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Destruction

2008-10-14T19:46:00.000-04:00

In the land of Sigur Ros and Bjork

2008-10-11T18:26:00.003-04:00

Here's something interesting about the economicrisis. I was reading that Iceland may in fact go nationally bankrupt, which is totally crazy since five years ago they were like the richest country per-capita or at least very close to it.

from yahoo news
----

REYKJAVIK, Iceland - This volcanic island near the Arctic Circle is on the brink of becoming the first "national bankruptcy" of the global financial meltdown.

Home to just 320,000 people on a territory the size of Kentucky, Iceland has formidable international reach because of an outsized banking sector that set out with Viking confidence to conquer swaths of the British economy — from fashion retailers to top soccer teams.

The strategy gave Icelanders one of the world's highest per capita incomes. But now they are watching helplessly as their economy implodes — their currency losing almost half its value, and their heavily exposed banks collapsing under the weight of debts incurred by lending in the boom times.

"Everything is closed. We couldn't sell our stock or take money from the bank," said Johann Sigurdsson as he left a branch of Landsbanki in downtown Reykjavik.

The government had earlier announced it had nationalized the bank under emergency laws enacted to deal with the crisis.

"We have been forced to take decisive action to save the country," Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde said of those sweeping new powers that allow the government to take over companies, limit the authority of boards, and call shareholder meetings.

A full-blown collapse of Iceland's financial system would send shock waves across Europe, given the heavy investment by Icelandic banks and companies across the continent.

One of Iceland's biggest companies, retailing investment group Baugur, owns or has stakes in dozens of major European retailers — including enough to make it the largest private company in Britain, where it owns a handful of stores such as the famous toy store Hamley's.

Kaupthing, Iceland's largest bank and one of those whose share trading was suspended last week to stop a huge sell-off, has also invested in European retail groups.

Thousands of Britons have accounts with Icesave, the online arm of Landsbanki that regulators said was likely to file for bankruptcy after it stopped permitting customers to withdraw money from their accounts Tuesday.

To try to wrest control of the spiraling situation, the government also loaned $680 million to Kaupthing to tide it over and said it was negotiating a $5.4 billion loan from Russia to shore up the nation's finances.

The speed of Iceland's downfall in the week since it announced it was nationalizing Glitnir bank, the country's third largest, caught many by surprise despite warnings that it was the "canary in the coal mine" of the global credit squeeze.

Famous for its cod fishing industry, geysers, moonscape and the Blue Lagoon, Iceland was the site of the Cold War showdown in which Bobby Fischer of the United States defeated Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union in 1972 for the world chess championship. Last year, Iceland won the U.N.'s "best country to live in" poll, with its residents deemed the most contented in the world.

No more.

Despite sunny skies Tuesday after three days of unseasonably cold weather, Reykjavik's mood remained grim — cafes were half-empty, real estate agents sat idle, and retailers reported few sales.

"I'm really starting to get worried now. Everything is bad news. I don't know what's happening," said retiree Helga Jonsdottir as she headed to a supermarket.

Icelanders are also beginning to question how a relative few were able to generate the disproportionate wealth — and associated debt — that Haarde has warned puts the entire country at risk of bankruptcy.

Iceland's reinvention from the poor cousin in Europe to one of the region's wealthiest countries dates to the deregulation of the banking industry and the creation of the domestic stock market in the mid-1990s.

Those free market reforms turned Iceland from a conservative, inward-looking country to one of a new generation of internationally educated young businessmen and women who were determined to give Iceland a modern profile far beyond its fishing base.

Entrepreneurs become its greatest export, as banks and companies marched across Europe and their acquisition wallets were filled by a stock market boom and a well-funded pension system. Among the purchases were the iconic Hamley's toy store and the West Ham soccer team.

Back home, the average family's wealth soared 45 percent in half a decade and gross domestic product rose at around 5 percent a year.

But the whole system was built on a shaky foundation of foreign debt.

The country's top four banks now hold foreign liabilities in excess of $100 billion, debts that dwarf Iceland's gross domestic product of $14 billion.

