Consumption.

Since it has been about a year, I figured I would jot down my my media consumption these days, after I noticed that I have apparently been bingeing. So, at the current moment (or at least in the past week or so), I am consuming:

Podcasts

• This American Life (of course.)
• Radiolab (there is never enough.)
• The Sporkful (food. squabbling.)
• All Slate Podcasts (the gabfests - sublime.)
• TedTalks (people devote their lives to the craziest things.)
• PTI (sports! fighting! bells dinging!)
• The BS Report (i don't have an explanation, but i listen to bill simmons talk. ok.)
• The Moth (stories. half lame. half awesome.)

Print

• The Big Short - Michael Lewis (the best of the books on the financial crisis. amazingly told. do it.)
• Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (so far so good. swedish.)
• Genius - James Gleick (a feynman biography. a remarkable man's story told remarkably.)
• Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami (fourth try. sigh.)
• Six Easy Pieces - Richard Feynman (physics!)
• Slate (still.)
• New Yorker (stands alone.)
• New York Times (obligatory.)
• WSJ (murdoch. ruined.)
• CNN (to see if anyone died. or countries in flames.)
• New York Magazine (?)

Video

• The Wire (rewatch!)
• Breaking Bad (run.)
• Twin Peaks (wtf?)
• Rome (sex. everywhere.)
• Glee (yes.)
• World Cup (Gol!)
• NBA Finals (fuck. la.)

Music (will simply refer to top 25 most played list) (ohgod embarassing)

• Jonsi (heart melt.)
• Rihanna (um. yeah!)
• Joanna Newsom (harp.)
• Sigur Ros (new album. not like old.)
• Explosions in the Sky (fnl.)
• Jason Mraz (long story. or a short one.)
• Colin Hay (i did not play this song this much.)
• MGMT (kids!)

I suppose the question is whether I have a life still. Surprisingly I still do.

The larger question is whether I should devote more energy to something other than entertaining myself. The answer is there. The solution is not. Apparently I just figured that out now. Sigh.

Oh. P.S. Janelle Monae Rocks. At least this song and video rock hard.

Memory.

Turns out I have no short or medium term memory. Increasingly, as I meet old friends who come into New York (of which there were 4 or 5 in the past two months), I simply do not remember anything about our last interactions, funny stories that took place or conversations I've had with them. Just big blank spots. Stories that stick in people's heads deeply are deeply unfamiliar to me. My own life is a string of present sense impressions with less and less reflection on the past, including firm commitments I make to myself and the smallest joys of each day. I have occasionally gone back through my blog and re-read some of my posts and realize that I don't have the slightest memory of the moments I've written about.

As a remedy for this, I am going to attempt (and hopefully not with futility) to record just a little bit at a time here and see if I can at least have some record of my own life and record the memories I don't record in my own mind.

In any case, I have recently turned back to the pleasures of food and the farmer's market. I'm snacking on french breakfast radishes dipped in room temperature butter seasoned with salt and pepper having just finished off beet pancakes accompanied by sauteed beet greens with garlic scapes. And tonight I think we are going to attempt to make an entire pound's worth of garlic scapes into garlic scape pesto as well as a giant bowl of fresh linguine with clams (which, despite its simplicity is deeply flavorful). And now I am going to try run 2 miles and see if my body gives out. I think I am back at an all-time high of being unhealthy after approximately a year of indolence and indulgence (a good name for my biography, actually), and I think it's time to once again remedy this. My last attempt resulted in a solid year of being healthy and in shape without the lingering self-loathing that would otherwise fill my days. Let's hope this works again.

Why Corporations Act Like Assholes. Part 1: Blame the Banks (how shocking.)

