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Even before the details of the president's executive action on immigration came down, William Gheen was hitting the phones, organizing demonstrations outside the Las Vegas high school Obama visited Friday.

"I don't know what's going to be effective, I don't think anybody ever expected that the president of the United States would side with an illegal immigrant invasion over American citizens' interest, but that's what's happened here," Gheen says.

Gheen is president of one of the country's largest anti-illegal immigration PACs, Americans for Legal Immigration. Activists like him are angry about the president's unilateral action to extend deportation relief to parents of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents and thousands more young people. But make no mistake, their opposition is about a lot more than just procedure.

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A Closer Look At Obama's Immigration Plan: What's In It, Who's Affected

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Starting early Friday morning, protesters began gathering outside Del Sol High School, where Obama spoke, standing along a sundrenched sidewalk and waving signs that read "Amnesty Hell No" and "Impeach Obama."

"The American people spoke loud and clear at the last election," says Patrice Lynes, who drove there from Riverside, Calif. "They wanted no amnesty, and they overwhelmingly elected Republicans."

Lynes was also in Murrieta, Calif., this past summer when buses carrying unaccompanied minors were turned away from a Border Patrol processing center. She supports the House Republicans who blocked a bipartisan immigration bill that passed the U.S. Senate in 2013.

Frustrated Farmers

Illegal immigration long has been a lightning rod issue in the Southwest. But it's one that also tends to cut right across traditional party lines. Conservative-leaning farm groups are also among those disappointed by the president's action, but for far different reasons.

"That does not get us any closer to resolving a very difficult national problem," says Tom Nassif, CEO of Western Growers.

Business

Obama's Immigration Moves Do Little To Help Businesses, Groups Say

Farmers did not get any special attention in the president's plan. They long have lobbied Congress for a guest worker program that would provide deportation relief to immigrants willing to work on farms for at least five years. The industry says it's facing a long-term labor crisis, especially in California and Arizona. The workforce is getting older, and tighter border security lately is deterring more migrant workers from coming north.

"We all agree, I think, that the best solution is for the U.S. Congress to reassert its constitutional authority and pass immigration bills that both parties can vote for and can become law," Nassif says.

Nassif doesn't think the president's unilateral action necessarily will change the dynamics in Congress, though. He's optimistic that an overhaul bill still will gain traction come January.

To DREAMers, A Plan Too Narrow

But it's safe to say that optimism isn't as pervasive in cities like Los Angeles. In the immigrant-heavy neighborhoods around the markets and pop-up shops of Alvarado Street, life probably will go on unchanged for thousands of people living here without papers.

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Angel Fernandez, left, and Jose Patino interrupt U.S. President Barack Obama's speech on U.S. immigration policy Friday at Del Sol High School on in Las Vegas. The two, who were brought to the United States as children and are protected from deportation by the president's policies, were upset that their parents still could be forced to leave. Ethan Miller/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Angel Fernandez, left, and Jose Patino interrupt U.S. President Barack Obama's speech on U.S. immigration policy Friday at Del Sol High School on in Las Vegas. The two, who were brought to the United States as children and are protected from deportation by the president's policies, were upset that their parents still could be forced to leave.

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Justino Mora, a political science student at UCLA, is pleased the president acted, but he says the plan isn't expansive enough.

"It's going to keep out a lot of people who could contribute so much to our country," he says.

Mora's mixed feelings stem from the fact that he got deportation relief the last time the president issued an executive action on immigration, in 2012, and was hoping his mother might be eligible this year. She brought him to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 11, he says, fleeing extreme poverty and domestic violence.

Because Mora is not a citizen, though, his mother won't be eligible for relief under the president's plan. "Which is, you know, something that is frustrating," he says, "knowing that she was basically the person that saved my life, saved my siblings' life, and has sacrificed so much to give us a better opportunity."

But Mora says the president's decision to act alone does send a clear message to Congress. The big question now is what lawmakers' next move will be.

The new film The Homesman is set in the pioneer days of the American West. It was directed by Tommy Lee Jones, who called on his regular composers, Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders, for the music. But instead of writing a traditional score for symphony orchestra, they became inventors and instrument builders to capture the story's desperate mood. Jones has a simple way of describing his approach to scoring a film: "The process is to derive music from what the lens is looking at," he says.

Jones met with the composers more than a year ago to start thinking about a score that would help tell the story of three pioneer women who lose their minds in the bleak and unforgiving Nebraska territory.

"We certainly didn't want 'crazy' music, the kind of music you hear when the giant ants appear after the flying saucer crashes," Jones says. "We didn't want effects music. We wanted to do something original, and that was reflective of the country and the way the country sounds. We both knew what the movie sounded like. We just had to find it."

