Today’s FBI-investigated hedge funds: Wellington Management, Balyasny Asset Management. According to the WSJ, “The Securities and Exchange Commission has shifted its focus on insider trading toward serial offenders and intertwined rings rather than individual trades.” Here’s Dealbreaker’s thinking: it’s all about the elusive, secretive Steve Cohen. On that, no idea: but it is true the reasonably oft-maligned SEC needs to bag some big game (and also, for once, to shoot it dead).

by Jaime Green

I definitely think Thanksgiving is better than Passover. Although the latter has the edge in terms of length, elaborateness and specificity of the ritual meal, the former pulls ahead with better food (despite lacking charoset), and none of that “thank you god for bringing us out of Egypt by your mighty hand” business.

I stopped going to synagogue in high school (other than weddings and bar/bat mizvahs — benei mitzvah for those of you who like proper Hebrew pluralizations, cause yeah, I still got it), stopped fasting for Yom Kippur in college and was never very good at a week without leavened bread, but it took me several years after that (and a little Richard Dawkins) to realize in the middle of a Passover seder that maybe I shouldn’t be intoning these words about god’s mighty hand that I so very much didn’t believe in.

That kind of ruined Passover for me. Which is a shame, because I love a good ritual meal. The rules, the organization, the tradition. The way my mother makes literally three times more food than is needed for any large group.

Thanksgiving (and Passover) were originally my paternal grandmother’s domain. Twenty or so of us piled into her Long Island studio apartment, kids at the far end, where my cousin and sister and I folded white cloth napkins onto our heads and called them Pilgrim hats.

But holidays and grandparents’ homes don’t last forever, because grandparents don’t either. (Sorry, I couldn’t think of a less morbid way to say that.) Thanksgiving at Grandma’s devolved into Thanksgiving at Grandma’s with catered food, then Thanksgiving with that side of the family at a restaurant, until we were dispersed among our other sides of our families, occasionally reconstituting in a cousin’s apartment, two uncles instead of five, eating on the couch with our plates in our laps, watching the new twin babies in their playpen, keeping the dogs off the furniture while my dad tried to feed them scraps.

That year my stepmother made the turkey, and they brought it in the car from Long Island in a cardboard box.

My mom hosted Thanksgiving two years ago, and I, newly really into cooking, volunteered to cook. My mother’s kitchen is a beautiful place to work, and the holiday, and cooking on my mother’s dime, afforded opportunities unknown in my little apartment kitchen. Like two ovens, and buying a single vanilla bean for five dollars.

I cooked all of the sides and a pie (on health food store-bought pre-made crust, because it turns out that normal pre-made crusts are all made with lard, though I’ve since learned how to make my own pie crust, and it is easy, the two tricks being a food processor and frozen butter), but as I’m a vegetarian, and feign flesh-squeamishness even to get out of washing chickeny dishes, my mother made the turkey. She also made an outside-the-bird vegetarian stuffing for me, because that’s what moms do — they take care of you, and make sure you have enough meatless food to eat. I’ve had to talk her out of dishes of tofu and tempeh at many a Thanksgiving, because, God, I could live on Thanksgiving sides for years unsupplemented. No tofu? More room for pie.

My mother’s turkey method can be disconcerting at first. I won’t even get into our modern fear, probably justified, of hot plastics leaching hormone-mimicking chemicals into our food. My mom won’t microwave soup under plastic wrap, but she will roast a turkey in a giant plastic bag.

Yup. The secret to moist, easy turkey is a giant plastic bag.

It is called a roasting bag, and we will assume it’s specially made to be safe for the many hours in the oven. It’s at least specially made for the oven. You put in your turkey, and the other stuff you want cooked with it, put the bag in a roasting pan, and off you go. I don’t eat the turkey, but I’ve seen how easily it falls apart when it’s carved, and I can promise, that shit is moist.

Thanksgiving’s back at my mom’s house this year. I basically forced her to have it with an October phone call — “What’s going on for Thanksgiving?” “I don’t know.” “Well we are having Thanksgiving, right?” — by combination of guilt and another volunteering to take care of everything but the bird. I’m not going to think about how I’ll make four sides, cranberry sauce, and, really, two pies? All in the 20 or so hours I’ll have from arrival Wednesday night to dinnertime? (I’ll probably have to DVR the parade and the dog show, but sacrifices must be made.) But my mom will be ready, the turkey probably stuffed and bagged and waiting in the fridge, and she’ll throw that baby in the oven — the one of the two I’m not using for, eesh, four sides and two pies — and then she’ll go take a nap or something while my stepfather runs the local 5-mile Turkey Trot. And you can freak out all you want about roasting a turkey in a giant plastic bag, but it is going to be — for the meat-eaters — seriously good.

