Random Bloggotage On The TARP

I was just going through some files, and this picture seemed like a good tie-in to all the bloggotage going around about the Troubled Assets Relief Program.

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Cartoonist Howard Taylor Misses A Deadline: A Sign Of The Apocalypse?

The unthinkable happened today, when veteran cartoonist Howard Taylor failed to post today's installment in his widely read daily comic, Schlock Mercenary. As he wrote on his blog:

Sclock Mercenary Blog: So… I guess the comic is going to be late.

I went seven years, nine months, and twenty-one days without missing a strip. That’s not such a bad run. But I guess with all the convention travel, I neglected to finish the work on today’s installment. I’ve forgotten to upload before, but until now I’ve not forgotten to color.

I would have caught that if I hadn’t been so very, very tired all day.

Best wishes to Howard Taylor and the Schlock Mercenary team for a speedy recovery!

*I don't think he'll mind me pinching that image off his website, since technically it isn't really anything, copyright or not.

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Coincidence? I think not! Well, maybe...

It's probably nothing, but at the moment, the sites for Marketnews, Canadian Business, and The Toronto Star, all based in Toronto are down. Major utility outage? Act of Terror? Alien invasion?

I guess we'll find out.

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RIP Marcel Marceau

Yahoo!: French mime artist Marcel Marceau dies

I'm assuming that he had no last words.

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This week in Art Theory

As always, The Onion is funny because it's true.

The Onion: Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry On Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not

The fact that the web page continually reverts to a "normal"
state, observers say, is either evidence that ongoing vandalization is being
deleted through vigilant updating, or a deliberate statement on the impermanence
of superficial petit-bourgeois culture in the age of modernity.

The Onion is pretty much a liberal arts graduate's best hope for gainful employment where they can actually use what they learned in school, isn't it?

I wonder what The Epicurean Dealmaker would surmise from this?

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Quote of the Day

From the excellent music blog No Rock and Roll Fun.com

Kelly Rowland's Ghetto Heaven

Kelly Rowland has recorded a song with Snoop Dogg, and, for her, that's as good as growing up in the Bronx, as the fabulously rich w:

I feel like everybody has some sort of element of ghetto in them. Think about it. Right? Wouldn't you say so? And everyone knows what the ghetto is.

Well, yes. But I also know what the North Atlantic Ridge is, Kelly, but that doesn't give me the right to go round claiming to be a blue whale.

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Author Germaine Greer labels Princess Di "a devious moron"

It's always important for an author to generate controversy prior to the release of their latest book. In fact, that seems to be true of many artists; look at the number of rappers who get in trouble with the law prior to the release of their new album, or actors who do something spectacularly misguided just before their latest movie hits the screens.

I imagine that activist/author Germaine Greer chose to take a pass on drunkenly assaulting a police officer. Regardless, she does win this week's prize for Willing To Go The Furthest To Promote A New Book.

Yahoo!: Diana a 'devious moron', insists Germaine Greer
LONDON (AFP) - Germaine Greer, the Australian academic and feminist, has launched a verbal attack on the late princess Diana in the run-up to the 10th anniversary of her death, a newspaper reported Sunday.
"I have come to the conclusion that she was a devious moron," Greer told the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Saturday, The Independent on Sunday said.
...
Greer severely criticised Diana during a presentation about her new book, which is about the life of William Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway.

This is obviously brilliant Guerrilla Marketing, because I can already hear the ruckus across the pond as legions of Brits and Royalistas get their knickers in a twist and start burning her in effigy and issuing fatwas against Ms. Greer. I imagine that her new book will see brisk sales just to support all of the book burning parties.

Oh, look: The Daily Mail is already foaming at the mouth! I bet that you didn't see that coming!

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The Creative Process

How, more or less, I write magazine articles:

Pour a drink

Open MS Word

Read email from my editor about story ideas he wants me to cover

Check bulletin board devoted to Powerlifting

Tap out a couple of sentences

Look at funny videos on YouTube

Go pour another drink

Tap out some bullet points on central themes of story

Re-check bulletin board devoted to Powerlifting

Check Facebook

Check bulletin board devoted to Strongman Competition

Look at music videos from 80's on YouTube

Hit refresh on window powerlifting board is open in

Look at Word, think "Fuck!"

Check bulletin board devoted to grip and hand strength

Get angry

Go take a piss

Hit refresh on window Facebook is open in

Pour another drink

Flash of inspiration, write nine hundred words

Repeat



Believe me, it's not always this easy.

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Long Live the King: 30th anniversary of the passing of Elvis

Tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll (unless you're one of the Reformed Orthodox adherents who believe in his Resurrection).


I was seven when he died; old enough to be sad about it, but not old enough to understand what killed him.


Some people prefer Elvis Impersonators who personify the young, skinny Elvis. Personally, when it comes to Elvis Impersonators, I favor the fat, dissolute ones. You know, satin jumpsuit so tight that you can see their mooseknuckles beneath their ponderous guts, high as a kite, slurring "Love me tender" through a mouthful of prescription pills and half-masticated cheeseburger, and with a bevy of barely-legal hookers in leopard print hotpants flocking to the stage.







That's the King that I want to remember!


The King is Dead. Long Live the King.

