Every summer I see people dressed like…well, slobs. There’s little excuse for it, especially if you are near a Muji store. For example, this women’s T-shirt is just over 20 bucks but looks like a million. Get one for jeans and one for a suit. For more details, see The Moment Blog

…you will be delighted to see that the great State of Texas is for sale on eBay. In case you think it is a mistake or a different Texas, read this:

The great state of Texas is for sale. All proceeds will go towards paying off the national debt of the United States of America. Must sell before she secedes! You’ll receive the whole state including all sports teams. Historic sites include the Alamo, Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood home, Bishop’s Palace, and so many more. Think of the income opportunities. The state is also plentiful in both hunting and fishing sites. As an added benefit you can make all your friends real, Texas Rangers. How about that!

So get out your credit card and click here:

The Great State of Texas – eBay (item 170322454911 end time Apr-24-09 10:29:03 PDT)

Better hurry. China might beat you too it. 😉

Etsy is great. And my friend, Laurie Grassi is great. Put them together, and what do you get? You get this great article:
Etsy :: The Storque :: Spotlight :: Guest Curator: Eco Chic with Style at Home’s Laurie Grassi

Laurie is featuring items both stylish and green. Check it out. And if you want more, check out her blog or the work she and the good folks do at style at home magazine.

You can see magic one of two ways: as mystery or trickery. Goldman Sachs recent profitability is certainly magical, but is it due to mysterious forces or is it a trick they have played? That’s what the New York Times is poking at in this Op-Ed Article:  Big Profits, Big Questions.

The poking around is fine and good, but like any good magician, Goldman Sachs will want to bow and move on before anyone has a chance to seriously ask: how did they do that? Having suffered enough from previous incantations from the financial industry, it is time to understand the magic behind this new found profitability of the banks. Now.

Working from home with children around is challenging. No doubt about that. However, there are things you can do that will make it productive for you and provide you for other benefits. Over at itbusiness.ca is a article titled, Child’s play: How to work from home and take care of the kids that outlines the ten essential steps to doing this. They are:

# Create a separate space.
# Set ground rules.
# Beat back kid noise.
# Install a kidcam.
# Kidproof your workspace.
# Protect pushable PC buttons.
# Lock down your keyboard.
# Kidproof your software.
# Bookmark kid-friendly search engines.
# Block the bad stuff from the Web.

See the article for the details behind each step. It’s good. I recommend one more step: be patient.

The accolades that Marian Anderson deserves are coming. If you don’t know who she is, you should. And if you do, I hope you get an opportunity to get to one of these events honouring her greatness.. See: Concert to pay tribute to late opera singer.

(Link and image: Associated Press)

…can be appreciated by reading this article: Worried customers flock to shuttered bank for answers in the Greeley Tribune. No one likes to see a bank fail, but it is much much worse if the bank’s customers go down with it: then you would see panic and despair on full display. Reading this article, you see at best concern and some degree of worry. You can also see what a difference the FDIC makes.

Thanks to David Kurtz from TPM for the pointer (via twitter).

When some bands don’t have an official video, you can find fans who make a video of their own. Most times, these videos are simply the song played over some static pictures. However, for the video gotta have you by the weepies, a fan has gone all out and made a sweet video to go with a sweet song. See:

As reported on Wallpaper:

Here’s something cool for your summer wardrobe that won’t cost a fortune – the new limited edition graphic T-shirt collection from Gap in collaboration with the Whitney Museum in New York. The shirts feature bold designs by artists like Jeff Koons, Chuck Close, Kiki Smith, Marilyn Minter, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Kenny Scharf, and Kerry James Marshall.

I’m on the lookout for the Chuck Close T myself (see the photo). Either that, or the Barbara Kruger. Regardless, you can’t go wrong with one of these. Good move by the Gap.

According to Time, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has a great show highlighting three master painters of the Renaissance. If you can get to the show, you should. It promises to be spectacular. In the meantime, you can get a sense for it in this photo essay from TIME:  Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese — Rivals in Renaissance Venice.  I am familiar with these painters, but I think the comparing and contrasting of them in this show would provide one with an education and a new appreciation of their work and their time. If you can get to go, you are fortunate.