Here, in my mom’s words, are the directions.

Fall-off-the-Bone Turkey

I had this kind of turkey for the first time at your aunt and uncle’s so I want to give credit to Harra. It was life-changing!

1. (10–15 minutes) Make your favorite stuffing and set aside for a few minutes or saute ingredients for the stuffing while you prepare the bird for stuffing.

2. (10 minutes) Spray the bag with oil and dust with flour according to the directions on the Reynolds Turkey Bags.

Place the empty bag in a roasting pan that can support a heavy bird. I purchase discardable foil pans that have supports and handles. Not reusable but it’s once a year and foil is recyclable!

I always put the roasting pan on a cookie sheet just in case it springs a leak. It also helps to move the roasting pan in and out of the oven. It can get pretty heavy.

Wash and dry the turkey, removing the giblets inside the bird.

Rub the turkey with black pepper and kosher salt, inside and out.

Place the turkey in the bag.

3. (5 -10 minutes) I stuff the turkey with my stuffing.

4. (10 minutes) Sprinkle the turkey with: white wine Worcester sauce, soy sauce or tamari or teriyaki, white wine (anything that’s open). Sprinkle generously so that there is liquid on the bottom of the bag.

Throw in vegetables all over the bag — on and around the turkey; your choice, but my favorite are carrots, onions, celery, turnips, parsley, scallions, dill. (Tip: don’t cut up the vegetables too small. They retain flavor better if they are bigger chunks — you probably won’t eat them anyway.)

5. (2–5 hours) Close the bag and roast at the suggested temperature and suggested time from the insert from the box of turkey bags.

Don’t forget to cut open the bag about 15 minutes before the end of the roasting time to brown the turkey.

If possible, make the bird the day before and refrigerate overnight. The next day, remove as much fat as possible while everything is still cold (the fat will harden at the top of the liquid when cold).

Pull the bag out from under the turkey and discard.

Cut up the bird and place back into the liquid in the same roasting pan. If you want to freshen the liquid with more Worcester and wine, go ahead. It’s your bird!

Reheat for an hour or so before eating.

The turkey will be exceptionally moist and tasty; as well, as it will be easier to remove from the pan. And it serves hotter if you don’t have to carve it up in front of company.

Credit to your dad’s side of the family: Arrange the white meat on one side of the platter and the dark meat (thighs, drum sticks, wings) on the other side for easier selection by company. (You ARE sharing this, right?)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Jaime Green recommends Field Grain Meat Co’s non-meat products (Celebration Roast or Apple-Sage Sausage) for your vegetarian, not-gluten-intolerant, Thanksgiving meat-replacing needs, but she personally will just be going for more sides. Also her mom is awesome.

“He said he chose to have it put in the back of the head as an allegorical statement about the things we don’t see and leave behind.”
 — Artist Wafaa Bilal will spend the next year with a tiny digital camera implanted in the rear of his noggin for… I dunno, art reasons. Important “social, aesthetic, political, technological and artistic questions” will be raised, of course.

While the Tuberous Bushcricket may have the biggest balls relative to body weight in the animal kingdom, the barnacle comes out the winner in the largest penis competition. “According to new research published in Marine Biology, the shape of barnacles’ penises varies depending on their circumstances. Barnacles spaced far apart from each other develop stretchier organs, the better for reaching across the gaps, and barnacles exposed to rough waves grow wider ones to stand up against the tide.” Some barnacles also develop stretchy, foldy penises, “like an accordion or a bendy straw.” Now you know! (Above, barnacles do sex to each other.)

As the holiday shopping season opens, it’s the best time of year to shop at your favorite local, independent businesses. So on November 27, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, join the movement and celebrate Small Business Saturday. Spend at least $25 using your registered American Express® Card at a small business that day to earn a $25 statement credit from American Express.

It’s a way of honoring the businesses that are the backbone of the economy. It’s also an important way to support your own neighbors, because for every $100 spent at local small businesses, $68 returns to the community, according to Civic Economics.

Small Business Saturday is being presented in partnership with local advocacy, business and trade organizations across the United States. American Express is donating $1 to Girls Inc. for each of the first 500,000 “Likes” of the Small Business Saturday Facebook page.

