A Crissy and stoogepie Fairytale

I haven’t been around much lately so I haven’t been posting much. Crissy over at crissyspage.com was nice enough to offer to help out by working with me on a comic. We even got a subtle product placement deal worked out. See whether you can spot it.

You probably already figured it out but, yes, here is our sponsor.

Thank you Bag O’ Dicks!

And thank you, Crissy! Swing by Crissy’s and leave her a comment or squeeze her tits or something.

That’s it for me and fairytales for a while unless another sponsor forks over some cash.

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A Wisconsin Thanksgiving and Other Crap

I have been MIA and I apologize. I owe you a blog post, but I am busy as hell and not feeling very funny. I am busy because, in my little corner of the world in fabulous in New York City, the global financial crisis has hit home. See, in the daylight, I am a fish in an incredible creative pond where wonderful imaginative creatures do fabulously inspired things. In about a month, the shit is going to hit the proverbial fan here. I can’t talk a lot about that, but it’s one of those movie-lot wind-generating turbo fans. And a lot of people are going to lose their jobs.

I’m not worried about losing my job. If I lose my job, I will post more regularly and dress less frequently. But a lot of good people I work with who have pink hair and nose rings and who smoke crack during their lunch breaks are going to lose their jobs, and then who the fuck will hire them?

So, this global financial crisis we’re in is on my mind a lot lately. And I’ve wanted to write about the global financial crisis, but it’s pretty fucking complicated. I mean differential equations complicated. So, instead, I will ramble about my Thanksgiving and Wisconsin.

See, a lot of people like me don’t think they are personally impacted by this whole financial mess. That’s because a lot of people like me don’t live in the real world. We live in this fantasy world where we wake up and say, “Where the fuck am I today? And who the fuck are these bitches?”

My Thanksgiving was spent with my mother at her house. Every Thanksgiving we share a feast, with a whole turkey and a whole ham and all the fixings, between just the two of us. Mum does not exactly live in the real world, either.

But I have always thought that she lived in the real world much less than I did, because I do things that are real that she does not. Like, I fuck and watch porn and snort cocaine and go to work at noon every day. My mom does not do those things, as far as I know. I have asked her and, though I never get a straight answer, I think that’s because the answer is “no, I do not fuck and watch porn and snort cocaine and go to work at noon every day.”

But I was wrong, as I found out this Thanksgiving. Not about the fucking maybe, but my mum lives more in the real world than I do. I discovered this because this year’s Thanksgiving revelation was that many of the friends I had as a child were, in fact, not imaginary at all. They were real people.

I have checked around since then and realized that many of my childhood friends were real people. In fact, I was an imaginary friend outcast.

So, I don’t really live in the real world. In fact, I am realizing more and more that the things that I do that I thought made my world real actually make it more unreal. For instance, a couple of years ago I took a trip to the Sonoran Desert to shoot at fruit. It was just for kicks and relaxation, you know? It’s a dude thing. I brought the guns and fruit with me in an SUV, along with some recreational drugs. You are probably wondering what could possibly be more real than using fancy guns in the stifling, dry heat just outside of Maricopa to shoot exotic fruit I personally imported while stoned out of my mind. I used to wonder the same thing. And I will tell you. Worrying about how you will buy crayons for kids and where your retirement money will come from.

That’s where Wisconsin comes in.

A couple of years ago, five Wisconsin school boards worried about how they would continue to pay for services to retired teachers amid escalating medical costs. A trusted St. Louis investment bank advised them that the best return on their money would come from something called a collateralized debt obligation, or CDO. Now, maybe you’ve heard a lot about credit-default swaps and CDOs. But just in case you haven’t, a credit-default swap is sort of like insurance. It’s a private contract where you pay a premium just like with insurance. The difference is that it is insurance for credit: if a loan goes into default, the insurer owes you money. You don’t need to have anything to do with the lender or borrower to buy a credit-default swap on their loan. We won’t talk about credit-default swaps at all because they bore me. They’re pretty easy to understand.