I think I have developed at least one good insight into why Corporations Act like Assholes. Since this is my first stab, let me clear away some of the low-hanging fruit: People are assholes, and when placed into large groups, the assholeness is magnified or at least unsurpressed. (Agreed. That actually answers almost every question.) Also easy to argue that assholes often climb to the top of the asshole pile to wield control of giant asshole robots to fuck over other people. (In this case, the metaphor is that the giant asshole robot is a corporation and that we are the denizens of the asshole pile.) This time: I'm going to blame the banks. And not necessarily just...banks…but the whole financial system. And I'm not going to blame them for the financial meltdown or anything like that here (though I do, for the record), but instead blame them for the broader failures in corporate citizenship (non-asshole version).

We have a broken system of corporate finance which means we have a very broken system of corporate governance which in turn means we have a very broken culture of socially conscious businesses. The gut conclusion is obvious - businesses don't give a shit about people, but that conclusion is neither useful nor does it have power since companies are made of people and most of us spend our lives working for them. The systemic case, which I am going to try and flesh out on my own and a little here, is much more powerful…though I hope it doesn't involve too many steps. In one sentence: Financial intermediation of virtually all public investment capital by profit-driven entities creates an unsatiable appetite for the continual growth of a corporate profits, which in turn forces management for all companies to take unreasonable risks and measures that result in large externalities borne by society at large.

Step 1) Corporations are owned by shareholders who have the power to control management.

I'm gonna start with the whole idea of public financial markets, which in its simplest form is allowing large numbers of people to own small pieces of a company with control over how the company management and thus the company behaves. That is how companies are, in theory, supposed to be good actors in this world. If a company does wrong, then the shareholders can punish the management. If your management has bungled its operations and has destroyed the Gulf Coast for the next generation, then you F them in the A with a BRD. The obvious rejoinder is that most shareholders either don't give a shit about voting their shares or they don't have any interests in buying a company other than profit. I concede these points and note that if these are the outcomes, then at least we can point to the collective indifference and selfishness of humanity and consider that deeper problem. To my mind, however, the central point is that the human analysis of owning a company is a multifaceted one. Most of my friends will not buy Big Oil shares outright. Others will never buy Smith and Wesson shares. And many people will buy Apple and Google and wind and solar power shares with the hope that they're helping provide capital for these businesses. In other words, people want a return on their money, but I hope and believe that they would prefer to get it honestly and not by foisting off all of the costs and externalities of their returns on the rest of society.

Step 2) Normal people are too busy or too confused to be shareholders.

For most people, shares are just a way to get a return on the money they've earned. I make 100 bucks, I would like to just stick it somewhere and make 5 dollars by merely sitting there. So I put it in the stock market - that is, I want to buy ownership stakes in companies and grow when they grow. And in order for people to be allowed to buy ownership stakes, the companies have to comply with thousands of byzantine disclosure requirements to sell their shares to the public. But no one understands these disclosures and nobody reads them. I make my living writing these disclosures and still have close to zero knowledge about how these laws work and what businesses I should invest in. No one's really able to understand these investment decisions. These companies have grown so large and have so many disclosures and are so complexly governed with obfuscation and opacity at every turn that we're basically at their whim. No normal shareholders have any real control.

Step 3) Financial Intermediation.

So what do we do about this inability to be shareholders? We Talk to Chuck. We send all of our money to financial institutions to manage. Since we don't really know what they are going to do with the money, we simply ask for the most productive, highest return activities - that is, we give our money to someone who will do *something* with it, and then they will give us that money back plus a bit. Nowhere in our mind do we think about owning companies. Nowhere do we feel remotely culpable for owning companies. More importantly, the investment decisions made by these financial institutions are emphatically not multifaceted. They are businesses with a single motive to make the highest possible returns. There are no other factors involved. I can no longer find the number, but financial institutions, that is, hedge funds, banks, investment banks, private equity funds, pension funds, etc. now own huge swaths of public companies on behalf of the rest of us, who ask them to take care our investments for us. In either case, it's safe to say that pretty much the only shareholders actively involved in governance and management issues are these financial institutions.

