“Punch Me Panda leaves the L train in Brooklyn.
Punch Me Panda walks down a Brooklyn street.
A man punches Punch Me Panda.
Someone runs from Punch Me Panda.”
 — This is like the weirdest children’s book ever. Great pictures though.

We know all about working for content farm Demand Media. But let’s look at it from an investor and IPO perspective! “Google and Demand are in a co-dependent relationship and who better to be co-dependent with than Google, the company that controls the search experience of most Internet users. The negative spin is that Demand is still a very small piece of Google’s revenue (less than 1 percent of Google’s Q3 revenue was generated on Demand pages) and that the nature of Demand’s content threatens the quality of the user experience on Google…. Demand highlights a fundamental weakness of algorithmic search: the ability to ‘trick’ the search engine…. Perform a search on ‘How to roast a chicken.’ The top result on Google is from Demand’s ‘Ehow Food’ site and is utterly useless.”

“Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is facing fresh humiliation today (Fri) as pornographers launched a new blue movie based on his ‘bunga bunga’ parties with sexy models. The film — ‘Bunga Bunga Mr President’ — stars a Berlusconi lookalike as the insatiable President Rokko of an unnamed European republic and the curvy young women he beds.”
 — Nothing much to add except that I do like the way they note that this is Friday’s humiliation, as opposed to the humiliations from the other days of the week.

“A camouflage-clad Florida dance troupe desperate to make it to a live TV talent show set off a rush-hour terror scare when they ditched their cars in merciless Lincoln Tunnel traffic and tried to sprint through the tube. The FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force was called in — and a massive contingent of heavily armed cops surrounded the harmless performers, who stood teary-eyed in their showy costumes as hundreds of angry drivers were stuck in the snarl.”

Spike Jonze directed this video for the title track from Arcade Fire’s latest album, and now here you are watching it. It’s funny how life works sometimes. [Via]

Bad news, ladies: “Some women may be able to hold their liquor as well as men do, but there’s no equality when it comes to whose health suffers more for it. Excessive alcohol use takes a higher toll on women’s bodies, with a greater risk of liver, brain or heart damage, among other devastating conditions.” On the other hand, red wine might prevent diabetes. So, you know, pick your poison.

The impression you get is that Robert Kraft just lost track of time. Another long day is closing at the New England Patriots owner’s vast tumbled Redwood of a desk, the daylight lowering and — uh oh, Kraft has just remembered that it is almost time for Thursday Night Football. Thursday Night Football which is like Monday Night Football, only without the benefit of Jon Gruden’s manic clairvoyance or the non-benefit of Chris Berman’s baffle-shrieked halftime highlights, and which no one watches because it’s on the NFL Network. Anyway, so Kraft is up and out of the office and onto his waiting golf cart (I know), which he pilots himself through the Foxboro, Mass. sports complex that he developed, until he gets to what appears to be… well, this is where it gets confusing.

Kraft arrives — you don’t see him tossing the golf cart key to a valet, but we can only assume he got there by cart — at an establishment with outdoor seating and wine and a general posh yacht club languor, but also close enough to Gillette Stadium that it is visible, lights on, in the background. Wherever Kraft winds up is, also, where the NFL’s Thursday Night Football commercial ends — on Kraft’s plump, plummy grin. The commercial has also shown us, intercut with the 655th-richest man in the world’s journey from his office to his date with some alfresco prime rib, a host of other ordinary joes and josephinas — bakers and uniformed civil servants and office drones eager to cut loose with some late-week AFC North action — making their own pilgrimages footballward. The overall sense is that the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots is something like first among football fan equals — a guy as psyched for NFL games as your average fan, but one who happens to own some very nice bespoke shirts and, um, a football team.

