YouTube Classic of the Week

Kevin Everett was a tight end for the Buffalo Bills who was badly injured onfield, and was given a "statistically small chance" to ever walk again. The good news is that after a long series of surgeries and rehab, he did regain full walking ability, appearing on Oprah in 2008 walking without assistance. The even better news is that News 12 Sports in West Palm Beach is notorious for major errors in their news telecasts. Enjoy.

Warren Buffett Sings For China

I'm just going to go totally literal here. Wearing a crew neck sweatshirt that says "Still plays with Trains", Warren Buffett, billionaire investor, sings "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad" while playing the ukulele. Behind him is a model train set. The song, broadcast on CCTV, is being directed at the residents of China in celebration of the New Year. When he finishes, he says "xie xie" (thank you) to somebody, I guess maybe all of China.



If someone could explain to me what is happening here, I would be very appreciative. Thanks.

Let's Go To The Mall!

Growing up, my local mall* was a lot like yours, except mine was prominently featured in “Jackie Brown” and also was the largest mall in the entire western hemisphere. The “Del Amo Fashion Center” held this title until I got to middle school, when some stupid mall in Canada (Edmonton?) built an environmental travesty/indoor water park that connected to their mall, thus surpassing my beloved local mall’s square footage. As a child, despite having an annual income of $0.00, I could scarcely think of anything more exhilarating than a trip to the Del Amo mall. The mall was this unending world of possibilities – it seemed to me the complex housed any product anyone could ever dream of wanting. Like if I could somehow physically step into Amazon.com while eating a hot dog on a stick. The Del Amo mall even had two completely separate multiplex movie theaters. Two different movie theaters! In one mall! The hedonism boggles the mind.

(*There was another mall near my high school, but no one ever buys anything there, so I don’t count that place. After Christmas I stopped in the Banana Republic – the sales clerk was so shocked to see a “customer” that she tripped while trying to greet me. The entire place must be a front for money laundering).

As you obviously know, no one goes to the mall anymore, for reasons I fully appreciate and agree with. Things are so bad for malls that Sbarro filed for bankruptcy. I stopped by Del Amo mall in January, and it looked awful. I saw boarded-up storefronts, signs that hadn’t been replaced in 20 years, and the same old beige-and-maroon patterned floor – I started to wonder if I had entered a time capsule.

Over the years, “Mallrats” has established this image of kids at the mall as slackers with nothing to do and nowhere to go, so hey, might as well hang out at the mall. While I like that movie, I want to forcefully assert that this is total nonsense. I used to be really, genuinely fired up to go to the mall, and so were most of my friends. If someone’s mom was driving to Del Amo, nobody ever passed on that opportunity.

It’s not that I am idiotically hoping indoor malls will make a comeback – it’s clearly good for society that Sbarro’s reign of inedible, disgusting, wasn’t-even-good-when-it-first-came-out-of-the-oven pizza/terror is coming to an end. But I had so many good times that I thought it would be nice to look back to better days, and my favorite spots at the mall.

Hat Kiosk – Oh man, there were so many hats! All in one place! I especially enjoyed the black LA Dodgers caps that Asian guys started wearing in their mid-90s effort to disown colors completely. I never had one, mostly because I look terrible in hats. But I was nevertheless excited by this kiosk.

Movie Theaters – Did I mention there were two?

Cinnabon – There were also two of these. I preferred the one in the main corridor because everyone would eye you with jealously when you bought one. The Cinnabon by the Marshall’s and Sam Goody just didn’t have the same glamour. Kind of like when Spago expanded out of Beverly Hills.

GameStop – To prevent kids from standing around playing the demo games, GameStop had a perfect solution. Every demo machine was always broken. GameStop is managed by business wunderkinds.

Things Remembered – I didn’t actually go in here, but I did want to share my super-awesome idea for a secondhand gift exchange for engraved items from Things Remembered. So if you have a candy box that reads, “To Lisa - I love you”, someone else dating a Lisa can buy it from you for 25 cents on the dollar. Payment declines the weirder your name is. This could be the best idea I ever had.

Poster Store – Poster store, I have no idea what you were called, but damn if you didn’t have a whole lot of posters. I was a particular sucker for Ken Griffey, Jr. posters when he was a Seattle Mariner. At age 11, the only difference to me between a Griffey poster and an original Matisse was that the Matisse looked like total ass. As an aside, basketball announcers always say “posterized” when someone gets dunked on, but it’s nearly impossible to find a poster where that’s actually the case. Whenever an announcer screams, “THAT’S GONNA BE ON A POSTER!” I yell back at my inanimate television, “I AM SKEPTICAL OF THAT OUTCOME!!”