Step 4) Single Minded Shareholders = Win or Die = Corporate Assholes

So how does this lead to a more dangerous world? Just think: With banks and hedge funds and mutual funds in the driver's seat, all of the votes, all of the corporate governance, everything about the internal structure of a company is about the pursuit of increasing returns on investment. It is not about someone considering their ownership of a company, it is about a 28 year-old banker trying to see how he can get a 15% return on his choice to invest in a company and net himself a $20 million dollar bonus that year. So executives who deviate from iron-fisted pursuits of profit will face their wrath. Fuck that guy who decided to keep on a large workforce in a market downturn, because he is going to fuck up the bonus I get from investing in his company. Ouster. Companies who have steady income and steady revenue and stable operations who make useful products, who make reliable products, who treat their employees well are not all that useful to these hedge fund managers. While I might be content owning a share in Toothpicks R' Us and getting a stable moderately sized dividend every year from the consistent sales of toothpicks, Goldman will not be content. Morgan Stanley wants growth. Hedge Fundoucher needs growth. Management will be ousted unless it increases its profits and grows and grows and continues to grow. So Toothpicks is forced to find ways to make more money. The ways they can do it are not hard to imagine. Less inspections. "Refurbished" wood laced with arsenic. Firing workers. Shutting down anti-splinter polishers. Mechanizing production. Outsourcing to China. Cutting corners. Stonewalling complaints. In other words, acting like Assholes.

The central point is this: How can companies expect to constantly and continually *grow* and *keep growing* year after year? How many more air-conditioners does the world need each year? How much Coca-Cola can the world consume? How can manufacturing shoelaces lead to double digit growth? Or…more chillingly…by what means are hospitals supposed to deliver 6% growth to their investors year after year? (The answer is actually to target diabetes and obesity and age-related treatments.) Or...more dangerously…how are news and media companies supposed to grow the size of the company and the revenue year after year? (The answer appears to be Fox and CNN.) Family run newspapers and companies don't work this way. Growth is preferable, but it is not indispensable and it should not become the universal business model. There are business owners are perfectly happy to make staplers or grow pumpkins, cover their costs and then take home a salary and a healthy profit. And this should be encouraged…but the financing system, as it stands, places all control over these companies in the hands of those with the intention of only providing capital to those companies who seek growth over all things.

When this becomes the only consideration, then the only way to go is to take massive risks. And, as we are learning, when companies take massive risks, whether by banks, oil companies, car companies or what have you…the costs are not borne by the companies and the costs are not borne by those making the decisions. Instead, the costs are borne by everyone else. We are forced to bail them out. We must clean up the oil slicks. We must bear the loss of life from faulty car designs. We must heal from the exploding dildos. And the executives walk away, it's all upside for them - there are no clawbacks for bad performance. It's either a hundred million to win or 10 million to lose. And the banks have made their money too. They take fees for picking stocks, fees for upward growth, fees for underwriting stock and bonuses for picking good companies and even bonuses for picking companies that explode in the long run, leaving their customers holding the bag. On all sides, most people lose while the wealthy either get wealth or get wealthier.

Um. So basically the financial system streamlines and intensifies the profit and growth pressure placed on management of public companies, leading to the taking of bigger and bigger risks, the costs of which are eventually borne by society at large and the shareholders. I'm not sure if there's going to be a part 2…but that's a start. The solution remains entirely unclear to me because I do not reject free market forces as a force for good.

Excuses, Excuses

My guess is that after silence for a year, no one’s still around. So this becomes an open letter to no one in particular, or in other words, a journal of sorts.

There are many reasons why I suddenly stopped posting on this blog last summer – none of them entirely convincing. My rotation into the securities distribution practice group was volatile, unstable, and grueling; I had run out of things to say and had begun posting third-party materials in lieu of original thinking; I had just met a girl and spent some of my energy negotiating that situation; I had a motorcycle and it was summertime. I was bored and burned out. And on and on, etc. etc.

