Chicago cab drivers petitioned the city to let them charge $50 when passengers vomit in their cab, in addition to other rate hikes. But according to Something Awful this isn’t a rate hike, it’s a premium service:
I’m a vomit-bucket-half-full sort of guy. I don’t think these cabbies are trying to charge you for puking, I think they are offering you the premium service of vomiting in their taxi.
America was built on the idea of premium services. This is how the wealthy are able to have so much more fun than everyone else. They can behave however they want as long as they have the money to cover the premiums!
The $70 currently in my wallet entitles me to a good three blocks on Michigan Avenue and a nice half-digested deep dish pizza projectile vomited all over the headrest.
The best part? This was through The Economist. How else could you get a comment like this on an Economist article:
Sir-
I don’t always vomit. But when I do, I probably drank Dos Equis.
I received an e-mail today from my little brother, who is working at a summer camp in Georgia. His only correspondence to me over the past six weeks, aside from a brief phone call, was the message “The south is fucked up” and this picture:
More information about his camp is available here.
The Swedish Kronor (SEK) has taken a steep slide against the U.S. Dollar since it was announced that Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in October. So much so that an article linked to by Greg Mankiw was off by over $200k in estimating the price of the prize in dollars. Makes me wish I had taken my vacation a few months later.
Three month chart of Swedish Kronor against US Dollar
Please help! I took my husband’s i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer!
I wonder if they have a “best-of” like Craigslist.
The Co-Op Casino in Ann Arbor, MI (my home during graduate school) has been robbed, reports The Onion:
Thus far, no firings have been made or even suggested, but the casino’s members have agreed to beef up oversight measures by replacing the position of casino pit boss with a 15-person pit coordinating committee.
Spanish authorities have released an American privateer treasure ship captain from custody:
The Spanish Navy blocked the salvage ship after it left Gibraltar on Tuesday and threatened to open fire when the captain refused to let police aboard.
In May, Odyssey found shipwreck booty estimated to be worth $500m (£245m).
After a tense standoff when it left the British port of Gibraltar, Spanish civil guards boarded and searched the vessel.
The Odyssey was then escorted to Algeciras, where the captain was arrested.
The Jews, the perennial fly in history’s ointment, have never been able to resist the impulse to sabotage a good thing. We ruined a rich Egyptian tradition of public works projects by letting a hallucinating second-rate magician with a speech impediment lead us, as one might expect from a hallucinating second-rate magician with a speech impediment, straight into freedom at the heart of one of the world’s most inhospitable deserts. We managed to improve on that enormous step sideways by sticking around for forty years because the whirling column of flames we were worshiping at the time didn’t appreciate artistic self-expression. We managed to let two perfectly good commonwealths get destroyed, the second time by a gang of sheet-wearing bathhouse enthusiasts. We nailed someone who was by all accounts a pretty nice guy to a stick. We called in a few favors from the countries we owned through our control of global banking and brought the proud German Empire to its knees – which, I remind you, did not turn out well for us.
The next paragraph is even better. After that, it degrades into an announcement for a blog that’s all about Humus. If he had quit at paragraph 2, it might be my favorite post of the year.
And for those who don’t know, Fuul is one of the most disgusting things on earth. It’s an Egyptian dish that resembles shit and tastes only slightly better, eaten for breakfast and every other meal. Why any rational human being with a choice would subject themselves to it is beyond me.
“We owe a debt to these students for providing my family with a home, but I was expecting glass in the windows and a ground floor,” said Mavis Riggs, whose original house was completely destroyed. “Converting the new septic tank into a hot tub was inventive, but we really won’t get a lot of use out of it. Or the barbecue pit, which I think was meant to form part of the foundation.”
The article gets bonus points for the shout out to my Alma Mater in the second paragraph. An AnonymousSister reported back from her Alternative Spring Break in an AnonymousLatinAmericanCountry with a similar experience.
Why pay professional house builders to build houses when we can spend twice as much to do it ourselves, party while we’re at it, and feel good along the way?
I sit on the couch and stare at that rustic path and those big old maple trees. By now I know the name of this particular wallpaper or background or whatever it is: Autumn. Moving to the desk and gazing more closely, I see a vague, dark, summoning something at the end of the path. A cabin? A covered bridge? A barn? I want to be there, for real, on that path, under those maples, moving slowly toward that dark, summoning something.
He’s talking about the windows background with the trees and bright orange leaves, and he actually tracked down where it’s from.
The not-so-weekly Equation of the Week returns with a formula for determining whether or not a person will engage in prostitution:
[(δU/δL) / (δU/δC) | Sp=0] ≤ w – [(δU/δr) / (δU/δC) | S = 0]
Where U=utility, L=leisure, C=goods and services consumed, S=quantity of prostitution sold, w=wage for prostitutes, and r=your reputation.
In other words:
An individual will start to sell prostitution if the price for selling the first amount of prostitution, minus the costs of a worsened reputation for doing so, exceeds the shadow price of leisure evaluated at zero prostitution sold.
Reputation, or more broadly social costs, may be one thing that individuals consider when selecting a profession, but to say it’s the only thing?
Taking a short break from sunny, geriatric Weston Florida (winds around 18 mpg, gusting to 27), I give you a technique for scoring your think tank panelists:
In times dominated by momentous questions of war and foreign policy, a particular kind of Washingtonian is bound to thrive: the think-tank pundit. But competition is relentless. Good judgment and extensive research may help advance a career, but what really matters in Washington is an elusive quality known as “Say-sO Superiority,” or SOS. Staffers at Asia Policy Point, a Washington foreign policy research center, devised the following highly scientific measure to calculate a speaker’s SOS score (and to keep themselves awake during luncheon talks).
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