2 yr old Golden Retriever Cody. He found many people to pay attention to him and even a few treats hidden in pockets. Turkey is out, relaxing with a Trader Joe’s American IPA before making the green beans and mashed potatoes. Life is good here.

    Giving thanks for our blessings and wishing the very best to those in more challenging circumstances.

  44. 44.

    Alison Rose

    Now doing my unrelated-to-the-holiday Thanksgiving tradition: watching The Wizard of Oz. And since there’s no one here to be annoyed, speaking/singing along with the entire film, since I’ve seen it enough times to know every word. (Well, the cat is probably annoyed, but that’s a cat’s default state.)

  47. 47.

    RaflW

    My BFs family pulled a surprise “let’s go parasaling” for the pre-dinner activity. Yesterday was 3 hours of kayaking thru mangroves (my idea, and it was fun, too).

    This is a family that is taking their “holiday not in Milwaukee” seriously (were in a vacay rental in Marathon, FL). :)

    Hope you all enjoy your Thanksgiving as active or inert as you please.

    And that any sudden trips to hospitals have good resolutions.

  48. 48.

    Gvg

    I am thankful that yesterday morning the former feral cat that has lived with me for 4 years now decided to allow me to pet him for the first time ever. His 3 siblings have been tame demanding snuggle bugs since about 3 to 6 months after my neighbor and I caught them, but not mister shy. I thought he might go his entire life as a shadow in the house. A few months ago though he started getting closer and watching so I started sneaking him treats when I could. About 10 days ago we worked up to trying squeezables treat off my fingers when I could keep the sisters from getting it all faster. He was still so shy even though he is the biggest, he lets them push him around. He worked out that he could get on the bathroom counter and go over them to get his even though it was right up to me. Wednesday he pushed against my hand like his sisters and asked to be scratched. He came back a few minutes later and did it again, then ran off for awhile. Big breakthrough! This morning I scratched his back and he liked that. Just amazing change. Years of flinching and running away if I even slightly touched or looked too long.

  52. 52.

    Marc

    A Thanksgiving story which is apparently more or less true, but this is more of a story about my family.  My grandfather and grandmother were born in one of the tobacco plantation towns in central Virginia during the early 1900s, and moved with their parents to a small city north of Boston, where their fathers worked in the local leather tanning plants (the chemicals used infamously poisoned the city water wells, resulting in a cancer cluster which would heavily impact my family and many others).  When my grandfather was 13 his father died, as the eldest of six siblings he had to drop out of school and start working.  He later became a self-taught auto/truck mechanic, machinist, and carpenter.  My grandmother was a domestic and seamstress, making some of those fabulous hats black women work to church.  During WWII his skills are in demand, and he was a shipfitter and welder at the Charlestown Navy Yard.  My grandmother’s seamstress skills are put to use assembling tiny electronic devices for radar systems.  After the war, both of their daughters go off to college, grandfather becomes chief mechanic at a leather tanning plant, and grandmother becomes a production supervisor at one of the first semiconductor plants on Route 128.  So, while not rich, they had some money available, so my grandfather, a brother, and a cousin buy a 50 acres of farm land in the then sleepy seaside town of Duxbury, complete with a large pond, a  large run-down farmhouse and a barn. They rebuilt the house to turn it into what would now be thought of as a bed and breakfast, rebuilt the barn as a dancehall and informal bar, and build 5 or 6 cabins for rental and/or use for the immediate family. The pond had a beach and there were rowboats for those who wanted to fish or just chill. A sandy ocean beach was a 1/4 mile walk away for swimming, fishing, or clamming (my favorite activity). By the time my sister and are born in the mid-50s, the place is hopping, with extended family and friends hanging out all summer long.  My mother gave up her job as a “computer” and “coder” when my sister was born, so we stay in our cabin most of the summer, my father would drive down for the weekends.  There were four big holidays celebrated there, Memorial Day, July 4th (grandfather and his brother would put on a big fireworks show), Labor Day (which officially closed the place), and Thanksgiving (for family only).