Those external liabilities mean the private sector has had great difficulty financing its debts, such as the more than $5.25 billion racked up by Kaupthing in five years to help fund British deals.

Iceland is unique "because the sheer size of its financial sector puts it in a vulnerable situation, and its currency has always been seen as a high risk and high yield," said Venla Sipila, a senior economist at Global Insight in London.

The krona is suffering in part from a withdrawal by a falloff in what are called carry trades — where investors borrow cheaply in a country with low rates, such as Japan, and invest in a country where returns, and often risks, are higher.

After watching the free-fall for several days, the Central Bank of Iceland stepped in Tuesday to fix the exchange rate of the currency at 175 — a level equal to 131 krona against the euro.

Haarde said he believed the measures had renewed confidence in the system. He also was critical of the lack of an Europe-wide response to the crisis, saying Iceland had been forced to adopt an "every-country-for-itself" mentality.

He acknowledged that Iceland's financial reputation was likely to suffer from both the crisis and the response despite strong fundamentals such as the fishing industry and clean and renewable energy resources.

As regular Icelanders begin to blame the government and market regulators, Haarde said the banks had been "victims of external circumstances."

Richard Portes of the London Business School agreed, noting the banks were well-capitalized and had not bought any of the toxic debt that has brought down banks elsewhere.

"I believe it is absolutely wrong to say these banks were reckless," said. "Quite the contrary. They were hugely unlucky."

Who would have thought that a country who's number one export is Bjork could be affected by the economic meltdown so quickly.

Wiitastic!

2008-09-02T08:37:00.002-04:00

I'm going to attempt to hack my Wii so I can do more things with it.

The only reason I even want to is that the Wii lacks a basic function that was introduced in the LAST generation of consoles: DVD playback. There's a homebrew program I want to use for that.

I have everything set up on SD cards and currently the only step left is to rent a copy of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I already own the gamecube version but that doesn't work for this.

The main problem being that Twilight Princess was a launch game so they didn't have it in Hollywood Video and while I haven't checked Blockbuster yet I doubt they'll have it either.

Night Falls on Sussex County

2008-06-20T03:19:00.002-04:00

I got my first successful roll of film back from Motophoto today. Then I got really drunk and almost left them in Eric's car. But I didn't.

However it's REALLY hard to scan these pictures because they keep sliding around since my scanner is on an angle or something so for now here are two.

and I made the second one into an album cover really fastlike

Cyborg Seadog Tell me What you Dream Of

2008-06-06T20:58:00.004-04:00

I dropped off another roll of 120 film at Motophoto. Here's hoping it doesn't come back blank. If it does I'll just stop using 120 film because I'm pretty clearly getting results with the 35mm film in the same camera.

You love the show

2008-05-09T05:44:00.001-04:00

I cant believe I got through

Concert Story

2008-03-24T16:23:00.002-04:00

I went to a Mountain Goats concert. It was at Webster Hall in Manhattan. This was a week ago and due to me being incredibly tired all the time and being one of the only managers at work I haven't been able to talk about it until now.

I spent most of the day wandering around Manhattan with Dan trying to find shit to do. We found a cheap restaurant type place that felt kind of like a Panera but not quite because they had double cheeseburgers and couscous on the menu, and had much better prices and delivered. We got yelled at by a Circuit City employee when we asked if she had scissors so we could open the memory card we just bought. We ate Chipotle and then hung out for a while at this Asian convenience store up the road from Webster Hall.

Okay so then it's 8:30 and the doors open and it's packed and all. We get an excellent spot, right at the front, seriously three feet from where John Darnielle was to stand. The opening band was The Moaners. They were pretty good, but I couldn't really hear a single word they sang. I'll check out their album later I suppose.

But the real fun is when the goats take the stage. We were right up against the stage, and I could have touched John Darnielle's shoe if I needed to for some reason. Now, while I thoroughly enjoyed the concert, I have one issue with it. The order of the songs. Every time they would get going with fast fun songs like See America Right, they would ruin it by throwing in New Monster Avenue or another slow song, totally fucking up the flow of the night.