Let’s talk about the CDOs the Wisconsin School Boards bought instead. With a CDO, somebody starts a company that buys a credit portfolio. It buys debt or maybe debt derivatives. The company funds these purchases by selling equity in itself and selling bonds it must pay back. Under this scheme, if you invest in a CDO, you never own any of the underlying assets or debt. It already sounds complicated, right? Well, there is a thing called a synthetic CDO that is even more complicated. It creates CDOs from other CDOs. And it’s a complex way for corporations to move bad debt off their books. It is in synthetic CDOs that the Wisconsin School Board unwittingly invested.

I won’t go into any more detail about how a synthetic CDO works, but if you’re really interested in the mechanics of it all, here is a mathematical formula you can ponder that may help to explain it all.

Anyways, these five Wisconsin school boards were convinced by their investment banker that CDOs were a really safe investment with a great return. In a meeting with their investment banker, he told them that, in order to lose money on their investment, “There would need to be fifteen Enrons.” That’s a direct quote from their tape-recorded meeting. So, the school boards invested $35 million dollars and borrowed another $165 million from a Irish bank to buy three CDOs from the Royal Bank of Canada. CDOs are deliciously global and awfully fucking expensive.

So, here we are fifteen Enrons — Lehman Brothers, AIG, Bear Sterns, Citigroup, to name a few — later. The Irish bank they borrowed the money from — Depfa — was bailed out by the German government to the tune of $85 billion. And their synthetic CDOs are pretty much worthless.

So, to pay back their debt, the Wisconsin school boards need to take money from their budgets. That means cutbacks for teachers and retirees. And it means fewer books and fewer crayons for children. As one first-grade teacher put it, “what happens to my retirement? Or the construction paper and pencils and supplies we need to teach?”

Well, Mr. or Ms. First-Grade Teacher, please see the formula above.

That’s the real world.

Here is something you should expect by now: the dude who was head of the Irish bank that got into that financial mess and had to be bailed out for $85 billion, Gerhard Bruckermann, got $150 million when he left the bank. Does this remind you of AIG, where the CEO of the company when it posted record losses and had to be bailed out, Martin Sullivan, was paid $47 million after he was fired? He also got an office and an assistant until the end of this year. That’s not the real world.

But in the real world, many people like you and me will lose their jobs and their pensions and their homes. Probably not me personally, at least not right away. But a lot of people I work with everyday.

A little while ago, we fired one of the bigshots where I work. This dude really had it coming. He made one big mistake each and every month he was with us, and each of those mistakes was at least as disastrous that the mistakes I make daily. He had been making like half a mil a year. After he got fired, I talked to him and he told me that his severance package sucked and he was on the verge of losing his house. He told a lot of people that. And I was discussing this with one of the pink-haired, chronically pierced women with whom I work and this is what she said.

Maybe you find it hard to feel sorry for Lehman Brothers or AIG or Citigroup. Maybe you think it’s wrong to bail those companies out. But let’s look at how a world financial collapse occurs. Credit-default swaps are a wonderful thing. Let’s say you have a business and you need to expand, but your credit is not so great. You had a rough year last year but, this year, your biggest competitor went out of business so business is booming. Still, your credit sucks and banks aren’t sure they want to lend you money. The answer is a credit-default swap: credit insurance. The bank will lend you money but buy a credit-default swap. You’ll pay a little more for the credit because the bank needs to pay for the swap. But your business can expand now, keeping the economy healthy and creating jobs. Everyone is happy and buying coke and whores. Lube flows like tap water.