Well, really he owns the football team and the stadium in which they play and the sprawling $375 million outdoor mall around it — it’s called Patriot Place and, as a commenter pointed out a couple weeks ago, is probably home to the venue at which Kraft enjoys his meal. (And, coincidentally, easily reachable by golf cart) Were he not in the television commercial, there’d be no real reason to single Robert Kraft out for criticism — or praise: those are some nice rich-guy shirts. He’s the sort of billionaire you don’t really notice — the kind that would give $25,000 to John McCain’s PAC in June of 2008, then another $25,000 to Barack Obama’s in August. Kraft once, controversially and perhaps not intentionally, gave one of his three Super Bowl rings to buff, Modigliani-headed Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin.

He’s that kind of billionaire, but he’s also the kind that grew up in suburban Boston and took a risk in buying the Patriots at a time when their value was low, and in so doing probably prevented the team from leaving the region. Stack him up against the NFL’s more outwardly ridiculous plutocrats — Daniel Snyder, idiot boy-king owner of the Washington Redskins and the man behind the roundly unloved ‘50s-themed trans-fat dispensaries Johnny Rockets; taut-faced embodiment of grandiose oil-country venality Jerry Jones, who owns/is the Dallas Cowboys — and Kraft is just another swell. Still, there’s no reason, outside of his presence in widely aired TV commercials and several appearances during every Patriots broadcast — where he sits in a luxury box high above the field — why football fans should or would want to know what Robert Kraft looks like. He doesn’t play football, after all. He develops malls.

But being in those NFL commercials and on all those broadcasts ensures that Kraft is more recognizable to the average football fan than virtually any of the players on his payroll. Kraft isn’t alone in this — Cowboys owner Jerry Jones pursues cameras with a Heidimontagian wantonness, and has surely appeared in more unwatchable Papa John’s commercials than any of his players. Jones also had a recurring role on the toxic long-form Axe Body Spray commercial that is “Entourage,” which is both heartrendingly perfect and, I’d argue, significant.

Aesthetically, “Entourage” is basically a homophobic live-action Skymall catalog with occasional nudity and bad jokes. Dramatically, it’s as slack and rote as a Family Circus cartoon (with occasional nudity and worse jokes). Look at it politically, though, and “Entourage” finally gets kind of interesting, and a bit more instructive for our purposes here. Not interesting in terms of actually containing an explicit or even implicit critique of anything — for all the show’s manic and unconvincing Hollywood insider-ness, there’s not an ounce of satire in it. But “Entourage”’s frantic, joyless consumerism, which is palpable in everything from the brand-building personal relationships to the actual consumerism-consumerism itself — no other show, ever, has so concerned itself with the question of what kind of watch a particular asshole should buy his girlfriend — winds up being damning all the same. What’s supposed to be an exercise in glossy wish fulfillment — the wishes being for money and the sense of impunity that comes with it; for women; for just the right sorry-I-fucked-that-other-model wristwatch for your ladyfriend — winds up repellent, claustrophobic and terribly dull. The series’ inability to stop gawking at all the idiot affluence on display is so crippling that the show itself winds up never quite happening. Instead of offering a dramatic experience, “Entourage” plays like a long commercial for everything, a big dumb ad for every conceivable ill-conceived purchase. It’s a commercial for being rich, made by rich people.

Which makes casting Jerry Jones in a recurring role perfect. There’s also something apposite about Jones showing up in those (horrible, even considering that one of them involves Jones getting socked in the beans by a fourth grader) Papa John’s ads, too, since national Papa John’s ads are in the same vein — they’re commercials for the crowd-pleasing force of nature that is brushcut CEO “Papa” John Schnatter, basically, with cameo appearances from his airport-quality pizza. But the same principle holds for both — the flatlined punchline, the only possible purpose, of putting these billionaires at center stage is to give the (non-billionaire) audience the notional frisson of seeing an actual billionaire acting like a regular human.