Terms and conditions apply to each of the offers described here, and you can see them and learn much more about the program at http://www.facebook.com/SmallBusinessSaturday.

Here’s how to get involved:
• If you’re an American Express® Cardmember, register your Card to be eligible to earn a $25 statement credit on any purchase of at least $25 on November 27 at locally owned independent small businesses that accept American Express.
Enrollment is required, and limited to the first 100,000 people who register at https://enroll.amexnetwork.com/US/sbs.
• If you’re a Small Business Owner, sign up at http://www.facebook.com/SmallBusinessSaturday to receive a $100 Facebook advertising credit to help build online buzz and drive customers to your business. Supplies of advertising
inventory for this offer are limited, so sign up now. You can also download promotional materials and a number of social media tools.
• If you want to Join the Movement and help support Small Business, visit http://www.facebook.com/SmallBusinessSaturday, where you can “like” Small Business Saturday, syndicate news feeds about the day to your personal networks and spread the word by giving a shout-out to your favorite local shops and restaurants via Facebook and Twitter.

Today in “I’ll see you in an hour or so”: Girl Talk’s All Day broken down by its component parts. It’s pretty cool, actually. [Via]

D.C. comedy site “The Daily Caller” has a hilarious piece today, extremely Swiftian and sophisticated in its humor and irony! It is by a former Tennessee District Attorney, named Joe Rehyansky. It goes like this: “I have never encountered my eminently sensible proposal, one that protects the patriotic urges of some homosexuals as well as the national interest on the basis of ‘force readiness’ arguments which should govern the thinking of those charged with implementing the defense of our country: Lesbians should be allowed to serve, gay men (hereafter ‘gays’) should not.” Fascinating idea right? He argues this case extremely hilariously well! Here’s my favorite ironic transition: “Most men who are sexually attracted to other men can and do indulge their promiscuous urges with little or no restraint; i.e., it’s ‘party time’ all the time. My wife and I watched a sad documentary about AIDS a few years ago.” [Pauses. Re-reads. Pauses again. Goes out for a cigarette. Comes back. Re-reads.] But wait, it gets even better. UPDATE: It actually “does get better” because that piece was just actually removed from the Daily Caller website. UPDATE AGAIN: Oh and now it’s back!

I mean: “It’s no secret that men are generally much more susceptible to sexual arousal through visual stimuli than are most women. Many gays will deny that this is the case with them, but why then is the Internet saturated with gay porn?”

Yes, why. Why is that. That speaks to me.

Our author is humble too. “I don’t claim to be a Constitutional law scholar on a par with President Obama,” he writes.

Anyway, if you’re not already rolling in the aisles/cubicles, the piece has a punchline that you literally won’t believe!

(And now you’ll never see it because it has apparently been disappeared.)

by Forrest Hanson

My coworker Ally and I had an opportunity to tour the Hoboken production shop and initial staging ground at which the floats and balloons for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade are constructed. This rococo monstrosity is the first thing you see when passing through the studio’s surprisingly fortified entryway. Housed outside, we found an unidentified sleigh construction (not Santa’s; it turned out to be the Dora float), three iconic Macy’s stars, red and inflated, and a blue cat on a rusty tin roof, all surrounded by barbed wire and a scattered few forklifts.

I didn’t immediately recognize the above as the OfficeMax float. (When it finally dawned on me, I thought to myself, “Those herky jerky moves? I am a better dancer than that.” No, I am not.) These elves did not rest once in the two hours we were there.

Planning is a year round process. If memory serves, there are around 25 floats in each parade, and this year seven will be new. To become a sponsor — like our host, Homewood Suites — you must submit an assumedly lofty proposal more than a year out. If accepted, you meet with the Macy’s crew — everyone at the studio is a Macy’s employee, as are most/all those who appear as balloon handlers/clowns/etc. — to discuss the overall vision. Once that is settled, it is in Macy’s hands until completion.

And here’s the final product. FOX 5 was there shooting a segment, and their enterprising reporter snagged school kid Donald Hill to help out with the report. Sick buffalo club hat!

John Piper, Macy’s VP of Parade Production or some similarly awesome title, told us that anyone hired to work at the studio must wear multiple hats. If you’re a computer designer, you also paint. If you’re a carpenter, you also help test the balloons, etc. (There’s more on that here.)

The Morton’s Salt float centers around anodyne folks dressed as cupcakes and gingerbread men frolicking in the land of hypertension, which struck me as a bit nefarious except I am offended by the concept of unsalted butter and so am in no position to judge.

