"Las Vegas bookmakers make their money by balancing their risk, but sometimes they simply come out on the wrong side of too many bets." With the regular 2012 NFL season now over and the playoffs about to begin, please take a moment and shed a tear -- or more likely, raise your beer -- as you consider
the terrible beating Las Vegas sports books absorbed in 2012. (LAT link, so potentially behind a paywall depending on your number of previous visits in last 30 days.)
[more inside]
posted by mosk
on Jan 2, 2013 -
30 comments
11FOOT8.com is a site dedicated to documenting a single 11'8" railroad trestle over a street in Durham, North Carolina and the trucks (and sometimes RVs) taller than 11'8" that fail to pass through underneath (or sometimes do pass through, just with pieces lost). Now over 30 crashes have been compiled into a three-minute video of (dare I? I dare.)
The Bridge's Greatest Hits.
posted by oneswellfoop
on Oct 29, 2012 -
113 comments
"All you do is put it in the center here like this and then set a fire to it. And not always but most -
uh oh." (Minecraft SLYT via
Reddit)
posted by stringbean
on Sep 19, 2010 -
382 comments
Recently, there have been a host of websites that delight in exposing the inanity and stupidity of our society. There is the granddaddy,
Overheard in New York, which recounts silly conversations heard in the Big Apple, as well as a
host of similar sites.
There are now a variety of such websites, dedicated to different aspects of our society.
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posted by reenum
on Jul 28, 2009 -
51 comments
Short selling is basically the practice of selling borrowed shares, with the intention of purchasing them back later at a lower price. It amounts to a placing a bet on the share value dropping, is a favoured move of
hedge funds, and has been recently
blamed for much of the current economic mayhem.
However, when last Sunday
Porsche tersely announced that, in addition to its 44% of
Volkswagen's shares, it had secured 31% through
cash-settled call options, the invisible hand of the market gave those short-sellers an
atomic wedgie:
Since the German state of
Lower Saxony holds just over 20% of VW, Porsche's disclosure meant that, in fact, there were only 5% of VW's shares left on the market, whereas traders were shorting for about 13% of those shares. This set off the "Mother of All
Short Squeezes".
[more inside]
posted by Skeptic
on Oct 29, 2008 -
98 comments
Image of the Year. From the article: "If you want to go shallow for an Image of the Year, you can't do better than
Paris Hilton, seen through the window of a Los Angeles sheriff's car, weeping as she's being hauled back to prison to complete a probation-violation sentence. But when you first notice the credit on that now infamous picture, there's a double take. The image came from the camera of
Nick Ut, whose
picture of a little girl burned by napalm, naked and running directly toward the camera and into the conscience of the American people, became perhaps the most powerful and influential vision of the Vietnam War. Not only was the Paris Hilton image taken by one of this country's most celebrated war photographers, it was taken June 8, 35 years to the day after the devastating image of 9-year-old Kim Phuc fleeing her bombed-out village. Let's put these two pictures up on the wall together for one last, end-of-the-year look, and see if something emerges."
posted by kittens for breakfast
on Dec 30, 2007 -
52 comments
In the wake of Rupert Murdoch's takeover of the Wall Street Journal, several of the paper's top reporters have left for safer ground. Among them is Tara Parker-Pope, who joined the New York Times on
October 3rd. Her blog,
Well, currently accounts for three of the paper's top ten e-mailed stories: in addition to number 1, Five Easy Ways to Go Organic, she has number 5,
Shhh...My Child Is Sleeping (in My Bed, Um, With Me), and number 8,
Drug-Resistant Staph: What You Need to Know. Touché Rupert.
posted by alms
on Oct 25, 2007 -
23 comments
Contentville goes
Splitsville. Steven Brill's online newsstand -- originally funded with $130 million from CBS, NBC and Primedia in
February 2000 -- closed their doors today. In a memo to his staff, Brill wrote, "My idea for Contentville just didn't work." I'm guessing that heavy competition from other online retailers and an abundance of freely available online content did them in.
posted by waxpancake
on Sep 30, 2001 -
9 comments
Now
this could possibly be
Schadenfreude at it's best!!
"eToys Expects Lower Than Estimated Fiscal Third Quarter Operating Results" Net sales are expected to be between $120 million and $130 million, rather than the $210 million to $240 million previously estimated. How could they be off their estimate by HALF? Oh yeah, maybe if they hadn't spent so much time (and money) pursuing
ETOY? Who's got the last laugh now?.....
posted by 120degrees
on Dec 16, 2000 -
13 comments
Schadenfreude is such a wonderful word; too bad English doesn't have any equivalent. If it's scrolled down, look for August 22 with headline
G4e still stumbling, competition massing . Critical quote inside.
posted by Steven Den Beste
on Aug 23, 2000 -
21 comments