The real reason, as it turns out, is that I was just tired. I wasn’t necessarily tired of writing so much as I was generally beset by a sense of malaise (…that fucking Jimmy Carter) that pretty much sapped any of my ambition and interests other than satisfying my near-to-immediate needs of fun, amusement, entertainment and social contact, not to mention the pleasure of cooking, eating, drinking and being merry in the moments I was not at work. This is not a complaint. There is much to be said about reveling in the stripped down pleasures of everyday life – they quietly fill up more space and provide more joy than we could ever reasonably expect. Maybe this is the Working Life – watching idly as your energy spirals down the drain of your workaday job so that there’s nothing left to devote to the things that matter to you. Or maybe, probably, almost certainly, I have just gotten older, a little bit more withdrawn, and now lack the energy to do the things it takes to do something meaningful. And I am very aware that lacking convictions and interests and pursuits and passions and goals and shit…dreams even by the age of 27 feels like a dangerous and foolish category to have hedonically snoozed my way into.

If this is the case, though, I haven’t gotten over being pissed about it. And maybe being pissed is what brings me back.

Or maybe not.

Anyway, the reason I’m posting is that I hope to begin writing again. In some sense to break the muddied, tire-sticking corporate attorney routine I’ve gotten myself into over the last year or so…and in another sense to begin to remember what it is like to try and communicate with other people. One reason is that the last year or so has been extremely alienating politically. I had virtually given up interest in the political system once I realized that intelligent, reasonable, rational, pragmatic thinking and policy-making would be entirely ignored and violently bucked by a continuation of the irrational class-warfare, fear mongering, ignorance and blind ideology of the radical Republican wings. I still have not heard cogent, reasoned and measured arguments made against any of Obama’s “radical” agenda and have found it so utterly frustrating that so many people are so stupid at the same time with such volume and such fury against policies crafted with such deliberation and sound reasoning disagreeifyoudisagreewithanideabutstopabusingandcheapeningwordsandideasliketyrannyandsocialismandevilandtraitorandevilandassassinationandfreedomandlibertyyoumotherfuckingsackofignorantshitwhodoesnotdeservetoliveinthegloryoflibertyandopportunitythatthiscountryhascreatedforyouandmetolivein…that I’ve simply shut down. Instead of engaging those shouting at me, I’ve ignored them. Instead of trying to discuss a point of policy with someone screaming “traitor” at me, I’ve simply decided that if they cannot comprehend 1 + 1, then they will not comprehend 2 + 2. And even if this turns out to be the only sound strategy (lets call it “stonewall the savages”) - I simply cannot bear it. I can’t. It ruins my day. It ruins my week. It infects everything because any civil conversation can simply be ambushed by a rabid nihilist. When someone earnestly talks about Sarah Palin running for the 2012 presidency because she’s the best candidate, it just makes me want to run outside, tear a brick from the foundation of this building and run screaming towards that person until I can bludgeon them to death, brick in hand. This cannot be healthy. So I fucking refuse. Let them gnash their teeth in anger and loathing…I cannot tolerate the madness. There are enough people both good and sane enough left for us to try to build a better world.

Oh…and of course…I also am back in part because I need to figure what the hell to do with my life. I have just sleepwalked my way through a year or so of my current employment and need to figure out what it is I want to do and where it is I want to go. What is clear is that I would find the status quo unbearable in the medium-to-long term.

Just one of those days...

Iran.

As an American or just as a person, I think it is worth your time to spend some of your energy paying attention to what is happening in Iran right now.

This is just one - not to be ignored.



This looks to be a Moment.

Hey, you know what's totally awesome?

MY MOTOCYCLE!!!!!!!!!

Though I didn't really spend all that much time thinking about it, because nothing seemed perfectly fitting...I think I will end up naming her Blueberry. Before I continue, Fuck You - yes, Blueberry. My first choice, as always, was simply naming my bike "Butters." The only reason I refrained from naming her Butters, is 1) if I get a dog at any point in my life, he will be named Butters, 2) Clearly she is a she, so Butters is not befitting (Hmm...Maybe Beurre...oooh, or Beurreberry), and 3) If I have a child at any point, he will be named Butters. In any case, if you have a suitable name for the bike, and I like it...I will go with it. Though an explanation for your suggestion would be appreciated. And any explanation that involves any permutation of "Because you're Gay" will be automatically eliminated.

