Technology confuse lizard! Lizard no like!
I love how he licks his lips each time, and then gives a WTF? look. I didn't think lizards had enough neurons to spell "WTF".
Leyre Valiente
Scene missing! A video in this post has disappeared. If you know of an accessible version of this video (search), please mail me so that I can update this post.
Tags: fashion, mpegs, scene missing
Great news, everybody! The recession's over!
Huge increase in executive pay for America's top bossesChief executive pay has roared back after two years of stagnation and decline. America's top bosses enjoyed pay hikes of between 27 and 40% last year. This year's survey shows CEO pay packages have boomed: the top 10 earners took home more than $770m between them in 2010. As stock prices began to recover last year, the increase in CEO pay outstripped the rise in share value.
"Wages for everybody else have either been in decline or stagnated in this period, and that's for those who are in work," said Hodgson. "I had a feeling that we would see some significant increases this year. But 30-40% was something of a surprise." Bosses won in every area, with dramatic increases in pensions, payoffs and perks -- as well as salary.
2010 was a great year to lose your job as a CEO. Four of the 10 highest paid CEOs were retired or departing executives. Ronald Williams, former head of Aetna, a health insurer, exercised 2.4m options for a profit of $50.4m. Aetna's stock price declined by 70% from when Williams assumed the role of CEO in February 2006 until his retirement. At pharmacy chain CVS, Thomas Ryan made a $28m profit on his options. During Ryan's 13-year tenure as CEO, CVS Caremark's stock price decreased almost 54%.
Red money, blue money: The making of the 2012 campaign
A handful of so-called Super PACs, enabled to collect unlimited donations by the continued erosion of campaign finance regulations, are expected to rival the official campaign organizations in importance this election. In many cases, these groups are acting essentially as outside arms of the campaigns.
More than 80 percent of giving to Super PACs so far has come from just 58 donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics analysis of the latest data, which covers the first half of 2011. The Republican groups have raised $17.6 million and the Democratic groups $7.6 million. Those numbers will balloon, with American Crossroads, the main Republican Super PAC, aiming to raise $240 million.)
Tags: big brother, corporations, doomed
DNA Lounge: Wherein urine sounds better with you, part two.
(Should my tagline for this have been "Music sounds better with urine" instead of "Urine sounds better with you"? I couldn't decide.)
Wow, I can't believe I'm writing about this again, but apparently this story has a lot of people "overly excited" if you know what I mean. They think this story is golden.
You may have heard that one of our recent DJs took a leak on our stage.
Here's some advice to the Bad Decision-Makers out there. When you've done something really stupid and been called on it, you've got a few ways you can go. Most people go with,
- 1. "Ha ha, my bad."
It's usually a good call to follow that up with,
- 2. "I was drunk," and/or "I'm sorry". (Note: this can be a face-saving gesture even if you weren't drunk and/or aren't sorry.)
Always popular is,
- 3. Ignore it and hope it goes away.
It seems that Alan Braxe decided to go with the more daring fourth option,
- 4. Deny that anything like that ever happened, or ever would happen, and claim the other person made the whole thing up.
Now, if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that you can accuse me of many things, but "just making shit up" is not one of those things. He peed while DJing at least three times, starting 10 or 15 minutes after his set began. There are multiple witnesses to this, among both our staff and customers. Why would I make this up?
So here's a guy who pisses on my stage, in a totally non-metaphorical way, and then calls me a liar.
This is my house. When I invite someone into my house and they treat it with so little respect -- such as literally treating my stage as a toilet -- I'm going to call them on it.
Many people wouldn't have called them on it, out of fear that that might affect their bottom line. For example, after all this, I think it's safe to say that Mr. Braxe won't choose to perform here in the future. Some people will look at this and say that my having called him on his disgusting antics was a bad decision. Well, if so, that's the kind of bad decision that I tend to make.
Not the kind of bad decision where I go into someone else's house and treat it as one giant urinal, then call them a liar afterward.
This story was reposted by Fact and then copied by Pitchfork. The A. V. Club's take on it is the funniest, though. SF Weekly spoke to Barry (DNA's General Manager) today, and posted a followup.
Hopefully we can stop talking about this now.
We have had performers behave badly before, and we will have performers behave badly again. This one isn't even that high on the list.
