It was the 90s.
Um, and yeah. The little key on my zipper unlocked a chain with a pad lock that I considered “jewelry.”
Also, found a place! In Bloomingdale. Woop!
Wish I could find the rest of this. A-Rod could probably learn something from Arnold.
Nara Leão, bossa nova muse. Can’t get enough for some reason. Found her on Pandora, which drives me nuts when I try to listen to curent music. But it worked much nicer when I put in Caetano Veloso.
High Crimes
Ex boyfriend finally moved out. And took with him ALL OF MY RECORDS. I caught him in the act and he grudgingly offered to bring them back, still denying that he’d actually taken ALL OF THEM. Of course, he did not bring any of them back. I know this is over-sharing but it is just too evil.
They just made a joke about Big Bama’s House on the Daily Show … Urm. Are race jokes going to become more acceptable now that we have a black president. That could be good, and bad. Might expose the accidental drunk racism of a few liberals.
WTF Forbes?
According to Forbes, of the 25 most influential liberals in the media, just four are women. The whole list leaves me baffled. A few people with big smart ideas, several people with a big zero ideas. Many lacking in actual reporting skills… The women they choose are especially frustrating. Huffington, Oprah, Dowd and Maddow. Huffington makes sense, though her site occasionally freaks me out. Maddow is cool but also totally pop. Oprah and Dowd? I’m sure they could have found a smart woman or two in the media with more intellectual juice. They just might not show up on the mastheads as often. Too mad to continue thinking about this.
Bonobo porn and plethysmographs???
Ok… I’m glad the NYT is writing about female arousal etc. But my first question, which I’ve wondered before when reading about the weird science of sex, is what effect a plethysmograph — a wire in your vagina measuring blood flow — would have on the whole situation. It’s like saying, “Hey. We’re gonna wait and see if you get turned on by putting a weird electrical device in your hooha. So.. ya know, dont’ try to think about SEX or anything.” Meanwhile, they could play videos of mailboxes and I’d think about SEX.
Tom Waits Wrote Me a Poem
Sorta. I had to ask these terrible questions for Us Weekly. One was: What’s your advice for romance on a budget. I corned Waits at a Jay-Z reception. (Not sure why he was there. He looked grumpy, especially after I introduced myself as a representative of Us Weekly.)
Anyway, after a little pleading he said: “Ok. I got one. Romance, without finance is a nuisANCE.” Swoon.
Update: Turns out he cribbed it.
Dorky History Stuff
Digging through the historical archive of the NYT I found some pretty scary parallels to the recent banking shenanigans.
On June 11, 1907, a pompous banker name Charles W. Morse, head of the National Bank of North America, received a letter a colleague admonishing him over diminishing cash reserves and the resulting limits on lending. “I have worried considerably over the situation and fully realize that the bank’s position is anything but a safe one,” his pal wrote, adding. “Very shortly we will have the Bank Examiner with us, and you know he has been none too friendly in the past.”
Morse had used his influence at the bank to drive up speculation in copper securities. Sound familiar? He ignored his friend’s warning and left for a European vacation, which left the bank without the quorum it needed to change things. Four months later, after the copper market crashed and nervous depositors demanded their cash, the bank collapsed. Morse was sentenced to 15 years in prison for violating national banking laws. (He later faked his own illness, by eating soap, to get a pardon from Taft, and went on to become a war profiteer during WWI.)
Except for the weird soap-eating, it sounds a lot like Lehman’s Dick Fuld. Like Morse, he received, and ignored, advice about how crappy his bank was doing. One email from a friend at a hedge fund: “some senior managers have to be much less arrogant and internally admit that some major mistakes have been made. Can’t continue to say “we are great and the market doesn’t understand”… People … WILL not understand that nobody pays for that mess and that it is “business as usual.””
Fuld’s copper was just complex derivatives.
TNR: Legal Advice for the Bankers Who Screwed Our Economy
My first story for the New Republic is up. I talked to white collar criminal defense attorneys about the best strategies for confronting the expected wave of prosecutions linked to the financial crisis. Main lesson: don’t say anything and, for God’s sake, say something!
John McCain Still Wants Your Money
I’m still getting emails from Obama asking for cash. Now McCain is back with his hands out. He’s starting a PAC called Country First. Ughhh. Will this be the election cycle that never ends? McCain has a strange video here but there’s little other content on the site, other than the donation page. Maybe he’s gonna start a new party?
Newsday dumps Les Payne
Newspapers are hemoraging journalists of color. Sort of a non issue for magazines, I guess. But I have to say it sucks. I interned at Newsday’s Queen’s bureau in the late 1990s and it was pretty much the thing that made me decide to stay in journalism. I got ruthless and supportive editing and mentorship from a very diverse cast of old fashioned news-people. Les Payne was right up there with Jimmy Breslin.