I will admit - the first week or so on the new bike in the city was a little bit nervewracking. Just nervewracking enough that I wouldn't cross 14th street (except when I got caught in traffic and got too scared to zip out of it to make a turn), and just nervewracking enough that it wasn't totally fun...but just a little bit terrifying. Just a lil bit. lil bit.

On top of that, having never driven a manual before...I had the stalling problem. I would roll the throttle/gas, let go of the clutch, lurch, feel a pop, and come to a dead standstill as my bike shuddered and stalled. The first 7 times this happened, I was in front of large groups of hip pretty young people eating breakfast outside in the lower east side. (I had ventured down to get some Guss' pickles, but found out they were closed. And promptly stalled in front of a mack truck and in front of lots of people.) In my defense, the clutch on this bike was very different from the clutch on the bike I learned on...so I had to get used to it. The friction spot in the clutch was very narrow so just half an inch stood between a slow start and an embarrassing stall.)

The worst of these moments was driving up near 23rd street on a particularly adventurous journey that first week, and stalling (inexplicably) while moving in heavy traffic. My guess is that I was in 3rd gear, didn't downshift in time, and simply stalled out. I was on my way to Ess-a-Bagel (!!!), when the stall happened...and I shakily parked my bike and hoofed it the rest of the way there, where I got myself an Everything Bagel with Whitefish (oh man, so good.)

Luckily, now I've gotten the hang of it.
And now that I've gotten the hang of it, I am back to totally loving it. I made a trip up to Hell's Kitchen last Sunday, with great success...namely, if you catch the Green Light starting at 14th St, you can pretty much make it ALL the way up 10th Avenue until you hit the mid-40s before you hit another Red Light. In New York? 30+ blocks in 2 or 3 minutes? Duuuude. (My trip to Hell's Kitchen was end-stopped by an artery squeezing free dinner at Shake Shack, courtesy of my friend Rachel who needed air condition installation help, which involved a caramel shake, a shack burger, AND a shack-cago dog. All of which made the drowsy ride home slightly more tenuous.)
(P.S. - Consider this a virtual coupon - if you visit me in New York and say the words "I love Patrick Dempsey", you will get a free ride to breakfast, snack, and dinner at Ess-a-Bagel, Guss' Pickles, and Shake Shack (the Madison Park version)...on me.)

(Hm...why do all of my motorcycle adventures involve food? And why does that make this So Much More AWESOME!)

Alright, as for the rest of my life, it's the same. Who cares.

Done!

Step 1: Drink a bottle of wine with a friend.

Step 2: Discuss the plan to chop the book into several pieces.

Step 3: Plan to plan meticulously about how to chop the book based on page numbering, symmetry, and ease of access to footnotes.

Step 4: Reach for the second bottle of wine and get out the cutting board. Wander out to the bedroom to search for the uberprecise eXacto knife.

Step 5: Return to the kitchen and express horror that the friend has opened the book to a random point and started sawing at the spine with a dull kitchen knife.

Step 6: Struggle mightily before simply letting go and resignedly holding a some section or other of the book chosen at random as the sawing continues.

Step 7: Wood glue the spinal wounds - air dry. Packing tape the entire outer "cover" pages and the cover, with additional reinforcement on the spine.

Step 8: Read with ease with only your left hand.

Step 9: Absorb, be baffled, love.

Step 10: Repeat. For 53 days.

Update!

Motorcycle Written Exam: 98 of 100
Motorcycle Skills Test: 100 of 100
Awesomeness: 99 of 100
Excitement: 101 of 100

Yeah it's been awhile.

So, I figure I might as well have a little post while I am off from work and not so brain-dead and exhausted as to have no interest at all in writing or explaining the things I do.

So I'm on what I've been told is a "Staycation" (variously conjugated on and off facebook as Gaycation, Jaycation, and Vacasian. Apparently asian and gay jokes are going to stick with me for life). Basically, in order to accommodate a three-day motorcycle safety course (more to follow), I took an entire week off from work and decided to just completely relax. Thus, all of the spring cleaning, reshuffling, shopping, laundry, and sunning in NYC are all being summarily handled with great aplomb.