He did play alot of good songs and pretty much avoided Get Lonely as much as he could, which is great because it's ALL slow songs and nobody cares about his slow songs.

Outstanding moments include:

When someone requested Golden Boy, and John and Peter Hughes refused and referenced the lyrics. "I have a theory that this is hell and that's why you can't hear Golden Boy"

Someone actually requested R. Kelly and then John Darnielle proceeded to say "R. Kelly is not a joke. R. Kelly is the fucking bomb." and then he sang a few lines of an R. Kelly song, but I don't know enough R. Kelly to tell you which one it was.

I don't remember the setlist because this was like a week ago.

Case of the Missing Rabbi

2008-03-07T08:39:00.003-05:00

Here's something totally crazy and messed up. The father of WFMU DJ Nachum Segal, host of JM in the AM (Jewish Moments in the Morning), went missing on Wednesday. I heard about it Thursday morning when I was driving home from work listening to WFMU. They were going on about how he went missing Wednesday morning after leaving the WFMU studios in Jersey City and urged listeners to contact the Jersey City police if they saw anything. So I go to sleep because overnight is tiring, and when I wake up I check to see if there'd been an update, and they found the Rabbi, and his car, in the Hackensack river.

It's totally fucking crazy.

WFMU

2008-02-29T14:55:00.002-05:00

Give all your money to WFMU

Here is a sample of what will happen if you don't!

Adblock

Development

2008-02-02T05:26:00.001-05:00

The second roll did actually record pictures to the film! Some came out too light on the negatives to be printed

Unfortunately, there were only two good ones, and one was just a picture of the street in front of my house and is kind of boring.

HOWEVER, because I have the colored flash holga, I was able to get this out of it:

(CLICK FOR LARGER)
This is my friend Eric. He exists in both Red and Blue.

Photo 2 Electric Boogaloo

2008-01-24T20:42:00.000-05:00

What's the verdict on roll numba 1?

Well, I got it back from Motophoto yesterday, and it came out totally blank. I must have either loaded the camera wrong, or the shutter is stuck or something. I shall investigate.

Let's Photocize

2008-01-18T04:49:00.000-05:00

Okay, so, I'm not nearly as good about updating a website that I pay good money for each month as I should be. But, here's to change, because with the 25 dollar amazon gift certificate that my aunt and uncle gave me for Christmas, I managed to pick up one of these:

A Holga. From Lomography. They sell crazy cameras, most of which are made of plastic and are very cheaply made. Some of which take more than one picture on a single frame of film. This one, for all intents and purposes, is a basic camera. Kind of. The Holga is not like a regular film camera in a few ways. First and foremost, most film cameras take 35mm film. I have one that does take 35mm film, but it's a piece of crap Fujifilm camera that would cost you about 2 dollars at a flea market. The Holga takes 120 format film. It's essentially huge film, you can take up to 16 pictures on a roll of it, and it isn't in a container in any way. It's just film on a paper backing that rolls onto a spool, at which point you drop it off for development somewhere.

So far the only place I know of that can develop the film it uses is the Motophoto in the next town over. CVS can't do it, not even through send-out service to Kodak's Qualex Lab in Allentown. Well, I could theoretically run it through the 1-hour machine at CVS and get the negatives done but with no way to print them that would be a waste.

I think I took the pictures wrong anyway, my theory is that when the pictures come back, each frame will slightly overlap with the next one, resulting in one really really big panoramic shot of a bunch of shit.

But anyway, the details of the camera are important I guess. Here's what you need to know.

The Holga is a very cheaply made camera. It's famous for light leaks and the back falls off at the slightest provocation. The aperture switch doesn't do anything, it's just there. The model I have came with an adapter for 35mm film if I so choose to us it. It also has a multi-colored flash. I can switch it between White, Yellow, Red and Blue at my liking. It came with a roll of 120 format film, which is next to impossible to load your first time. The clickwheel for advancing the film doesn't stop when it's at the next frame. It keeps going until I stop turning. Also, the clickwheel and shutter aren't linked so I can advance the film without taking a shot, or, after taking multiple shots on one frame. It has a manual focus, and is rather large and klunky. It's really interesting.

