Goth Cruise!

Prison with a chance of drowning, but with freaks!


Goth Cruise the Movie trailer - a 'Gothumentary' from jeanie finlay on Vimeo.

Guillermo Rodriguez in Twilight

And in The Bourne Supremacy

Paul Krugman's Suggestions For "Fixing" the Economy

But will the gummint do it? And will it work?

Rick Astley Rick-Rolls Some Preschoolers

First, from Wikipedia, a definition of Rick-Rolling:

Rickrolling is an Internet meme typically involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up". The meme is a bait and switch: a person provides a Web link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true source of the link without clicking. When a person clicks on the link given and is led to the web page he/she is said to have been "Rickrolled" (also spelled Rickroll'd). By extension, it can also mean playing the song loudly in public in order to be disruptive.

Read the whole Wiki post - it's pretty funny. Here's Rick Astley doing the Rick-Rolling at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade yesterday:

When Private Ain't Really Private

Interesting post from Dan Savage on the fallout over the resignation (under pressure) of the director of the LA Film Festival, Richard Raddon, after it became public that he donated $1500 to the Yes on 8 campaign.

Thank You Sarah Palin!

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

Fed Pledges up to $7.4 Trillion for Bailout!

So Bloomberg reports. And with very little transparancy. Check out Bernanke:

“Some have asked us to reveal the names of the banks that are borrowing, how much they are borrowing, what collateral they are posting,” Bernanke said Nov. 18 to the House Financial Services Committee. “We think that’s counterproductive.”

Things are too crazy for words...

Sunday Night Tahitian Pearl Blogging

Tahitian pearls come in a variety of cool colors, including green, purple, blue, pistachio, white, grey, and yellow. They are grown in the warm waters of French Polynesia in the South Pacific.

NY Times on Citigroup

Excellent article about the Citigroup mess, including the role played by Robert Rubin. A sample:

The bank’s downfall was years in the making and involved many in its hierarchy, particularly [CEO] Mr. [Charles O.] Prince and Robert E. Rubin, an influential director and senior adviser.

Citigroup insiders and analysts say that Mr. Prince and Mr. Rubin played pivotal roles in the bank’s current woes, by drafting and blessing a strategy that involved taking greater trading risks to expand its business and reap higher profits. Mr. Prince and Mr. Rubin both declined to comment for this article.

When he was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, Mr. Rubin helped loosen Depression-era banking regulations that made the creation of Citigroup possible by allowing banks to expand far beyond their traditional role as lenders and permitting them to profit from a variety of financial activities. During the same period he helped beat back tighter oversight of exotic financial products, a development he had previously said he was helpless to prevent.

As y'all know, Robert Rubin is an economic adviser on the Obama transition team. More change we can believe in!

Awesome Obama Impression

Shiver Me Timbers!

From The Globe & Mail, and awesome phony Bloomberg story making the rounds on Wall Street:

Somali Pirates in Discussions to Acquire Citigroup

By Andreas Hippin
November 20 (Bloomberg) -- The Somali pirates, renegade Somalis known for hijacking ships for ransom in the Gulf of Aden, are negotiating a purchase of Citigroup.

The pirates would buy Citigroup with new debt and their existing cash stockpiles, earned most recently from hijacking numerous ships, including most recently a $200 million Saudi Arabian oil tanker. The Somali pirates are offering up to $0.10 per share for Citigroup, pirate spokesman Sugule Ali said earlier today. The negotiations have entered the final stage, Ali said.

"You may not like our price, but we are not in the business of paying for things. Be happy we are in the mood to offer the shareholders anything," said Ali.

The pirates will finance part of the purchase by selling new Pirate Ransom Backed Securities. The PRBS's are backed by the cash flows from future ransom payments from hijackings in the Gulf of Aden. Moody's and S&P have already issued their top investment grade ratings for the PRBS's.

Head pirate, Ubu Kalid Shandu, said: "We need a bank so that we have a place to keep all of our ransom money. Thankfully, the dislocations in the capital markets has allowed us to purchase Citigroup at an attractive valuation and to take advantage of TARP capital to grow the business even faster."

Shandu added, "We don't call ourselves pirates. We are coastguards and this will just allow us to guard our coasts better."

*CITI IN TALKS WITH SOMALI PIRATES FOR POSSIBLE CAPITAL INFUSION

*WILL REQUIRE ALL CITI EMPLOYEES TO WEAR PATCH OVER ONE EYE

*SOMALIAN PIRATES APPLY TO BECOME BANK TO ACCESS TARP

*PAULSON: TARP PIRATE EQUITY IS AN `INVESTMENT,' WILL PAY OFF

*KASHKARI SAYS `SOMALI PIRATES ARE 'FUNDAMENTALLY SOUND' '

*Moody's upgrade Somali Pirates to AAA

*HUD SAYS SOMALI DHOW FORECLOSURE PROGRAM HAD `VERY LOW' PARTICPATION

Wednesday Night Eres Tu Blogging

Wonderfully sappy song from 1973 Spain. How could Franco let this happen?

China Rising?

Somewhat long, complicated, interesting article about the interconnectedness of the global economic system. Sample graph:

So far China has been relatively unaffected by the worst insanities of the investment markets. The Financial Times reported a story that did the rounds in Beijing: "At a secret meeting of top Communist officials at the start of this decade, Zhu Rongji, then China's premier, summoned senior academics and finance officials to teach a crash course on complex financial instruments. Financial derivatives. . . were described as like putting a mirror in front of another mirror, allowing a physical object to be reflected into infinity." This is a good description of a mechanism with a worldwide value of more than a $1,000 trillion - the equivalent of 20 years' global production - resting on sand.

Cheezeburger Funny!

Awesome, though very cheesy, website for cat- and animal-lovers!

How Prop 8 May Go Down...

Very interesting point about the courts and Prop 8 from one of Andrew Sullivan's readers, quoted in full:

The critical point that is put forward in every brief seeking Prop 8's invalidation is that Prop 8 stands for more than gay marriage: it stands for the premise that any minority group can suddenly be targeted by the majority for discrimination. It essentially eviscerates the Equal Protection Clause of the California Constitution. This because a) the Supreme Court has held (in Perez, some 20 years before Loving) that marriage is a fundamental right and b) in the Marriage Cases, that homosexuals are a suspect class. Unless Prop 8 somehow by implication reversed either of those, Prop 8 means that any time we wanted to be mean to some minority group, we could.

So, just to help you think about this a little more clearly: Prop 8 stands for the idea that we could put on the ballot tomorrow the question of whether Catholics could marry. We could also put on the ballot the question of whether someone with HIV could vote or own property. We could put on the ballot the question of whether mexican catholics can be discriminated against in housing or employment.

You just don't get, do you, up in your ivory tower, that the courts are the ultimate backstop for human rights. Remind me, did desegregation come because of a referendum? No, that was Brown v. Board. Oh, and wait. How about interracial marriage? Nope, that was Perez in California and Loving v. Virginia federally. And I will wager a year's salary that in both cases, had the question been put to a vote, it would have come out completely differently. And if it were put to voters today, I have no confidence that they would vote to sustain them.

That's the point of the Equal Protection Clause. (Aside--do you then also disagree with Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas?) The rights of minorities aren't subject to extinction by the majority's fiat.