happy thanksgiving

This is excellent - from the McSweeney's archies, a production rider for your thanksgiving tour home. A sample -

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LOAD IN:

TALENT arrives alone. Upon arrival, do not ask where CREW is. Do not get clever by saying boyfriend/your friend/special friend instead of CREW. Consider VENUE forewarned that when TALENT feels VENUE can act appropriately around CREW, TALENT will bring CREW. So TALENT will be arriving alone.

TALENT will be bringing one (1) duffel bag full of laundry, and TALENT doesn't want to hear she's too old for this. TALENT will do laundry herself. Unless VENUE, you know, was already planning on doing some anyway, in which case it would probably be easier if VENUE just threw it in with whatever VENUE is doing. No big deal.

nunchuck ping pong

The title says it all. This isn't that great, but I like it. It's just a Nokia ad in China, and it has a poor stand-in for Bruce Lee, but it is a minute of nunchuck ping pong.

domino day 2008

The inner dork in me loves this - 4.3 million dominos falling, all filmed for television. A new world record (that link has another vid) that would make Rube Goldberg proud.



If you want yet another vid, with a cheesy Coldplay score, here you go - link


PS - I googled Rube to check the spelling, and found this (today, 11/17/2008) on rubegoldberg.com -
2007 Calendar: $5.00 while they last!

Chart of the day: Nudge

Props to the gf - 85% of her students passed the regents exam for her class (including the special ed kids).

Unfortunately, she made the mistake of showing me the excel spreadsheet she keeps the scores on. After a few minutes and some crunching, I came up with the chart above - how many students scored in each 5 point interval. So while the raw data didn't reveal anything, the chart says something - notice the huge bump at 65% (just passing) compared to the valley at 60% (just failing). Hmmm....

Note, the data doesn't look as bad as that chart. But I'm just saying - no kid got a 64.

"The black son/child Obama - anything is possible!"

The Chinese Google, Baidu, had an image of Obama as it's Google-holiday-esque icon, casting a fishing net.

Pacific Epoch, via Shanghaiist (via, of course, HTWW)-

Following more general features including Hong Kong entertainers and snow storm survivors, Obama comes as Baidu's first foreign installment. In the drawing, a smiling Obama is joined by a dapper donkey as he throws a "net" over the Chinese portion of Baidu's logo.

Check out the page of you clicked on the logo (when it was there). You can click on some good videos there. His speeches work seem very modern alongside the Chinese characters and colorful logos. The title of this post is what it says in Chinese at the top. Another section of the page (translated by a commenter on the HTWW post) -

Two years ago, very few people in the world knew of this "Black kid" Obama. But today, this 47 year-old ethnic African, charismatic and bright, has become the most moving American presidential candidate.

In America's online world, Obama has remained an all-time hot topic. The video of Obama's speech in Philadelphia was the most popular video on the Internet.

In the age of the Internet, it does not matter if one is a common civilian, from a metropolis or from a rural area. As long as one is hardworking and tries to fulfill one's dreams, even an ordinary civilian (as Obama once was), can become a presidential candidate.

Communist propaganda or truth? Yes.

Italian beauties

I've been reading a great non-fiction book by Umberto Eco, Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism, which is a compilation of articles he's written for various Italian newspapers. He focuses a lot on their Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and with good reason - he's great fodder for commentary. Imagine the mouth of Rush Limbaugh, the personable mien of Bush, the media reach of Rupert Murdoch (within Italy), and the cutthroat political instincts of Karl Rove all rolled into one.

Some examples: He once told a German politician he would have perfect for the role of a guard at a concentration camp. He calls The Economist the Ecommunist, after harsh criticism. He once named the founders of Rome as Romulus and Remulus. The BBC has a good compilation of gaffes here.

Anyway, so I've been reading this book, and notice this is one of the top headlines on Bloomberg -

Berlusconi Says Opposition Has Poor Taste in Women


I went to the article, helping ensure it remained a top story.