The Sharper Image – How did this store stay in business for so long? Someone once gave me a $50 gift certificate to the Sharper Image. I couldn’t find anyone who would buy it from me for $35.

Sweet Factory – I finished every trip to the mall with a stop here. The variety of candy was staggering, there was a whole wall devoted to sour punch, sour straw and sour bands. I always denied to my mom that I was eating candy at the mall, but the red and green sour punch stuck in between my teeth was not super helpful to my case.

Farewell, mall. The memories are forever.

A Little Gross, But Still Important

Steve sent this along today, and even though it's kind of disgusting (1:07), I had to share for a couple reasons:

1. Love this kid's persistence. He's going to crush the GMAT one day.
2. He really does rock this out starting at 0:19.
3. But the obvious reason Steve sent this - this looks jarringly like me 15 years ago. Honestly, if it wasn't for the fact that I can't play the drums (even in Rock Band, I sort of suck on the drums), I would be seriously wondering if this was some awful memory I blacked out from my youth.

Anyways, enjoy watching Baby Eric gut his way through an epic performance.

A Trip To The Chinese Market

Whenever I’m back in LA, at some point I end up with my parents at Chinese supermarkets. The Chinese supermarket experience is magical, and honestly, it’s better than Disneyland.  People have been afraid to say that, but not me. I’m not scared of you, Disneyland. Anyhow, a photo tour for the uninformed:

 Look at how pretty her lips are, must be from drinking a LOT of instant coffee.

This is an Australian king crab, but it reminded me of the boxes of blue crabs they sometimes have. As a kid/last year, I loved poking them with tongs and seeing which crab jumped the highest. Someone got all upset with my “animal cruelty” at which point I tried to make something up about how crabs have exoskeletons, so they don’t have any pain receptors. I should have told the truth which was, “Poking crabs is a hilarious good time.”

My favorite kind of fiesta. The Danish kind.

 Don’t eat the non-edible beef blood, it’s not good. Stick to the edible blood.

 The Cordyceps Fungus isn’t even one of the 10 most expensive fungi in the store.

I immediately bought 14 of these. My favorite thing about this might be the label at the top – “Communicate Everywhere”, evidently marketing the pearl earpick as a substitute to satellite phones.

 I never know what this means.

Regular supermarkets maybe sell like one footstool. The Chinese market invariably has its own footstool section. Is it wrong that I chuckle when I see this? I think it’s probably okay.

When I was little, my friend Ali had a pet turtle. It cost $110 from the pet store. My dad couldn’t believe Ali got his parents to pay roughly $250/lb. for a turtle when the going rate at the time was only $7.99/lb. 

Twitter, Expanded

In the ever-so-slight time gap in entries on the blog, I sometimes (rarely) would have the genesis of an interesting idea, but I was far too lazy to write 500 words. So, on Hemanshu’s advice, I started Tweeting (@ericswisdom) instead – maybe I couldn’t write 500 words, but surely I could muster the effort to write 12.

I didn’t understand Twitter at all when it debuted, choosing instead to mock people for their mindless self-absorption, and predicting that Twitter would die a rapid death.

That was perhaps the most glaring Andy-Rooney-hates-on-Kurt-Cobain “I don’t get you kids” moment of my life. (I think I just revealed myself to be 47 years old.) Eventually I conceded, and started working my own “prose” down to 140 characters. Most of what I tweeted about was pie, and my efforts to defeat the cupcake movement on a grassroots level, eventually leading to cupcake shops beings replaced nationwide with pie shops. That seems to be happening, so I’ve lost some of the energy that was driving my tweeting. Anyways, now that I’m theoretically writing this blog again, I thought it might be fun to expand on some tweets that didn’t get fully explored. Here’s the first three that caught my eye:

296 days ago: “If Obama had any sense, he would announce he was lowering his salary to one dollar. Americans would eat that nonsense like candy omnomnom”

I still think Obama should do this. His presidential salary is negligible when you think about his expected career earnings from books and speaking engagements. Why not do this, turnaround-CEO-style, and say, “Obviously this is a small and symbolic contribution, but sacrifice starts at the top. And if we all can sacrifice just a little bit…blah blah blah.” It would be political gold! I don’t understand why this hasn’t happened yet.

