PC Magazine's Digital Edition and "street" prices

As I understand it, one purported advantage for publishers in "going digital" (besides the whole cost-of-dead-trees thing) is that the content can stay fresh. Links updated, minor corrections made, stuff like that.

It appears the folks who work up the product guides for PC Magazine haven't quite adapted to this online thing just yet. Unless "$500 street" is the going rate for a stolen one, in which case you'd be more likely to see it on Craigslist these days.

Coolest Kodak ad ever.

Or it would be, if Kodak had made it...

The Olympus Pen was a popular, small rangefinder camera back in the 60s, when the other photographic choices were "complicated and expensive" and "plastic and cheap". Nice gear, but I don't recall them ever attaining the level of cultural status this ad retroactively conveys upon them.

The ad campaign is for the new Olympus Pen Digital. At $900 and up, those memories are going to be pretty damn precious, indeed.

Some hotties just can't catch a break in life. Just ask Erin Andrews.

How to enhance fame as a world-class babe without pulling a Paris:

1. Be famously hot ESPN "sideline reporter" Erin Andrews.
2. Do your hair while naked in your hotel room. (Apparently this is not an uncommon phenomenon, although I suspect the likelihood of nude self-coiffeuring is directly proportional to how hot you are. Or how hot the hotel room is. I personally have never done this, as far as you know.)
3. Take your time preening and admiring your very healthy female body in the hotel room mirror, to allow plenty of time for some cretin outside your door to capture a video through the peephole.
4. When the resulting grainy and distorted video is released on the internets, announce through your employer's attorney that you will prosecute anyone posting this NAKED VIDEO OF YOU IN A HOTEL ROOM, even though there was no way to know for certain it was actually you in said video without your confirmation.

Watch your popularity -- as measured by Google Trends -- go through the roof...

Whoever did this is a scumbag of the lowest order. And Miss Andrews has every right to take any action she feels is necessary to find and prosecute whoever was responsible

But something about this feels a little ..off.

I've spent the last couple of hours searching the web -- no, not for the video (I'm willing to stipulate that she has a smokin' hot bod, that they may be fake but who cares, and she probably keeps the lawn well trimmed; I don't need video confirmation), but for any historic evidence that there was any level of net chatter about an "Erin Andrews video", or any words to that effect, that would have justified the nuclear option.

"Erin and the Curling Iron" was apparently first uploaded to a French video site called Dailymotion sometime in March, where it languished, barely noticed, until last Friday. Deadspin has detail on this along with a screen cap of the listing for the posted video, clevery titled "Hot Blonde (view in original format)" and labeled "Sexy and Hot Blonde shows us her all!". The original file, along with the uploader account, is long gone, but..

Once it's online, it's forever, right? Surely there had to have been some buzz.. something on the blogs.. at TMZ... right?

Nothing.

I found various salivating encomiums.. references to her fashion-forward appearance at the ESPY awards, being hit in the face with a baseball at a Dodger game, and.. her apparent proclivity towards use of the legal process to discourage rumors (over the winter, a rumor -- by all accounts absolutely false -- was planted regarding a sex tape starring Andrews and alleged Mets superstar David Wright).

But references to the video? Nothing.. until the ESPN legal press release.

Although web sites now abound that will direct the cluetards seeking this video online to virus farms, and nobody deserves to have their system infected more, the original file will live on forever as a torrent. It's available, in virus-free unedited glory, on sites like the infamous Pirate Bay, where it was posted on July 18 (as of tonight, the 20th, there were several thousand active seeders on the torrent).

There's no legal process in the world that can "remove the file from the Internet".

Andrews, with a degree in telecommunications from Florida, is probably smart enough to know this. ESPN is damn well smart enough to know how this publicity thing works. The best way to ensure something will be widely disseminated is to announce you want to suppress it. They might as well have put a crawl on the bottom of the ESPN national feed: "ERIN ANDREWS NAKED VIDEO!!! ONLINE NOW!!! AUTHENTICITY GUARANTEED!!!"

