26 thoughts on “The Turkey is A Funny Bird”

  1. Did you know that Benjamin Franklin suggested that the Turkey be designated the National Bird! He thought it was a magnificent bird when the feathers were expanded. Happy Thanksgiving to all.

  2. Well, well, well…..Jill Stein will have the loot by tomorrow to force a recount in Wisconsin……PA and MI by next week. Money is the only obstacle.

    Cash is piling up and she’s reaching out to Bernie today.

    Hillary up 2 million in popular vote?
    Can recounted votes change electoral votes total?

    Is President Trump in jeopardy?

    Lawyers and experts (real or self-appointed)….PLEASE CHIME IN !!!!!

    Wild speculation…they have the goods (two words….Clinton Foundation) on Crooked Hillary, she goes back to introspective walks on the deer trail and Bernie gets in, after Trump gets screwed on a recount just like the last big, bushy machine gored Albert in 2000.
    Or worse, Crooked Hillary will be our President.

    I hope I can stomach my Turkey today.

    1. Well well well 🙂 … Ms. Freeh, the pain in the neck from Flying Pond who regularly dumps on the Irish on this blog … Khalid, who is not a bad guy, but is perhaps a depressive whose reaction to someone taking the time to write creatively is to gabble on about … COMMAS … Honest Abe, who is sitting in the Family corner as usual on Thanksgiving, completing his role as the crazy uncle, And the beloved Rather Not who is zipping around on his two wheel scooter and looking for Grandfather Matty to give him a chuck under the chin …. And then there are the literate Connolly’s, NC and William or Bill C. as he likes to name himself in roguish sobriety ( I liked your writing better when you were looking for terrorists in the Berkeley St. Starbucks btw Bill, but it still holds up. Listen Honest Abe, you are suffering today. And the rest of you girls listen very closely as if it will be the last thing you ever hear. I GET SUFFERING … MY EAR IS TUNED TO IT … So I deal with each as I feel is due. NO, Honest Abe is not really a turd … Just cannot help being who he is … Freeh has done many good things, but cannot help who he is … The Connolly’s Et Al … Well … Savvy this : IT’S JUST ANOTHER DYSFUNCTIONAL IRISH FAMILY THANKSGIVING IN BOSTON … EAT 🙂

      1. Thanks to Teddy Roosevelt (What a guy…!!!) and his “Bully Pulpit.”

        A century ago, football was an even more brutal sport than it is today, featuring games that left dozens dead on college and prep school gridirons. With the very existence of the sport in jeopardy, President Theodore Roosevelt entered the fray and urged radical reforms that ultimately saved the sport and gave birth to the modern game.

        At the turn of the 20th century, America’s football gridirons were killing fields. The college game drew tens of thousands of spectators and rivaled professional baseball in fan appeal, but football in the early 1900s was lethally brutal. Football was a grinding, bruising sport in which the forward pass was illegal and brute strength was required to move the ball. Players locked arms in mass formations and used their helmetless heads as battering rams. Gang tackles routinely buried ball carriers underneath a ton and a half of tangled humanity.

        With little protective equipment, players sustained gruesome injuries—wrenched spinal cords, crushed skulls and broken ribs that pierced their hearts. The Chicago Tribune reported that in 1904 alone, there were 18 football deaths and 159 serious injuries, mostly among prep school players. Obituaries of young pigskin players ran on a nearly weekly basis during the football season. The carnage appalled America. Newspaper editorials called on colleges and high schools to banish football outright. “The once athletic sport has degenerated into a contest that for brutality is little better than the gladiatorial combats in the arena in ancient Rome,” opined the Beaumont Express. The sport reached such a crisis that one of its biggest boosters—President Theodore Roosevelt—got involved.

        Although his nearsightedness kept him off the Harvard varsity squad, Roosevelt was a vocal exponent of football’s contribution to the “strenuous life,” both on and off the field. As New York City police commissioner, he helped revive the annual Harvard-Yale football series after it had been canceled for two years following the violent 1894 clash that was deemed “the bloodbath at Hampden Park.” His belief that the football field was a proving ground for the battlefield was validated by the performance of his fellow Rough Riders who were former football standouts. “In life, as in a football game,” he wrote, “the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!” In 1903, the president told an audience, “I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports. I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal.”

        Football, however, was fatal, and even Roosevelt acknowledged it required reform if it was to be saved. With his son Theodore Jr. now playing for the Harvard freshman team, he had a paternal interest in reforming the game as well. Fresh from negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War, Roosevelt sought to end violence on the football field as well as the battlefield. Using his “big stick,” the First Fan summoned the head coaches and representatives of the premier collegiate powers—Harvard, Yale and Princeton—to the White House on October 9, 1905. Roosevelt urged them to curb excessive violence and set an example of fair play for the rest of the country. The schools released a statement condemning brutality and pledging to keep the game clean.