Then the economy goes sour. It’s actually been going south for much of President Bush’s tenure in office, but he and Congress don’t do shit about it. Finally, the real estate market tanks and businesses start to default on their loans. Now, all those credit-default swaps are coming due. Just like any insurance business, the credit-default swap business plays the law of averages. But when an economic bubble just bursts as happened in real estate, a lot of swaps are all of a sudden due at the same time. This is what pushes Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy. The government does nothing to help Lehman and, in fact, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has stated that a bailout of Lehman was never an option. But when Lehman files for bankruptcy, the global credit markets freeze. That’s because, all of a sudden, a lot of debt is uninsured and creditors are afraid to extend themselves any further. When the credit markets choke, businesses can’t buy inventory or finish projects and acquisitions to which they are already committed, leading to more defaults. This is what pushes AIG to the verge of bankruptcy. Then, because it is one of the few ways of raising capital left, variable-rate bond interest shoots through the roof, pushing more businesses into insolvency. There was a domino effect. There is already lots of evidence that a different sort of global domino effect will occur if we don’t bail out the US automakers. And we haven’t even talked about how many whores are now walking the streets with nothing to do.

Maybe you still don’t feel bad. Maybe you still think that AIG and other businesses should have been better prepared. AIG should have guessed years before that, if Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, the credit market would implode like a house of cards and AIG would be in serious trouble. Well, maybe. But AIG had 116,000 employees when the grips rolled out an industrial-strength fan and started throwing shit at it. The group that caused all of this trouble — the group responsible for AIG’s entire credit derivatives business and all of AIG’s heartache — always had fewer than 400 people. It’s true that the average salary of everyone in that tiny unit was more than a million bucks. So maybe you think that 116,000 people should lose their jobs and their health care and their pensions and not be able to buy crayons for their kids because 400 millionaires fucked up. If so, you will love the global depression that will occur if we don’t bail out these companies. There’s no guarantee that it’s not coming anyway. And those millionaires will still be able to buy all the porn and cake they want.

I could tell exactly the same story about Citibank. One tiny unit lost all of Citibank’s money. Pivotal in this collapse of Citibank was Robert E. Rubin. Rubin had been Treasury Secretary under Clinton, when he oversaw the removal of depression-era regulations that prevented banks from entering certain risky businesses. After Clinton, he went to Citibank and blessed their riskiest investments. Now, he’s on President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team as an economic advisor. So, he still has a job. Everyone is not so lucky. All of Citibank’s roughly 370,000 employees reaped the rewards of a boom in the financial markets, including the credit market with all its complicated derivatives. But in 2008, Citibank has shed about 70,000 of those 370,000 jobs. Most of those 70,000 people did not know what a credit-default swap or a CDO was before reading this post today. And now they can’t buy their kids construction paper or pencils. If they weren’t living in the real world, they are now. But if those people weren’t living in the real world, none of us were.

And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s not fair to blame place all the blame on the backs of a few thousand millionaires for a delusion we all shared. We all snorted lots and lots of coke and fucked two different whores everyday and bought only the fanciest cake to go with the nastiest porn.  Or something like that, right?

Oh, that reminds me: I never told you about all that I was thankful for this Thanksgiving. I have plenty for which to be thankful. The irony of this entire post is that, on January 20, 2009, this country will inaugurate a president I hope will do something about this stinking mess, in spite of Robert Rubin’s presence on the transition team. That’s about a month away, too.

So, even though the inauguration will happen too late to save a lot of people from a shitstorm of grief, one of the many things I am thankful for is that we do not have this to look forward to for the next eight years.

By the way, I wasn’t kidding about waking up and wondering where the fuck I am. After two weeks of traveling, I woke up this morning and wasn’t sure where in the world my sorry ass had landed. My bedroom was cold and foreign. It was raining outside so it was mostly dark, but some mucky light still pulsed into the room through cracks in the blinds. I could tell you stories about the last two weeks, about women with thigh-highs the color of coffee ice cream and others with eyelids that sparkled like bubblegum. About meetings and meetings and meatings. But I won’t. I will tell you that, after a few minutes of laying there, I realized that a passing siren had awakened me but I still didn’t know where I was or who I was. And I imagine now that this feeling is a lot like what all of you experience when you read a blog by some anonymous dude you know nothing about besides the fact that he likes cake and porn an awful lot and is sadly without as many imaginary friends as he had once imagined he had.

I wish I could help you out here, but I can’t save you. Sorry.

