“Inspired” is one way of looking at it. Agitating Bowie into a response is probably a better way of looking at it. If you don’t see what I mean, look at “Hallo Spaceboy” where David’s clearly trying to deal with the frustration of all of the controversies that came out of Angela’s book (“Do you like girls or boys?”)

I think there’s two separate issues. One is that Angela Bowie never got her due for shouldering the promotion of the Ziggy/Spiders era band, so that David and Mick Ronson could concentrate on the music. That was her work, and it should be acknowledged.

It wasn’t “meh” for David. He spent the 80's trying to walk a tightrope between his public pronouncements about his bisexuality (which were part genuine and part PR) while making it clear that he was done with being anybody’s fuckboy.

It’s kind of rich to attack David Bowie for drugs and cheating when both Angela and David were both quite up front about their relationship being open, sexually experimental and fueled by drugs through the 1970's —with Angie (as David’s manager and impresario) the one who is widely acknowledged as having built up that…

As I understand it, the issue is this: polish comes in glass bottles that are full of chemicals. That’s not an issue for ground transportation, but it is an issue in trying to get product shipped by air.

I knew someone who was in on the polish black market. It exists.

I’ll agree that the practice of steering naive first-time homeowners toward subprime ARM’s, when they were clearly capable of going into a standard mortgage, was one of the scummier parts of the bubble.

Let me be clear: complexity doesn’t apply to the chain of causality. You pretty clearly had a financial industry that obfuscated in the pursuit of fees. Everything that followed was a side-effect of that.

Personally, I never quite know how to try to work an absolute scale of justice without my emotions getting into it. It gets harder because newspapers frequently use punishment exposure —a cumulative total for how much time a person could serve if convicted of all crimes and then sentenced to consecutive sentences—…

Totally not legal, but in outer borough NYC supermarkets it’s very common to have someone working off-the-books at the end of the conveyor belt/register, just for tips. (For anyone reading this: if you’re ever at a supermarket that does that —don’t shop there).

This is why I liked The Big Short. There was probably a temptation to try to come up with the Final Boss of Capitalism, or to make the people who shorted the housing market into good guys, or to try to give us some closure. But it just doesn’t. The whole film really captures the essence of the Great Recession, which…

I’m not sure what to think about anything with this anymore. There are so many participants involved, it will become an absolute shitshow unless there’s full non-coerced and videotaped confessions, the victim’s own testimony, and/or a bunch of physical evidence that shows who did what.

“You think we went a little too hard with the Outer Glow on this layer?”

Just for shits and giggles, this quote needs to be on the front page of a lawsuit by every former USFL player. (Cough cough, I’m looking at you, multiple-concussion-suffering Steve Young.)

For the record, there were a lot of things fucked up about Christopher Hitchens. Torture was never one of them. Too many Brits were tortured during WWII for any Brit to endorse torture.

There’s non-basketball reasons for Prokhorov to avoid the smell of tanking. Right now, he owns 100% of the Barclay’s Center and the Nets, because the original owners (Forest City Ratner) have to concentrate on their core real estate business (which is the redevelopment of the area around the Barclay’s Center).

Conversion to Judaism: You’re doing it wrong.

Dunno about whether this applies to Hungary, but I actually get a weird proto-fascist volkisch vibe from the photos.