…because according to this article at NYTimes.com, Making a Comeback – $200,000 Studios, there are a number of properties in that price range. Now, are they small? (yes) Overlooking Central Park? (no) Penthouses? (ha!) But this article has found “10 studio apartments in prime Manhattan” that range from $199K to $269K. And they are nice spaces, however small.

In case you were wondering:

“When was the last time I saw these prices?” said Dan Danielli, a broker at Halstead Property. “Not in a long time. Let’s put it that way.”

If you always wanted to live in Manhattan, this is likely as good a time as any. Get more details at the article.

I have started to notice a backlash against Twitter. Some of the critiques are warranted, but others fault it for things that it is not and cannot be responsible for. But rather than dwell on the negative, I’d like to focus on the positive, specifically this article that Mashable has on the 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates. Even people who don’t use twitter will find it fascinating, I believe. As for people like me, who have been a part of the Twitter movement for some time now (4000+ updates and counting), well…I am happy to have been part of it the whole experience.

And how did I come across this article? Why, from someone else’s tweet, of course! 🙂

The rules of reviewing a creative work are simple to me, as I read them once before:

1. What is the work (book, film, etc.) trying to do?
2. Does it do it?
3. Was it worth doing it?

From what I see in this review, I get a good sense of points 1 and 2. And based on the discussions that I have been having with my 13 year old daughter, number 3 has already been established, at least for it’s audience Based on that, the new HM film is a critical success.

Faults like “why can’t anyone see that Miley Cyrus is Hannah Montana” could equally be levelled at any number of mistaken identity plot devices in everything from Shakespeare to Superman. Hey, they propel the plot: get your suspension-of-belief hat on and enjoy it!  Likewise for some of the other critiques, albeit gentle ones, in this AP Review: `Hannah Montana’ fans will love new movie.

I just bought the tickets online for her and her friends because the buzz was so great on FB that she was concerned about getting there and having the tickets all gone the way it almost happened for Twilight.

Personally, I would rather go to the dentist than go see it myself. (And I hate going to the dentist). But then again, it is not for me. Or grown ups reviewing films either.

I think Jason Kottke nails it here in this post: Pixar doesn’t care about Disney’s investors. Dreamworks makes good animated films, but they do have that check-the-box approach. Pixar makes great films, period.

As for toys, McDonald’s is pushing Monsters vs. Aliens toys this week. But as a frequent visitor to Toys R Us, I am surprised to not see M vs A toys there. Then again, I saw lots of Wall-E toys languishing on the shelves months ago. I don’t think there is an easy formula that says these characters from such-and-such a film will be attractive to kids. There is one exception: Star Wars toys command significant space and sell pretty well.

Happiness can be elusive,  but misery is easy to self-induce. Indeed, eliminating ways that make you unhappy can allow happiness to shine through. Take a look at this list, 50 Ways To Make Yourself Miserable from the blog: Health Money Success. Try to eliminate or reduce the ones that are predominant in your life. Starting….now!

You just might find yourself happier.

(Photo from Joe Shlabotnik’s photostream on flickr.com )

It’s easy. Just visit the Glossary of Wine Pronunciation at InterWine.co.uk. It’s comprehensive.

It appears to be, if you look at this chart and the recent direction of the blue line.

But as Paul Krugman observed, look at the gray line labeled “Crash of 1929”. It too had an upward turn at roughly the same time in the cycle. And indeed, not only that line, but the other lines also had periods of upward trends before the overall trend assumed it’s downward trend.

That said, each economy is different. All we can say is up is better than down, even if up doesn’t necessarily mean we are done with down, yet.

(From The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (April 02, 2009) – The Markets Are Up)

…is captured in this chart:

Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight has an explanation on why GM’s Problems are 50 Years in the Making. So there is going to be alot of talk about short term steps such as restructing and bankrupcy protection and Chapter 11. But to me, looking at this chart, I see one doomed company. Instead of chapter 11, it’s time for chapter 7. And I think the focus should no longer be about GM (or Chrysler). Instead, the focus should be on Michigan and the American (and for that matter, Canadian) automobile industry.