So the motorcycle lessons are, well, totally sweet-ass. I hate the NYC DMV with a purple passion, and if you take the motorcycle course, they will teach you all the basics of riding, and once you pass their course, you no longer have to take a NY road test - that is, you get a waiver and a license.

So I dragged my ass out of bed at 5:15 am and arrived in the Bronx at 7:15 am and we promptly got our riding lessons starting with the fundamentals and moving into more complex formations and techniques. The sun was a blazing 82 degrees, the bikes were easy starter bikes, and I have to say that if I wasn't already completely sold on riding from all my previous experiences...finally getting onto a geared machine and feeling the workings of the clutch, throttle and gears was shudderingly good. I've always ridden non-geared scooters in the past, which just let you pull the throttle and then use two hands to brake...but really didn't involve any deeper interaction with the machine. Oh: Here's the bike they provided.

It's not super powerful, which I will grant, but at 250 ccs, it was substantially more powerful than anything I've ever ridden, including a beast of a Honda scooter I rode in India this summer with an Asian in tow and not even the slightest bit of drag on acceleration (while dodging hideous auto drivers and poo-covered cows). I would actually buy one of these, but given that they are only 250 ccs and I'm 6'2", it's just slightly slightly cramped.

I was actually surprised by how involved a process it is to drive anything manual. I must have stalled out at least 20 times over the course of the day (tip: do not let go of the clutch if you are in first gear, lest you be shuddered and silenced while a line of angry latinos and white dudes waits for you to get the fuck out of the way). It's almost like drumming in a weird way. You have four completely separate functions being performed by four completely separate limbs, while astride a steel contraption hurtling towards a chain-link fence in front of an audience of 12 very macho men wearing bandanas and timberlands. Apparently, if something darts out in front of you, your automatic emergency reaction is supposed to be:

1) Roll off the throttle.
2) Right hand: Hand brake.
3) Right foot: Foot Brake.
4) Left hand: Clutch.
5) Left Foot: Downshift after the engine has been disengaged.
6) Left hand: Not let go of the clutch.
7) Left hand: Why? Because you'll stall out.
8) Left hand: I let go of the clutch.

But my instructor did clap and say "Good job!" So, yeah.

In any case, here's is what I'm looking at now: It's from a friend of a friend, so he seems totally reliable. It's a Kawasaki KZ440...but it's from 1982. Which means this bike is older than me...but apparently still runs like a top. The clincher? $500 dollars. So excited.



I myself am pretty shocked that a 27 year old bike looks this modern and this clean, but I am not complaining. At 440 ccs, it's about twice as powerful as the bikes I've been taught on, but it's still small enough that I'm not going to lose control...unlike those fucking 1200 cc Harley's that take a fucking drum line to your ear drums whenever they ride by.

Other relevant updates? I've now been hooked and reeled in by Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad, both of which are excellent excellent shows...and I'm 800+ pages into Infinite Jest, which means that I will be done soon, after which I will read a newly procured copy of the Brothers Karamazov...which sadly I have only recently decided to explore after reading an essay DFW wrote about the biographer of Doestoevsky. That guy has got some crazy influence on me...

Ok, peace out you two.
Anyway, that's all.

Vices.

I cannot, for the life of me, ever manage to rid my life of all of my vices at the same time.

If I'm not drinking, then I'm eating terrible food or smoking lots of cigarettes.

If I'm eating healthy and exercising, I'm invariably drinking enough to counteract it.

When I quit smoking last year, I also managed to start exercising and eating healthy. The alcohol intake rose substantially.

It's not even a voluntary choice.

