a turkey stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken.

Yeah, it's a cute idea, but mathematically uninspiring.

Much more interesting would be some sort

of fractal-fowl arrangement.

Say the turkey were stuffed with two ducks,

and say each duck were stuffed with two hens.

You'd get a turduckduckenenenen, or turduckenenduckenen.

I'm not sure yet.

Then each hen could be stuffed with two quails, or whatever.

And by the time you get down to sparrows,

you have a whole flock of them in there.

That sounds fun and practical.

Let's do it!

But being an extremely practical person

who realizes that exponential quails will not fit inside

of one turkey, I am using tiny unborn quails.

Eight of them inside four hens, inside two ducks,

inside one turkey.

This structure is much more interesting

because birds belong in trees, binary trees, that is.

Obviously this is superior to the old linear bird-stuffing

paradigm, and while you're deboning seven birds,

you have lots of time to consider

the question of binary bird stuffing nomenclature.

How do you traverse this tree of syllables?

Unless you can say lots of words that once, like turduckenail,

you'll have to say the syllables in a linear order.

You could go layer by layer, biggest birds first,

like turduckenenenenailailailailailailailail.

Or, you could go down through the layers,

like turduckenailailenailailduckenailailenailail.

The second one is certainly more complicated to say,

but I like the way the structure of it

suggests the structure of the whole.

And say you've made two of these and put them in a goose.

In the first scheme, the new bird names

get inserted into the name to get

gooturturduckduckduckenenenenenenenenailailailailailailailailailailailailailailailail, while for the second,

you start with goose and then just repeat the old word twice

to get gooturduckenailailenailailduckenailailenailailturduckenailailenailailduckenailailenailail.

So it's nice that part of it stays the same.

Of course, those aren't the only possible naming schemes.

Maybe you go from left to right on the tree.

So this would be, quailenquailduckquailenquailkeyquailenquailduckquailenquail

ooh, [? abba cabba ?] pattern.

OK, so in 1807, a guy roasted a bustard-- whatever

that is-- stuffed with a turkey, stuffed with a goose,

stuffed with a pheasant, chicken, duck, guinea fowl,

teal, woodcock, partridge, plover, lapwing quail, thrush,

lark, bunting, and warbler to get

at buskeygooseantenduckneatealcockridgeerwingailusharktinbler.

But say he had done this with the new exponential

bird-stuffing paradigm.

I mean, you'd need over 100,000 birds to do it,

but the world has a lot of birds in it.

And if you can consistently say four syllables a second,

you can say the name of it in only like nine hours.

It might seem like a lot, but it's really

not compared to if you used, say just twice

as many kinds of birds.

Then you'd need over 8.5 billion individual birds.

And if you started naming it as soon as you learned

to talk and take breaks to sleep at night,

you'd still probably die before you finish.

So I can't say I recommend it, buy hey, maybe with advances

in medicine, it will become a more feasible goal.

And even there it is-- two quail eggs

in each hen, two hens in each duck,

two ducks in this turkey-- if I can close it.

Eventually I had to go for sewing up

the turkey most of the way with the one duckenailailenailail,

and then stuffing the other duckenailailenailail in.

Now you can arrange it nicely with the original legs,

and wings, and stuffing to make it look perfectly natural.

There.

Anyway, once you've got that, you're

pretty much good to go as far as Thanksgiving is concerned.

You should already have your gelatinous cranberry cylinder,

bread spheres with butter prism, masked potatoes

with organic hyperbolic plain, string bean vector

field with Borromean onion rings on top, double helix cut ham,

pi, tau, and so on.

And now, finally, you've got your

turduckenailailenailailduckenailailenailail, or

quailenquailduckquailenquailkeyquailenquailduckquailenquail, or

turduckduckenenenenailailailailailailailail whatever.

Each slice gives a different cross

section of this binary bird.

Here, you can see a quail egg wrapped

in the light meat of the hen, wrapped in the darker

meat of the duck, wrapped in the light meat of the turkey.

Another cross section shows two eggs.

Now you can sit down, eat your mathematically-inspired food

and be thankful that no matter how crazy people are,

at least mathematics is always there for you,

making sense, and truth, and beauty, and birds.

Lots of birds.