People are tying themselves in knots with regards to Michelle Obama. On one hand, they want to talk about how smart she is in terms of intellect. On the other hand, they want to talk about how smart she is in terms of fashion and a sense of style. The mistake they make is assuming that these two things are mutually exclusive.

Michelle Obama shows how intelligent she is in any number of ways: what she says, how she acts, and how she dresses. Not only does she have a great sense of style, but she has a way of knowing what to wear, when.

Here she is wearing a cardigan by Japanese designer Junya Watanabe.  A cardigan with an argyle pattern is a very traditional thing to wear, especially in England. But this design is also very innovative and bold. Perfect for whom she was meeting at the time.

Like I said: smart.

(For lots more on Michelle Obama at the G20, see here or here.) Heck, you can go on pretty well any major online newspaper and see pictures of her. You can even see pictures of her husband….what’s his name again? 🙂

LBJ knew how to govern. In fact, the way he managed other politicians, either with carrots or sticks, was famously known as the Johnson Treatment (illustrated quite nicely here).

The NYTimes.com has a good article (Can Obama Be a Majority of One? – 100 Days Blog – NYTimes.com) covering the ways that LBJ governed and what Obama could learn from him. Indeed, anyone responsible for the governing of anything from a country to a small town should read this as a primer on how to win political battles and influence other politicians.

There is one obvious error in the article, however. It says: “Unlike L.B.J., he lacks long-time ties to Congressional leaders, which may be one reason his stimulus plan barely made it out of the Senate”. If Obama lacks those Washington ties, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has them in spades. As does his Vice President, Joe Biden. I think it is less the case of ties and more the case that the U.S. Senate is difficult to manage at the best of times. LBJ was “Master of the Senate”: any president is going to come up short compared to him.

As CNN aptly describes it. What had me thinking was how they determine who gets to stand / sit where. Obviously QEII gets to be front and centre, and her Prime Minister is her right hand man. And non-heads of states like the head of the World Bank get to go to the back. But why, for example, does Obama get to be in the second row? Or Merkel? I suspect there is alot of thought put into this: I wonder what it is.

The other thing that struck me is how almost ever man is wearing a dark suit and a white shirt. The women really stand out, especially “Liz” who really “pops” in pink. 🙂

I am a big fan of TED. If you are too, you might want to check out this site that I accidently came across tonight: Big Think. I was impressed by the number of big thinkers found there as well as the topics that they are discussing. Well worth looking around.

The Times online has an article on the best classical divas currently performing. Besides the analysis of what makes each singer noteworthy, there are also clips of some of them performing. It’s worth a look for opera fans (and non-fans too).

And who do they think is #1? Anna Netrebko (pictured here).

Then you want to see this one from Russell Investments. It illustrates “a few key economic and market indicators to help assess the current economic health and trend”. And it illustrates it well, shockingly so. For example, this chart:

The blue range is “typical” and under 3.5%. As you can see, the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 is anything but typical.

There are some good indicators, including a number of 3 month trends that show things moving out of the extreme areas and back towards typical. Indeed, some metrics, like credit risk and consumer spending, are in the typical range. However, economic expansion is not only out of the typical range, but it is trending away from it.

I’d keep an eye of this dashboard.

The NYTimes.com has a good analysis of whether or not caffeine can help your performance when you run. It turns out that it is very likely it does help, although not everyone is keen on its benefits, as the article explains.

If you are thinking about using caffeine during a race, try it out on training runs before you do. You may find that you don’t like the results. If you don’t, you want to discover this before your big race, not during.

Read the article: it does a good job of providing the details on the benefits of caffeine and running.

(photo by Flip Kwaitkowski for The New York Times)

Because it actually uses the word zaftig. Really. See Kim Kardashian: ‘So What! I Have Cellulite!’ – Bodywatch, Kim Kardashian : People.com

Michelle Bachmann has been taking heat from alot of bloggers I read for being stupid and asking idiotic questions. To that, I saw: pshaw! Personally, I think the woman is a genius. I think she is creating political drama of the highest calibre.

