Link roundup

1. You can read Michael Lewis's latest long article about the economic meltdown at Vanity Fair. This time he looks at Ireland. Like all of his writing it's a great read, full of interesting facts and memorable characters. But the message from all of his articles is basically the same - - financial wizards are typically dumb or immoral or both, and you should absolutely not trust them. Via.

2. Archaeologists have found the remains of a South American giant short-faced bear in Argentina. The bear stood 11 feet tall and weighed over 3,500 pounds. "The largest record for a living bear is a male polar bear that obtained the weight of about 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg)." And speaking of polar bears, look at these.

3. You can win a new limited edition t-shirt from Last Exit to Nowhere based on Simon Pegg's movie Paul.

Link roundup

1. What happens if you release 100 cats in an Ikea store? Who knows, mostly the video shows closeups of people watching the cats.

UPDATE: My mistake, there's a commercial featuring the cats in action.

2. Michael Lewis looks at Greece's disastrous economic situation, which he blames on corruption and lax oversight. His focus is on a monastery reminiscent of the the one in Neal Stephenson's Anathem:

Knowing nothing else about the Vatopaidi monastery except that, in a perfectly corrupt society, it had somehow been identified as the soul of corruption, I made my way up to the north of Greece, in search of a bunch of monks who had found new, improved ways to work the Greek economy. The first stage was fairly easy: the plane to Greece’s second city of Thessaloniki, the car being driven along narrow roads at nerve-racking speeds, and a night with a lot of Bulgarian tourists at a surprisingly delightful hotel in the middle of nowhere, called the Eagles Palace. There the single most helpful hotel employee I have ever met (ask for Olga) handed me a stack of books and said wistfully how lucky I was to be able to visit the place. The Vatopaidi monastery, along with 19 others, was built in the 10th century on a 37-mile-long-by-6-mile-wide peninsula in northeast Greece, called Mount Athos. Mount Athos now is severed from the mainland by a long fence, and so the only way onto it is by boat, which gives the peninsula the flavor of an island. And on this island no women are allowed—no female animals of any kind, in fact, except for cats. The official history ascribes the ban to the desire of the church to honor the Virgin; the unofficial one to the problem of monks hitting on female visitors. The ban has stood for 1,000 years.

This explains the high-pitched shrieks the next morning, as the ancient ferry packed with monks and pilgrims pulls away from the docks. Dozens of women gather there to holler at the tops of their lungs, but with such good cheer that it is unclear whether they are lamenting or celebrating the fact that they cannot accompany their men. Olga has told me that she was pretty sure I was going to need to hike some part of the way to Vatopaidi, and that the people she has seen off to the holy mountain don’t usually carry with them anything so redolent of the modern material world as a wheelie bag. As a result, all I have is an Eagles Palace plastic laundry bag with spare underwear, a toothbrush, and a bottle of Ambien.

3. A woman fell into a wasp nest and was stung 500 times:

Rescue crews had to deal with yellow jackets even inside the ambulance, and once the unidentified woman was taken to Sturdy Memorial Hospital, hospital staff then had to handle yellow jackets in the emergency room.

Via.

*Buy Anathem at Amazon (it's like Harry Potter, but with string theory).

Desktop Wallpaper: Vintage Sea Serpent (link roundup)

Download a desktop wallpaper-sized image of the Nantucket Sea Monster here.

And a few more links:

1. Alex CF's latest specimen is a dessicated 10-month old werewolf.

2. I guess Michael Lewis' article about how Shane Battier is the Kobe killer is a little outdated.

3. The instructions in the bible for building the ark include a demand that dolphin leather be used?

4. You quite possibly have already seen a link to Joshua Davis' well-written account of a Mission Impossible-style $100 million diamond heist in Antwerp. If not, read it, it's great. Of course, it's mostly great as fiction. The insanely clever master thieves assembled a huge pile of incriminating paperwork including receipts and business cards, waited until after the heist to dispose of it, and then entrusted that evidence to the one man they didn't trust? Just one of the glaring flaws in an excellent work of fiction.

*Previously: The bible's best sex stories.

*Buy plush werewolves at eBay.

Plane-eating giraffe (link roundup)

"The Giraffagon" is one of two paintings recently posted by Amanda Visell.

And a few more links:

1. Next time someone claims with a straight face that modern (and legal) training techniques explain why athletes have gotten bigger and faster, ask them why free throw shooting hasn't improved in 40 years.

2. Supposedly, the median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was $7,500, and there's no major grocery chain in the city.

3. Photo of a Burger King salad illustrates the recession nicely.

4. Fascinating article by Michael Lewis about the financial collapse in Iceland. First of all, it mentions someone named "Snorri Snorrasson." Second, it includes information like this:

Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.” The other, more serious problem was the Icelandic male: he took more safety risks than aluminum workers in other nations did. “In manufacturing,” says the spokesman, “you want people who follow the rules and fall in line. You don’t want them to be heroes. You don’t want them to try to fix something it’s not their job to fix, because they might blow up the place.” The Icelandic male had a propensity to try to fix something it wasn’t his job to fix.

Read the entire article here.

*Previously: Visell's Fallout Dragon.