There’s a breathtaking vanity to this certainty that we’d rather watch Jerry Jones do something than watch someone else do it, because Jerry Jones owns a football team — or that we’d take some sort of thrill in knowing that Robert Kraft watches football just as we do, but while wearing fancier shirts in a mall he owns. But there’s also something kind of sad about that certainty, because it’s so manifestly wrong. The rich might be different from you and I, but they’re not necessarily more interesting. To anyone outside their peer group, at least. Thus the for-us-by-us noxiousness of “Entourage,” or the poignant fraudulence of Everyman Billionaire Robert Kraft and his relatable-everyman golf cart and poor naugahyde-faced Jerry Jones’s evident and poignantly mislaid faith in his own charm. Thus, too, the ghoulish what-if-the-megarich-actually-had-to-work prank/program that is “Undercover Boss” (which premiered after the last Super Bowl on CBS). All of them testify, nauseatingly, to the mad, perspective-obliterating vanity of great wealth.

And so, too, does the fact that Kraft and his fellow owners are laying the groundwork for a lockout shortly after this NFL season ends. This is hardly the only place in which we can see the devastation wrought by the rot of our nation’s discursive tendency towards glib wealth-fluffing. But while the terrified, brutal brainlessness of Tea Party Randianism’s foundational makers-versus-takers mythos will surely do worse things to our nation than would the 2011 NFL season starting a few weeks late, the point is that all this self-defeating vainglory comes from the same dim, self-enamored place, and terminates in the same ulcerous isolation. Repeat often enough that the rational magic of the market delivers the only true justice we know on earth, and the risk is that people will start believing that shit — believing that great success can be reverse-engineered to reveal great worthiness, and that those who have less must inexorably deserve that fate. This is what brings the sour-faced dowagers onto the National Mall when some doughty millionaire demagogue demands it — the idea that what they have earned is so manifestly and deservedly theirs that there is no higher call than to hoard it, context or consequence be damned.

It is a churlish, childish way to look at one’s life, but also a very popular one. And it is also how we wound up with Jerry Richardson, the owner of the Carolina Panthers and the man with the dubious career credit of having essentially invented Hardee’s, rising to address his peers back in March 2009. The scene was the NFL ownership meeting, and the discussion concerned locking out players when the NFL’s current collective bargaining agreement expires in March of 2011, should the players’ union not accede to the owners’ redrawn economic map. The owners were demanding the addition of two regular season games (without an extra bye week) to the schedule, as well as claiming a slice of revenues that would effectively hand the league’s players — that is, the guys who play the actual games — an 18 percent pay cut. (The NFLPA released its counter-proposal this week)

Richardson had a unique perspective among those in the room: he is the only NFL owner to have played in the league, and caught a touchdown pass from Johnny Unitas in the Baltimore Colts’ 1959 NFL Championship win, then quit the NFL two years later after Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom refused to give him a $250 raise. But that was a different Richardson — since his playing days, he’d made a lot of money in the bad burger biz, become a big wheel in Carolina Republican politics, and fired his own sons from their jobs in the Panthers front office. Things change, people change, so on.

“We signed a shitty deal last time,” Richardson told the assembled billionaires and multi-millionaires, referring to the last collective bargaining agreement, which dedicated almost 60 percent of the NFL’s annual revenues to player salaries. “And [this time] we’re going to stick together and take back our league and fucking do something about it.” The crowd reportedly erupted into cheers. The owners were ready to take back what wasn’t actually theirs, ready to reclaim their league from the limping, concussion-marred athletic geniuses who give it its value. The workaday billionaires and unsung heroes in the executive suites were, finally, ready to stand up and get what they were certain they deserved.

Two and a half months to find my level, and my level is… exactly that of a coin. I’m not going to dwell on this, because I’m not proud of that particular level and because I know that the coin has no actual intellect, but I will say that I’m happy that I have a brain that allows me not to pick Carolina this week. They’re starting someone named Brian St. Pierre, who was a doctor on a soap opera last week, at quarterback. DeAngelo Williams is out for the season. Expect Jerry Richardson to start lobbying hard for a lockout around halftime.