One thing I used to love about watching great British drama with superb actors like Helen Mirren was how they would subtly convey what thoughts and emotions they experienced with small facial changes or shifts in their body even while they were saying banal things or nothing at all. Well, Congresswoman Bachmann gets that same effect with the questions she asks! Seriously, watch the expressions of the Treasury Secretary or the head of the Fed while they are being questioned by her. You can just hear the wheels turning in their heads while they try to answer her inane questions. And yet, her questions may not even be inane, but “dog whistle” comments for wingnuts watching this. Like I said, drama of the highest calibre. For proof, go see:

As Ta-Nehesi Coates might say: awesome sauce! (Ok, he thinks she is an idiot, but anyway…. :))

There’s been alot of commentary this week about President Obama and whether or not he is appearing too much in public. One example of this can be seen in this NYTimes.com article.

What I believe is happening is that Obama is changing the rules with regards to how the President interacts with the citizens of the U.S. He did this as a candidate for the job, and he is carrying this through now that he is President.

Some have commented that he is continually campaigning. But this assumes you must act one way running for office and a different way afterwards. Obama is challenging that assumption.

Likewise, some media commentators are taken aback at Obama’s use of new media and alternative media to communicate his message. Again the assumption is, once you get in office, you use traditional means to communicate your message. Obama is challenging that assumption, too.

Lastly, Obama is challenging the way people expect him to behave, by frankly, being himself. Why this is a surprise to anyone is a mystery to me. Many people voted for him because they liked him. He’d be crazy to shove that aside. People may eventually turn away from him for all sorts of reasons, but it’s not likely because they don’t like the man from what they know about him.

I believe that if you want to be a successful president, you have to be very comfortable in your own skin. George W. Bush was this way, as was Clinton and Reagan. Obama is as comfortable as it gets. And what he is going to be very comfortable doing is redefining what it means to be the leader of the U.S. Expect interesting times.

Can be found here. I found their explanations of CDS, shortselling (via the Uptick Rule video) and cramdowns to be compelling and easy to understand. I highly recommend you see them. Go to Marketplace on Vimeo

(Tip from andrewSullivan.com)

According to this article, Can Blogging Make You Happier? | World of Psychology, blogging helps you feel more connected and increases your own sense of well-being. It can also allow you to express things in a public way yet that helps get things off your chest without having to do it directly.

What goes for blogging is true for things like Facebook and even Twitter, as well as other sites (like Etsy).

Read the article, and then let me know when you set up your blog. Get happy!

(Nice photo from Joe Shlabotnik’s photostream on flickr)

It’s all here in black and white and Powerpoint. Lots of European banks (Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank), but some Canadian ones too (Bank of Montreal). And who is Maiden Lane? Well, that is a unique organization that is not that easy to understand. This might help.

Over at the magazine n+1 were a couple of interviews with a hedge fund manager before and after the financial meltdown occurred. Both interviews were compelling, and worth reading.

One part that really stuck with me was an analysis of how the Bear Stearns takeover by JPMorgan occurred. I think the key parts are the ones I put in italics:

‘Well, the government had their role. The difference between what happened and a normal takeover is the Fed, because the Fed is providing JPMorgan some non-recourse financing for Bear Stearns assets. The strange thing about the deal is that Morgan is paying so little for Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns was trading at 170 dollars a share not that long ago, now the deal was 2 dollars a share. A lot of wealth was wiped out. The question is, why would anyone accept it? Just before you came in today, JPMorgan increased their offer to 10 dollars. But a 2-dollar share offer, for the most part it’s like, “This is like pennies to me. I’ll say no to this deal and maybe I’ll do better in bankruptcy.” The reason the Fed didn’t want Bear to go through bankruptcy is that there are all kinds of interconnections between Bear and other banks. There’s counterparty risk, it could lead to panic, it could lead to a whole mess in the financial market, so the Fed just wants the problem to go away, the Treasury just wants the problem to go away. But if I am a shareholder it’s not my problem. “Let’s go bankrupt, let’s see, maybe we can do better than 2 dollars!” So everyone here was puzzled that Bear would agree to that kind of a deal.