At the current moment, I am eating quite healthily, exercising 4-5 times a week, and drinking in moderation...so, as you may have guessed, something about working on a particular transaction for 500 hours over two months turned me back into a smoker. (I know, I know. I made a public declaration last time, and here I am reaping the scorn for it.) So I'm basically going to try cut smoking again tomorrow...which has been back with a vengeance for about 3 months now, and see where that takes me. I imagine the healthy eating will remain, since I've built it so rigidly into my daily routines that I've gotten very used to it...so here's to hope.

P.S. Working on corporate transactions is stressful. Ugh.

P.P.S. And yes, I am a gay fish.

Your mother is...

[fill in as necessary. My preference is "a whore."]

YEAH!!

That is all.

Full Blown Obsessions.

Bjork - more historical than current.

The Wire - one full rundown down complete, surely to be repeated.

Radio Lab - apparently the reaction is not universal, but that just means you suck.

Deadwood - so good that you're upset no one else was in the room to witness what it is that just unfolded.

David Foster Wallace - this one is going to be trouble. BIG trouble.
...Read it or don't. (Start here for pure joy if you do)

No more pushing. But my life is so immensely, incredibly, and internally richer for it.


And Every. Single. One.
...a sense of wonder at this beautiful mess.

Infinite Jest.

Edit: Following on Sarah's comment about the size of this fucker, has anyone ever cut a large book into 2 or 3 normal sized pieces and rebound it themselves?


I am now, much like my quitting smoking fiasco, broadcasting that I have begun to read Infinite Jest in order to prepare myself for the battle that may be awaiting me by using public shaming as an additional buttress.

Wish me luck, though so far having read 1.38% of it, it is every bit as enthralling and mind bending as I had hoped.

If you have ever wanted to read this book, or just are in the mood for something that by all appearances is going to be deeply challenging and equally rewarding and twisted, I maybe sorta hope that you will take the leap and try and read this fucker as I do. Sorta like AA. Or a book club. I'm only on page 15 of 1079 right now, and I imagine I won't make it past page 50 tonight before I fall asleep. Let me know.

Abercrombie and Fitch.

I used to really have it out for Abercrombie: the people who wore abercrombie, their advertisements, the whole she-bang. It just felt like it represented all of the wrong things. It wasn't evil or malicious or anything like that, but just...wrong. I generally stopped caring as we appeared to be moving out of the age group where people buy these clothes.

Anyway...I read this article today about how A&F refuses to cut prices and is trying to remain a luxury brand in the midst of the recession, quite stupidly, and how their share prices are tanking and they are struggling quite a bit. Not interesting. Then found a link to a picture of the Chairman and CEO of the company, one Mr. Mike Jeffries.

"To Jeffries, the "A&F guy" is the best of what America has to offer: He's cool, he's beautiful, he's funny, he's masculine, he's optimistic, and he's certainly not "cynical" or "moody," two traits he finds wholly unattractive." - Salon, January 24, 2006

The man is 64.

OOOHHHHHHH MYYYYYYY GODDDDD!!!!!!

OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!OHMYGOD!!
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Yeah, that makes sense.

"Swiss-filled?" Eddie Murphy? Pee Wee Herman?

Come on people. I think we should open up an advertising agency called "Not Morons LLP": We would making a killing.


(From the website: And you have no business asking why the fuck I went there in the first place. One of you might have some inkling.)

Ho Hos ® - Another San Francisco Treat

Apparently, rice isn't the only San Francisco treat. The history of Hostess Ho Hos dates back to 1967, when a San Francisco bakery began hand-producing the Swiss-filled chocolate cakes elegantly enrobed in delectable confectionary coating.

Over the years, the tubular snack has enjoyed its share of laughs. In connection with the 1999 introduction of Nutty Ho Hos, which added chopped peanuts to the original roll, a search was launched for the country's nuttiest celebrity laugh - or ho ho. (We know what you're thinking, but not everyone laughs with a ha ha. Just ask Santa.) When the votes were tallied, Americans decided that comedian Eddie Murphy's laugh took the proverbial cake, followed by the kooky cackles of Phyllis Diller, Roseanne Barr and Pee Wee Herman.

Even at the G-20 the cool kids leave out the Chinese kids.