My dad thinks there should be a charity where you just give more money to the US government. Like voluntary increased taxation. He says that’s the neediest entity right now, so we should give money there. I told him traditional charities were always going to be more popular, to which he said, “Oh I see. Because that money is tax-deductible.” So then I started wondering whether voluntary taxes would themselves be tax-deductible. A couple seconds later my head literally exploded and there was a big mess on the floor.

276 days ago: “What did people do before the creation of the paper sleeve that goes outside the coffee cup? Nobody knows.” “My theory: only women, whose hands are less sensitive to heat, drank coffee on-the-go. Nobel Prize committee, I await your call.”

I surveyed my old coworkers, and everyone agreed that women can hold much hotter objects than men. Something can be scalding hot, and women just grab it like it’s nothing. I don’t even think they’re showing off, they just hardly notice heat. If you ask a woman about this, she’ll invariably say, “That’s because women have a higher pain tolerance than men.” If she’s extra fun, she will add, “It’s because we give birth.” I’m not 100% sure about that, but there’s no point arguing – once ladies bring up giving birth, you’ve reached the end of the conversation.

258 days ago: “Julia Roberts is such an entitled bitch at the end of Ocean’s 11 – angry bc a guy would leave her for $163 million. $163 million, come on!”

To refresh your memory on Ocean’s Eleven – Clooney and gang steal ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-THREE MILLION DOLLARS from Andy Garcia. Numerically, that looks like this: $163,000,000.00. Clooney asks Garcia if he would dump Julia Roberts if Clooney gave him information that led to getting the money back. Garcia says yes, Julia Roberts sees this on closed-circuit TV, becomes super furious and immediately dumps Garcia.

First of all, what if Garcia just said that to Clooney to get information, but he really had no intention whatsoever of dumping Julia Roberts? The dude just lost $163 million, I think he’s entitled to use some “unconventional” means to try to get the money back. But Julia doesn’t even consider this, she just immediately goes apeshit in her cold, distant way. Secondly, even if Garcia actually meant that he would dump her, we’re talking about $163 million dollars. I understand it’s hard to put a price on love, but it seems awfully arrogant to assume that your price is greater than $163 million dollars. If someone hinted at breaking up with me for $163 million dollars, I’d like to think I’d at least be willing to have a conversation about it. Would Clooney choose her over $163 million dollars? She has absolutely no idea! The scene is supposed to expose Garcia’s character for being phony, greedy and evil, but to me, it just reveals that Julia Roberts is spoiled and entitled. I hate Julia Roberts. Wait, I mean her character. I hate her character.

Facebook Timeline

Usually when Facebook unveils a new feature, I get all grumpy with my ever-decreasing “privacy,” which I am hell-bent on protecting for no conceivable reason. I always agree whenever someone says “I don’t like how much Facebook knows about me,” but that’s impossibly stupid, because I provided all the information in the first place. But last week, I switched to Facebook Timeline, and I must say that have no complaints, it is tremendous. I probably spent a good hour stalking myself for a change, and it was great fun seeing my weight and skin tone vacillate over the years. (2008 was my fattest year.) Seeing everything presented chronologically almost made me wish I had posted more on Facebook and subjected people to more inane status updates.

Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t have anything on me pre-2004, other than my birth. So I got to thinking about other life milestones Facebook Timeline isn’t capturing. In the spirit of Christmas, I thought about when I first learned conclusively (spoiler alert!) that Santa Claus was an utter and complete lie.

3 Years Old: Getting fat from a daily diet of refried beans and nachos, oblivious to Santa even though he has been giving me gifts for a couple years now. Not only am I oblivious to Santa, I’m also probably oblivious to the gifts. Pass me some more nachos.

3 ½ Years Old: Full understanding of Santa Claus. Super freaking pumped about it. I was a pretty good kid, so not worried about coal at all.

4 Years Old: Santa gets me a globe. I am concerned that my letter got lost in the mail. I can’t be mad at Santa, so I instead blame our mailman and secretly plot his demise.

4 ½ Years Old: I start to gain some minor understanding of how many homes and children exist in the world. Don’t have precise numbers, but I know it’s a lot.

5 Years Old: I’m getting mad suspicious about Santa. How does this guy eat so many cookies? I LOVE cookies, but even when I’m really really hungry I can at eat at MOST like 14 cookies. How can one dude eat at least 1,000,000 cookies? Something does not add up, and by this age, I’m getting real damn good at addition. My friend says I must not love cookies enough, but that’s preposterous, nobody loves cookies more than me.