Week 10 (and overall): David Roth: 6–8 (69–69–8); Al Toonie The Lucky Canadian Two-Dollar Coin: 6–8 (69–69–8)

Sunday, November 21
• Oakland Raiders at Pittsburgh Steelers (-7), 1pm — DR: Pittsburgh; ATTLCTDC: Pittsburgh
• Houston Texans at New York Jets (-7), 1pm — DR: New Jersey J; ATTLCTDC: Houston
• Baltimore Ravens (-10) at Carolina Panthers, 1pm — DR: Baltimore; ATTLCTDC: Carolina
• Washington Redskins at Tennessee Titans (-7), 1pm — DR: Tennessee; ATTLCTDC: Washington
• Detroit Lions at Dallas Cowboys (-6.5), 1pm — DR: Detroit; ATTLCTDC: Detroit
• Green Bay Packers (-3) at Minnesota Vikings, 1pm — DR: Green Bay; ATTLCTDC: Green Bay
• Buffalo Bills at Cincinnati Bengals (-5.5), 1pm — DR: Cincinnati; ATTLCTDC: Buffalo
• Cleveland Browns at Jacksonville Jaguars (-1), 1pm — DR: Cleveland; ATTLCTDC: Cleveland
• Arizona Cardinals at Kansas City Chiefs (-8), 1pm — DR: Kansas City; ATTLCTDC: Arizona
• Seattle Seahawks at New Orleans Saints (-12), 4:05pm — DR: New Orleans; ATTLCTDC: New Orleans
• Atlanta Falcons (-3) at St. Louis Rams, 4:05pm — DR: Atlanta; ATTLCTDC: Atlanta
• Tampa Bay Buccaneers at San Francisco 49ers (-3), 4:05pm — DR: San Francisco; ATTLCTDC: Tampa Bay
• Indianapolis Colts at New England Patriots (-3), 4:15pm — DR: New England; ATTLCTDC: Indianapolis
• New York Giants at Philadelphia Eagles (-3), 8:20 pm — DR: Philadelphia; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey G

Monday, November 22
• Denver Broncos at San Diego Chargers (-10), 8:30pm — DR: San Diego; ATTLCTDC: Denver

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

The only thing that could top this would be Charlie Rangel getting into Kabbalah: “Most Americans got their last glimpse of Bob Ney in 2006 when the powerful Ohio representative resigned his office and left Washington to begin a 30-month term in federal prison in Morgantown, W.Va. A player in the Jack Abramoff scandal, Ney was a disgraced Republican with a drinking problem and an expanding waistline. Today, he has been reborn as a sober and slimmed-down follower of the Dalai Lama and is studying meditation techniques with Tibetan monks at a Buddhist temple in India.” [Via]

by Forrest Hanson

In the age of Double Downs, McRibs, and more bacon-wrapped atrocities than you can shake your fat little finger at, it’s not hard to lump the turducken in as yet another cellular symptom of America’s fatty issue.

After all, a turducken is meat, filled with meat, enclosed by meat, stuffed with bread, butter, a few begrudging vegetables, and more meat. It owes its place in modern discourse to two men — Paul Prudhomme and John Madden — who’ve treated their bodies less like temples and more like a chain of Golden Corrals. And as our nation struggles to tighten its belt, the turducken doesn’t exactly scream abstention.

Yet now is the time we need turduckens the most!

Turduckens call for a coming together — of chefs, of feasters, of proteins — during a season when coming together is oh so difficult. The sanctioned holidays bracket a medley of looming deadlines and libertine holiday parties. Each hour spent with family is offset by an interminable queue or TSA peepshow. Every sniffle and sopping cuff is a reminder that you’d rather be at home under the covers. And all anyone really wants is an excuse to throw on some sweats, gather with friends, and tryptophan out.

Turducken is that excuse.

