The good news: They've successfully capped the oil spill. The bad news: they are only capturing, at best, 8.3% of the oil. Alright! Now here's some other fun facts you may not know about BP:

• The stock market may think BP's lost 29% of it's value, but BP has only spent about a billion dollars on gulf relief efforts so far. That's... not big money. In fact, they are prepared to pay 20 times that in spill related losses and still pay out the same dividends they did last year. My take: BP is now undervalued. I rate it a buy!
• Environmental impact study of a spill on this site was not performed because it was deemed unlikely.
• Amid this crisis, Obama is having trouble getting congress to drop special tax breaks for big oil.
• BP has had an unusually bad history of safety, recently. Really, worst in the industry. You really get the feeling that this is a company that treats safety risks as part of the cost of doing business.
• On paper Big Oil pays roughly 40-50% of their income in taxes, but they manage to shelter most of it offshore perfectly legally.
• The tragedy is not that the government was so desperate that the felt they needed to ask for James Cameron's help, but that BP turned him down! Can you believe it? I mean, he's a hollywood guy with his own fleet of deep-sea diving gizmotrons! Poor guy, will no one let him be the hero? He just want to be a hero like in his movies!
• You think this hurts the US? 1/6 of all corporate dividends come from BP in the UK.

 So apparently, lots of guys are signing off text messages to each other with "x". As in "kisses". And when I say lots, I mean almost a quarter. While I think it's nice that guys aren't afraid of a little SMS (short message snogging) with each other, it might make some of their wives jealous if they found out that their guy friends are getting more textual love than they are. Still, it makes me wonder: if fully 75% of 18-24 year old men are "Metrotextuals" and 48% saying that the kiss is commonplace among their friends, what kind of messages are they sending to each other? (Also, did T-Mobile get our permission to do this research?)

I've always known, deep in my heart, that women would be the death of me. Truth be told though, I always thought it would be one, solitary gun wielding femme fatale who simply had an taste for danger. Now I know the truth: all attractive women are dangerous. All of them. My misconception was due to art, while the truth comes by science. Thank God for science, which, truly, is unbiased, honest always has our best interests at heart. Take it from these wise researchers: Don't spend any time with attractive women: especially not alone. They are like black widows sucking at your souls!

...

mike: or you can explain your relation to her
ira: there is a limit on the size.
ira: i did 288
mike: lbs?
ira: we were hanging out before i went to chicago the first time
mike: 288 what?
ira: met at that party when i put all my eggs in one basket but only because it was my only egg.
ira: pixels.
mike: ahh...
mike: right.

...

-----

Submitted by the "ira" in this convo.

Fig A. If you thought Michelle "Bombshell" McGee looked "trashy", Let me introduce you to Mr James' Ex-Wife, Janine Lindemulder. (Occupation? You guessed it: Porn Star)

 Oh, we all feel for you, Sandra. Your husband, Jesse James, married twice before (once to a tattoo-covered porn star, Fig A), cheated on you with a girl who, like him and unlike you, was covered in tattoos. Yup. No one could have seen that coming. I mean, here's a guy who's built a reputation on being Mr I-will-build-you-a-custom car/motorcycle/whatever (with 10 times the legal exhaust (!), no less), covered in tattoos, and here you are, little miss Bullock. Sure, we saw you in Miss Congeniality. You're tough. You like to act mean. But look, dating football players in high school won't cut it. Your momma was an opera singer and your daddy was a voice coach. A voice coach. You cannot compete in this territory.

 Michelle "Bombshell" McGee was the "trashy" girl's name. She's the one who did this to you. Let's see what the media has to say:

 I finally saw Avatar. I am pleased to say I learned a lot of lessons that I'm glad are being passed on to children all over the world:

       The comparisons were inevitable. One is a sexually provocative, envelope-pushing, hit-churning, fashion-risk-taking, controversy-thriving, gay pop icon. And the other is....well, the same thing. While Gaga is clearly much newer to the fame game and has yet to demonstrate the enormous staying power of Queen Madge, they have both developed their own unique brands of cultural hysteria and fiercely loyal fanbases. Allow Chicktellectual to break it down for you.

When it comes to looking good in grad school, look no further than academichic, an awesome blog written by "Three feminist PhD candidates at a Midwest university, on a crusade against the ill-fitting polyester suit of academic yore." Yore? How about today? Man have you seen the way a typical PhD dresses? Like crap, that's how. But I digress, these PhDc's not only have a fab website (arranged with categories like "Funding" for ads, "Bibliography" instead of blog roll, etc), but they show off some truly adorable outfits on (mostly) grad-school budgets. And would we put them here if they didn't look smart and cute? Of course, with complete academic rigor, they show you how they put the outfit together and include well-photographed close-ups when necessary. This is no amateur fashion blog.

Is there feminist talk? Hells yea. As advertised. (although it is mostly in the comments).

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Amy Sohn obviously understands Park Slope.

Click here if the link on the left doesn't work.

Or something Like that....

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 After reading this comic you might be thinking to yourself, "man, Bjorn has a really low opinion of marketing people," but actually what inspired this comic is not what you think. I happen to know a few really amazing marketing people. These people not only follow hip new trends and know what's up, but they actually understand things like how to analyze sales and other data to see if marketing campaigns worked. These folks also seem to use Twitter very effectively, and it got me curious, so I did some googling to find out how you might use that new-fangled twittery-thing for marketing purposes. The results of my research are in the comic.

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When the internet first came out people talked about how it was going to "democratize" free press, by which they meant lowering the barriers to entry (sort of like when Alan Greenspan said that sub-prime loans would "democratize" credit. They are confusing capitalism with democracy. Ayn Rand would be proud.) Well they were sort of right: it's really cheap to start a blog/website/online-magazine/whatever and tell people what you think about things. Look at me doing it right now! Unfortunately, for the most part, if you are highly opinionated, you will usually be preaching to the choir. So, in the end, democracy is pretty much unchanged.

Twitter is sort of the same way. It started out as something fun and when people started engaging in politics or news on twitter, suddenly it was changing the very nature of politics and news. Sane people knew this was ridiculous, but sane people can never stop the hype machine. Hopefully twitter won't be hurt by overblown expectations.

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In case you didn't know this about me, I am a big dork. Not only that, but I'm not really into new-fangled things like twitter, and so on. While I love computers, I have more in common with the old Unix guy with the beard than the kid at the dotcom with his fancy new laptop: I hate buying new laptops. I rarely get excited about new hardware or things like twitter. I don't plan to ever buy an iPhone, and it's only recently that I've seen any actual use to the web other than as a diversion. Still, I think this comic represents two sides of my geekiness.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this three-part comic series on why I still just don't get twitter. The next two will be more accessible.

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 Well, it's fall and that means that once again the television networks are trying to get us interested. We asked our readers what's going to be flickering on their screens this fall: