Category Archives: Humor in the Night

Not nearly frightened enough!

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by the Night Writer


(from boing-boing)

Nancy features the word “zombie” in her Word for the Week on Fritinancy, and offers an entertaining history of the origin and uses of the word as well, of course, as its place in our entertainment and culture. Included in this is the following punditry she’s come across recently:

But it’s the ongoing global financial crisis that has truly reanimated “zombie.” References to zombie banks and zombie companies have proliferated over the last 12 months. “The threat of zombies here and now is real,” wrote Alyce Lomax in the Motley Fool blog last week:

That is, the zombie banks and zombie corporations that are artificially kept alive even though in any rational, natural world they should be dead. And if these reanimated corpses are still stumbling around, growing greater and greater in number, well, I’m pretty sure we all know what appears to be causing the dead to rise.

In a Jan. 18 column titled “Wall Street Voodoo,” New York Times op-ed columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman wrote about a hypothetical bank, “Gothamgroup”:

On paper, Gotham has $2 trillion in assets and $1.9 trillion in liabilities, so that it has a net worth of $100 billion. But a substantial fraction of its assets — say, $400 billion worth — are mortgage-backed securities and other toxic waste. If the bank tried to sell these assets, it would get no more than $200 billion.

So Gotham is a zombie bank: it’s still operating, but the reality is that it has already gone bust. Its stock isn’t totally worthless — it still has a market capitalization of $20 billion — but that value is entirely based on the hope that shareholders will be rescued by a government bailout.

I think in these cases the zombies are roaming the streets moaning for “Brains!” not because they want to eat them but because they seem to have misplaced them. This does give me an excuse to link to a classic from Tiger Lilly, however:


(Finally, the Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader-level trivia question: What movie did the headline of this post come from? Hint: it wasn’t a zombie film.)

Update:

To find out what the zombies don’t want you to know (i.e., who you’re really borrowing from) go here. (HT: Through the Illusion).

Steven Segal IS…back

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A few years ago Jeff Kouba introduced the “Steven Seagal IS…” game on his blog, Peace Like a River.

Seagal’s earlier movies all could be used with the phrase “Steven Seagal IS…”, and indeed movie trailers often did just that. “Steven Seagal IS Marked For Death.” “Steven Seagal IS Hard To Kill.” And so on.

Well, now you can join in the fun. Just put the phrase in front of today’s movies, and you too can have buckets of entertainment.

Now Jeff is one of the gang blogging at Truth vs. The Machine and, on the heels of some new Steven Seagal news, has brought the game back for the waning days of 2008. Go here to get in on the latest game; it is, as Jeff would say, “fun for the whole family.”

Here are my entries (so far) in the latest game:

Steven Seagal IS The Lord of the Rings!
Steven Seagal IS Cinderella Man!
Steven Seagal IS The Pursuit of Happyness!
Steven Seagal IS Knocked Up!
Steven Seagal IS The Queen!
Steven Seagal IS Stranger Than Fiction!
Steven Seagal IS The Last King of Scotland!
Steven Seagal IS Sideways!
Steven Seagal IS An Inconvenient Truth!
Steven Seagal IS 300 (pounds)!
Steven Seagal IS Dan in Real Life!
Steven Seagal IS The Bourne Identity!

Troy eager to drop Childress

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Ex-Vikings “receiver” Troy Williamson says he’s still mad at the way Coach Brad Childress treated him and wants to “duke it out” with Childress at this weekend’s Vikings/Jaquars game (Williamson now sits for the Jags).

Williamson, now in Jacksonville, said Wednesday he lost respect for his former coach last year and would like to “duke it out” with him when the Jaguars host the Vikings on Sunday.

“We can meet on the 50-yard line and we can go at it,” Williamson said.

The 6-foot-1, 200-pound receiver said he liked his chances against Childress, too, especially with a few inches and at least 10 pounds on the coach. Williamson even said he would fight with both hands tied behind his back.

I think Williamson has an unfair advantage in that he always played as if both hands were tied behind his back anyway so he’s used to it. If he did connect, however, watch out! Williamson’s “hands of stone” would make Roberto Duran curl up in his corner and cry.

Oh no you didn’t

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Some time ago I did a list of three-word sentences you should and shouldn’t use with your wife. Simple and easy to follow, that post has made it’s way around the blogosphere. Even simpler, and with the added appeal of being set to a catchy tune, is this short but valuable “user’s guide”:

HT: Persistent Illusion. I may need to add this to the “Are You Marriageable” series.

Too funny…and too true

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British comics Bird and Fortune explain the financial crisis in this clip entitled “How the Markets Really Work”. It’s a lot funnier than my last 401k statement … but just as painfully close to the truth.

An excerpt from this “interview”, discussing the sub-prime fiasco:

Surely the reality is that the people who have lent all this money have been incredibly stupid.

Oh no, no…the reality is that what is stupid is that at some point somebody asked how much these houses are actually worth. I mean, if they hadn’t asked that question everything would have gone on perfectly as normal.

Now some will say that this will lead to a financial melt-down. Can it be avoided?

It can be avoided provided the governments and central banks give us — the speculators and financial advisors — the money back that we’ve lost.

But…isn’t that rewarding greed and stupidity?

No, it’s rewarding what Prime Minister Gordon Brown calls “the ingenuity of the markets.”

I see….

We don’t want this money to spend on ourselves. We want this money to go into the market so we can carry on borrowing and lending money as if nothing had happened without thinking too much about it.

Well, if worst came to worst and you didn’t get this money, what then?

Well then, the market would crash and I would say to you what people like me always say, “It’s not us who will suffer, it’s your pension fund.”

The 401-Keg Plan

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I work for a major, MAJOR financial services company. It’s been a wild couple of weeks lately, including some issues over the weekend that resulted in me being called out of church service twice on Sunday. That made the following, which appeared on the bulletin board of our break-room on Monday, sound like pretty good advice:

If you had purchased $1,000.00 of AIG stock one year ago you would have $44.34 left.

With Wachovia, you would have had $54.74 left of the original $1,000.00.

With Lehman, you would have had $0.00 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of beer one year ago…drank all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have $214.00 cash.

Based on the above, the best investment plan is to drink heavily & recycle. It is called “The 401-Keg” plan.

Sounds as if you ought to fire JRoosh as your financial advisor and hire Kevin Ecker.

What I meant to say

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Kevin Ecker periodically runs a photo caption contest over at his blog, EckerNet. He posts an unusual photo and invites captions; whoever makes him laugh, wins. Knowing what amuses Kevin gives you an advantage in the contest, though this might be a handicap in life in general (I must confess I’ve had some success in this contest).

I didn’t win the latest contest, but I think it’s because Kevin had already picked the winner by the time I went to enter my latest brainstorm. Oh well, waste not, want not. Below is the photo and my belated caption.


The Obama campaign leadership decides they’re finally going to have to break down and call Joe the Plumber.