5 ½ Years Old: I continue to search high and low for credible explanations, but none are forthcoming. I plan deep undercover investigation for Christmas.

6 Years Old: Oh, I see. Santa has my mom’s handwriting. Check.

I wonder how immigrant parents spread the word about what they’re supposed to do in these kinds of situations. The one I wondered the most about was the tooth fairy; how did my parents learn about that? I must have just excitedly blabbered about how I would spend the dollar I was getting once my tooth finally fell out. I bet my parents then had to call other parents asking, “Uhhh, so…‘tooth fairy’? You’re saying our children believe a magical being flies around at night and collects teeth? Why does it go under the pillow? That is not clean, so we will need to wash the sheets afterwards. $1 feels like too much money!” Truth be told, I never even believed in the tooth fairy – I just wanted a dollar. That whole story never made sense, what are the tooth fairy’s motivations? Why does she want all these teeth, it’s totally gross. I just tried reading the tooth fairy entry on Wikipedia, and I didn’t get any good answers.

Anyways, Facebook Timeline has done a good job capturing some milestones, but there’s a lot missing. More milestones to come. Maybe. We all know how bad I am about updating this.

Ridiculous Pricing: Ralph Lauren Black Label

On a massive sale for $308 through Gilt Groupe is this head-turning 96% cashmere sweater.

They say fashion should make a statement. What's great about this extraordinarily long-sleeved sweater is that it makes a real statement to the world. Specifically, it says "I would rather look like this than have $308." Once people see it and then realize how poorly you manage your money, everyone will want to be your friend!

Answer Fail

Courtesy of Sujit: The white kid's reaction when he finds out he's wrong is priceless. Though...is he really wrong?

YouTube Mosaic Music Video - Dennis Liu

Been meaning to post this for days - many of you have hopefully already seen this, it's a uniquely interactive music video that I would describe as a gloriously meta explosion of the Internet onto itself. I am lucky enough to know the director Dennis Liu, and got a chance to see an earlier version, minus the billion annotations (which is a big part of the fun, be sure to play around with it). What you're about to see is assuredly the end product of an indescribable amount of work, but I'm sure you'll agree the creative results were well worth it.

Judging from his ability as a movie director, one can only imagine how great a corporate attorney, investment banker, or medical doctor Dennis would have made. While it is surely a massive shame that he has not pursued those obviously more worthy life paths, it is not a complete loss. At least there is this video. Enjoy!

Dinosaurs and Outer Space

I met a friend of a friend recently who wearing an outer-space themed shirt. Not like some trendy design or some hipster joke shirt - more like the kind of shirt you would find at the gift shop at an observatory. The picture here is more “gift-shoppy” (read: ridiculous) than the shirt he was wearing, but I think the picture is instructive just so we all roughly know what I am talking about.

Ultimately, this guy was making a conscious decision. He was silently saying, “I like outer space, and I don’t care if this is a socially marginalizing choice, what I care about is that the solar system is awesome.” Because it really is a socially marginalizing choice. Wearing an outer space themed shirt, or a similar museum-gift-shop dinosaur shirt in your everyday life effectively cuts you off from tons of social circles. If you're going to rock shirts like this, it's a wrap for you on having sex with anyone who doesn't also wear these shirts.

Upon further reflection, I think this is rather unfortunate. I’ve been to a couple natural history museums with friends recently, and everyone is psyched to check out the dinosaur exhibits. And excluding the reputational damage from the time Lance Bass almost went into space, space travel still seems pretty sweet to most people I know. But although I still think space travel and dinosaurs are sweet, I’ve long since passed the age where it’s acceptable to be truly enthusiastic about such things, or enthusiastic enough to wear t-shirts like the one my friend’s friend wore. It’s been so long that my actual enthusiasm has diminished, and I presumably will never recover that. Had I known this was going to happen, I would have soaked it in a little more. If I could live life over again, I would definitely make sure I saw “Jurassic Park” in theaters instead of watching it three years later on NBC.

Regrets, I’ve had a few.

Well This Is Just About The Best Story Ever

I can't guarantee that this story is true, but I CAN guarantee that it is awesome. In Stuttgart, Germany, a sterile man paid his neighbor, a father of two, $2,500 to impregnate his wife, a former beauty queen. For 3 nights a week for the next 6 months, (72 times for you kids counting at home), the neighbor tried to get this woman pregnant. Eventually the husband forced his neighbor to see the doctor, who determined the neighbor was sterile as well.

