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In This Issue

• Todurken: Hot Poultry Threesome
• New York City Hates The Homeless (Surprise!)
• Pope Lives It Up In Final Days
• Letters to the Feditrix: We Want Orangutans!
• Columbia's Investments Are Really Shady (Another Surprise!)
• Italian Neo-Fascism: Sexier than Ever
• Hidden Origins of your Favorite Holidays
• Macy's Parade Unites Jaded New Yorkers in Disgust
• Slow Motion Gunfight Saves Christmas
• Barnard Feminists Full of It (You Guessed It!)
• Reality TV to follow Nike's Lead, Exploit Third World Women
• Fed Staffer Admits Inappropriate Santa Fantasies
• Family Time Blows (Got you Again!)
• The Obligatory Vegan Option: Tofurky
• Why Holiday Diversity Scares Me
• A Paris Hilton Holiday Comic
• Your Retirement Fund
• Silent Vengeance: Book II
• Wacky Fun Whitey
• Robot Ninjas vs. Zombie Vikings

Let's face it, the only thing that the holidays are good for is gorging with the people you love to hate: your family. Yet this isn't as simple as it sounds. Just sitting and chewing with your fucked up extended family isn't enough anymore. Now you have to accommodate contemporary dietary habits.

You have Aunt Phyllis who is "literally in love and wants to have sex with" the Atkins Diet, the vegetarian friends whose guilty pleasure is fish because they don't have fur and "the big expressive brown eyes of cows" and never have anywhere to go but your dinner table for the holidays. Then Cousin Eric, turned vegan at college in Northern California, because he says, with his effeminate vegetarian lisp, that "by eating only grains, I save 43,567,890 acres of rainforest every year," so he can revel in his moral authority. And Grandpa Ben has been reduced to sipping lumpless gravy from his Sponge Bob Square Pants sippy cup through a plastic, heart-shaped twisty straw. So what can you put on the table that everyone will eat, or sip?

I am second-cousin-twice removed-and-once-replaced Perrie and with a title like that, my purpose here is to further obfuscate holiday dinner for one and all. So while the obvious answer is Tofurky, meat made only out of soy, I object.

The horrifying slaughtering of Tofurky is equivalent to the extermination of the Native Americans, to the closing of Columbia Bagels for a year, or to your parents trying to re-enact the Paris Hilton porno. Yes, I have been to where the makers of Tofurky reside, and I must expose what I encountered.

I met with the earth-tone clad couple responsible for producing Tofurky, not just for the holidays but for year-round consumption.They offered me a tour. The factory is a huge dark warehouse where the soybeans are forced to live in tiny pens, right on top of each other in large piles. These soybeans never see the light of day and most suffocate under the weight of the other soybeans on top of them. The soybeans that hold on to life, although I don't know how, those brave little things, fight with the other soybeans and suffer from chronic depression. With no appendages and only able to wiggle slightly in their overcrowded pods, the beans scream for salvation. From afar, their pleas sound like "SOOOOooooooy." Their cries still haunt my dreams. Due to the intense injections of hormones to enlarge the soybeans, the pods are often not large enough to contain their beans and break from the pressure. The beans knowing that all they have to live for is to be eaten by granola-crunching PETA activists. Finally, the soybeans are given no anesthesia as a mechanical sledge hammer methodically smashes each bean into mush, which is then shaped into various Tofurky products.

So this Holiday season, my memories of the Tofurky slaughterhouse compel me to abstain from all soy products at the Christmas/Kwanzaa/Hanukah table. This year, I suggest some raw carrots for dinner and maybe some water for Grandpa Ben. Eating with relatives during the holidays sucks ass, but so does propagating the suffering of innocent soybeans. Take that, cousin Eric. Now who's morally superior?