The Wire

A video of someone's choices for the 100 greatest quotes from The Wire. Oh how I miss some of these characters.

Insider trading.

Carly and I are currently dog-sitting in midtown for my aunt and uncle. They live next door to Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge-fund manager (he founded Galleon Group) and number 236 on Forbes' list of the richest Americans. Raj is also notable for his fantasy football league, which has a $100,000 entry fee and awards a total of $1,000,000 to the top three teams each year.

Early this morning his apartment was raided by the FBI and Raj was hauled in on insider trading charges alleging he earned over $20,000,000 illegally. Apparently the FBI is good at quiet raids, because Carly and I slept through the 6am arrest and apartment search.

**Correction: Raj was arrested Friday morning, not this morning. Carly and I still heard nothing.

An exclusive club.

From The Warren Times Observer, a Pennsylvania paper:


(In case you cannot read it, the ad says, "May Obama follow in the footsteps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy!")

Stupid people.

• Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton announced that Internet is pure evil. More specifically he said, “I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.”
• Florida prison guards, in an apparent effort to keep the retirees happy and the children docile, stun-gunned 43 children last week during ''Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work Day.'' Three prisons stun-gunned children while another facility chose to tear-gas them instead. Three firings, two resignations, and sixteen disciplinary actions have resulted so far.
• The National Inquirer is stopping to (possibly?) new lows. A freelance writer working for The Inquirer checked Brooke Shield’s demented mother out of her nursing home and drove her around hoping to prompt the confused woman to tell a juicy secret of her daughter’s.
• Two Yellowstone Park workers were fired after a web cam caught them peeing into a geyser. They also face charges.

Bernie Madoff sucks

I know this story is sort of ubiquitous, but it can't hurt to emphasize how awful this guy is. I mean, the guy cost his investors 50 billion dollars. That's with a B. Billions of dollars is not foreign to us, but it's not something you hear with individuals. Bill Gates' entire net worth is $58 billion, roughly the same ballpark as the amount stolen. Or, put another way, $50 billion is also roughly the same amount the government has spent on AIG, Chrysler, and GM combined - and it'll get some of that money back.

What really did it for me, though, was that he defrauded his own sister out of millions, leaving her with "nothing" (though to be fair, I'm not sure what "nothing" means to a millionaire).