I am still working on my epic project for this blog. It truly is epic but it’s also not even half done. In part, that’s because I had an epiphany about it and restarted the whole thing from scratch after Thanksgiving. It’s also in part because I have just not had much time to work on the bajillion images. But hang tight. It’s coming.

In closing, I have spent a lot of time in airplanes lately, and I would like to address the final section of this blog to a special woman.

To the woman in seat 4D of Virgin Atlantic flight VS007 on December 2nd: I was the dude seated in 3A. We made eye contact a couple of times before takeoff and you smiled shyly. Many passengers were angry with you after you had some kind of crazy, very dramatic seizure right after we got into the air because we then had to turn around. We were delayed for hours after that. Others felt sorry for you. I felt neither anger nor pity. In fact, I found the whole thing very sexy. If you flop around and bite and snort and drool and tremble like that every time you have a seizure, I think we could have a really good time together. And I couldn’t help but notice that your skirt was soaking wet afterward. Because you were kind of out of it, I did not get your number. Please contact me if you read this.

To the flight crew on that same Virgin Atlantic flight: I am not really a doctor.

That’s all I have to say about all of that.

I will try to post every week or so, but I won’t make promises I can’t keep. Not because I’m opposed to that or anything. I just don’t feel like it right now.

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Why No Whores, Craigslist?

Well, this is one of those obligatory posts. See, I’m working on a different post. A big post. Kind of like when I worked on Pierre the Zombie or Wikipedia Jones. And it took a while and I had to get my dick sucked a lot and I needed a little S&M and a lot of drugs.

So, I’m in that way again, and not totally sure that the drugs aren’t counterproductive, and thinking a little that maybe I should stop the drugs for a while. After I run out of my stash, maybe, I mean. Which might happen by January or so, unless I can find a bunch of coke-sniffing sluts to come over to the stoogepen and use up all my drugs.

Not that it’s all that hard to find coke-sluts, but I was looking on Craigslist the other day for, you know, wholesale whores in the pussy section and I discovered that they changed that whole section of Craigslist. There are no more ads for whores there.

When I say “whores,” I mean prostitutes, not sluts.

See, two weeks ago, Craigslist reached a settlement with the attorneys general of forty states that required them to get ID for any ads placed in the personals section. So now you need a phone number and a credit card to take out an ad in the fuck section of Craigslist. And Craigslist also sued people who set up ways to circumvent the system by assigning temporary phone numbers and credit card numbers for a fee. So, this is some serious shit.

No pussy for you. Not if Craigslist has anything to say about it.

Since Craigslist implemented these measures, fuck ads are down by 80%. And the po-po made a lot of arrests at the same time. Like in Massachusetts, they arrested eight people. And in North Carolina, they arrested another eight people. And a couple more in South Carolina. And in Florida, they arrested a whopping 35 people!

So, there is less fucking for money going on. Meaning that, in addition to the economic crisis the United States faces, it now also faces a pussy crisis.

As an aside — and this is a little bit of a tangent — if you have been following all the sordid details of the subprime mortgage crisis, you know that mortgage wholesalers were routinely offering pussy in exchange for mortgage sales. Yeah, you read that right: underwrite my mortgage and I will suck your dick. So, all I’m saying is that a lot fewer dicks are getting sucked all at the same time in this country.

Talk about a recession. This is the Great Pussy Depression of 2008-2009.

And my big question is this: what is wrong with getting a little fuck and suck for a few hundred bucks or, you know, the cost of a mortgage? What is so wrong about prostitution?

In an earlier post, I pointed out that, while prostitution is illegal, porno is not. Meaning that I can pay you to have sex with me and, as long as there is a fucking cameraman in the room with us, it’s perfectly legal. Now, how does that make sense to anyone? I am considering starting a company that pretty much charges dudes a few hundred bucks to film them fucking a prostitute porn star.

