Passive-Aggressive Notes

In honor of anyone who can't say it to the face of their roommates, neighbors, cleaning ladies, tenants, and coworkers, there is passiveaggressivenotes.com

100 Ways to Kill a Peep

Tis the season. Quite a misleading title considering the site only has 15 ways thus far. Nevertheless, check the site out here.

Lady Gaga

NY Mag has a little piece on how Ms. Gaga rose to fame. And if you need some Poker Face, click here.

"In 2004, she graduated from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private girls school near the Guggenheim with a dress code of kilt skirts. “We were good girls, but we weren’t nerdy like the girls at Chapin,” she says. “We were the girls that guys still wanted to date junior year of high school, because we hadn’t had sex or given blow jobs yet.” Things are different for her now, as a bisexual adult who idolizes transvestite fashion. (A tabloid recently quoted Christina Aguilera dissing her—“I don’t know if it is a man or a woman”; Gaga ate it up.) “I love sex,” she says, tipping her sunglasses down a bit and leering. “You know, sense memory is a powerful thing. I can give myself an orgasm just by thinking about it.”

Spring Stimulus

Spring is fighting through the wind and the rain to poke its sunny head through the WORST winter in life's memory. Not the worst winter weather wise. They are all equally bad. I'm talking about the R or D word that's been on the tip on the tip of every one's tongues since October.

In New York City, we've seen glimpses: the token random February 68 degree Tuesday, the "I think spring is here, but it's really not" mid-March day, and a few others where people wear coats even though it's 75 degrees just because it was 50 yesterday.

April is just about upon us. Baseball starts back up this weekend. Before we know it we will be dusting off our jorts and capris to bask in warmness of springtime. It won't save our economy or open up new jobs, but there's something hardwired into our brains that says that the new season represents much more than a few degrees. People literally spring into life.

Restaurants and bars open their patios. People stroll around instead of beeline for the next destination. Sunglasses make everyone look less ugly. Hacks and hack-nots ball together on the courts. Rollerbladers make us laugh and a little jealous at the same time. Strollers and ice cream cones and all sorts of Mary Poppinsish outdoor nonsense come to mind so much that I should be writing this in poem form.

It's the collection of it all that makes the new season so great. This isn't about suppressing the trillion dollar distraction; it's about renewing a sense of living. Nobody wakes up every morning to log a ten hour day and cap it off with some Two and Half Men in their Snuggie. Part of the charm of the city is walking around, taking in sights and sounds and freaks and lost tourists without freezing our ass off speedwalking to the subway.

We constantly hear about this Crisis of Confidence. True, no one will buy anything if they have no money or fear losing their job, but no one wants to do much of anything when they are miserable in the cold. Pea coats are nice and the indoor/outdoor contrast makes for a nice juxtaposition when saying "f*** it's so cold out there" or "f*** it's so much warmer in here". But one of the rights of passages living here is braving the horrifically cold winters and horrifically hot summers to enjoy the fall and spring of New York City.

In a time when no news seems to be good news, the best news ends up not being news at all. Rather it's something so simple and bare as the turning of the seasons. Time to get out and enjoy it.

Lebron on 60 Minutes

I had forgotten how James fired his agent a few years ago and hired his childhood friends to run his business. Quite an uproar over the move at the time.

Why the Bleep Do You Have a Kid?

This is pretty bad

Figuring Out This Online TV Model

The line between TV and the internet is blurring quicker than you may think. Subscription-based services may soon replace a lot of free programming available through hulu and the like:

"Time Warner Cable, the second-largest cable operator in the country, is working with customers here to test a subscriber model for online TV viewing. Residents who pay for HBO can watch “Big Love,” “Entourage” and other programs on their computers, using special software and a personal log-in. People who are not HBO subscribers are barred from the service."

"Cable executives expect broader tests by this summer of the new systems, which require them to develop technology to identify their subscribers when they go online. The approach is expected to be a hot topic at the cable industry’s annual trade show in Washington this week.

There are also signs that broadcasters and cable networks are worried that their initial, highly publicized push to put some of their programs online may be threatening the higher revenue they bring in when the same material runs on regular television. Cable networks are loath to put programs online unless they can maintain the per-subscriber fee that they receive from distributors."

The Yanks

Will Leitch tackles the Yankees challenges ahead in this weeks 3,500 word NY Mag feature:

"So while the rest of us are tightening our belts and bracing for the worst, the Yankees are opening a state-of-the-art, $1.6 billion stadium. While the executives at AIG are held out as venal masters of destruction and shamed into giving up their bonuses, the Yankees are spending $423.5 million on three players. While the housing market tanks and nobody will buy so much as a pair of socks unless they’re 75 percent off, the Yankees dished out two and a half times more money this off-season than the rest of the American League combined.

It’s not that the Yankees didn’t take their licks, just like the rest of us have. Last year, the Yankees missed the playoffs for the first time since 1994, when there were no playoffs. But their response was not to cower, or to reevaluate their methods, or to try to play by the same rules as the rest of the world. They did not renounce their ways: They went all-in. Downturn in the economy? Hey, screw that. That’s loser talk. You see those three top free agents they have there? We’ll take all of them, thank you. The Washington Nationals built a brand-new stadium and watched attendance fall to half-capacity by the second game? Pshaw, like we’re the freaking Nationals. The rest of baseball cutting ticket prices and slashing the payroll? More for us, please!"