*Buy Amanda Visell toys at eBay.

Found item bug sculpture (link roundup)

Found item bug sculpture by Lockwasher. Much more ominous than the bug sculptures I posted earlier.

And a few more links:

1. Michael Lewis jokes about his role as editor of a collection for McSweeney's:

Well it had really impure beginnings. Dave is a friend, and he has this philanthropy that is forever in need of dollars. And he came over here in early 2007 and we were having lunch. And he asked me if I would edit one of these anthologies for McSweeney's. And they've had some very distinguished people do them -- you know, David Sedaris and Michael Chabon and so on. But they never sell. But there's an advance -- you know, ten grand or twenty grand or whatever -- and so we schemed. What could we throw out there that we could fool people into buying that would actually generate real dollars?

Amazon link.

2. Roger Ebert makes an interesting observation about Paul Blart: Mall Cop:

Kevin James illustrates how lighting and camera angles can affect our perception of an actor. In the early scenes, he's a fat schlub, but after he goes into action, the camera lowers subtly, the lighting changes, and suddenly he's a good-looking action hero, ready for business.

3. You can see lots of photos of the special edition Coraline Nike Dunks here. Actually, special, special edition because the models on display include props from the movie.

4. Russia claims this is the last year it will be allowing tourists to go to the space station. I imagine there's a pretty interesting story about their reasons, although it's not really explored in the article. Via.

*Previously: Michael Chabon's script for Spider-Man 2.

*Buy "Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age" at Amazon.

Irony photographed

Truck with flame decals, actually on fire. Photo found here.

Here's a few more links:

1. Animated gif of Warblade helping a cat down from a tree, perhaps? (Or it's the new Blue Beetle?)


2. Antique vampire hunting kit from the 1800s sells for $14,850? Via.


3. Obama logo cherry/blueberry pie. Via.


4. Michael Lewis writes about the latest Wall Street collapse:

Then came Meredith Whitney with news. Whitney was an obscure analyst of financial firms for Oppenheimer Securities who, on October 31, 2007, ceased to be obscure. On that day, she predicted that Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust. It’s never entirely clear on any given day what causes what in the stock market, but it was pretty obvious that on October 31, Meredith Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to crash. By the end of the trading day, a woman whom basically no one had ever heard of had shaved $369 billion off the value of financial firms in the market. Four days later, Citigroup’s C.E.O., Chuck Prince, resigned. In January, Citigroup slashed its dividend.

Read more of his latest article here. And you can buy his book Liar's Poker, which is about Wall Street in the 80's at Amazon. (My general rule is never buy a nonfiction book, unless it's written by Gladwell or Lewis.)

*Previously: A recently made "antique" vampire hunting kit.

*Buy Obama and McCain action figures at Amazon.

Fascinating article about Cuban baseball players

Fascinating article by Michael Lewis of Moneyball fame. Here's a sample:

That’s how Gus Dominguez had become a sports agent. He took an interest in these Cubans when no one else did, and so he became, by default, their guy. The players in Cuba learned of Arocha’s success—and saw the Cuban government’s decision not to punish his family—and thought, If he can do it, I can, too. In 1993, two years after Arocha defected, the Cuban national “B” team flew to Buffalo, New York, for the World University Games. Eddie Oropesa, a 21-year-old pitcher on his first trip abroad, sneaked out of the college dorm in which he was housed, but couldn’t find the cousin who was supposed to be waiting. Terrified, he wound up wandering around some graveyard in the dark. He ran back to his room and stared at the ceiling. The next morning, as the team warmed up, Oropesa handed his spikes to his good friend shortstop Rey Ordoñez, then dashed for the fence behind home plate. It was at least 12 feet high, but he went up and over in his stocking feet. “I didn’t know where my cousin was,” Oropesa recalls. “I just started climbing the fence. I heard Rey shouting, ‘Oropesa! Oropesa! Oropesa’s gone crazy!’ But I didn’t look back. When I hit the ground I just started running.” Newly liberated, he heard Gus Dominguez was the man to see. “I wanted to leave not because I thought I could play baseball,” says Oropesa, “but because I didn’t want my son to go through the experience that I had. And the only way for him to get out was for me to get out first.” (Dominguez helped Oropesa extract his wife and son from Cuba three years later.)

Here's another:

That night a stuffy, windowless van drove him from his apartment outside Havana to a beach in Matanzas, a few hours away, picking up along the way 21 other people who would ride out on the same boat. Among these were the four other baseball players: Francisley Bueno, Allen Guevara, Yoankis Turino, and Osmany Masso. The motorboat was just big enough to hold them, but the ballplayers were still treated as the first-class passengers. Racing from the shore in the dark, they nearly collided with what they feared was a Cuban police boat. “The driver said some people would have to jump out into the water, to slow the police boat down,” says Osbek. “They would have to stop and pick up the people. They were trying to decide who would jump out, and the driver said the baseball players had to stay in the boat, because we were the most valuable. Then everyone on the boat started swearing they were baseball players, so they wouldn’t have to jump out.”

Read the whole thing.

If you haven't read Moneyball, I highly recommend it, even if, like me, you find baseball boring. There's some very cheap used copies at Amazon.