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Amateur Hour: Brit teen hostpitalized for coffee overdose

Daily Mail: Overdose drama of girl who had 14 cups of espresso
A teenage waitress overdosed on caffeine after drinking 14 shots of espresso.
Jasmine Willis, 17, could hardly breathe and was taken to hospital with a high temperature and heart palpitations.
She had drunk almost three times the recommended daily amount of caffeine in just four hours.

Firstly, 14 shots of espresso is the equivalent of about 7 cups of coffee.

Secondly, pfft. From the perspective of myself, or my good friend Doug (who has been called "the Hunter S. Thompson of coffee") she's a total lightweight.

Thirdly, I am alarmed by the whiny, hand wringing commentary left by Mail readers at the bottom of the article. This nervous nelly attitude is why the Brits lost their empire. These are a people who saved the world from the Axis powers, and now they whine and cluck because some girl drank too much coffee. Nanny State, indeed!

Get over yourselves, people!

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The Epicurean Dealmaker incites more bloggery, envy

Lest you think that I am without parallel in the field of Dearly In Love With One's Own Prose, I find myself one-upped with the somewhat anti-climactic exercise in self-adulation left behind by TED prior to taking his holidays.

The Epicurean Dealmaker: More Works to Look On and Despair

To my delight, folly, avarice, and hubris have been thick on the ground these past few months, so I have had plenty of grist for my metaphorical mill. Having slaughtered many innocent pixels on the altar of Better Information Through Vanity Publishing on the Internet, I had copious material from which to select the following gems. (Those of you sensitive to Green issues can consider this my contribution to global recycling, if you wish.)

Without further ado, I offer you the current crop of the best and brightest:

I don't wish to infer that I don't enjoy reading and re-reading my own prose, basking in the radiance of my own cleverness. I do, really.

I just also know to give credit where it is due, and acknowledge the work of a master.

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You know that it's Götterdämmerung in the capital markets when...

Dealbreaker's John Carney starts quoting Martin Heidegger.

Dealbreaker: Philosophy and Markets

Heidegger, in my estimation, vacillated between being completely full of crap, and dining out on pointing out the obvious, but couching it in lots of obtuse compound words.

I have been told by more than one person that philosophy students in Deutschland read Heidegger in the english translations, because he makes more sense in english than in his native german.

See also my entry in Dealbreaker's comments section, re: Jean Paul Sartre.

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After Hours: Fun With Science

British educational television remains some of the best in the world.





I need to write a grant proposal so that I can get funding from the feds to do this myself...

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Keeping up is like drinking from the firehose

Total number of newsletters I get in my email on a daily or weekly basis: 17

Although, in truth, I have no idea how I ended up subscribed to Cabling Installation & Maintenance, but I'm too lazy to click on "unsubscribe."

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Paris Hilton's 15 minutes over?

Reviewing via Google Analytics the search terms people use to find this blog, I am pleased to inform you that not once this month did anyone use the words "Paris Hilton" to arrive here.

This means that either fewer people care about her exploits than the media would like you to believe, or nobody actually comes here.

Either way, this is significant data.

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Paris Hilton makes the news for not doing anything extraordinary

Okay, this headline made me laugh out loud:

On a hunger strike?
Paris Hilton has not eaten or slept since returning to life behind bars on Friday, reports say.

If reports of her social life are to be believed, she never ate or slept anyway.

Goddamnit, why am I still talking about this? I need a shower...

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Hitler's Ultimate Downfall

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Onion News Network: American high school students unprepared for college-level drinking

In The Know: Teenagers and Alcohol

Prior to admission, I got extra credit for my work with yukafluks, which helped a lot when I chose to major in ΔKE.

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The new Bionic Woman: Okay, television today may be derivative, but it can still be cool!

I know that it's Bionic Woman meets The Fugitive meets Dark Angel meets Gilmore Girls, but I was totally unprepared for how cool this trailer was.

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CEO "forgets" to tell investors that he's been subpoenaed by the SEC...for over a year!

This is one of those Man Bites Dog stories that gets readers' attention. More accurately, it's one of those human interest stories, like the guy who has amnesia for ten years and suddenly snaps out of it. It's a Miracle!

I've only paid tangential attention to the Overstock.com saga because, quite frankly, I cover companies that either sell stuff, produce stuff, or market stuff, and I'm not entirely certain that Overstock.com's business plan focuses on doing anything other than setting large piles of money on fire and generating negative publicity.

However this latest piece of news is so bizarre, and well, sordid, that it must be mentioned. Ever since Sam E Antar broke this story the other day, Gary Weiss, Tracy Coenen and others have been going bananas over it like rottweilers loose in a butcher shop.

White Collar Fraud Blog: Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, receives SEC subpoena

However, Overstock.com finally disclosed Patrick Byrne's subpoena, about a year later.

...

The Overstock.com 10-q for the quarter ended 03/31/07 contained this new additional disclosure:

“On May 17, 2006, Patrick Byrne also received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission, Salt Lake City District Office.”
Questions:

Why did Overstock.com wait to make that additional disclosure until its 10-Q for the 1st quarter of fiscal year 2007.

Why was such a disclosure about you receiving a subpoena from the SEC omitted from Overstock.com’s?

10-K for the fiscal year ended 12/31/06,

10-Q for the quarter ended 09/30/06,

10-Q for the quarter ended 06/30/06,<

10-Q for the quarter ended 03/31/06 (filed on 05/10/06)

Other disclosures

That is indeed a very good question. Will it be answered? You don't have to be a Magic 8-Ball to suggest that All Signs Point To No.

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