I know, poor Jani Lane. I remember an interview he did where he said the band went into a record execs office before recording Cherry Pie, and saw a poster for the album for Dirty Rotten [etc.] on his wall. A year later, it was replaced by Alice in Chains’ Dirt. One thing that’s kind of interesting though is that they released a greatest hits CD off an indie label in 1999, where they re-recorded all of their hits with new members— and Lane on drums as well as vocals.
When I was in fifth grade, this cover band performed at our school, and they closed their set with this. We thought it was the greatest thing ever. Then, a year later, when I was putting Nirvana’s Nevermind on my Christmas list, Warrant, “Heaven”, and that cover band felt like they were decades ago— and now they really are, which is even crazier.
Today’s 0630: St. John’s Church and cemetery in Portsmouth, NH.
iPhone 4s, ProHDR, tweaked in Snapseed
Here is the first passionate love-letter I have ever written in my life. Strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl.
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Dorian Gray, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde.
The real reason that we should be concerned about private equity’s expanding power lies in the way these firms have become increasingly adept at using financial gimmicks to line their pockets, deriving enormous wealth not from management or investing skills but, rather, from the way the U.S. tax system works. Indeed, for an industry that’s often held up as an exemplar of free-market capitalism, private equity is surprisingly dependent on government subsidies for its profits. Financial engineering has always been central to leveraged buyouts. In a typical deal, a private-equity firm buys a company, using some of its own money and some borrowed money. It then tries to improve the performance of the acquired company, with an eye toward cashing out by selling it or taking it public. The key to this strategy is debt: the model encourages firms to borrow as much as possible, since, just as with a mortgage, the less money you put down, the bigger your potential return on investment. The rewards can be extraordinary: when Romney was at Bain, it supposedly earned eighty-eight per cent a year for its investors. But piles of debt also increase the risk that companies will go bust.
- In this week’s issue, James Surowiecki writes about how private equity firms like Bain Capital earn profits: http://nyr.kr/ArHyoL
One female writer laments the um, messy effects of our porn-y culture. An excerpt:
I was out with a Brit I’ll call Robbie, because that was what he went by, poor guy. Not Robert or Rob. Or even Bob. A 31-year-old Robbie. It was our fourth date, and we’d already done some things in dark corners of various Brooklyn bars that get kids kicked out of BYU, but he hadn’t, as Jason Segel might say, put his p in my v yet. It was time to take it to a bed. Or at least behind a closed door. So we went back to my apartment and consummated our courtship. There was some fumbling, as there always is at first, especially after a couple of nerve-zapping beers. But we’d managed to get the condom on, the penis in, and a nice back-and-forth rhythm going. We were making sounds like Jodie Foster in Nell. Making faces that signify a stroke. In short: Everything was coming along nicely, pun intended.
Then Robbie started talking. Indelicately. Fun fact: Turns out the Brits have their own term for “dirty slut.” The phrase was something like “tidy slapper.” As in “You’re a tidy slapper, aren’t you?” Tidy slappers, I learned, like “big hard cocks.” Robbie’s precoital BBC accent had morphed into a buttery Cockney. It was like I’d wandered onto the set of an X-rated movie called Cherry Poppins. Before I knew it, he was out of me, over me, and breathlessly inquiring, “Where do you want this?”
Unfortunately he was not the first nondermatologist to offer a fourth-date facial.
As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