        Roosevelt soon discovered that brokering peace in the Far East may have been an easier proposition than getting an American sport to clean up its act. Fatalities and injuries mounted during the 1905 season. In the freshman tilt against Yale, the president’s son was bruised and his nose broken—deliberately, according to some accounts. The following week, the Harvard varsity nearly walked off the field while playing against Yale after their captain was leveled by an illegal hit on a fair catch that left his nose broken and bloodied. The same afternoon, Union College halfback Harold Moore died of a cerebral hemorrhage after being kicked in the head while attempting to tackle a New York University runner. It was a grim end to a savage season. In what the Chicago Tribune referred to as a “death harvest,” the 1905 football season resulted in 19 player deaths and 137 serious injuries. A Cincinnati Commercial Tribune cartoon depicted the Grim Reaper on a goalpost surveying a twisted mass of fallen players.

        Following the season, Stanford and California switched to rugby while Columbia, Northwestern and Duke dropped football. Harvard president Charles Eliot, who considered football “more brutalizing than prizefighting, cockfighting or bullfighting,” warned that Harvard could be next, a move that would be a crushing blow to the college game and the Harvard alum in the Oval Office. Roosevelt wrote in a letter to a friend that he would not let Eliot “emasculate football,” and that he hoped to “minimize the danger” without football having to be played “on too ladylike a basis.” Roosevelt again used his bully pulpit. He urged the Harvard coach and other leading football authorities to push for radical rule changes, and he invited other school leaders to the White House in the offseason.

        An intercollegiate conference, which would become the forerunner of the NCAA, approved radical rule changes for the 1906 season. They legalized the forward pass, abolished the dangerous mass formations, created a neutral zone between offense and defense and doubled the first-down distance to 10 yards, to be gained in three downs. The rule changes didn’t eliminate football’s dangers, but fatalities declined—to 11 per year in both 1906 and 1907—while injuries fell sharply. A spike in fatalities in 1909 led to another round of reforms that further eased restrictions on the forward pass and formed the foundation of the modern sport.

        history.com

        John, if you made it to the end of this…..thanks for the compliment in your description of our merry band of misfits.

        Happy Thanksgiving.

        1. YOU CANNOT KILL THE BULL MOOSE

          Yes Rather, I always liked TR. Generally though I have found long recitative citations on this Blog to be a crashing bore. I have been with the Blog since its inception. I have PUSHED Matt and the discussion in many instances, and have complimented him on his ability to come around to my view as to Jimmy not being the killer of Flemmi’s two satanic sacrifices in the persons of the Ladies Deborah.

          I know the Guy and am fully aware of what he is and is not capable of. If anyone does not like that they can go screw themselves. I have ” Forgotten ” more about those deals they would ever have the balls to comprehend . So, I don’t put up with the gangster wannabe posers.

          I’ll tell you a funny story because I think you are a good kid. The guy who told it me was very circumspect as to details, naturally. The gist of it was that he was in his younger days a …Professional … Hitter. He had a deep and sincere loathing for guys like Flemmi who were just murderous pigs and were serious birches if you ran up on them and they did not have a gun. I mean this was I guess you would say a very … Ethical … guy. He had a serious aversion to collateral damage of innocent folk on the scene of a hit, and where a Johnny Martorano, whom he liked by the way, had no compunction about killing as well the potential witnesses, this guy would not do it. He considered that behavior … Unprofessional.

          Anyway, like I said, He was open with me because he liked me, but very chary of incriminating details, Naturally . He had never taken a Hit for … Money … he told me. I did not enquire further into his motivations, and he despised coke dealers and gangsters whio knew the rules and broke them. He concluded by putting a sort of values clarification question to me that I have never forgotten : ” What do you think Johnny ? I carefully stalked a murderer once to murder him in a very public place … I actually waited on him at the Spot, ya’ know why? … Because there were people whom his body was lined up with, and I did not want my slug transiting through this bum and hitting anyone else. ” I just looked at him , What could I say ? 🙂

          1. John,
            I agree.
            Ditchman did the Debs.

            And John, your authenticity is undeniable and proudly on display.
            Myself,…I’m very, very similar, but I hide it better.

            Born and raised right in the thick of it (both sides)…..but never a participant.

            PS. Thanks for calling me a “kid.”

            1. Rather :

              I’m the OLDER brother . Not concerned with … Authenticity … or the extent to which things are or are not hidden. Like Abe, I know who I Am … And that is the Sine Qua Non of … Just Bein’ Yo Sef ‘ ! … So, Just be Yo Sef ‘ . There is nothing nice about Murder or hurting families or a lot of the nasty stuff that happened. But there is a Code. JB is Guy who lived by it. He has kept silent about very much for the sake of people he is Loyal to. The smearing of him with the fantastical napping woman killer fiend stories was disgusting. It was more particularly an attempt to smear his brother, The Senate President, and … Ultimately … to smear South Boston and its Irish American inhabitants in particular. This is what I have labored to … Deconstruct . We … have labored on this finely administered Blog … to Deconstruct … this unbelievable … Calumny. I am content to leave it there. And that makes for a collective sigh of relief at One Center Plaza. The Troops are not at all completely to blame. Many hands have pitch on them in this entire deal. Thankyou for your good words … Kid 🙂

          2. John,
            Let’s just say,….when I read Benji/Howie’s book……I became aware of some information that directly affects me and my family. And there is no closure.
            It’s a slap in the face.

