O Emmy! My Emmy!

Blogging is difficult when you have a full-time job writing and want to do nothing more when you get home than sit and watch episodes of Firefly on Hulu with a beer in your hand. 'Cause I can do that now. 'Cause I'm 21. (This is still a new and exciting state, bear with me.)

So, real quick thoughts on the Emmy noms:

So glad they finally recognized the genius of Dexter.

I really need to get through the first season of Mad Men, apparently. I wonder when Vincent Kartheiser is going to finally get his due.

That's right, Robot Chicken is nominated. And if it loses to dreck like King of the Hill, I will break something. Or maybe just impotently blog about my anger.

I don't watch The Wire, but it certainly seems like a pretty egregious snub.

Okay, the rest has pretty much been covered ad nauseum, blah blah.

I'll make more of an effort to update more. Things have just been...crazy. I will start working at EW soon, though, so that's exciting.

Impomptu hiatus

Sorry for the impromptu hiatus. Work's been absurdly busy, I've been trying to find another job, and I've decided to finally live in my apartment, i.e. buy furniture and get my shit out of boxes. So, after spending $600 at Ikea (I know, I know) and countless hours building it, I finally feel a little more settled.

That certainly hasn't stopped my wanderlust, though. Is that something that all young people have? This urge to be somewhere, anywhere but here, even if "here" isn't really all that bad a place? I want to go to Yellowstone. Just camp out for a few days. I miss wilderness.

I finally turned 21. It hasn't quite hit me yet, though. Obviously I did the requisite (and fun!) going out, but I still look in awe at the alcohol section of the grocery store. "I could buy this," I tell myself. It's like...

UNLIMITED POWER!

(Start at 3:45 to get to that part.)



Thoughts on Emmy nominees to come. (Or, TK if you're as big a journalism tool as I am.)

Popular

Apparently everyone wants to read about the top 10 design cities in America, since it's the most popular story on the BusinessWeek website.

Oh yeah, disclaimer: I wrote the story.

Boo. Yah.

Sniff...sniff

Smell that? Smells like college football to me.

Now, don't get me wrong. Summer vacation is great. (...When you have one.) There's nothing like that sense of anticipation that slowly builds over those long, hot summer months, but the best part is that first game's kickoff. From then on, you can be sure the season will be a complete shitshow. (Thanks, BCS!) At this point, we're just two months away from the season's start. Already all the usual pundits are starting to make their predictions. I guess it's not really that hard--all you really have to do is look at the teams' records from last season, compare their new recruits, and you've got maybe a 50% chance of not being horribly wrong. I don't really plan on doing that, though, because I'm usually horribly wrong, probably because I don't do college football analysis for a living.

However, I did get it right in 2006. About a quarter through the season, as Florida began its inevitable rise to the top of the Top 25, I started to tease Steve, Mr. Buckeye himself.

"You just watch," I said. "The championship game is going to be Ohio State and Florida, and Florida is going to stomp your ass."

(It sounds like I hate Ohio State. I don't. I only root against them when they're playing Florida or Northwestern--otherwise, I think they have a great team that makes for some amazing games. I do hate their fans, though. Thugs and assholes, all of them.)

After a few weeks of eye-rolling and "Whatever, what do you know about football"-s, my prediction began coming true. Of course, there was a bump or two along the way (Fuck you, Auburn, and way to fuck up that game, punter Eric Wilbur, with whom I attended high school). My Gators came to the championship game with two losses. Steve laughed, confident that the undefeated Buckeyes would slaughter Leak and Tebow. I don't know why he thought that, exactly, but whatever. We won, I won, and I still get to hold that over all those annoying-ass Buckeye fans. Then they lost against LSU this year, and I laughed some more.

God, I can't wait for September.

Feed the Bear

One of the most remarkable stories I've read in a while is about a subject I usually detest: finance. (That might sound funny coming from someone who works at a business publication, but, you know, sometimes jobs pick you, not the other way around.) Reading "Bringing Down Bear Stearns," I learned how the art of business writing can actually be an art. Granted, my very own BusinessWeek helped break the subprime mortgage story wide open, but while that story (and the subsequent ones) were all fine examples of journalism, I don't know if I would qualify them as "art," necessarily. This takes the collapse of a financial institution and turns it into drama. It gives its characters--whom I would normally find utterly reprehensible, billionaires cushioned against the crushing blow of an elevator freefall by the bodies of their own employees--depth and pathos.

Also, for someone who works at a business pub, I know a surprisingly small amount about the business world. Yeah, I remember a bunch of stuff from AP Macroeconomics. But that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what's going on in today's world. Hedge funds, options, derivitives. These things make no sense to someone like me. Of course, I know much more now than I did before, but it still boggles my mind, the amount of money these Wall Street people win or lose on a daily basis. Most of it isn't even money. It's the promise of money. That's what's most confusing. How can betting that the price of corn is going to fall gain you money? That...is kind of fucked up. You are not providing a service to anyone. You're like a hyena laughing as a zebra gets taken down in front of you. But you somehow profit. It's patently ridiculous.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a hippie or anything. I know this is the way the world works now, and there's almost nothing we can do right now, save wait for all the other hedge funds and the like to collapse under the weight of their own cleverness. (This might never happen, but hey, you never know.)

Perhaps the best (and worst) thing about the Bear cautionary tale is that nothing was really wrong with Bear. How did it get taken down? Probably by a group of people very similar to those working within the company. They started a rumor, a rumor that Bear was "having liquidity issues." Bear didn't have enough cash. They did (at least, according to Bear execs, they did), but those rumors are just as poisonous as the ones on Gawker, apparently. Addressing a rumor like that only makes it worse. $18 billion worse, sometimes.

Someone made a lot of money betting Bear would die.

So, for all the business world's talk about nothing being personal, I bet I could find 14,000 former Bear employees who would strenuously disagree. And I bet they'd say something about accounting for human instinct and emotion in your business model.

(Also, can you imagine calling up the Fed and asking for a $30 billion loan? Jesus Christ.)