Once I get the negatives developed, I'll scan them and post them here.
Let's hope I did things right.

I feel like Lovecraft in Brooklyn.

2008-01-01T22:02:00.000-05:00

Heretic Pride totally kicks the shit out of Get Lonely. Heretic Pride has more of the "this is sad but JD sings INTENSE" songs as opposed to "this song is sad so JD gon' whisper it" songs. John Darnielle's intense singing is what makes his other albums such as We Shall all be Healed and The Sunset Tree and Tallahassee and All Hail West Texas etc (he has way too many albums).

I give this album Five out of Five switchblades.

Gore Gone Wild

2007-12-18T01:40:00.001-05:00

Okay, so I'm at work today, right? And it turns out that the higher ups want me in charge of magazines because nobody ever does anything with them even though they're supposed to. Fun fun fun! So anyway I'm scanning out like 4 deliveries worth of magazine returns, and towards the end of the five-hour 1400 issue scan-a-thon, I find this:

It may be blurry, but I think it's fucking hilarious.

My grandfather tried to escape.

2007-11-17T17:36:00.000-05:00

My grandfather tried to escape. Grandma wasn't having any of that, but didn't seem to notice until he made it to the mailbox. It was pretty funny. If grandpa wants to go outside, let him. He can barely walk, so he isn't going very far.

IN OTHER NEWS,

ha internet

2007-11-13T01:49:00.000-05:00

What the hell do people Blog about? I am at a total loss for content here.

The Mountain Goats: Great band, or greatest band?

2007-09-30T19:08:00.000-04:00

Any time someone can write a song with the line "So I shot him in the face" in a completely serious context earns major quality points

An Excerpt from the Inbox

2007-09-27T09:25:00.000-04:00

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In this blog I link to other blogs

2007-09-24T18:03:00.000-04:00

So I'm fucking around on the internet and some dude links me to a thing. This thing, or "web site" as it's colloquially known in "cyber space" alerts me to a startling new perfume. It's called Vulva, and you can probably guess what it's supposed to smell like.

Whoops, time's up, the answer was VAGINA.

And to add to the comedy, the "web site" that brought this horrid stench to my attention went out on the streets in a predominantly gay section of NYC, and did some testing. It turns out that fags like me don't enjoy the smell of vagina. Who would have thought?

Click for videoooo and words

Man Man is in a commercial.

2007-09-18T13:38:00.001-04:00

So I'm watching TV the other day and a Nike commercial comes on. I suddenly realize "OH SHIT this music is Man Man. How strange." And because I was so freaked out by it I forgot what the commercial was for like a week but I found it on youtube!

stabbity stab

2007-09-18T10:55:00.000-04:00

Last night someone was stabbed behind the store I work at.

The police said nobody was hurt, although I am completely unsure as to how one can be stabbed without being hurt. The police wanted about an hour worth of store security footage, but we don't have any cameras outside so the footage will probably be useless.

hello

2007-09-07T18:02:00.001-04:00

I am horribly lazy when it comes to mantaining my website that I actually pay good money every year for.

I think John Darnielle needs to sing louder than he does most of the time.

I live in the worst of all the counties in New Jersey, The Sussex.

I work at a drug store and am a Shift Supervisor in training.

I used to go to William Paterson but that is no longer the case.

I drive around in a chunk of metal death waiting to happen, colloquially known as a 1992 Chevy Lumina with a WFMU bumper sticker.

My diet consists mainly of Chinese Food, the spicy chicken sandwich from Wendy's, and Qdoba/Chipotle burritos.

Sometimes I'll try and write a story but I'll never finish one because I always get bored and stop.

I haven't had a haircut in two years.

I'm Alex, what's up homeslice?