Now Bear Stearns is unusual in that a lot of the shares are owned by insiders in the company, and the theory we had at the desk here is that the Treasury Department—not the Fed, the Fed’s not so tough, but the Treasury Department went to the top guys at Bear and said: “Either a deal gets done that saves Bear and calms the financial system by the end of this weekend, or we will find some reason to put you in jail.” And I think one of the things that every officer of a public company is very sensitive to, post-Enron, is jail. There has been a criminalization of failure. And after Sarbanes-Oxley, and in the wake of prosecutions related to business failures, it was like Beria said: You show me the man, I’ll find the crime.’

First off, I don’t think the Beria analogy is a good one. If anything, I think it is more the case that any prosecutor worth their salt could go in a find all kinds of things. But I agree with the rest of it.

the question I have is: why isn’t the Treasury department getting tougher with AIG? Because they can throw people in jail. The current approach isn’t working.

According to AP and TheStar.com, there is now a probe focusing on insiders, likely starting with his family.

My belief is that one of the motivations for Madoff’s behavoir was to shield his family from being dragged down into this. I don’t think it’s going to work, however, unless his family was totally divorced from this. Which I don’t believe to be true, but we will see.

Amazingly, A.I.G. is planning to pay $100 Million in bonuses after huge bailout. That’s correct: bonuses. Bonuses, as in: you did a good job, here’s a bonus. And why? According to the chairman of A.I.G.:

“We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury…”

First, it shouldn’t be arbitrary at all. They should get no bonuses. None. Nothing arbitrary about that.

Second, on the issue of retention, I would ask the chairman: where are they going to go? Has he checked the industry lately? There are lots of people in the banking industry unemployed now. They would likely to be happy to settle with a salary.

Incredible.

The NYTimes had a great idea. For the Home section of the paper, they…

“…. approached several New York interior designers (only a few of whom, to be fair, had ever espoused anything like that theory) on behalf of five people in and around the city who had recently lost their jobs and were beginning, by their own accounts, to go stir-crazy at home.

The designers were asked to remake a room for one of these prospective clients — whichever room bothered the client most — spending no more than $300 (just under the average weekly unemployment benefit in New York State), excluding their own labor.”

The results are impressive. Granted, you can’t buy much in the way of furnishings when you do this, but here’s what you can do, based on what these designers did:

1. Straighten up. You need to get rid of things you don’t need first.
2. Appreciate and rediscover and reuse the things you do have. Fix up some things that need fixing, either by cleaning them or painting them. Then highlight them.
3. Get some good paint. For almost all these rooms, a good paint job was applied to make a big difference to the room. (Interestingly, all these designers used Benjamin Moore paint.)
4. Treat your windows to some nice fabric. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but good window treatment can go along way after a good paint job.
5. Buy a few additional low cost items to add some impact to the room. (IKEA is useful here, but garage sales and other ways of sourcing low cost items is just as good).

Check out the article and the multimedia: it has lots of useful advice for anyone, unemployed or not.

(Photo by Michael Falco for The New York Times)

Especially when you can get a work like this for under $50. art interiors is offering great art work at amazing prices (as always), but they are also offering other things as well. So make a sandwich instead of eating out and take the money you save and head over to art interiors and get something and find out what else they are offering.

This piece is Dreamer by Danielle Hession. Her pieces are going fast (as they should).

In this blog post, A.I.G.: Rage Against the Machine from The Opinionator Blog at the NYTimes.com, I am seeing something I expect to see alot more of. People are moving away from asking, “How did this happen?”, to talking about “fraud”, “scam” and “clawback”. I think this is going to get alot more difficult for people like the head of A.I.G., Bank of America, Citibank, and others. Unless things improve very soon, which I doubt. I would not be surprised to see subpoenas and jail terms.

Recall Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert. I think we might see things turn in that direction soon.

P.S. I wrote this a few days ago. Sure enough, see this.

…in the world, according to IBM.