    On Thanksgiving, our family tradition was driving down to Duxbury the day before, stopping at the turkey farm in town (Bongi’s Turkey, which is still there) where we’d meet my grandfather.  Old Mr. Bongiotto owed my grandfather for some favor (there were many such people around Boston, apparently), so he’d provide two turkeys of our choice for free.  On what would be the last Thanksgiving down there, I was 6 and my sister was 4, Mr. Bongiotto would hand us buckets of corn and send us into a pasture where we’d look for our two favorite turkeys which (we thought) we’d named a couple of years before (the one I remember we called “Bongo”).  He’d corral our turkeys into a pen, we’d feed them and try to hug them, then we’d meet up with my mother to shop in the store for candy and other essentials.  A half an hour or so later, my grandfather would load two large boxes in the back of his car, Mr. Bongiotto would hand us each a couple of large pretty turkey feathers, we’d wave and drive the rest of the way to the place.  The next morning, my grandmother mother and aunts would cook up mounds of blueberry pancakes, eggs, bacon, and muffins.  My grandfather’s wood-fired smokers handmade from 55 gallon drums would be set up, the two turkeys would be split and smoked, along with a lot of fish and usually a small pig.  Mass quantities of dressing, maple candied yams, greens, cakes, and pies would be prepared, then anywhere from 50 to 100 people would show up for dinner.  After dinner, everyone would retire to the dancehall for drinks, music, multiple tables of bridge and canasta, and a lot of loud talking.  The next day everything would be repeated with the leftovers.  When bedtime came, my father settled us into our pajamas, as mother would be helping to clean up.  We would head home the next day to avoid the Sunday traffic. My father was relaxing in his chair, likely reading an IEEE journal or a science fiction book, when we came in to say good night.  We asked if we could go visit our turkeys on the way back, and my father, being a man of few works, replied with something like “that would be hard, as you ate them.”  We were like “what!?”, when we figured it out the resulting crying and screaming was so severe that he to call for mother and grandmother to console us.  The screaming started again the next day as we passed the turkey farm.

    This was to be our last visit there, as my grandfather’s cousin/partner was a gambler, and ended up having to pass his share off to a member of the Irish mob.  It quickly became obvious that this was not going to work, so grandfather and his brother sold their shares to the mob, as well.  He was able to get a fair price, as they also apparently owed him for a favor.  The major highway to Cape Cod was completed a few years later, and the land was suddenly worth a lot more since Duxbury was now a reasonable driving commute from Boston.  There’s now an upscale community of expensive houses sitting on that land.  If you got this far, Happy Thanksgiving!

  53. 53.

    FelonyGovt

    Happy Thanksgiving, friends. I will miss you all at the Zoom today. Been feeling crummy (just a nasty cold, I hope) for more than a week now. Hope you’re all having a wonderful day.

  55. 55.

    twbrandt

    @dr. luba: ​
     I’m also a lifelong Michigander, grew up in a downriver burb, moved to Ann Arbor, and now live in Dearborn. I know Dave fairly well and heard him describe some of the things in his story.

  60. 60.

    Phylllis

    We went low effort this year-had the meal catered from a local BBQ place. All I had to do was load pans in order in the oven to heat everything up. Enough side leftovers for one more meal, and enough smoked turkey for sandwiches and a pot of soup. Lather, rinse, repeat for Christmas.

  65. 65.

    Geminid

    Is anybody watching/watched Dolly Parton singing at halftime of the Dallas game? I think it’s on CBS, but she might be done nw.

  66. 66.

    raven

    @Geminid: not near as bad as last week at the Georgia-Tennessee beat down. They had her singing that putrid “Rocky Top” and she had no monitor!

  73. 73.

    Geminid

    @Geminid: Now I see Dallas was leading Washington 45-10 with 4 1/2 minutes left. The Cowboys scored 25 points in the first 10 minutes of the 4th quarter.

    Oh well, that makes it a Happy Thanksgiving for many football fans.. Washington traditionally has been the most disliked of NFL franchises.

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