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The Crisis of Credit by Jonathan Jarvis (Good Stuff)

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Chad Lindsey, Hero At Large

After watching all the drunken Saint Patrick's Day retards stumbling around Murray Hlll last night, it's nice to wake up to a story like this.

From The NY Times

Mr. Lindsey, 33, is from Harbor Springs, Mich. He moved to New York City three years ago and settled in Woodside, Queens.

“I was waiting for the C,” he said from his office on West 30th Street, where he works as a proofreader. “I’m an actor — shocker.”

He said almost everyone seems to be an aspiring actor nowadays, but in this case, it is a critical point to the story: Mr. Lindsey currently appears in an Off Broadway show called “Kasper Hauser,” in a role that requires him to repeatedly lift a character who cannot walk.

On Monday, as he waited for the train, about 2:30 p.m., he was thinking ahead to the reading he was heading to. “I’m kind of zoned out, and I saw this guy come too quickly to the edge,” he said. “He stopped and kind of reeled around. I felt bad, because I couldn’t get close enough to grab his coat. He fell, and immediately hit his head on the rail and passed out.”

Mr. Lindsey said he sensed a train was approaching, because the platform was crowded. “I dropped my bag and jumped down there. I tried to wake him up,” he said. “He probably had a massive concussion at that point. I jumped down there and he just wouldn’t wake up, and he was bleeding all over the place.”

He looked back up at the people on the platform. “I yelled, ‘Contact the station agent and call the police!’ which I think is hilarious because I don’t think I ever said ‘station agent’ before in my life. What am I, on ‘24’?”

The man wouldn’t wake up, he said. “He was hunched over on his front. I grabbed him from behind, like under the armpits, and kind of got him over to the platform. It wasn’t very elegant. I just hoisted him up so his belly was on the platform. It’s kind of higher than you think it is.”

He stole a glance toward the dark subway tunnel that was becoming ominously less dark, with the glow on the tracks, familiar to all New Yorkers, signaling an approaching train.

“I couldn’t see the train coming, but I could see the light on the tracks, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to get out of this hole.’ ”

He remembered the subway hero of 2007, Wesley Autrey, who jumped on top of a man who was having a seizure on the tracks and held him down in the shallow trench between the rails as the subway passed over them. “I was like, ‘I am not doing that. We’ve got to get out of here.’ ”

People on the platform joined the effort. “Someone pulled him out, and I just jumped up out of there,” he said. With time to spare: “The train didn’t come for another 10 or 15 seconds or something.”

The man lay bleeding on the platform, and the police arrived. Mr. Lindsey soon got on another train. A large group of riders who had been on the platform entered the subway car with him, smiling and clapping him on the back and saying thank you.

“Then I sort of freaked out, and I was nervous and shaky. These five women opened their purses and gave me Handi-Wipes. I was covered in blood and dirt from the subway tracks.”

The fallen man was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan and was later released.

The police identified him late Tuesday afternoon as Theodore Larson, 60, of the Bronx.

Mr. Lindsey, of course, never learned the man’s name. His story told, he said goodbye, adding, “It was quite a New York day.”

Rachel Maddow PWNS AIG and Their Evil PR Hacks

Rachel Maddow sheds some additional light on the financial insanity that is the AIG bailout. Apparently, they're using your 173 billion on (drum roll) Public Relations.

Kirk Cameron's Fireproof Now Available on DVD – Fuck Yeah!

Kirk Cameron’s Fireproof is about God and saving your marriage and finding religion and not saying "bitch" apparently (?) It was an enormous success ($34 million gross on a $500k budget.) Where'd rednecks get that kind of money?!

This is a highlight reel from the recently released DVD ... let me repeat, this is NOT a gag reel. These are actual scenes that were included in the film. Based on these clips I'd say the plot also focuses on a profound hatred of computers, recycling and naturalistic dialog. I've watched it three times already. It's really THAT good. Swiped over at FilmDrunk.

Rep. Paul Kanjorski Explains How the World Economy Almost Collapsed

Swiped over at boingboing

The Capital Markets Subcommittee Chair, Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, explains how the world economy almost collapsed in a matter of hours.

 At 2 minutes, 20 seconds into this C-Span video clip, Kanjorski reports on a "tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the United States, to the tune of $550 billion dollars." According to Kanjorski, this electronic transfer occured over the period of an hour or two.