Jones usually gives direction in broad strokes, saying something like, "I want it to be folksy, but surrounded by madness."

"You know, when you get a comment like that, you can really run with it," Buck Sanders says. "And he'll let you know very quickly if it's not what he's thinking. And so it was really a dream gig — just to be able to work with a director like that, who would give you artistic freedom."

Sanders and Marco Beltrami first took inspiration from the music of the nature so prevalent in the film's setting.

"You know, wind was a factor for a lot of these women, and just everybody in general there," Beltrami says. "The wind would even make people go crazy, besides the disease and all the hardships. And so we were thinking, 'How can we channel that?' And one of Buck's first instincts was to begin examining Aeolian harps, which — you know, they're basically just strings attached to some surface, wooden surface often, and they resonate with the wind, and you can tune them. And Tommy came up here — actually on a very windy day — and was blown away by how... I think he said basically we just suck the music right out of the air. [Laughs.] Which is sort of true."

Beltrami's Malibu studio sits up high in the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There, he and Sanders have dreamed up the music for World War Z, 3:10 To Yuma and two other films directed by Jones. Sanders was largely responsible for building the wind harp, which looks like power lines growing out of the back of a weathered old piano.

"So this is the Aeolian wind piano," Sanders says. "It's an old upright that our piano tuner found, like in a basement, that he was willing to donate. We put it on top of a 10-foot-tall metal storage unit. He just put it, like, in a tractor scoop and dumped it up here. And then they strapped it down, and then we have eight piano wires coming perpendicularly out of the piano soundboard, and running 175 feet up the hill to two large metal water-storage tanks to catch the winds."

When they tethered the wires to those tanks, they stumbled onto one of the score's signature sounds.

"You could put your ear up to the water tank, and you can hear stuff's going on in there, and certain frequencies resonate really strongly," Sanders says. "I wasn't too sure what it would get. You know, it was just an experiment, and a fun day on the job. [Laughs.] But it ended up being a beautiful, crystalline-type sound."

It's a sound meant to evoke the characters' unsteady grasp on sanity.

The two composers did use more traditional instruments to capture the film's environment. They recorded a small string ensemble, but they recorded it outdoors.

"It's a very austere environment, this environment of the settlers coming to the plains in the mid-19th century," Beltrami says. "And we're so used to recording scores in warm rooms that have a lot of reverberation, and that are built beautifully and make everything sound great. But it wasn't really the environment of the setting."

In one scene, the woman who volunteers to transport the women back east, played by Hilary Swank, gets lost and ends up nearly losing her own mind.

"She's going around in circles," Beltrami says. "And we thought, this shouldn't have any of the warmth that you would normally have in a room recording the sound. If there's any way it can just dissipate into the air, it would be great."

This may seem like a lot of trouble to go through in an era when the click of a key can do so much to imitate or manipulate music.

"The wonderful thing about this score was just the amount of tactile experience we had, you know, building stuff and working outside," Sanders says. "Because film scoring has become very sort of computer-centric, and a lot of shows have to use samples to get the mockups done. But I think really having that, what really is a physical experience, of building instruments and recording outside — it creates a strong connection with the music that does inspire you, and you know it's yours.

"You have to keep the nature of fun in it," Beltrami says. "If it's just a question of punching keys into a computer, that gets old. This has to remain fun and inspiring in order to come up with new things. And I think we're just continuing along a time-honored tradition of exploration here."

Beltrami says one of the best things about working with Tommy Lee Jones is the leeway he allows the composers.

"Creative freedom, and the opportunity for originality, is about all we had to offer Marco," Jones says. "It's not something he gets every day, and that's really the basis of our working relationship."

YouTube

The turducken — a whole chicken stuffed inside a whole duck stuffed inside a whole turkey, all boneless — is a relatively recent culinary phenomenon. Though popularized in the past 20 years with the help of Louisiana's Chef Paul Prudhomme and John Madden, who brought one to a football game broadcast in 1997, the turducken actually builds on a long tradition of creative bird-into-bird stuffing.

Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynire, the world's first restaurant critic, in 1803 launched the Almanach des Gourmands, what the Paris-based dining historian Carolin Young calls the world's first serial food journal. He would edit and publish this best-selling guide to seasonal cooking and restaurants until 1812.

Like any good publisher, Grimod de la Reynire knew he needed to slide in some extra flair from time to time. And in 1807, he put out a recipe for rti sans pareil, the roast without equal.

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The daredevil-ish recipe calls for a tiny warbler stuffed in a bunting, inserted in a lark, squeezed in a thrush, thrown in a quail, inserted in a lapwing, introduced to a plover, piled into a partridge, wormed into a woodcock, shoehorned into a teal, kicked into a guinea fowl, rammed inside a duck, shoved into a chicken, jammed up in a pheasant, wedged deep inside a goose, logged into a turkey. And just when you think a 16-bird roast is probably enough, it's not. This meat sphere is finally crammed up into a Great Bustard, an Old World turkey-turned-wrapping paper, for this most epic of poultry meals.