Shiftiness at Bank of America

Can't give exorbitant bonuses to bankers on the taxpayers dime? How about raising base salaries instead? Bloomberg reports:

"Bank of America, which has received $45 billion of taxpayers’ money, may raise the annual base pay for some managing directors to about $300,000 from $180,000, said the people, who declined to be identified because the final numbers are still under discussion. Salaries for less-senior directors would climb to about $250,000 from $150,000, and vice presidents would get $200,000, up from about $125,000, the people said."

I'm sure this will sit well with the public:

“We’re in an economic downturn, the government is pouring billions into banks, and these guys are boosting their salaries,” said Jason Kennedy, chief executive officer of London-based recruitment firm Kennedy Associates. “There’s an issue of public perception.”

The AIG Perspective

Maybe this is just a natural reaction whenever the media and public goes so overboard in anger, but I feel a degree of sympathy to some of the employees at AIG. That's why I found an uncovered internal blog entry from an exec at AIG so compelling. Below is an excerpt, but I recommend reading the whole thing here:

"It's amusing to hear people say we should be fired, or that the job isn't all that hard, or there's 50 people willing to do any of our jobs. To all of those folks, here's a clue: This is not a going concern, we have been working ourselves out of a job for the last 6 months, we will not have jobs when we are done, and any replacement will be doing it slower than we can, and is very likely to screw it up much worse than it already is. Oh, and a replacement might not get paid at all, if the government changes its mind again. The only reason I stayed was because I was told that I was a valued member of the team and I was promised a payment. Nobody ever actually tried to renegotiate the terms. It was never a secret, the ERP (Employee Retention Plan) was disclosed many times. Anybody telling you otherwise is lying. Anybody - Geithner, Cuomo, Blumenthal, Dodd, all of them and also those guys in Congress - they all had that information back in October. Cummings has been railing at Liddy about it since at least October."

Links

99 Seinfeld references

Lost photographs of Hiroshima

New math. It's very Demetri Martinesque

Speaking of, "Taking Woodstock" trailer, with Demetri Martin

Arenas returns!

Detroit's Future

Next stop on the U.S. city tour is TIME's look at Detroit's future:

"Detroit's motto, coined in 1827 to memorialize a devastating fire, translates from Latin as "We hope for better things; it shall arise from the ashes." But hope is in short supply. At 13%, Detroit's unemployment rate is the worst in the country among major metropolitan areas. City hall, long racked by corruption and cronyism, became a punch line last fall amid former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's imprisonment. To make matters worse, the city is struggling to bankroll potential remedies. Its projected $300 million budget deficit recently spurred ratings agencies to downgrade its municipal bonds to junk status. (See pictures of Detroit's decline.)

Yet all is not lost, as the city looks to reinvent itself as a greener community and haven for up- and-coming artists.

"In other ways, Detroit is moving on. In place of assembly lines, hundreds of urban farms and gardens have taken root. Nonprofit organizations are helping residents transform barren neighborhoods into fertile plots that feed impoverished families, beautify blighted blocks and raise home values. Others are taking the initiative on their own. Last April, after losing his job, Mark Covington hauled away the garbage piled on his street and began planting squash, tomatoes, collard greens and kale to give away.

His Georgia Street Community Collective devised a mentoring program for kids, held a holiday fundraiser for an evicted family and purchased a vacant building for $1 to convert into a community center and store--a useful commodity in a city vexed by food deserts. "We have to step up and do things for ourselves," Covington explains. "My idea is to have some type of garden on every block."

Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?

The New York Times addresses the question:

"More than two and a half million dissenters have joined a group on Facebook’s own site called “Millions Against Facebook’s New Layout and Terms of Service.” Others are lambasting the changes in their own status updates, which are now, ironically, distributed much more visibly to all of their Facebook friends.

The changes, Facebook executives say, are intended to make the act of sharing — not just information about themselves but what people are doing now — easier, faster and more urgent. Chris Cox, 26, Facebook’s director of products and a confidant of Mr. Zuckerberg, envisions users announcing where they are going to lunch as they leave their computers so friends can see the updates and join them.

“That is the kind of thing that is not meaningful when it is announced 40 minutes later,” he says.

The simmering conflict over the design change speaks to the challenges of pleasing 200 million users, many of whom feel pride of ownership because they helped to build the site with free labor and very personal contributions."

“They have a strange problem,” says S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, of Facebook’s quandary. “This is a technology that has inherently generated community, and it has gotten to the point where members of that community feel not only vested but empowered to challenge the company.”

ShamWow Vince Arrested

The Smoking Gun reports that Vince of ShamWow and Slap Chop fame was arrested and released on 4 easy payments of $232.50 after punching a prostitute during a hotel room romp. It should be noted that he punched her as she was biting his tongue without letting go.

But wait, there's more! Act now by clicking on the report link and we'll also throw in the prostitute's mug shot for no additional charge.