CURIOUSLY, “SHOOT AND EAT” ISN’T OFFERED AS AN OPTION: What to do if there’s a wild turkey in your yard.

A TASTE OF HEAVEN: Irish People Taste American Thanksgiving Food for the First Time. “I feel like I’ve been cheated my whole life because I haven’t had this before.” A fair description of the misfortune of not being born American.

THE POWER LINE THANKSGIVING DAY IN PICTURES: Special Edition.

START OFF YOUR HOLIDAY SHOPPING SEASON RIGHT: Your VodkaPundit Holiday Cocktail Guide.

If for nothing else, you’ll want to click over for Scott’s Ancho Chili Manhattan.

UPDATE: Link was bad before, so I bumped this back up.

WHY IS NBC SUCH A CESSPIT OF MISOGYNY? Gabrielle Union Criticized the Culture at America’s Got Talent. Now She’s No Longer There.

Flashbacks:

● Ronan Farrow Book Alleges Matt Lauer Raped NBC News Colleague.

● NBC News Investigated Itself and Found No Culture of Harassment at NBC News.

● How NBC ‘Killed’ Ronan Farrow’s Weinstein Exposé.

● Lauer Locked Women In Office — And Management Covered For Him; Update: SOP At NBC?

AT AMAZON, shop Black Friday deals today.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Arizona State U. group gets women empowerment poster removed due to ‘blackface.’

RESET THE VOX COUNTER: Vox: Bonnie and Clyde are always white … in the American imagination.

Exit quote: “Remember that meme where young people thought Titanic was just a movie and not real. I think Vox thinks Bonnie and Clyde were not real.”

Earlier: James Lileks Reviews the New Netflix Movie, The Highwaymen.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Trump-connected impeachment fails at UF as leftist narrative is torched. Weird how college speakers getting paid five-figure sums isn’t a scandal until one of them is a Republican. But then the campus-speaker biz is just a way to launder taxpayer money into the hands of lefty activists. Likewise much of the documentary biz. So what was going on here was basically just a species of turf protection.

WHY DOES SYRACUSE SUCK SO MUCH? Free speech org calls out ‘substantial overstep’ of authority at Syracuse.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.

Plus, Best Selling Products – Updated Every Hour.

Also, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

EVERGREEN: WKRP In Cincinnati Thanksgiving Turkey Drop.

COLLUSION: Apple changes Crimea map to meet Russian demands.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: ‘Gobble This!’ Edition. “A genuinely brief Briefing today, as the last thing any of us need is a political hot take interfering with a righteous food coma. The feast I’m going to is going to have a fried turkey and a smoked turkey, so I will probably be passing on the side dishes and focusing my taste buds on just the birds.”

Gravy. Don’t forget the gravy.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Digital Media Invented The Thanksgiving Argument — It’s an apt strategy for pulling in some general-interest clicks.

THOSE #METOO TORPEDOES WERE SUPPOSED TO TAKE OUT TRUMP, NOT CIRCLE AROUND AND NAIL OUR PEOPLE! Michael Bloomberg built a $54 billion company. For two decades, women who worked there have called it a toxic, sexually charged nightmare.

WHAT SHOULD I BUY MYSELF FOR CHRISTMAS? Gun sales surge past 2018 rate, fueled by 2020 Democrat gun-grab threats.

THE COCOANUT GROVE FIRE: On this day in 1942, in Boston Massachusetts, the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire killed 492 Thanksgiving weekend revelers. Yes, that’s four hundred and ninety-two.

Nightclub fires with horrific death counts have occurred throughout the world, but I am aware of none worse than the Cocoanut Grove fire. The only usable street exit was a revolving door. The crowd quickly pressed up against that door so no one could escape. Some of those who did escape the fast-moving flames somehow climbed up onto the roof and jumped down on parked cars. Others escaped through kitchen windows and doors.

I wish I could report to you a few hero stories. As Instapundit readers may have noticed, I like hero stories. But as one survivor put it, “… I looked back at the dance floor. People were fighting to get out of the club. Pandemonium is the only word I can think of, and I must say the scene did no credit to the male sex.” (Ah … the 1940s, when masculinity was still measured the old-fashioned way.)

I did find one apparently unverified story, and there are likely others that I missed (or, sadly, that everyone missed because the individuals involved didn’t live to tell the story):

Joseph Lawrence Ford, a second-class petty officer in the Navy, stationed at Portsmouth, N.H., said he entered the burning building by breaking a window and jumping inside. He added: “I crawled along on my hands and knees and then I bumped into five forms. All were moaning and some were twisting around on the floor, clawing at their throats.”

An AP reporter wrote that Ford reported that he rescued three women and two men.  (Note that the fact that the story is unverified does not mean it isn’t true.  It’s not so easy to verify this kind of thing.)

Anyway, if you’re looking for something to be thankful for, you can start with being thankful you weren’t at the Cocoanut Grove fire.  And for those of you (like me) who have never had your mettle tested in a sudden emergency, be thankful for that too.

UPDATE:  A reader supplies us with more hero stories:

From “The Official Chronology of the U.S. Navy in World War II” by Robert J. Cressman:

November 28, Sat.