But how could he be sterile - didn't he have two children? This led to the neighbor's wife confessing that he was not the father of their two kids. I guess you win some, you lose some. If you get paid to have sex with your neighbor's hot wife 72 times, you should probably figure something horrendous is coming your way.

This story is too good to be true, but then again, so are deep-fried empanadas. So maybe it's true. "Full" details at the link below.

http://www.global-report.com/perth/?l=en&a=347624

ETA: Oh yeah, and now the guy who was paid to make a baby is being sued for breach of contract. But his defense is that he tried his best. Well played, sir, well played.

The Latest From Michael Lewis

My favorite writer is probably Michael Lewis, a man whose life I recently realized I was inadvertently copying. He went to Princeton, I went to Princeton. He studied economics, I studied economics. He worked for Salomon Brothers, I worked for Citigroup. His interests seem to be writing, sports, business and technology. So we also have the same interests. Really the only difference is that he has numerous bestselling books whereas I possess an alarmingly detailed knowledge of America’s Best Dance Crew. But surely the bestselling books are in my future. Hopefully I won’t have to write them myself, someone can just interview me for a couple hours and then ghostwrite for me.

All of this is just a roundabout introduction for my extremely enthusiastic recommendation of Lewis’ latest piece in Vanity Fair, entitled “Wall Street on the Tundra”. It’s a terrific examination of what led to Iceland, a quirky fishing and aluminum smelting community, into its ridiculous bankruptcy. Lewis hears small bombs go off in the streets during the middle of the night – he eventually learns people are bombing their own Range Rovers for the insurance money. With the nonsensical rise of the Icelandic financial system, Iceland’s krona was rising at 16% per year, so everyone in Iceland took out car loans and mortgages in yen, which was only rising 3% per year.

It must have seemed like a no-brainer: buy these ever more valuable houses and cars with money you are, in effect, paid to borrow. But, in October, after the krona collapsed, the yen and Swiss francs they must repay are many times more expensive. Now many Icelanders—especially young Icelanders—own $500,000 houses with $1.5 million mortgages, and $35,000 Range Rovers with $100,000 in loans against them. To the Range Rover problem there are two immediate solutions. One is to put it on a boat, ship it to Europe, and try to sell it for a currency that still has value. The other is set it on fire and collect the insurance: Boom!

I would say it’s unbelievable, except that I believe it completely. So how did this all happen, financially speaking?

I spoke with a hedge fund in New York that, in late 2006, spotted what it took to be an easy mark: a weak Scandinavian bank getting weaker. It established a short position, and then, out of nowhere, came Kaupthing to take a 10 percent stake in this soon-to-be defunct enterprise—driving up the share price to absurd levels. I spoke to another hedge fund in London so perplexed by the many bad LBOs Icelandic banks were financing that it hired private investigators to figure out what was going on in the Icelandic financial system. The investigators produced a chart detailing a byzantine web of interlinked entities that boiled down to this: A handful of guys in Iceland, who had no experience of finance, were taking out tens of billions of dollars in short-term loans from abroad. They were then re-lending this money to themselves and their friends to buy assets—the banks, soccer teams, etc. Since the entire world’s assets were rising—thanks in part to people like these Icelandic lunatics paying crazy prices for them—they appeared to be making money. Yet another hedge-fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.

Even more interesting than the finance is the cultural element to all this. Enough from me, read the whole piece here. I promise it’s worth the time. While you do that, I’ll be off writing my first bestseller. Or watching an episode of “Burn Notice”. It’s tough to say which.

Bizkit The Sleepwalking Dog

This makes me wish I had a dog...

Shocking News: Quick Follow Up

People, listen up - you definitely know someone who could commit a murder. Let's be realistic here.

Shocking News

I was recently informed of some fairly incredible news - a girl I went to Princeton with (graduated a year ahead of me, but I didn’t know her) apparently went on to become a porn star. “Star” is probably a misnomer, I’m sure she’s not famous or anything, so just think of it as “porn actress”. Even though I didn’t know this girl, I nonetheless found the story mind-blowing. I definitely reacted with a bigger “wow” to this news than any other high school or college classmate news I’d ever heard.

This got me to thinking - what could I hear about a former classmate that would be more shocking than finding out he or she did porn? I gave it a good 10-15 minutes of thought, and here is the list of “eventual classmate outcomes” that I came up with:

1. Became a terrorist.
2. Became the leader/messiah of a substantial cult (over 20 people) that ultimately involved death.
3. Switched genders.
4. I couldn’t think of anything else that would be more shocking than porn.