            1. Rather,

              I carefully distanced myself long ago from characters who had not the character of one character in particular. There is no closure for me. There is just the lived creed of always trying to do what I felt was right in a World officially peopled by those who were as bad as the people they claimed to be protecting us from. When you speak of authenticity or pride or concealment or your non-participation you needs must speak only for yourself. These are not hallmarks of any characterizations I have offered. I would venture to say that a slap in the face has never been anything I took laying down. I do not attempt to speak for or characterize your life experience. I do know I have always found you genuine .

      2. I grew out of d-bags like you the day I left my job down on D Street. Go back upstairs and stick your face back in your grandmothers underwear drawer.

        1. We know you, your ” Job ” on D Street was sucking Hogan’ s .. Goat … at the corner of D and West Sixth, and word is that you were awfully good at it … you got beaten up bad by a black drag queens on the song back in the day too Abe … So listen micro-man …There are MEN talking here right now … you would shit your grandmother’s bloomers ( That grandmother’s upstairs underwear drawer is a very curiously … personal … reference … on yiur part, as is your ” arse licking . ” reference ; you own them) You are way out if your little league. Keep pissing in Public and you’ll be unhappy at what a small world it … Reallllly … is. Happy Thanksgiving. … Not D bag. … that just shows your contempt for people from Southie…but ABIE WALKING SIDEWAYS WITH A LOAD IN HIS PANTS SIDEWAYS … Dirt Bag … Cuz’ that’s what you live with every day … YOU are your punishment. 🙂

          1. I always thought God’s cruelest joke was giving all male snakes two penises and no hands. Then I started reading your egomaniacal posts and realized how wrong I was. Have another 7&7, crawl back into Mike Kiley’s and tell a few more lies to anyone that still cares.

            1. Give it a rest Louise … That’s right … you took the … Time … to read my posts. I am known for being a complete tee-totaler … Call the Fed and ask for an OC Agent … Spill out your tale of woe about JKM and they will shut you down very fast .. Yep, I came up rough … I was spending cold winter nights in the Combat Zone when I was 12 cuz’ I had an alcoholic guardian who was a brutal fuck and would just tell me to clear out … So, I know how to deal with brutal people.

              I also am not a homophobic type. The drag queens in the Zone had the compassion to shelter me as a kid in those circumstances and never molested me. I think you would have just sat on ypur stool and kept your mouth shut if you had ever met Puerto Rican Frannie back in the day … She would wear sometimes a toilet seat around her neck … She called it a … Puerto Rican necklace … 6’4″ and 250 she would have gone through you like a dose of salt … Saw her stick a broken bottle …. in some body part 🙂 of a black pimp in the wee hours in the … —— Lounge alley … He had beaten on one of her charges … Franny always treated me with RESPECT though … even at 12 .

              So, what can I say? We are all responsible for our own experience. You can anonymously run your mouth on this blog, Abie. Or come to your ever livin’ senses, and just deal wirh your shit on a day that clearly is difficult for you. I am …extremely … Patient. I am known for this quality. So, We will wait … and see. Chin up there Blue 🙂

              1. We have a lot in common. Grove Hall to Eggelston was my patch. Haven’t had a sip in 23 years this coming Christmas Day. Lots of scars, mostly on my head. (Known to some as Zipperhead) I knew all the right/wrong people. Maybe some time we’ll talk. You rule, Tough Guy

              2. Honest Abe … We understand … Scars … that’s … Experience! … RESPECT MY BROTHER. … We Soldier on … Somebody’s got to set a Good example. 🙂 Jack McDonald

            1. Abie is a Seinfeld fan it turns out … Irish ….. Ya’ gotta fuckin’ love them! 🙂

              2. Yep, Same guy who writes the highbrow shit also goes lowbrow and right between the eyes … so to speak ..Abe. Relax Pal … I like you in spite of yourself. Don’t ask me why. Kinda my Cross to bear .

  3. HONEST ABE , THE TURD IN THE THANKSGIVING PUNCHBOWL! …
    GROW UP YOU A-HOLE …. I NEVER GRADUATED FROM H.S. EITHER … STILL MADE IT TO A UNIVERSITY DEGREE … POST BY POST 🙂 ++++++++

    1. Thank you, Mister Wonderful. How does you live with itself? If I’m the turd in the punchbow I couldn’t be Prowder. That’s what we do.

      I wonder how many panic attacks Trump has had since the big day. Any of Mamie Eisenhower’s nebutal lying around are GONE.

  4. Matt,
    You have shined a megawatt spotlight where it was/is needed in this dirty little city we love and call home….and provided the forum for honest, meaningful discourse found no where else in Boston, or on the web…..3+ years and still going strong.

    Giving Thanks to you for that, Matt.

    Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow commenters. Bye Bye Crooked Hillary.

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