United States

“Cocoanut Grove” nightclub in Boston, Massachusetts, catches fire;
Ensigns George W. Carlson and Mac A. Cason, SC-V(P), USNR, driving
through the city at that hour, respond immediately when they see flames
issuing from the burning building. Exhibiting courage, leadership and
resourcefulness, these two Supply Corps officers, who organize rescue
parties from enlisted men they see in the gathering crowd, are later
deemed “the cause of saving more lives than any other single agency.”
Despite rescuers’ efforts, however, 492 people perish in the tragedy.

In the military, officers of all services and specialties are supposed to show initiative and lead. Enlisted personnel are suppose to intelligently respond to orders and work as a team to carry out the mission.

John Nisley, USN (Ret.), 1974-1994

Well done, Ensigns Carlson and Cason and CPO Ford.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING! I’m thankful for all of you. You’ve meant a lot to me over the years.

IT’S COME TO THIS: In Santa Monica, Homeless Sculpture Installed in Former Home of Iconic Mural.

November 20, 2019 — A seven-foot-tall sculpture of a homeless man was unveiled Monday in the courtyard of the former Santa Monica bank building once graced by the iconic mural “Pleasures Along the Beach.”

Titled “In The Image,” the work by Los Angeles artist and activist Ed Massey was installed two and a half months after the mural by renown artist Millard Sheets was relocated to the City of Orange (“How Santa Monica Lost Its Iconic Half-Century Old Mosaic,” June 7, 2019).

The new sculpture — which will be on display for six weeks — depicts a bearded homeless man in baggy clothes staring at a red plastic cup in his hand, a blanket draped across a shoulder.

The sculpture installed at the 50-year-old Home Savings building on 26th Street and Wilshire Boulevard “simultaneously references contemporary social themes and historical religious imagery,” according to Massey.

The work, the artist wrote in an accompanying description, invites passersby to “contemplate their views and elevate their discourse on the issue — one that has now come to affect us all where we work and live.”

As Roger Kimball wrote a decade ago at the New Criterion, PC England once again led the way; the American left is only now just catching up:

Trafalgar is full of lessons. When my wife and I visited London last September, we took our young son, a fervent admirer of Nelson, to Trafalgar Square to see Nelson’s column. We were surprised to see that it had company. On one of the plinths behind the famous memorial sat a huge sculpture of white marble. This, I knew, was one of the benefactions that Ken Livingstone, the Communist mayor of London, had bestowed on his grateful constituency: public art on Trafalgar Square that was more in keeping with cool Britannia’s new image than statues of warriors. From a distance, the white blob looked liked a gigantic marshmallow in need of an air pump. But on closer inspection, it turned out to be a sculpture of an armless and mostly legless woman, with swollen breasts and distended belly. In fact, it was a sculpture by Marc Quinn of one Alison Lapper, made when she was eight months pregnant. Ms. Lapper, who was born with those horrible handicaps, is herself an artist. Asked how she felt about the sculpture, Ms. Lapper said that she was glad that at last Trafalgar Square recognized someone who was not a white male murderer. It is worth noting, as one journalist pointed out, that the architects of Trafalgar Square were ahead of their time in at least one sense, for the sculpture of Ms. Lapper represented the second commemoration of a seriously disabled person. After all, there is Nelson on his column, missing his right arm and an eye.

Regarding the Santa Monica statue, Moonbattery notes, “A society erects statues of those who embody the values it venerates. That’s why statues of great historical figures who represent the best of our culture when it was healthy are under attack (e.g., Thomas Jefferson, George Washington) now that it is sick with moonbattery. New statues will appear that reflect what we believe in currently: irresponsibility, self-imposed victimhood, self-indulgence, uselessness, dysfunction, psychosis. This process has already begun.”

(Via Maggie’s Farm, which as always, is loaded with links even during this holiday week.)

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The homeless statue sounds like something out of Kurt Schlichter’s Collapse, but then, as he says, actual events keep overtaking his parody of leftism.

WHY IS OUR RULING CLASS SUCH A HOTBED OF ANTI-SEMITISM? ‘Victims Becoming the Perpetrators’: Remarks about Jews at Elite Private School Spark Outrage.

WASHINGTON POST: AMERICANS BELIEVING THE MEDIA IS A “PATRIOTIC”* DUTY. At Frontpage, Daniel Greenfield writes:

Margaret Sullivan has been melting down for a while. But this meltdown, as the public backs further away from impeachment, is truly glorious.

“I don’t know what to believe’ is an unpatriotic cop-out. Do better, Americans.” – Washington Post

We’re in Bertolt Brecht territory here. Time to replace the people with a people the media approve of. Open borders for everyone.

More from Sullivan:

If every American did any two of the following things, the “who knows?” club could be swiftly disbanded. Subscribe to a national newspaper and go beyond the headlines into the substance of the main articles; subscribe to your local newspaper and read it thoroughly — in print, if possible; watch the top of “PBS NewsHour” every night; watch the first 15 minutes of the half-hour broadcast nightly news; tune in to a public-radio news broadcast;…

That’s pretty rich coming from a columnist at a newspaper that tweeted yesterday, “Trump tweets doctored photo of his head on Sylvester Stallone’s body, unclear why.”

Frontpage’s slogan is “Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out,” and Sullivan’s “do better Americans” demand is simply a kinder and gentler sounding version of the eternal primal scream of writers employed by the Post: “Yeah, I’m in the media. Screw you.”

* Which the left believes is the last refuge of a deplorable scoundrel.