Great: Why I’m Happy, Why I’m Not Satisfied.

I really like Color Me Katie’s thought bubbles project. Her whole blog is fun. I imagine she’s just like Jennifer Garner’s character from 13 Going On 30.

The Onion wraps up their grisly series:

• Bush Tumbles Wildly Down Washington Monument Staircase
• Crocodile Bites Off Bush’s Arm
• Bush Passes Three-Pound Kidney Stone
• Bush Dragged Behind Presidential Motorcade For 26 Blocks
• Bush’s Eyelid Accidentally Nailed To Wall
• Single-Engine Cessna Crashes Into Bush

Finally, mercifully, Bush Dies Peacefully In His Sleep.

Monolist gives you three planes of Space Invader remake action. Use the UP and DOWN arrows to switch between planes. The aliens couldn’t be more abstract, and yet it’s still satisfying to mow them down. The blue and red triangles are the best ones to catch.

Inauguration day’s coming, do you have your t-shirt? I could go for either the “Yes We Can” soup can, or the dollar bill.

P.S. Speaking of Obama t-shirts.

Excellent graph: how many As do people use when Googling Khaaan!.

RIP, Ricardo Montalban.

Dear Eli Manning Era Giants Fans:

First off, thank you for supporting my favorite team in sports for the past eleven months. It’s been a pleasure having your company since last year’s NFC Championship game - which, coincidentally, is when you first realized that “your” team actually had a chance to play in the Super Bowl.

Just the first two sentences as a teaser. Some harsh language, understandably.

I really have to try the ping-pong ball-induced hallucinations.

Twitch has the Japanese Watchmen trailer and it looks tons better than any of the US trailers I’ve seen. I’m curious to see how this one survives the adaptation. I expect nothing better than a guilty pleasure, but I can hope.

First it has to get out of legal limbo, of course.

A buddy of mine just turned me on to Abstruse Goose. My favorites of the last 20:

• Lie of Omission
• ask a silly question…
• Young George
• Gift Horse
• The Purposeful Life

I feel like I’m cheating on xkcd. Ahh, that’s better.

Inc. Magazine has a piece on Markus Frind, creator of previously mentioned dating site Plenty of Fish. Check this:

• 1.6 billion page views per month.
• $10 million / year in revenue.
• 3 employees (customer service), with Frind himself working maybe an hour a day doing the rest.
• Eight servers.

This, in spite of being anti-design:

Plenty of Fish is a designer’s nightmare; at once minimalist and inelegant, it looks like something your nephew could have made in an afternoon

… and not listening to his users:

“I don’t listen to the users,” he says. “The people who suggest things are the vocal minority who have stupid ideas that only apply to their little niches.”

Can’t judge a book by its cover, though. It’s no accident his site runs on eight machines instead of 80:

…cleaning up other people’s messes taught Frind how to quickly simplify complex code. In his spare time, he started working on a piece of software that was designed to find prime numbers in arithmetic progression. The topic, a perennial challenge in mathematics because it requires lots of computing power, had been discussed in one of his classes, and Frind thought it would be a fun way to learn how to sharpen his skills. He finished the hobby project in 2002, and, two years later, his program discovered a string of 23 prime numbers, the longest ever. (Frind’s record has since been surpassed, but not before it was cited by UCLA mathematician and Fields Medal winner Terence Tao.) “It was just a way of teaching myself something,” Frind says. “I was learning how to make the computer as fast as possible.”

Impressive, odd fellow. Some kind of savant. I don’t know what kind (certainly not the idiot kind, though).

By now these articles have almost certainly made the rounds, but just in case you missed them Michael Lewis’s articles on the financial crisis are must-reads: The End of Wall Street’s Boom, The End of the Financial World as We Know It, and How to Repair a Broken Financial World.

Nobody else has done a better job of describing the lunacy that brought us to this in such a vivid and gripping way.

Some choice bits, starting with Steve Eisman’s description of the engine of doom:

“You have to understand this,” he says. “This was the engine of doom.” Then he draws a picture of several towers of debt. The first tower is made of the original subprime loans that had been piled together. At the top of this tower is the AAA tranche, just below it the AA tranche, and so on down to the riskiest, the BBB tranche—the bonds Eisman had shorted. But Wall Street had used these BBB tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of bonds: a “particularly egregious” C.D.O. The reason they did this was that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by dubious loans, would pronounce most of them AAA. These bonds could then be sold to investors—pension funds, insurance companies—who were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities. “I cannot fucking believe this is allowed—I must have said that a thousand times in the past two years,” Eisman says.

Eisman knows enough to short the BBB tranche, but then he has dinner with a C.D.O. scumbag who reveals the gruesome twist, “I love it when you guys short my market. Without you, I don’t have anything to buy.” And that is why we’re so screwed:

That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors' appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”

I had like 10 other passages I was going to quote here, but really, go read ‘em all. Those bits are from the first article. Wait until you get to the others and you read about how Paulson has been spending the bailout money.