And don’t give me any shit about diseases or bad self-esteem or drugs. Before you give me that bullshit, do a little fucking research. You don’t know shit about prostitutes. Click here for a decent starting point. But I’ll tell you what in case you’re too lazy to do your own research: about half of prostitutes also do something else. Maybe they work at your carwash or mind your kids all day or serve you food at your local diner or make the peanut butter you eat. Fact is, that doesn’t pay enough so they can afford the subprime mortgage that someone else, unbeknownst to them, sucked a dick to get approved. So they suck some dicks and their kids get some food on the table.

Or maybe they just like fucking for money. What’s wrong with that? Wouldn’t it be nice if you liked your job?

We all have a price. You would suck my dick if I gave you enough money. Not that you don’t all want to suck my dick for free. I’m just being hypothetical here. So don’t start thinking, “Hmmm. How much can I get from stoogepie for sucking his dick?” when you know you would have done it for free five minutes ago.

My point is that everyone has a price. You do. Maybe you’re thinking it is millions of dollars, but you are just fooling yourself. I mean, if someone who was not Dick Cheney politely said, “You know, I would pay you $100,000 for a blowjob,” would you really say no? Probably not, and I only say “probably” because you might just have so much money that $100,000 doesn’t get your juices flowing. But you get the idea.

Now, admit to yourself that you would suck off pretty much anybody — even Dick Cheney — for a million bucks. Because otherwise you are a fucking idiot. Really. And it wouldn’t traumatize you or send your self-esteem plummeting or anything. You would be like, “so, do you have any friends with a million bucks who would also like to bust a nut in my mouth?”

And now ask yourself why it is not okay for someone to do the same shit for a hundred bucks. Maybe it’s their mortgage. Maybe it’s like a million bucks to them. Or maybe they just like sucking dick.

So, look, you can do something about the Great Pussy Depression of 2008-2009. You can support the legalization of prostitution. Or you can, you know, just suck a dick for a few bucks. And maybe help me use up my stash. It will stimulate the economy and it will also stimulate the good people of this country.

Think about it.

So, if you have been scared off of Craigslist and need a place to advertise your cunt or your mouth or your ass, feel free to leave a comment with prices and such.  Or, you know, even if you’re not a pro, if you just want to let everybody know your price, that would be nice, too.

That’s all I have to say about pussy for money, at least for now.

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And The Winner Is…

Some of you may recall that I hosted the Nude MILF Sweepstakes in an effort to help Crissy win Hottest Mommy Blogger. Well, Crissy won!

Now, I actually have to pick a winner. This is the fucked up part of hosting a sweepstakes.

I’ll tell you the winning number and username, and then I’ll tell you how Blogger’s Choice tried to fuck me up the ass, how I chose the winner with a special guest monitor, and how I’m changing the rules of the Sweepstakes in an arbitrary and meaningless way because I am a prick.

The Winner.

The winner is… number 277, username Soapbox.

You have won all this shit right here:

• A Sony DSC-T300 Cyber-shot® 10-Megapixel Digital Camera - Silver
• A Sony LCS-THM/B Genuine Black Leather Case
• A Sandisk 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo
• Adobe Photoshop CS3, boxed retail version for Windows
• A signed copy of Melissa Lion’s novel, Swollen, with a personalized message of your choosing inside
• A signed copy of Melissa Lion’s novel, Upstream, with a personalized message of your choosing inside

All you have to do to collect your prizes is contact me using the contact form (or email stooge at this domain) within the next week, meaning within exactly 168 hours from the instant this is posted. Tell me that you won, validate your username, tell me where you first heard about this contest, and you’re done. You get all that stuff. And, just so you know, the blogger that you finger as having told you about this contest wins a Sony Handycam HDR-TG1.

All of you sore fucking losers who did not win should keep reading anyway because, after I tell you how Blogger’s Choice tried to fuck me over, I am going to tell you how the second-chance drawing will work if Soapbox doesn’t contact me in time.

How Blogger’s Choice Tried To Fuck Me Over.

