Category Archives: U.S.

a hedge fund manager explains everything

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Job HunterWell, a hedge fund manager explains in unique, hedge fund managerial style; which is to say, you might as well take a hit of acid, down a few fingers (say, nine) of tequila, and put on an audiotape of the Math Olympics while watching an old 16mm reel of The Candidate simultaneous with a laserdisc copy of How to Get Ahead in Advertising. It’s Fear and Loathing in East Hampton, baby, so fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Well, for those of you with money, anyway. I, on the other hand, haven’t lost a cent! Ha, ha, ha! Where did I put that Janis Joplin album…?

So here, without further ado, is the simple, straightforward explanation of the global economic brainfart that just wiped out a significant, if small, percentage of the money of really, really obscenely stinkin’ rich people. Warm up your teensy, tinesy violins.

Hedge-Fund Guy Atones for
His Subprime Bond Sins
By Mark Gilbert

Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) — Dear investor, we’d like to take this opportunity to update you on the recent performance of our hedge fund, Short-Term Capital Mismanagement LLP.

As you know, market selection for the entire fund is guided by a proprietary investing tool we like to call “a dartboard.” Once the asset classes are decided, individual security selections are generated by digitizing our unique hexagonal cuboid models.

Unfortunately, it transpires that our hexagonal cuboids are not as unique as we thought. Hundreds of other hedge funds possess identical dice. The technical term for this is a “crowded trade.” You may also see it referred to as “climbing on a bandwagon already headed for the wall.”

As our alpha generation collapses, our beta has turned negative, our delta hedging has gone toxic and, trust me, you do not want to hear about our gamma. We can’t even find our epsilons in the dark with both hands…

and so on, at length. I think their bonus is calculated by the wordcount.

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best. title. ev-ar.

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The second in our continuing series on the best ____ ev-ar.

Chinatown movie

from Defamer, who have beaten all Fark challengers into the ground with the sheer, sexy erudition of this one:

it’s white meat! (slap!) dark meat! (slap!) white meat, dark meat! (slap!)

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God hates Hawai’i

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Hawaii Earthquake

See that map? There are 40 earthquakes on that map, including the 5.3-Scale monster that just hit the south-east of the Big Island about an hour ago. And that only goes back two weeks.

See this?

Hurricane Flossie

That’s Hurricane Flossie, due to hit the location in the above map in about twenty-four hours, with a 15-to-20-foot increase in wave height, winds up to 60mph, and 10 inches of rain.

At 5 a.m. EDT, Flossie had maximum sustained winds near 135 mph about. The storm was traveling west at about 14 mph.

Flossie may weaken as it moves over cooler ocean waters and travels south of Hawaii, according to the forecast. But it could also keep its strength and veer toward the islands.

It used to be that God hated trailer parks, and who can blame him? I felt about mine the way that kids in Springsteen songs feel about their small towns. But why, God? WHY MUST YOU HATE HAWAII???

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Fish heads, fish heads…by Barnes & Barnes

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Eat them up, yum.

Well, this is a weird one. People always look at me funny when I talk about avant garde art in LA, but I tell ya, there are a lot of former art and fine art grads out there with soul killing nine-to-fivers, money to toss at their dreams, and memberships at Beyond Baroque. They’ve got to do something with their spare time.

Say hello to Barnes & Barnes. You get a sense of just how far out these guys really are when you realize that Dr Demento plays the straight man.

How are my darling little Spazchow heads? Fine? That’s swell! It’s 2007. Time is passing us by quickly. We’re getting older. One day we’ll all die and go to heaven. Or perhaps hell. You never can be too sure…Ya know, the internet is a wondrous thing. It makes me wanna say TOOMP!…

Man, is it ever a great time to be a B & B fan, or what?! And be nice to Billy Mumy, he’s really not a bad fellow. I mean it was touch and go there for awhile, but he got through it and now he’s just fine! Make sure to shout out a Down Hetta Hetta to him every once in awhile. Be sure to eat your vegetables and change your socks. Wash your hands after using the toilet and don’t leave the seat up. And fellows, when you drip, clean the rim, will ya?

Thanks and be sure to stay in touch and try to patronize Mr. Mumy and buy his music. He needs cash real bad.

Your extra special pal,
the ever reclusive Artie Barnes….

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the dreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

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The Dreck of the Edmund FitzgeraldOne of the greatest and most Canadian of all Canadian songs is Gordon Lightfoot‘s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Quite typically, it’s a story about a tragedy that actually took place in the US, affecting primarily Americans and it is more or less successfully attempting to pass as a Yank tune.

It’s the accent.

The ship went down in a storm on November 10, 1975. The ship had been in grave trouble, and in constant radio and visual contact with a fellow ship, for many hours when it vanished in a sudden squall. No trace of the ship has surfaced…until now.

Now, from exotic Conklin, Michigan comes news that bits of the wreckage have begun to wash up on the shores of Lake Superior. Well, 20 feet up from the water line, about as high as the waves were the night she went down. Unfortunately, the constituent parts of a Great Lakes shipping vessel are not exactly the glamorous New World equivalent of the gold of Spanish galleons.

Joe, an apple farmer from Conklin, Mich., was agate hunting with his family midway between Horse Shoe Harbor and High Rock Bay in Keweenaw County Friday when he discovered a life ring off to the side of a blown-down tree. The ring was found 100 feet from the waters edge, up a rocky slope, 20 feet higher than the lake level, three feet into the trees, Joe said. The ring was not visible until he went up the bank, he said. Thinking nothing of it, Joe rolled the ring down the hill to his daughters. Joe’s youngest daughter Elizabeth, 10, caught the ring in her hands and turned it over. What was printed on the ring, they had never imagined: Edmund Fitzgerald.

“It sent a chill down my spine,” Joe said. “It’s the last thing I thought it was.”

Lyrics over the jump: Continue reading →