Turkey trivia is meaningless, but you can use it to impress your guests either during the eight hours it takes to make the dinner, the 25 minutes it takes to eat it or the two and a half hours afterward of lying around draped on the furniture like polar bears in the sun.
In fact, we may as well start there. The reason your guests are going down like redwoods within minutes after dinner is that turkey is full of an amino acid called tryptophan, which produces something called serotonin in your body, which works almost as well as Ambien only faster.
A turkey that is less than four months old is called a fryer but if it's five to seven months old, it's called a roaster. Who made up that rule? What does how old a turkey is have to do with roasting or frying? I don't get it. Male turkeys are called gobblers or toms. Female turkeys are called Vivian. No, they're not. I made that up. She turkeys are called hens.
Turkeys are the only poultry native to the Western Hemisphere. Turkeys have excellent hearing, but no external ears. They also have very good eyesight, with a much wider field of vision than ours — about 270 degrees, which is why it's almost impossible to sneak up on a turkey. It's also why when turkeys go to the movies, they'll only go to IMAX theaters. It's the wide screen they love.
Farmed turkeys can't fly. Wild turkeys can, at up to 55 miles per hour. Wild turkeys occasionally sleep in trees. The dance is called the Turkey Trot because it mimics the way a turkey moves in short, jerky steps. Turkeys can drown if they look up while it's raining, they can get severe headaches, and they often die of heart attacks.
