Next week, Cornell is going to break for a hot sec. to honor our country’s Thanksgiving (for the “peace-making” between “whiteys” and “injuns”). As per custom, we’re gonna fete this holiday up big by feasting on some turkey (or, like me five years ago, beasting on Tofurkey — the horribly sad and gastronomically inept soy-isolate protein “turkey”).

Question: How many pounds of bird does the U.S. collectively eat each Thanksgiving, according to the Division of Environmental Health?

Answer: 675 million pounds each Thanksgiving.

“Too much turkey!” You cry?

Is this fowl figure, in your outlook, the sign of a foully gluttonous nation?

Mm, maybe you are onto something (you wet blanket, you!). But since I don’t actually care about your opinion regarding yearly turkey consumption, let’s talk foul (i.e. strange, weird or otherwise inappropriate) uses of animal products instead.

(Elegant segue, I know. Writing this good is hard to come by these days.)

Our first strange usage of animal products comes to us from a place not so near to my heart but near to my hometown: Lyndhurst, Ohio. “Eggshells,” you ask yourself, “Just a covering for bird babies, or a work of art?”

When moderately conservative Christians get down with JC, the humble eggshell transgresses its bodily fetters and transubstantiates into a sublime piece of Easter artwork.

And nobody’s got Easter art more on lock than Eggshelland, the brainchild of Ron and Betty Manolio. Recurring annually since 1957, the display has grown from 750 painted eggshells to over 20,000, the layout always including a 50-foot cross, positioned next to their “mascot,” the Easter Bunny.

What is particularly interesting about Eggshelland is not necessarily the enormity of the display (though that is part of its allure); nor is it about the man-power that goes into painting, saving and storing the eggshells each year (though that’s part of it, too); nor, finally, is it about the average yearly breakage (1500, not counting the number damaged by weather).

Its intrigue, to me, comes from the art they decide to make out of these shells. This year’s theme was, arbitrarily, the “Zoo’s Who’s Who”: Eggy assemblages of a lion, tiger, bear, rhinoceros and elephant — not to forget a parrot, a duckling and a butterfly. All of this crap on the Manolio’s suburban front lawn for thousands of Ohioan pilgrims to see year after year! How strange ... and how awesome.

Our second strange usage of an animal product jets us across the world to Russia, where Dartz is aiming to make the world’s most expensive car.

The $1.45 million Pombron Monaco Red Diamond Edition SUV “has gold-plated windows, pure tungsten exhausts, and the speed gauges are encrusted in diamonds,” along with sporting “an exterior bulletproof Kevlar coating,” says the Daily Mail Online. The car also includes in its price tag three bottles of the world’s most expensive vodka, totaling about $1 million dollars. (Just don’t swill ‘n’ spill, high-roller buyers!)

In fact, Dartz thinks so highly of its vehicle that they have got big plans in the works. According to a Dartz spokesperson, “In the past our customers have included Lenin and his revolutionary partner Trotsky. In fact we are launching a version of this new model in 2012, just for Latin America. This will commemorate the fact that Trotsky was killed in Mexico with an ice pick in 1940. As such, the Latin version will come with a gold ice axe to mark this fact.”

Ah yes, Dartz’s ostentatious consumerism is the ideal manifestation of what Trotsky meant by “continuous revolution.” Plain and simple: If someone doesn’t agree with your opinion, you can just run him or her over with your bulletproof tank of an SUV and gouge them with your gold ice pick. Not that any of that will matter anyway; we all know that the world (especially Latin America) is ending in 2012. Didn’t Dartz see that John Cusack flick?

Regardless of any end-world judgment Dartz may be trying to avoid, the company is now rescinding some of its former arrogance by refusing to swathe the car’s interior in their preferred material: whale penis leather. They explain their viewpoint by writing to the public (verbatim), “We have no any ideas to kill the whale or something like that. All we want- to make just luxury car…. We just looking for most expensive products for this car — and that’s why we choosed whale penis leathure when we checked it is most of most. After wave of protest we realised our mistake and make a decision not to use natural leathure at all.”

Instead, they will use the most precious synthetic material they can find, to skirt any further controversy. To show their real commitment against using the leather in question, Dartz further proclaimed, “We want to tell our hello to all whales: ‘Our Sea Brothers! We all know that earth are stand on three whales — we will keep You live! We don't Earth fall down to Ocean!’”

Certainly, Dartz’s wish to fend against “Earth fall [sic] down to Ocean” is a noble one, and one for which I am sure male whales will thank the company in the future. Unfortunately, the wittily-colored eggs used on the wittily-named Eggshelland were not as lucky. And neither will be those 675 million pounds of turkey we eat in about a week’s time, but what can I say? The world — you know, the one that Dartz thinks stands on “three whales” — is an unfair (and weird) place; I’m just here to here to document it.

Further Reading:

“EGGSHELLAND” http://eggshellandohio.tripod.com/

“DAILY MAIL ONLINE” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1221947/Revealed-The-1...

“SAVE THE WHALES!” http://dartz.eu/en/dartz_site_bankz/vip-armored-car/tree253_unnamed_alias