If umami is the fifth flavor, investment is the sixth and your turducken will have it in spades. You will pour blood, sweat, and tears into these birds and your back will tire and your focus will wane and you will rely on your friends to pull you through. As others arrive offering potluck soufflés and glögg as recompense for a taste of your delicacy, a bustling affinity will consume the day. Little hamlets will sprout up around the apartment, and you’ll make the appointed rounds.

Then you’ll step aside and watch as each of your friends, in random succession, takes a bite that completely overwhelms them. They will lean back. Their eyes will close. They’ll smile and they will exhale. And in that instant, as you feel a dull ache in your chest and pressure building between your eyes, you’ll wonder why you don’t do this more often.

Suffice it to say, if you’re ordering your turducken through Google Adwords you are missing the point. So let’s begin!

First things first, you’re going to need: a turkey (15–20lbs); a duck (5–6 lbs); and a chicken (3–4lbs). Order those suckers pronto. You’ll also need to assemble a team. Turduckening is a marathon, and you’ll need everyone to be in it for the longhaul. Four to five people is an ideal crew. Sort out your alphas and your betas, and rest assured there are tasks enough for everyone — shopping, chopping, stirring, baking, and deboning to name a few — so there’s no room for kitchen bullies here! Now divvy up the following tasks as you see fit.

DEBONING THE BIRDS

A great pleasure of the Turducken is that it’s boneless and can be sliced like a loaf of bread. Unfortunately unless you ordered your birds from KFC, you will have to remove those bones yourself. Do not order your birds from KFC.

Deboning was always our pre-med roommate Mike’s domain. (He is filling out secondary applications right now and was asked in one to complete the following sentence: “Most people don’t know that I can (fill in the blank).” He opted for “…de-bone fowl with surgical precision.” True story.) In his absence, I’ll refer you to these gentlemen with a few addenda. 1) You can break up the larger bones with a hammer first. It makes the job a lot easier, and it is great stress relief. 2) Watch plenty of Swedish chef.

Remember how much Big Bird always bothered you. Big Bird sucks. GO TO TOWN!

STUFFING #1

· 1 cup evaporated milk
· 2 eggs
· 10 tablespoons unsalted butter (in all)
· 3 bay leaves
· 3 cups chopped onions
· 2 cups chopped green bell peppers
· 1 ¾ cups chopped celery
· 1 ½ tablespoons minced garlic
· 4 tablespoons Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Poultry Magic (!)
· 4 tablespoons Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Magic Pepper Sauce (!!!!)
· 2 lbs duck or chicken giblets, ground
· 8 cups roughly crumbled cornbread

You should start by calling your mom and asking for her cornbread recipe. It is the best around, and you owe her a call anyway. Now bake it, shred it, spread it across a sheet pan, and return it to 300 degree heat until the crumbs are dry and browning (30ish minutes).

While that is happening, melt half the butter together with the bay leaves before adding in your onions (solo for 5 minutes) then your peppers, celery, garlic, and (with pizzazz) both magics. Do not use some generic-brand magic. It has to be Chef Paul’s. As the onions brown and the green fades from your peppers, stir in the giblets and let the whole mess cook another 5 minutes. Add the remaining butter, remove everything from the heat, and chuck the bay leaves.

In a mixing bowl, combine the breadcrumbs with the eggs and milk — which you presciently blended together ahead of time — then add the veggie mixture incrementally until it’s all evenly mixed. Spread everything out as thin as you can on the sheet pan and balance it in the freezer so it cools as quickly as possible. High five!

STUFFING #2

· 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
· 2 ½ lbs Andouille sausage
· 5 cups chopped onions
· 3 cups chopped celery
· 2 ½ cups chopped bell peppers
· ¼ cup minced garlic
· 7 tablespoons Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Magic Pepper Sauce
· 5 tablespoons Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Meat Magic
· 3 cups breadcrumbs

If you noticed these ingredients look suspiciously like the last recipe’s only with sausage, you’re right. Got a problem with that? I didn’t think so. Team up with your cornbread friend and chop chop. (Literally. You will forget there was ever a time you WEREN’T chopping vegetables.) Chin up. It’s worth it!

