The Noble Turkey

While you’re bellied up to the table on Thursday, showering your potatoes with rivulets of gravy, consider these utterly random facts about Thanksgiving's bird of the hour:

--Californians are the biggest turkey eaters in the country. (really?) Each year they eat 3 pounds more turkey than the average American consumer.

--When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin sat down to eat their first meal on the moon, their foil food packets contained turkey with all the trimmings.

--Turkeys have great hearing skills but no ears. They have a poor sense of smell but a great sense of taste. And turkeys see in color.

--And here's my personal favorite: Benjamin Franklin much preferred the turkey over the eagle as a national symbol. He condemned the eagle, calling it "a bird of bad moral character."

"[The eagle] does not get his living honestly," he went on to say. "He is a rank coward... and is no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest."

His thoughts on the turkey? "It is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America . . . a bird of courage who would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards."

Who knew that the turkey could be so noble? Perhaps we should pay homage to the nearly-national bird... before we stuff it with giblets and roast it in the oven.