If she'd just ignored it, chances are the video would have lived forever as "Hot Blonde (original format)". Maybe some pimpled losers would send out a tweet now and then -- "Look here, is this Erin Andrews?"

But.. think of it. The perfect oppo for buzz. It's not a sex tape. She was completely innocent. Just fixing her hair! How awful of those bad people to do this! It's only right to clear her name!

I'm just cynical enough to believe that Andrews and her handlers calculated this out and decided there was a bigger payoff to coming out against the video, thus guaranteeing its longevity and association. No scandal, so no notoriety, no risk of catcalls from the sideline drunks -- well, no more than usual -- and no possibility that she'll become unemployed. (As if.)

(As usual, EDSBS has the best speculative take: A coworker was responsible.)

It's not easy to not write good

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

-- the winning entry by author David McKenzie, of Federal Way, Washington, in this year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, where multitudes annually submit wretched opening paragraphs to imaginary works of fiction. Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton is memorialized in this contest for apparently being the first to open a story with the timeless "It was a dark and stormy night.."

The other cleat drops

There's nothing I can say about
Oregon's Uniform Proposals, 2009 that wasn't said far more eloquently and hilariously on EDSBS.

In general, though, I think of the various clown suits they've been wearing recently, these are the best looking, i.e., least gay. But the "feathers" on the shoulders still seem too trompe-l'oeil for a football field.

When I first saw the metally feather-shapes-that-looked-like-straight-razors-or-maybe-retractable-wing-flaps last year I was sure it was a design riff on Gladiator-style Roman armor. Which I thought was kind of cool. Turned out that, no, they were supposed to be just .. feathers. Now, they have a new "color" called Steel. But the shoulder thingies are still.. metal feathers. Bleh.

And there ain't nothing uniform about any of this stuff.

Classics from Denis Leary's Family Cookbook

(from his book Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid which is really hilarious but nowhere close to what anyone would call politcally correct so consider this a warning. Or an endorsement.)

CABBAGE POTATO CHUCK ROAST

• 14 sticks of butter
• pinch of salt
• cabbage
• Seven hundred potatoes
• 2 pounds chuck roast beef

Place chuck roast, potatoes and cabbage into a very large pot of already boiling water. Boil for five hours. Turn heat down to a simmer. Drop in 14 sticks of butter and pinch of salt. Let boil for one more hour. Then another fifteen minutes. Then a couple more minutes. Make sure all germs and taste have been boiled out. Serve.

(and, because good Catholics had to eat something on Fridays...)

FISH

• One loaf Wonder Bread
• 8 sticks butter
• Cabbage
• Seven hundred potatoes
• Six boxes Gorton's Frozen Fish Sticks
• Two large bottles ketchup

Place fish sticks in flat pan in oven. Turn knob up as far as it will go. Place cabbage and potatoes in large pot of already boiling water. Wait twenty minutes. Take fish sticks out while middle seems to still be frozen. Pour ketchup over them until they disappear beneath a sea of red. Wait another hour for flavor to evaporate from cabbage and potatoes and they are soft to the touch. Make sign of the cross. Serve.

Every home should have one

Pop goes the mortgage

Nearly 61% of option ARMs originated in 2007 will eventually default, according to a recent analysis by Goldman Sachs ...

-- from Calculated Risk

61% failure rate. And this for loans originated after the bubble started popping. What the hell were all these people -- the applicants, the brokers, the underwriters, the banks, the realty agents -- smoking?

A friend suggested that my view that the housing bubble resulted in an overabundance of homeownership, with the "American dream" expanded to envelop hundreds of thousands of mortgages issued to people who, in a less insane environment, wouldn't have received mortgages in the first place, was condescending.

