Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Male
Sasha Baron Cohen was escorted from a fashion show in Milan on Friday.
After a few minutes of darkness while Baron Cohen, or Bruno, was escorted off the catwalk, the show started again. Models had kept their cool but the designer was visibly upset when she appeared at the end of the show.
Miley Cyrus Fires Disney
“It seemed like we were doing our job and getting along with Miley,” said Disney senior spokesdwarf, Obvious. “Now we’re hurt, angry, and confused. We’d like to punch her in the throat but she is just so damned cute.”
Tensions between Ms. Cyrus and Disney had been escalating for months amid rumors of the teen phenom agreeing to appear in a cheesy cinematic adaptation of a cheesy Nicholas Sparks novel, and as a young Carrie Bradshaw in the highly anticipated Sex and the City prequel, Heavy Petting and the City.
How much money can you make if you REALLY fuck up?
CEO pay: What those involved in the financial meltdown made
As Congress considers a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street and the banking sector, there are calls to restrict the pay and severance packages for CEOs at investment houses, banks and mortgage lenders poised to be benefit from the plan put forward by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.
Executives from some of the major investment and commercial banks involved in the financial upheaval and bailout earned hefty paychecks last year, according to proxy statements outlining their salaries, bonuses and stock options:
Help Is On the Way
From China Daily 4-11-06 “Foreign Takeover Controversial”
“If China lets multinationals’ malicious mergers and acquisitions go ahead freely, China can only act as labour in the global supply chain,” said Li, worrying that Chinese brands and the innovation ability of the national industry would disappear gradually and core parts, key technologies and high added value of China’s leading enterprises might be completely controlled by multinationals.”
Apparently the sense this makes has not yet occured to American bankers who are looking everywhere for cover:
US investment giant Morgan Stanley has frozen talks on a merger with Wachovia bank but is pressing on with talks for CIC of China to end up with a big stake in it, a media report said on Monday.
Our country has been taken over by us, and I don’t mean We the People.
Petty moguls, we
I have this theory. It’s no doubt unoriginal, but I can’t recall hearing it explicitly stated anywhere. It goes like this:
The greatest pacifying device the rich, ruling class ever came up with, was common stock.
Candidates Waging Battle of Quotes, Sources Say
New York, NY — It’s never been more difficult to separate whining from substance. America’s 2008 presidential race is fully engaged, but truth and credibility are not.
The road to the White House is littered with the corpses of shattered reality and common decency — casualties of one of the ugliest, nastiest major U.S. elections since 2004.
[A 24 Hour Trip to New York]
A beautifully done piece with pictures taken exclusively on the iphone in French with subtitles (via kottke and lonelysandwhich).
Comments on Commercials
- The TV ads in which a Chevy at a gas station is sabotaged by the pump hose were made by people who are much better at what they do than GM is.
- Every time I see the ExxonMobil commercial, in which a man with a short gray beard is suddenly buying mosquito nets for everybody in Africa (which is a good cause), I think of the mob giving money to the Catholic Church.
- When I see a John McCain commercial, I can’t imagine who wouldn’t think that it was a call to look for a person missing from a home.
Apple Store
Went to the Apple store yesterday to get Cindy’s iPod Touch (gift certificate, generously given to her by her staff), which she wanted instead of the phone because she hates phones and the iPod, with wi-fi, lets her do everything she wants to do with such a thing. Jesus–what recession? That place was packed, like a trade show held in a one-room apartment. And everybody but me looked like they had lived in that place for so long–who wouldn’t know how it all works? It all went well though, and I got the Touch and a nice Italian leather case for it. On my way out I saw a woman with her sullen off-to-college-for-the-first-time son, and you wouldn’t believe the stuff she was piling up for him. MacAir, printer, stack of software, big monitor–and a load of all those little things mom would later have to buy again and stuff into his Christmas stocking because he lost them “outside somewhere.” I wanted to hang around to overhear the total, but it was enough to see that Mary Kay didn’t really give a shit how much it was. Strange feeling it all left me with. I like all that stuff too, but I kind of felt like I needed a shower.
On the Prostitution and Exploitation of Artists
Today Pinky was hired to paint all day for a client who has a dead bird fetish. Here is the chicken he painted in the morning (wearing only his underwear and cowboy hat). She preferred dead parakeets and pigeons. By the afternoon Pinky had geared up the dead bird painting to paint the sweetest little dead parakeet in a little red dunce cap. It almost made him cry.
When I was, oh, twenty-five or so, I requested of an eighteen-year-old artist I knew that he draw me a picture of a man whose head had been pierced in one side and out the other, Injun arrow-style, by a weasel, then to draw me a picture of Jack Nicholson as an animated cartoon rat. He fulfilled both requests and didn’t charge me nothing. I guess that was some kind of exploitation.
Pentagon Ends Tactical Fighter Leasing Program
Ordnance leasing became popular during the military boom years of the Eighties and early Nineties, thanks to turmoil in war-torn regions like Lebanon, Serbia, and Detroit. This strife created an unrealistic demand for capable weapons of mass destruction — a demand that has ultimately led to today’s unsustainably poor depreciation and low used-warhead resale values.
Music making internet cash
It can actually happen. Sorgatz is right to link to this:
We’re glad that someone’s figured out how to make some money in an era of all-free, all-digital music. We’re just not sure it ought to have been Avril Lavigne. Thanks to the forward-thinking strategies of her management, the singer has netted a cool £1m just from fans watching a music video on YouTube.
It could provide a new music model even if she hasn’t seen the money yet.
