A 13-year-old boy stole his father’s credit cards to hire hookers to play video games with him and his friends in a hotel. They told the suspicious escorts that they were actually little people working at a circus, and that under the Americans With Disabilities act they could not be discriminated against. Compared to a $30,000 weekend of video games, junk food, hotels, and trashy women, it seems like a failure of imagination that at that age I was just stealing change from my father’...

Maybe if I didn’t shop at Whole Paycheck Markets like the yuppie scum I am, I’d feel better about the price of oil, but I am not paying forty bucks a gallon, extra-virgin or not. ...

Via Ectomo, a new remix of the Mountain Goats song “Lovecraft In Brooklyn.” ...

I know the financial district, by its very nature, is infested with over-moneyed d-bags, and I was warned in advance that Vintage Lounge was pricey, but fifteen dollars for one shot of Jameson? ...

As part of my new job, I’ve been reading up a lot on student loans and how they’ve been affected by the recent turmoil in the credit markets. Turns out that a lot of lenders have been pulling back on making student loans, even those guaranteed by the government, because they simply don’t have the liquidity to do more business. FinAid.Org has a list of what happened when, and looking through it, I was surprised to see this: An Form 8-K SEC filing by CIT Group attributes $120 mi...

Today I spent about six hours reading through letters that get sent to borrowers at every stage of the student-loan repayment process: From “you’re out of school, time to start paying up” through “congratulations, you’re paid in full, keep this for your records,” and all the millions of things that can go wrong along the way. And oh man, are there things that can go wrong. Misdated checks, payments from 45-190 days late, defaults, loan rehab, multiple defaults...

Well, I just quit my job at MeeVee and jumped ship to do communications for American Student Assistance, a student-loan guarantor. I think it’s the right kind of job for me: Useful, not flashy, heavy on writing. I start Monday and I’m feeling a mix of elation and terror. ...

The isle of Lesbos is home to some 250,000 Lesbians who are gay, straight, and otherwise, and until now it hasn’t been much of an issue that there’s both a place and an orientation named after that place. But at least three Lesbians are annoyed that people confuse people from Lesbos with, you know, lesbians. They want the national courts to force a name-change on the Homosexual And Lesbian Community Of Greece. It’s not that they have anything against lesbians, of course. They j...

This Chinese desert highway, maintained by hundreds of workers who live totally isolated lives for years at a time, isn’t just an incredible public-works project. It also seems like a uniquely Chinese solution to the problem. Drifting sand? I know, we’ll irrigate the desert along the edges of the highway, and post people to live at the roadside every few kilometers to maintain the irrigation system! For years at a time! Labor is cheap, the desert isn’t worth studying, nobody ha...

According to the internets, this is a southern white-faced owl trying to appear larger or smaller than other birds by ruffling its feathers in different ways. The first display in particular seems sort of adorably Cthuloid to me. ...

I told you so! Evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds! Suck it, Ben Stein! Scary art: One, Two. Somehow, NYC is not on fire. I don’t know whether that’s a good sign that calm minds have prevailed, or a bad sign that apathy has ruined us all. The Blue Zone test says I should buy some long-term care insurance. I don’t recommend the test to anyone else though: There isn’t a good way to unsubscribe once you’ve signed up. ...

I am so part of the problem. ...

Every time I think I’m a little too crazy, I come across a story like this one. You know, you could run a simple experiment: If medication makes the voices go away, then they weren’t real. Same with that whole Congolese penis-snatching epidemic. And every time I think I’m a little too dirty, I come across a story like this one. His lawyer’s argument is that he was just crossing the park to get back to his hotel. But if you’re picked up for “loitering” a...

Mmmm, apocalicious. ...

So, there’s this incredibly wonderful fancy industrial-grade coffee maker, The Clover. It costs like ten grand, but that’s not too much more than your standard coffeeshop mega-brewing machine. The difference is that with this one you can program in, cup by cup, exactly the temperature and amount of water and how long it stays in the grounds. It’s become the hot thing among coffee-obsessives, and all the really cool shops were all over them. It got profiles in The New Yorker and...

I’m beginning to think there are a lot of Massholes on the internet. Why? Background: Melonie Griffiths-Evans buys a house with a terrible loan: $470,000, no money down, an ARM her broker insists can be refinanced rapidly to something she can afford. She should know better, though, because she’s a realtor. Sure enough, the broker disappears and the company he worked for has since been shut down by the state. And sure enough, Melonie got behind on payments and ended up in foreclosure....

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We’d be interested in knowing more about the 1.8 percent of historians who regard this presidency as a success. ...

A stork delivers a baby, struggling through waves and storms and deserts, pausing only to fight wolves to make it safely to suburbia, and then is really let down that the baby grows up to be a functionary in a gloomy office. Message: Are you living up to your potential? If not, use our website to find a new job. Oh, crap. Are you crying at an advertisement again? Yeah, that’s always embarrassing. The ad leaves me with more questions than answers. I mean, is it a good idea to make your pot...

Oh dear. 3D Printers have learned to self-replicate and NKOTB has reunited. Surely the second coming is at hand! Market self-regulation will make planes fall from the sky and sinners will have to use poorly-designed web pages to figure out what happened. Ol’ John McCain seems to think so, anyway. On the other hand, given man’s inhumanity to man, maybe a good scourge and tribulation might not be an entirely bad thing. ...