"The Treasury opened its window to help. They pumped a hundred and five billion dollars into the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts, and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn't be further panic and there. And that's what actually happened. If they had not done that their estimation was that by two o'clock that afternoon, five-and-a-half trillion dollars would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed."

"It would have been the end of our political system and our economic systems as we know it."

The Keene Act & You – What You Need to Know

Financial Advisor Fakes Plane Crash, Parachutes Into Infamy

From today's Times. (This guy sounds so awesome ... I bet he gets his own reality show.)

MIAMI — A financial adviser from Indiana disappeared into the Alabama woods early Monday after faking a distress call and parachuting from a small plane that crashed in Florida.

The police in three states were looking for the pilot, identified as Marcus Schrenker, 38.

No one was hurt in the crash. According to the police in Santa Rosa County in the Florida Panhandle, where the plane went down, Mr. Schrenker turned up safely about 220 miles north of there. And there is evidence that Mr. Schrenker was an experienced pilot who might have been trying to fake his own death.

His life seemed to be unraveling. Court records show that Mr. Schrenker’s wife filed for divorce on Dec. 30. A Maryland court recently issued a judgment of more than $500,000 against one of three Indiana companies registered in his name — and all three are being investigated for securities fraud by the Indiana Secretary of State’s Office, a spokesman, Jim Gavin, said.

Mr. Schrenker has at least a decade of experience as a pilot, according to the airport in Anderson, Ind., where he departed Sunday evening. But the police said that within hours of taking off, he issued a distress call.

He told air traffic controllers that he was bleeding profusely and that the windshield of his Piper PA-46 turboprop had imploded. The control tower told him to try to land nearby, but instead he “appears to have intentionally abandoned the plane after putting it on autopilot over the Birmingham, Ala., area,” the police in Santa Rosa County said.

He next appeared in Childersburg, Ala., about 30 miles to the southeast, when he approached local officers at a store and said he had been in a canoeing accident. He was wet from the knees down and carried what the police described as “goggles that looked like they were made for ‘flying.’ ”

After checking his Indiana license, the officers drove Mr. Schrenker to a hotel. After learning of the abandoned plane, they returned, but his room was empty.

Witnesses said a man believed to be Mr. Schrenker wearing a black toboggan cap had run into the woods next to the hotel.

He has not been seen since. The telephones at Mr. Schrenker’s home and one of his companies, Heritage Wealth Management, have been disconnected.

His piloting skills, however, can be seen in a YouTube video in which he flies under bridges in the Bahamas. “This stunt,” it says, “should not be tried by any pilot that wishes to stay alive.”

The Sad State of American Film

Marley and Me ($106,664,046) – Week #2
Slumdog Millionaire ($28,676,598) – Week #8

Burton + Boobs = Burlington Blow Up

How's that for creative alliteration! Full article at Boston.com, excerpted here.

Burton's new line of "Love" Snowboards featuring retro images of Playboy bunnies has found itself at the center of a growing controversy in the lame, err .... pseudo liberal state of Vermont.  

The Burlington City Council discussed asking Burton to withdraw the boards, and the Girl Scout Council of Vermont is considering taking concerns to lawmakers next month.

The outcry hasn't made a dent in sales of the new lines, Burton cofounder Jake Carpenter told the Burlington newspaper Seven Days in November. The Playboy line and a second line called Primo, which depicts mutilated hands, have "completely oversold by virtue of this exposure," he said.

Mark Redmond, the head of nonprofit, Spectrum Youth & Family Services, said he pulled his enrollment from a Burton program that donates snowboards to needy children after learning about the Playboy line because objectification of women increases the chance men will become abusive, he said.

Fuzzy Logic:

Yeah, refusing free charitable donations from the states largest employer, that'll teach 'em Mark!

Seriously, everybody just take a deep breath and have another cup of herbal tea. The concept of using Playboy bunnies on snowboards qualifies as edgy and counterculture ... but the design execution, utilizing tasteful cropping, is actually pretty tame. By the time you pop the bindings on these boards, everything's pretty much covered up anyway. We've all got bums people! (and most of them aren't this nice)

When reached for comment Jake Burton had the following to say. "Fuck you bitches. I own this state."