McCain Advocates Phil Gramm Surge
“My friends — and I truly think of all of you as friends — listen up,” Mr. McCain told supporters and press. “The U.S. will withdraw from Iraq only after victory is achieved. We will achieve that victory by pounding the terrorists as if they are economical cuts of flank steak.”
“I have the military and foreign policy experience to make statements like that,” he continued in a strident, nasally voice, “even if I clearly can’t tell the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni.”
Escalator Mishap Makes a Mess of Makeup
Forgive me for laughing at this.
InBev Buys Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac
“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have endured troubled times lately,” said InBev CEO Carlos Brito, “but that will change now that they have joined our corporate family. A little tweaking, some layoffs — there is no limit to what we can achieve together.”
“We often make our expansion decisions based on brand equity,” Mr. Brito added. “However, in this particular case the first thing we will do is change those incredibly stupid company names.”
Small Victories
Anytime Comcast gets it gives me joy:
When Comcast admitted last fall that it was blocking — or slowing down, as the company preferred to call it — certain file transfers by customers, a lot of people complained that the company was unfairly discriminating against heavy Internet users.
Now it seems that the Federal Communications Commission is poised to agree.
Iran Launches Oil Barrels into Persian Gulf
Tehran, Iran — The global petroleum market threw up a little in its throat Thursday as Iran commenced a second consecutive day of test firing oil-filled surface-to-surface missiles.
Determined to prove its courage, fortitude, and earnest resistance to common sense, the radical Islamic republic launched an estimated five hundred fully laden medium- and short-range Shahab-3, Scud-C, and Hoot missiles into the Straits of Hormuz, gateway to 40% of the world’s fuel supply.
The Fall of Detroit
Detroit is in the worst state it’s seen in years, and the bureaucracy that runs it is essentially a horde of criminals. I live 20 miles outside of the city border and used to work in the city itself. I’ve been watching this my entire life. The citizen migration rate out of the city is staggering, and the population has dropped below the 1M mark; it is the first American city in history to drop below a million citizens. By way of contrast, in 1950 it boasted 1.8M residents.
Half the housing stock is needed. Many parts of the city are literally a wasteland.
The powers-that-be have a track record of turning down large, entrepreneur-originating initiatives of $200M for new, progressive charter schools. Invariably, the Detroit Board of Education sees the gesture as a white man’s attempt to infiltrate and overthrow the black power structure, not as one to provide a viable option to an otherwise horrible and floundering educational system.
People are starting to talk about Detroit in an urgent fashion, and not just because of Kwame Kilpatrick’s ridiculous troubles. Here’s a spot-on video of Newt Gingrich saying what nobody in Detroit wants to hear — and what I bet nobody will listen to in my lifetime.
Why so pessimistic? Because I’m an analytical person, and I see no data whatsoever that suggests this trend is anywhere near being reversed.
An Alternate Future
There will be no War Between the Vampires and the Zombies, as predicted in the apocalyptic clusterflock post Historic Downtown Greenville (Ohio).
The coming War of Distinctive Destinations will instead pit Historic Downtown Greenville (Ohio) against Galena (Illinois).
Depression Not So Great
New York, NY — Last Friday’s stock market near-crash sent waves of intestinal cramps rippling through the world’s investment community.
With the Dow Jones Industrial Average having lost more value than at any time post-1929 and reaching its lowest point in the past 22 months, the current financial crisis is taking a psychological and emotional toll on jittery investors.
Your Favorite Laptop Models
I was checking my AOL email a couple of minutes ago, and that was one of their scrolling news headlines. I had to think about it for a minute before I realized they were talking about computers.
Cow in Mergers and Acquisitions
The cow who leads a lot of the company’s buyouts and takeover bids is an expert negotiator. No one who looks into her profound, liquid eyes is unmoved.
Business spam evolves
I found an interesting spam email in my inbox this morning that’s basically a personalized approach that hints at a risk to an online trademark (domain name) due to a foreign application being made for the trademark name in country-specific versions (.asia, .biz, .cc, .cn, .com. cn., .hk, etc.). It looks valid enough to hook a reader at first glance, and only when some research is done do you discover what it’s all about.
This approach is obviously personalized to the owner/manager of a commercial Internet brand and hints at risk to our online trademark (miproconsulting) due to a foreign application being made for our trademark name in country-specific flavors (.asia, .biz, .cc, .cn, .com. cn., .hk, etc.). Being the nice foreign domain registrar they are, the sender of this message, SK Holdings, is asking us if we want to do business with them and secure all of the miproconsulting variants listed below so that we can protect our Internet brand from this foreign applicant.
This is pretexting: it takes a known fact or truism about an individual or business and uses that piece if information to get someone to divulge information or carry out some other action. In this case, the spammer wants the victim to purchase the extended domain names before the foreign applicant does, thereby allowing the victim to protect his Internet trademark. Not exactly the most aboveboard way to do business, but it is clever. I’ll grant them that.
The Unforeseen — Recommended
Cindy and I saw this documentary at the Angelica in Dallas yesterday. It’s great for those who have an Austin connection–and great for those who don’t. If it’s not showing in your area you might want to add it to your Netflix list.
One of the things I like best about this documentary is the inspiration it offers for those who want to confront the economically powerful. It very clearly makes the point that everything that stimulates the economy is not therefore positive in nature: a train wreck generates the need for clean-up hires and for orders for new train cars to be built. Here you will see the problems that result when short term ambitions collide with trans-generational values. And the film is very well edited: it shows a vast range of desires and the human weaknesses–and courage– that attend the fight to realize them.
Oil 2.0
LS9, a Silicon Valley company doing energy research, has found a way to modify a nonpathogenic strain of E. coli so that it creates the equivalent of crude oil as a byproduct of eating agricultural waste.