This is a model of the Keith Haring float that made the trip down Broadway in 2008 and had a run-in with Meredith Vieira and the Today Show’s broadcast booth. Unlike most floats, which lean forward and lurch along, “Untitled (Figure with Heart)” was fully upright and thus much harder to control. Tom Otterness and Jeff Koons have also had their work immortalized in balloon form…

…and you can add the omni-present Takashi Murakami to that list.

Meet KaiKai and Kiki, Murakami’s weirdly adorable rabbit-and-fanged-chakra tandem. KiKi’s top land speed must max out around .5 MPH because those costumes are like being shackled with cotton candy, so you should look for these on one float or another. My money is on Kanye’s float since he is performing (“Hell of a Life”, hopefully!) and he and Murakami are pals, but I can’t confirm that.

Kanye has also offered to inflate each of this year’s balloons using hot air from his Twitter feed. Just kidding! The balloons will be filled with helium like you’d expect. Interesting fact though: I always thought of parade balloons as being single hollow volumes, but they are actually made up of many smaller pockets designed to support the structure and even out lift. Each pocket is inflated and left for six hours to prove that it’s completely sealed. If any compartment deflates, the team will patch and repeat as necessary. (Above: Po of Kung Fu Panda fame.)

If you would like to volunteer as a balloon handler, you must be an NFL ref with a sweet mustache.

Makes you long for a time when the world only existed in fiery-orange hues.

The paint-spattered floor and the myriad plans and models of past glory in John’s office suggest just how storied a space this studio is. Hoboken has been the parade’s true home for the past forty-fifty years and you can tell. John mentioned wistfully that they’re in the midst of constructing a new studio deeper in Jersey, closer to the storage facility. They are going to have a lot of packing to do.

Joan Rivers is this year’s Snow Queen, and this is her sleigh. True story: Melissa was initially part of the float design but has since been relegated to accompanying her mother’s float on horseback. Note the terrifying disembodied elk head. Gah.

Still dancing! Did I mention that nearly everyone involved in the parade is a Macy’s employee, including the hundreds of folks who volunteer their Thanksgiving morning to see the parade off without a hitch? One Maine outlet’s employees annually close up shop on Thanksgiving Eve, caravan through the night to Central Park West, dutifully escort the parade south through Manhattan, then return north in time for Black Friday. Something to remember as you stuff yourself in the cozy confines of home. Not that anyone can blame you. Happy holidays!

Forrest Hanson loves a parade.

Perhaps you heard that a new Kanye West album came out yesterday. It’s been getting generally positive reviews. And that Jay-Z just put out a book, also to good reviews. But you know, in the rap game, today’s news is yesterday’s papers. And these two are already on to the next one, as Jay would say.

The next one for them is a collaborative album, Watch the Throne, that they have been recording in France, and will soon work more on in Australia, and complete and release early next year. A first single from the album leaked yesterday. And while it’s probably not a final version, it is — as no one should be surprised at this point — totally excellent. The beat, made by A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip, has a late-80s feel, with it’s “Funky Drummer” sample, and scratches and squeals reminiscent of the Bomb Squad and Rob Base. The hook is sung by Eleanor Kate Jackson from the English synth duo La Roux. Kanye has been bringing the best out of everyone around him lately. And now, hooray, Q-Tip!

Kanye mumbles through the first verse: place-holder syllables to mark a flow he hasn’t yet completed lyrics for. He did this with “Runaway,” a month or so ago, and ended up just leaving it like that — realizing, I’d suppose, that it added to the emotional ambivalence that makes that song as phenomenally great as it is. It’s always interesting to get this kind of look at artistic process, I think. (And it sounds pretty cool here, too. It’s like Waka Flocka Flame lyrics, in a way.) But it also serves as an indication of Kanye’s current work pace. And of his confidence, and a sort of intentional transparency that the Times’ Jon Caramanica wrote about recently. Like, “Hey, Here’s what I was working on last night, check it out.” This is, assuming that its okay with Kanye that this got out, and I am assuming that; I’m thinking this is a move, on his and Jay’s part, while they dominate another week’s magazines and talk shows, to tell everyone once again, that it don’t stop.

It’s hard to keep up. But we should. This is important.

“GERMANY’S gay community is outraged after a homosexual couple were forcibly parted to be made to mate with females. Guido and Detlef have become the poster boys for intolerance of their alternative lifestyle — despite the fact they are both male vultures.”