Holiday Recipes

The Veggieducken: A Meatless Dish With Gravitas

While there's no record of anyone actually making the rti sans pareil, Grimod de la Reynire seemingly achieved what is every publisher's goal: capturing (generations of) eyeballs. (If you want a visual of the concoction, check out the illustrations that Wired magazine and Vice came up with.)

It's clear that culinary stunts with meat started long before chefs were grilling steaks with molten lava. Take the cockentrice, a half-pig, half-turkey combo that rode the line between mythical beast and gastronomic masterpiece during the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century. It's been re-created by Richard Fitch, the project coordinator for the Historic Kitchens at Hampton Palace, who told Vice that while these dishes certainly weren't the norm, Henry VIII once served a cockentrice and a dolphin to the French King, Francis I. (As we've previously reported, royals of that era went to great lengths for a culinary thrill.)

While the roti may seem freakish or excessive today, we do have the bacon-wrapped alligator, a sort of modern-day meat mummy.

For those who heart turducken, the demand is high enough that big-box stores like Sam's Club and Costco now stock them. There's even a vegetarian version, if the stuffing concept floats your boat.

food history

Thanksgiving

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

If this year's National Book Awards saw a fiery speech from Ursula K. Le Guin, the evening also featured incendiary comments of quite another kind. Ceremony host Daniel Handler — whom most readers might know better by his pen name, Lemony Snicket — made several racially charged jokes that drew a strong reaction Thursday.

In the wake of Jacqueline Woodson's win for her memoir in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, Handler brought up the topic of watermelon — which, to put it lightly, was a poor idea. His joke is reproduced here in full (and you can watch the video here):

"I told you! I told Jackie she was going to win. And I said that if she won, I would tell all of you something I learned this summer, which is that Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your mind.

"And I said, 'You have to put that in a book.' And she said, 'You put that in a book.' And I said that I am only writing a book about a black girl who is allergic to watermelon if I get a blurb from you, Cornell West, Toni Morrison and Barack Obama saying, 'This guy's OK. This guy's fine.' "

The joke wasn't his first of the night to bear racial overtones. He also quipped that two black nominees together in the poetry category may be considered "probable cause."

The reaction was swift. Writers such as Roxane Gay, Kwame Alexander and Laila Lalami (as well as plenty of publications) were quick to condemn the remarks on Thursday. For his part, Handler's apology came nearly as quickly, and it arrived via Twitter.

My job at last night's National Book Awards #NBAwards was to shine a light on tremendous writers, including Jacqueline Woodson... -DH [1/2]

— Daniel Handler (@DanielHandler) November 20, 2014

...and not to overshadow their achievements with my own ill-conceived attempts at humor. I clearly failed, and I’m sorry. -DH [2/2]

— Daniel Handler (@DanielHandler) November 20, 2014

It's Not Ludwig Van: Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, composed a song in dedication to a woman named Barbara in 1951. After more than half a century lost, that song has been found, according to The Guardian. Discovered amid the late woman's possessions by her 100-year-old husband, the song will be performed by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on Nov. 26.

It's A [Book]! Children's publishing imprint Ladybird has announced its plans to drop the gendered labels from its books, according to an announcement from the Let Books Be Books campaign. The campaign, a spin-off of the Let Toys Be Toys group, has for months pressured children's publishers to stop marking books "for boys" or "for girls," arguing that they confine children to presuppositions about gender.

"At Ladybird we certainly don't want to be seen to be limiting children in any way," reads Ladybird's announcement. "Out of literally hundreds of titles currently in print, we actually only have the six titles you cite with this kind of titling, so I do feel we offer a vast range for children and their parents. As Ladybird is part of the Penguin Random House Children's division, our commitment to avoiding gendered titles in the trade crosses all our imprints."

Fun, Fun, Fun: One of the founders of the Beach Boys plans to publish his memoir in 2016. Mike Love's book is tentatively titled Good Vibrations, naturally, but it may not be the first Beach Boy autobiography to hit bookstores in the coming years. Fellow founder — and frequent rival — Brian Wilson expects to release one of his own in 2015.

CIA Reviews Edward Snowden Books: Seriously, though — this is not satire. Hayden Peake puts together the "Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf" for the agency, and lately he has picked up three books on the Snowden intelligence leaks, including Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide. While Peake did offer a few words of praise, his conclusion isn't exactly a surprise.

"Greenwald's often bitter ad hominem rationale for [Snowden's actions] is unlikely to be the last word on the subject."