January, 2012 archive
Dustbiters 0
Just when you thought no more banks could fail, the banksters prove that their capacity for financial shenanigans has not yet been exhausted.
Injunction Hoagie with Extra Lawyers To Go 0
We frequented the Capriotti’s (not a franchise) just up the hill from us when I lived in Delaware.
The suit, filed in Delaware this week, claims the Las Vegas shop teamed up with the strip club Crazy Horse III to offer the famous Capriotti’s Thanksgiving-on-a-roll “Bobbie” sandwich and a beer or soda for $5 during happy hour.
The lawsuit alleges that the joint promotion was not authorized by Capriotti’s parent company and was in direct violation of the franchise agreement.
An anonymous spokesperson from Lost Wages says they will fight.
The “Bobbie” is Thanksgiving dinner on hoagie roll: Sliced turkey (not pre-sliced deli meat), (fully) dressing, gravy, and cranberry sauce; it is really tasty.
The boobie is–oh, never mind.
Twits on Twitter 2
So much for Twitter as a conduit of information (Warning: Language.)
Via BlagHag, who concludes that there is no hope for humanity.
Strain at a Gnat etc. 0
Sandra Niedergall, Old Dominion’s associate athletic director for compliance and student welfare, said the NCAA has ruled Brandao ineligible for 44 games because she played on a team with professional players in 2008 and 2009.
(snip)
The Lady Monarchs are contending that the team was not professional. Niedergall said that Brandao was not paid and was unaware of any payments made to teammates or other players in the league.
NCAA.
Amateurism.
Yeah.
Right.
Most Likely To . . . . 0
Yearbook quotes from Presidential candidates. Warning: Language.
TSA Security Theatre 0
The women were 85 and 88. The devices were a colostomy bag and a back brace.
Management promises to retrain everyone.
As the veteran of over three decades in the training biz, I would not consider this a “training” issue.
This is an “arrogance of unlimited power” issue.
Republican Family Values, the Gift that Keeps on Giving (Updated) 0
Back when I wrote case studies for training courses, I could never have come up with something like this.
If would have been too bizarre, even for an audience of hardened railroaders.
Addendum:
“I think the destructive, distracting, and vicious nature of the news media makes it harder to govern this country,” Gingrich responded. “I am frankly astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate. . . . This story is false.”
For all I know, the ex’s charges may be false.
Newt the Gingrinch doesn’t seem to have cared about getting his wives’ permission for affairs.
How Wall Street Ticks 0
(Link fixed)
Eric Zorn talks with an expert about how “private equity” works and considers whether “parasite capitalism” would be a more descriptive term than “vulture capitalism.”
He points out that they borrow money from a successful business, use that money to buy said successful business, then suck it dry, carve it up, and sell the pieces, illustrating this with the story of his hypothetical “Zorn Co.”
OK, so Josh Co. is humming along. And Zorn Capital buys it for $100 million.
We cut a check for $20 million — our down payment. The other $80 million comes from a loan that Josh Co. takes out in effect to pay for its own purchase.
And that $20 million investment by Zorn Capital? Only $2 million comes directly from us, assuming this is a typical private-equity deal, says Kosman. The other $18 million comes from our investors, whom we charge a 2 percent annual investment-management fee.
Also, Zorn Capital will be charging Josh Co. an annual $50,000 “monitoring fee” to oversee the business.
But wait! There’s more! Follow the link for the rest of the story.
It’s sort of like getting the dogs to pay the ticks for services rendered.
A. P. Ticker Wonders: “Why So Much Hate?” 0
Less than three and a half minutes. Watch it.
Meta: How I Took My Site Dark 0
I have seen several posts from various bloggers saying that they supported yesterday’s blackout, but feared taking down their sites because they were afraid they couldn’t get them back up.
The solution is simple–you don’t take down your site. (I’m tempted to add, “For Pete’s sake!”)
When a browser hits a site, it resolves by default to a file named index.html. If no index.html is present, it looks for index.php, and so on, through the various recognized formats.
I created the redirection page to send browsers to nosopa.org and added a little text to it, so, if the redirection were delayed for some reason, users would know they had landed at the right place and why there was no there there.
I then used FTP to rename my index.html and index.php files to index.html.orig and index.php.orig (the browser doesn’t know what to do with a *.orig–my term for “original”–file) and to send my new index files to the website. I left the rest of the website untouched.
When a browser hit the site, it saw the new index files with the redirection command and sped over to nosopa.org.
Late last night, I used FTP to delete the special index files and renamed to *.orig files back to their regular names, and Viola! the site was restored.
Piece of cake.
The Resilience of the Faithful, Conventional Wisdom Dept. 0
The touching faith in developer magic–the childlike belief that someone in a business suit waving a PowerPoint presentation will miraculously transform a city–never dies.
Witness this, which the resident curmudgeon at my local rag demolishes most convincingly.
I think the belief in developer magic is the belief of the desperate. The city fathers can’t make the Ford plant reopen; new plants don’t seem to get built except in far away places with strange sounding names.
Heck, they can’t even keep track of who’s on the payroll.
So they turn to burning money to developer gods to attract the conventions that will never come.
Once again, persons go to hotels to visit cities. They don’t go to cities to visit hotels.
Conventions go to Chicago, Las Vegas, San Franscisco, and other cities because the conventioneers want to go to cities like Chicago, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. Their convention centers have succeeded because persons want to visit the cities; the cities haven’t succeeded because persons want to visit the convention centers.
Virginia Beach is a nice town with a nice beach; visitors come for the beach, not for the hotels.
Norfolk is a nice little city (unlike Virginia Beach, Norfolk feels like a city) with a Naval base or two or three; visitors come to see their friends and family off to deployment.
As great a museum as the Chrysler is, the Smithsonian it’s not; as nice an urban neighborhood as is Norfolk’sHistoricGhent (I swear, the way it’s described by all the radio announcers it is one word), it is no Greenwich Village–it’s not even Fort Washington.
Nevertheless, desperate persons do desperate things, so I expect that City Fathers throughout the nation will continue to worship at PowerPoint rites and to burn money on the altar of developer magic, hoping to conjure up a replacement for that defunct industry or missing plant now decamped abroad.
Afterthought:
If developer magic is such a sure thing, why are the developers not able to cast their spells over private investors?
The Shape-Shifter 0
In the Chicago Tribune, Paul Begala argues that Mitt the Flip illustrates in micro Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest. After pointing out that the “fittest” does not mean the strongest, but rather the most adaptable, he supports his thesis with examples:
Now Mittbot 3.0 is a conservative . . . .
(snip)
That, friends, is what I call adaptable. Romney is a political shape-shifter who will renege (sic) on any promise, abandon any pledge, betray any principle to please his audience.
He goes on to point to Mitt’s one constant: His allegiance to the bankster creed that money means virtue and that any way of amassing money is therefore a virtuous way.
The only constants I see in the Flipper are ambition and entitlement.
He believes he should be President because he believes he should be President because he believes he should be President . . . .
Follow the link for the rest.
