47 seconds of nail biting intensity – Man! Versus! Toddler!
November 2009 Archives
In the United States, corporate bonuses are booming yet unemployment is way up. Robert Reich, writing in Salon, explains why:
How can the stock market hit new highs at the same time unemployment is hitting new highs? Simple. The market is up because corporate earnings are up. Corporate earnings are up because companies are cutting costs. And the biggest single cost they’re cutting is their payrolls. So they let people go and, presto, their balance sheets look better and their stock prices rise.
Reich was secretary of labour under the Clinton administration, so his credentials are unimpeachable. He’s also a very funny guy; I highly recommend this podcast from ABC’s Big Ideas programme. It’s a couple of years old now, but what’s not to love about someone who opens their lecture by saying:
I am an economist. And, as some of you may know, an economist is someone who did not have the personality to become an accountant.
Amusing puns – and imaginative scissorcraft – with the humble leaf.
Appropriately Autumnal, for those north of the equator.
Peggy Black won a competition to create a new character for The Simpsons:
In pondering her contest entry, Black decided there was a void on “The Simpsons” and that Springfield needed “something like a Casanova,” she said.
[Ricardo] Bomba, a handsome, smooth-talking South American nicknamed “La Bomba,” works at the town’s nuclear power plant by day and “by night, works Springfield’s singles scene,” as Fox describes him.
Not bad … though I was hoping it would be a little more out of left field. He sounds awfully similar to Alberto Tomba, the Italian playboy Olympic ski gold medalist who was also dubbed “la Bomba”.