``The left doesn't even have good taste when it comes to women,'' Berlusconi told Sky TG24 television in an interview today. The women in his People of Liberty party ``are more beautiful and moreover all have super degrees. When I say ours are better looking it's because when I look around in parliament, there really is no comparison."

Wow - better looking AND with better degrees. Not like those stupid un-hot feminazis.

What about investing in Italy?

Visiting the New York Stock Exchange in September 2003, he told investors to put their money in Italy because ``the secretaries are beautiful, so at least you can take pleasure working there.''

What about his personal life?

The ex-premier has also been known to make racy public comments about his own marriage. In response to newspaper reports of his wife Veronica's alleged affair with Venice Mayor Massimo Cacciari, Berlusconi joked at a 2002 news conference with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen that he might ``introduce Rasmussen to my wife, because he is much better- looking than Cacciari.''

I'm surprised I knew so little about him. Could you imagine the Daily Show in Italy?

Attractiveness Scales

Thanks to Long or Short Capital, we can graph, first for man-to-woman relationships...



And woman-to-man...



What's great about these charts is that they allow for some good data plotting. For example, using {x,y} notation, and assuming each axis as displayed goes to a count of 10, one might have Ashley/Kristen at {8,0.5} for example. I believe this is part of my enlightened view of women, which is multi-dimensional (where "multi" is two).

Of course, the same applies to men, so Spitzer might be a {5,7}? (please note that the attractiveness axes are inverted between the 2 charts) Of course, women are more complex than men, so perhaps the w2m chart should be 3-dimensional, where the y-axis represents wealth, in which case Spitzer is a {5,7,9}, which of course, isn't so bad. Ladies let me know.

Of course, each of us has a utility curve, but given that, marriage becomes a simple problem of optimization - finding the person who gives you maximum utility, to whom you provide the same. Fuck eHarmony.

In the interest of compiling data, please feel free to add people and their coordinates in the comments. Also, realize this is now going to be part of my description of everyone, so familiarize yourself with these charts before I see you again.

What leap year?

So what if the market was down size (almost 3%) yesterday?

From my new favorite finance-snark blog, Long or Short Capital - a rough draft from Bernanke's speechwriter.

Friday, February 29th, doesn’t count. That’s right. Simply didn’t happen. It was the leap day of a leap year, an anomaly, and we have the ability at the Fed to strike an anomalous day from existing. We plan to utilize this power that we have at our discretion, and by open market actions, remove the existence of February 29th from the record books.

If we let Friday exist, it will distort comparisons with prior years and also it meant that markets went down a lot. And to that I say, not on my watch, sir, not on my watch. So expect all your portfolios and investments to be reset to their close of business Thursday values very soon. And remember, who loves you? I do. Thank you.

Cien años

"Like hope, but different."

I'm taking, of course, from Jake.

I got work to do

from Spin magazine -

Kidz in the Hall "Work To Do (Obama Campaign)" Over a bubblin', we-gotta-make-it sample of the '72 Isley Brothers jam "Work to Do," this Ivy League rap duo solicit your support for our next president

This is for people who thought the other song sounded too much like a Gap ad.

download

Oh...Canada....

That's a chart of the Canadian vs. US Dollar. The US Dollar is again the stronger currency - a CAD would cost you $.98.

But I consider this terrible personal news. I am that guy. If you read this blog, you are getting nothing new, only regurgitated group-think. I'm like the Chris Matthews of casual financial banter. My blog is a contrarian indicator for any trend, and this saddens me. Basically, it's time to sell when I call something out.

In fairness to me, the top of the CAD-USD rally came a couple months after my blog post. Also, I wasn't also advocating putting all your money in Canadian investments. Also, I'm prepared to blame this one on my new colleagues at work, whose opinions I haven't yet learned to ignore while forming my own.

As a side note, one of the said colleagues was visiting Canada during the weekend of the CAD-USD peak in November. He doesn't like this chart either, because he's paranoid that the world's financial markets are out to get him.