I don't think it's condescending to assert that the orgy of available mortgage cash between 2002 and 2006 resulted in loans being given to people who had no business getting them. In this period it was possible to apply for a mortgage, say "I have a job as a blablabla-ist and I make $100,000 a year and I have $50k in the bank but I don't want to prove it".. and get approved for a NINJA loan (no income verification, no job verification, no asset verification). Apparently, the mortgage officer would just get an opinion from someone stating that it was possible for a blablabla-ist to make $100k a year and save $50k over n years. Voila, you're approved, and here's your 105%-to-value Option ARM. Don't worry about that balloon in two years, we'll just refinance you, you'll probably be able to pull out some of the equity you're bound to have, because prices just go up and your house will doubtlessly be worth twice as much then!

The whole sub-prime mess created the housing bubble. I'm not the only one who feels this way. The inherent self-interest of the real estate and banking industries only served to encourage people who shouldn't have been buying to buy, and made what were ultimately speculative purchases possible. We've all had the American Dream of home ownership pounded into our heads as long as we've been around. Ownership is fine for what it is, but when you remove the false concepts and outright lies of the real estate industry and start ignoring the political bias towards home ownership (never forget how much campaign cash comes from the realty/mortgage industry), it gets harder to justify home ownership as a prudent majority housing option.

Back in the day before we started saying "back in the day", banks generated income by investing in people by loaning them money. Because they didn't want to get stuck with illiquid undervalued assets, there were underwriting standards; they'd only loan 80% to value without mortgage insurance, vetted the buyers carefully, and wound up with a solid base of performing loans.

The rules changed, the giant pool of money started chasing new places to invest, the geniuses of finance created new instruments, the mortgage broker took over from the bank as the place to get your loan, and up it went.. the speculators came along happily, flipping away, creating massive new developments in what used to be in the middle of nowhere.. nobody really paying attention to the minor detail that incomes weren't increasing to match the rise in housing values and eventually people really *wouldn't* be able to afford that mortgage the broker put them into. And now look what we have. It's a fucking meltdown.

In a way i'm living proof of this. In late 2005 I wanted to buy a home in Salem. I hadn't sold my other home yet -- it was on the market. I thought "i'll either have to make the purchase contingent or just wait until i get a firm offer for my house." Ha ha! I didn't understand how things worked then. My realtor said "no worries, I know a broker who can do this." Just on my income and "good credit history" I received another mortgage for the new house.. on top of the one I already had. The fact that the combined mortgages added up to about 80% of my net income didn't seem to factor into anything. Everything turned out OK -- I sold the other home within a couple of days of listing it; that's the way the marked was then -- but what if it hadn't?

For 20 years I've been trying to tell anyone that would listen that if people were ever in a position of having to purchase a new car that they could really afford, the auto market would go in the shitter. It took a while but that's exactly what happened. , and the same thing's happening in housing.

So I don't feel guilt-trippable, or that it's condescending, when I say there were a whole bunch of loans handed out between 2002 and 2006 that, if we weren't in Bizarro Financial World, wouldn't have had a snowball's chance in hell of passing underwriting. And, yes, some of those loans were given to first-time homeowners who bought into the whole Benefit Of Homeownership program. Ultimately they're the ones getting screwed. The bankers all kept on making their nut. The realtors were just doing their job, which is selling things. America the Beautiful.

Durn fool kids these days all thinking they can "buy their second house first," encouraged by the gov't, browbeaten by the realtors, walking off a cliff blindfolded while the bankers wipe their asses with their profits and buy their own vacation homes in cash with their bonuses.

A whole industry (industries, really) gorged itself on the concept that the quality of a mortgage loan against developed property didn't really matter because when it came to home ownership, a price of p wasn't *really* outrageous because someone would undoubtedly come along in n months and give them xp for their asset, where x > 1.5. Greater Fool Theory and all that. Too bad the Greater Fool Theory has a mirror component.

Good thing I didn't go for that realty career

I got 9 out of 15.. and question 1 is a gimme.