Forgive my laughter, Z-dr, but your story reminds me of a Thanksgiving a couple of years back. I had travelled to the home of my brother and his family in rural South Carolina for Turkey Day. He had just purchased his snazzy, shiny, new Turkey Fryer and he was intent on showing his older brother up with his culinary prowess.

Preparing to deep fry that turkey became a major undertaking. Entire military campaigns have been waged with lesser logisitical and tactical planning than was evident that brisk November day. I swear he must have weighed that bird twenty times as it defrosted over a three day period. He used a high speed, high capacity computer to calculate the exact number of teaspoons of cooking oil he would need along with the number of pounds of propane fuel that would be needed. It was almost five years before he learned how to convert thousands of carefully poured out teaspoons into gallons and quarts. He purchased a audaciously expensive stop watch with more functions than normally available to the crew on the flight deck of a Boeing 747 or any of our shuttle missions to assure exact cooking times. He read the words off the pages of the instruction manual and commited them to memory. During his nightly snooze before the blaring television set on the eve of the big day, he was heard muttering cooking instructions verbatim from the manual in his sleep. The boy was ready!

You sense an impending disaster, do you? Ahh, Grasshopper, you know my family well.

Somehow, my brother overlooked a simple phrase, or clause, in one of the instructions listed under "WARNING! EXTREME HAZARDS TO AVOID!" His newly purchased, and also highly expensive, cooking thermometer sat proudly attached to the lip of that shiny pot containing just exactly the right amount of cooking oil and signalled to him when the oil had reached the proper temperature for introduction of the guest of honor to its warm embrace.

My brother rushed to the kitchen sink where the bird sat awaiting its fate prior to its intended role as the centerpiece of a holiday table laden with future interminable leftovers-to-come. The instructions said the bird should be washed well before it was committed to the hot touch of the cooking oil nearing a boiling point outside. It also said that the chef-du-dumb-ass should make certain the bird had been patted dry and then allowed to dry completely before being placed into the hot oil. That was the minor clause my brother had overlooked or assigned to lesser regions of his memory banks.

With great fanfare and ceremony, as well as a few congratulatory libations lifted in its honor, the bird was skewered upon the metal fingered contraption that was to hold it upright as it began its hoped for journey into family culinary history and a procession of family members accompanied the bird on its "last mile" to the front porch where the new cooking rig awaited its moment of glory and its opportunity to demonstrate its cost-value effectiveness ratio as being well worth the nearly $100.00 of assorted turkey cooking gear assembled for this moment in history.

By this date, both my brother and I had surpassed the half-century mark of existence. Neither of us move as well as we once did thanks to the ravages of time, hard, harsh labor and our individual tours of duty in southeast Asia in the mid-1960s... but fortune provided an opportunity that fateful day for my brother and, to a somewhat lesser extent, for me to dazzle our assembled family and friends with our rapidity of movement and well-honed evasive skills.

The instructions indicated the bird should be "lowered carefully into the now well heated oil." It didn't say one darned thing about the oil bubbling up like some ancient and crazed and highly disturbed volcanic god or goddess of mythology. IT ERUPTED as the still wet bird hit that oil. Naturally, the bird was left to fend for herself as my brother, his family, my guest, a couple of family friends, assorted children, pets, livestock and yours truly attempted to defy the laws of physics by outrunning hot, splashing, bubbling, erupting, angry cooking oil spewing like some ancient geyser from the top of that cooker. Heck, my nephew got so flustered he forgot his assigned duty of starting the stop watch. My sister-in-law attempted to convince us that she had been meaning to climb that rose trellis to check the condition of the roof gutters anyway and her awkward position atop that roof was not her reaction to the eruption of Mount Butterball in any way. My niece hardly blushed at all as we helped her come down from the lower branches of the pine tree in the far reaches of the front yard. I am happy to report that less than a quarter ounce of Kaintuck's finest sipping whiskey splashed from the glass in my hand, and there was sufficient there to make my quarter mile walk back to that porch a real leisurely jaunt.

My brother? Aside from severe contusions to his pride and dignity, he escaped unscathed as well, though to this day he swears he doesn't remember how he got into that fish pond several hundred yards down the lawn.

For the historical record, and in the interest of accuracy in reporting, I will tell you one lesson we all learned that fateful day. Cooking times for a whole turkey in a deep fryer are normally listed in minutes per pound at predetermined oil temperatures. I later checked, but nowhere in that manual did I see any mention that cooking times for WET turkeys dropped in hot oil in such cooking utensils is measured in microseconds per ton. If it hadn't taken so long to soak up all the oil from the boards of that porch, we might have considered working up such a table for future use by klutzes like ourselves.

Following a somewhat fervent prayer of gratitude for the deliverance of all assembled around the highly crispy carcass gracing a center spot of infamy at that table, I heard my brother mutter what vaguely sounded like a death threat under his breath when my guest indicated that she wanted a piece of the "well done" part of the bird and her request was marked by odd, suppressed choking sounds from everyone seated at that table.

I said nothing the following year when my brother again brought out his no longer shining turkey fryer for our annual get together. I didn't dare. He glared a look at me that heated the oil all by itself when I poured my libation into a spill proof container and laced my running shoes up a notch as he brought the bird out in its terry cloth draping followed by my niece with her blow dryer on its highest setting being pressed into emergency preventive service as a sort of dehydrating honor guard.

And now, dear kiddies, you know how it became customary and traditional in our family to mark Thanksgiving Day with bologna sandwiches.