Blogger’s Choice hid the votes of the top three blogs for most of October, except for a very brief time on October 3rd when Crissy moved out of the top three for a few hours. So I couldn’t track the voting. Luckily, I printed out eighteen pages of votes, so I have the usernames of the first 360 voters. Still, I thought this was no big fucking deal, right, because I assumed that, after voting concluded, Blogger’s Choice would make the voters visible again. Wrong. Blogger’s Choice reset everything. We know that Crissy got 578 votes, but I have no idea who cast the last 218 votes.

So, I invited a lawyer to oversee the drawing of the winner. Last night, in the presence of this esteemed attorney, I went to random.org and chose a random integer between 1 and 578. It’s just luck that random.org spit out number 277 because, if it had been any number above 360, I would have been forced to write to Blogger’s Choice and beg them to tell me the username. And they just might have told me to go fuck myself, which I am not opposed to doing but would get me no closer to a winner of all the camera gear sitting in my closet for the past fucking month.

The lawyer who witnessed all of this was Dingo, from asiwassaying.com. She is a member in good standing of the bar so, yo!, she is totally required to be honest.

Yes, I met the beautiful Dingo and also got to meet her dude, Mr. Dingo. After we picked the winner, we went out to dinner and got drunk. Still, they turned down my offer of weed both before and after dinner, and were none too excited about a threesome, either.

Did I mention that Dingo is hot? And I don’t mean hot for a lawyer, either. Anyways, we had a good time at dinner and I may write more about that sometime.

How I Am Changing The Rules.

It occurs to me, first of all, that a bunch of people voted for Crissy without knowing a thing about this contest. They just saw Crissy in the top three, visited the blog, and voted for the MILF. So, those folks would never know they won the sweepstakes. And I will never know who a bunch of those people are.

There is a great chance that Soapbox is not one of those people and will come forward, but I want to be prepared just in case. In the event that Soapbox does not come forward and claim her or his prize, I do not want to draw another number from 578 and have to contact Blogger’s Choice to find out who the fuck won, and maybe have to repeat that process over and over again. So, I am just going to choose from among people who vote for Crissy in the 2009 Hottest Mommy Blogger category. You should all be registered already anyway. If it comes to that, this should be a much smaller pool to choose from. And, for validation, just email stooge at this domain name or use the contact form to tell me what your username is anytime between now and next week. Or leave a comment here with your username. Whatever. That will make identifying the winner a lot faster and I expect the pool to be a lot smaller.

Oh, and if Soapbox does not come forward, I am also just going to pick a winner of the camcorder randomly from among the people who pimped the contest. Here is my list:

• As I Was Saying
• Arjewtino
• Bad Mutha Fudruckers
• Bonj
• Crissy’s Page
• Darkstarian Dissonance
• Golightly
• i hate so much
• I’m a Mom in Real Life
• ken-gilbert.com
• New Life in South Dakota
• no ordinary rollercoaster
• Perfectly Shelly
• Recovering Californian
• Surviving Myself

If I missed you, let me know!  I’m a fuckhead like that.

That’s it.

Rosie Kicked My Ass.

So, it turns out that stoogepie.com was up for Best Celebrity Blog on the Blogger’s Choice Awards. I came in second, after Rosie O’Donnell’s blog. So, Rosie kicked my ass.

Some years ago, when I first laid eyes on Rosie, I may have said, “She could kick my ass.” Well, now she has. Nicely done, Rosie. Nicely done.

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Vadgets™ and Bumballs™

Yeah, I haven’t been posting enough.  Well, I’ve gotten really busy with a project that has nothing at all to do with this blog.  And, aside from that, it’s the summer.  You may be so old that summer doesn’t mean you spend a lot more time outdoors, but I’m not.

So, my big project ends at the end of August, then I go away for a week.  And summer will be all over then.  Normal posting schedules will resume.

Anyways, I have an awesome new invention to share with you.

What better way to propose than to stick a ring up your ass and let her dig it out, huh?  How could she say no?

That’s all I have to say about Vadgets™ and Bumballs™ except that, until Vadgets™ and Bumballs™ are widely available, feel free to stick things up your ass the old fashioned way.

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