STUFFING #3

Chef Paul’s turducken instructions call for a third, seafood variation with shrimp and oysters or some such, but Homey don’t play that. And Stove Top is delicious! Buy a box!

With all these things going on, your kitchen will look something like:

(Video by Craig Rubens.)

But don’t let that stress you out. If things for some reason get a little tense, you can tell this joke to lighten the mood: Where is a turducken’s favorite vacation spot? Port Manteau.

Better? It’s yours. Onward!

FRANKENBIRD

Plop the turkey skin down on to a clean counter or kitchen island where everyone can reach it. Sprinkle the turkey’s interior with as much Meat Magic is you see fit, massaging it in for max flavor. Then start cramming chilled cornbread stuffing all up in that bird! About a cup and a half in each leg cavity, a few cups in the wings, and a ¾-inch thick bed for the duck to rest on in the turkey’s breast cleavage. Giggle at the words “breast cleavage”. Refrigerate. (You’ll have used 8–9 cups in total — the remainder you’ll bake separately.)

Do roughly the same thing with the duck and the sausage stuffing (~ 4 lbs) then again with the chicken and the Stove Top (~ 3 lbs), but I recommend having cooked both those birds beforehand. The sum of a turducken is greater than its parts, unless one of those parts is undercooked. Then it’s just unhealthy. Better to be sure. And don’t worry about those bad boys drying out. They’re enSCONCED in moist fatty goodness! They will be fine.

That done, it’s time to piece everything together. You’ll need a handful of bamboo skewers, a 15 x 11-inch baking pan, and another, slightly larger pan. Roll the chicken’s sides together around the stuffing and secure it with two criss-crossed skewers inserted lengthwise down the chicken. It will look like a little meat football. Wrap the duck around the chicken, hitching it with two more skewers and removing the first two from the chicken, then repeat with the turkey around the duck/chicken. It should be stuffed but not engorged as you don’t want the skin to tear while it cooks. Remove excess dressing as necessary and secure the neck flap with another skewer.

Turn your 15 x 11-inch pan upside-down and press it onto your turducken’s skewered undercarriage. Enlist a friend’s help to flip the whole thing so your creation’s unmarred breast faces up, then mar that guy with as much Meat Magic as your heart desires. Wrap a few pieces of tin foil around the tips of the wings and place two more pieces at the front and rear to keep any excess stuffing from tumbling out. Place this pan into the larger pan, ideally leaving an inch or two on each side to collect any overflowing goodness.

Now comes the hard part: waiting. Your bird needs eight hours in the oven (at 225 degrees — you’ll cover it with tin foil after 4 hours and remove it when your meat thermometer reads 165) plus another hour to settle, and you should baste it at least once an hour. So settle in. Put on some Vince Guaraldi. Play some euchre. Have you been neglecting your holiday sweater collection?

Or just take a nap. You’ll need to be well-rested for that first bite.

I told you everything would come together!

Forrest Hanson is a slore for life.

4D Man is in fact a male between 15 and 40 who is “confident, individual and has varied interests and passions.” A Bauer spokesperson told Media Week that 4D man is “not as tribal as his predecessors, the metrosexual and the lad, where you either were one or you weren’t.” He is also “increasingly interested in culture and is more health-conscious.”

Well bowl me over. This regards the launch of a men’s magazine. Called Gaz7etta. (I think that’s how you spell Portßolio in Italian?) A few things! 1. “Between 15 and 40”? I don’t buy your demographic coinage if it encompasses half of adulthood. And spreads between two distinct generations. 2. So the extra D is for extra douchetruckishness? 3. BASICALLY, THIS IS WHAT, JUST A YOUNGER PAUL RUDD, AND WHO ELSE?