Even hearing that someone committed murder would be less shocking. Let’s be honest here – we all went to school with someone who conceivably could kill another person. Doesn’t mean we thought it was really going to happen, but it was within the scope of plausibility. I’m sure you know someone who, given specific environmental conditions, you believe has a greater than 1% chance to commit a homicide. You’re just a little leery around that person, right? This person has no reason whatsoever to kill you, and yet…you’re careful. Better safe than sorry.

As an aside on the murder thing, after the Columbine tragedy, I wondered, “if that happened at my school, who would it be?” I started making a mental list of plausible candidates, and let’s just say that list was way too long for my liking. Once the list got to eight or nine, I started reversing course. “No…that’s ridiculous, Eric, he could never kill a dozen people…uh…right?” The whole mental exercise was both spooky and depressing.

Terrorist is, suffice it to say, a pretty big deal - I actually can’t envision a single person I’ve ever met going down that path, so, I mean, yay for that. Same for the cult leader thing, although I can sort of imagine someone leading an innocuous cult for a little while. There was supposedly a small cult at Princeton a few years before I got there, but nobody died.

Transgender was a tough one to rank on the list – surely hearing that kind of news would elicit a huge “wow!” from me. At the same time though, my instinct is that there are more transgender people in the world than there are porn stars. I don’t really have any statistical evidence to support that claim, but I somehow intuitively feel this is correct. This might stem from the fact that I have met at least two transgender people (I suppose you never truly know how many transgender people you’ve met), but zero porn stars (I guess the same inconclusive comment holds here too). I used to work in the same building as a 6’4” man-turned-woman who was fond of wearing giant frilly pink dresses. It was a giant wall of pink. Dude/non-dude did get her own bathroom though. That was a good perk. Anyways, despite the “numbers”, I ultimately think switching genders would shock me more than porn.

If somebody became a con man/white collar criminal, it would need to be on an epic Bernie Madoff type scale to outweigh porn star, I’d say. Drug dealer, bank robber – those things just don’t quite measure up unless we’re talking about Pablo Escobar or Bonnie and Clyde level stuff. Let me know in the comments if you think I missed anything of if you would have a different list. In the meantime, I’ll worry about how my Google AdSense banner ad is going to change in light of some keywords in this post.

Christian Bale Takes David To The Dentist

In case you live in hole and don't know the background, here's Christian Bale going absolutely apeshit on a crew member of the new Terminator movie, and here is the original "David After Dentist" video, where some parents take a video of their young son after being given laughing gas at the dentist.

And now, for the brilliance that is the internet:

Married Chinese Tycoon Holds Contest To Determine Which Mistress To Keep - Results Not Awesome

The title mostly says it all. Here's some choice quotes from the AFP story:

"A married Chinese tycoon who could no longer afford to support his five mistresses during the economic slowdown held a contest to decide which one to keep, local media reported Tuesday. The contest took a tragic turn when one of the mistresses, who was eliminated based on her looks, drove her former lover and the four other women off a mountain road in an apparent fit of anger, the Shanghai Daily reported."

"Fan later introduced her to the four other mistresses...However, when Fan's business ran into tough times, he decided to lay off all but one woman...Fan hired an instructor from a modelling agency to judge a private contest he held at a hotel in May, but he did not tell the women about his intentions.
Yu was eliminated in the first-round beauty competition and a woman surnamed Liu eventually won after dominating the drinking round, the report said."

Full story here. Thanks to Jessie for sending along.

FML

Those of you who are plugged in to the happenings of cyberspace have surely already seen this, but since I know many of you are not, I thought I'd pass along a new site, courtesy of Yoonmee and Rich. It's filled with little gems like:

"Today, my boyfriend gave me a card for my birthday and told me to open it 10 minutes after he leaves. I waited 5, in the card it said "it's not working out, but here's 20$". FML"

I am a little unclear how many of these are real, a lot of them seem fictional. But they're still funny.

Google Predictive Text

Sara showed me a funny site the other day that showed some pretty ridiculous Google predictive text results when you type something into the Google search bar. I've been playing around with it on and off for the last week. My personal favorite, #2: when you just type "Is " (with the space after it). Personal favorite #1: when you type "Chinese people eat" (with no space after eat).

I don't want to spoil the fun, I'll let you try typing that yourself. (Don't actually hit the search button).