Tag: Feedly

Bill and Hillary Clinton have summered in the same East Hampton home belonging to Elie Hirschfeld for the last two years, and aside from the fact that he wanted photos with them in addition to the rent, the deal seems to have been routine enough. Almost too routine, as Hamptons rental properties apparently go. Hirschfeld’s not renting the place out to them this year but according to the New York Times, “the Clintons indicated that they were not necessarily interested in returning anyway after enduring last year what so many Hamptons renters have before them — the loss of a large chunk of their security deposit.” Good god, did they turn the pool water to Jell-O or improvise a skylight or something? Alas, no.

One Times anonymous sources revealed that “the expenses associated with the home — which has lush landscaping, a large heated pool and eight bedrooms in 12,000 square feet of space — ate up the bulk of the deposit. Security deposits are typically applied to household expenses like heating oil, electricity, housekeeping and lawn maintenance, and Mr. Hirschfeld said the Clintons did not make a fuss about it.” They can afford it, after all. According to the Times, their vacation house this summer in Sagaponack is in a neighborhood where homes go for about $100,000 a week in August.

Read more posts by Adam Martin

Filed Under: real estate
,hamptons
,the clintons

via Daily Intelligencer http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/08/clintons-lost-part-of-hampton-security-deposit.html

Met Opera insiders are buzzing over a recent performance by Anthony Weiner to disrupt the outdoor concert series at Brooklyn Bridge Park. Sources tell Page…

via NY Post: Page Six http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/weiner_met_opera_vibrato_Ffn7m97Io2iDCAE9JL6f9L?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=

The first thing Washington’s latest VIP made clear is that he doesn’t want to live here. “I am happily living in ‘the other Washington’ where I have a day job that I love,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wrote to his new employees after buying The Washington Post this week.

With that sentiment, Bezos will fit right into his new terrain. Much of Washington’s decision-making class never misses an opportunity to declare how happy they are to be away from the city that provides them status, power, and influence. It’s a convention of modern politics that elected officials who spend years scrambling to reach Washington must immediately demonstrate how eager they are to escape it.

Bezos is a much more accidental power broker. By all indications, he acquired The Post almost by happenstance, as if picking up an alluring, though somewhat frayed, novel on remainder. And yet by keeping his distance from his new domain, he is displaying the intuitive understanding that almost no one is enlarged by close association with the modern Washington of maximum conflict and minimum achievement.

via Homepage http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/political-connections/why-jeff-bezos-will-feel-out-of-place-in-washington-20130809

Leah Remini, the King of Queens star who noisily and publicly left Scientology after three decades of membership over disagreements with church leader David Miscavige, filed a missing person report for his wife Shelly who supposedly hasn’t been seen in public in six years. The LAPD has taken the report and “ruled as unfounded.” The missing person case is closed.

Read more…

via Gawker http://gawker.com/tv-stars-missing-person-claim-against-scientology-rule-1076869636

The reign of the House Republicans has not yet resulted in the crisis of a government shutdown or the calamity of a debt-ceiling failure. But the avoidance of disaster has created a false complacency, or so I’ve argued. Republicans have defused the bomb before by crafting last-second deals between Mitch McConnell and the White House and working around the anarchists of the House.

But, for one thing, the anarchists have grown increasingly angry at their marginalization, and increasingly determined to force their leaders not to cooperate. For another, McConnell is now facing a tea party challenger stoking conservative resentment over precisely this inside deal-maker role, which means McConnell probably can’t defy the anarchists anymore. If all that weren’t grim enough, Lori Montgomery reports an additional new danger — the small number of rational Republican staffers who cut those deals has cleared out.

John Boehner’s policy aide, Brett Loper, who cut the big budget deal with the White House in 2011 that the House GOP caucus blew up, is now a lobbyist. But the big departure, she reports, is Rohit Kumar, McConnell’s aide and the key Guy in the Room when the administration and the Senate Republicans defused the debt-ceiling bomb. Kumar is not what you’d call a moderate, but he does understand policy detail — an “evil genius,” one Obama adviser calls him:

“If you have to do business with the dark side, it’s better to negotiate with an evil genius than with someone who only knows how to say no and doesn’t understand the details,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment.

Kumar is “negotiating on behalf of an irrational, unpredictable crowd, and he likes to run out the clock, which is a dangerous combination. But to his credit, he never wanted to let the clock strike midnight and the world to blow up,” the official said.

Things have gotten pretty bad when the departure of an evil genius actually makes the situation more dangerous. But the implication here is that other Republicans are evil non-geniuses, or possibly are so evil they actually want to blow up the world. Autumn in Washington is going to be fun.

Read more posts by Jonathan Chait

Filed Under: the national interest
,politics
,debt ceiling hostage crisis
,mitch mcconnell

via Daily Intelligencer http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/08/evil-genius-departs-washington-more-dangerous.html

If there’s one actor on television who understands sleazy lawyers, it’s Bob Odenkirk, who portrays Breaking Bad‘s resident shyster Saul Goodman with gleeful shamelessness. When we first saw Saul, it was in the show’s re-creation of one of the great American art forms: low-budget local lawyer commercials. So now that fans prepare for Saul’s final episodes on Breaking Bad (which may launch him into his spinoff), we thought we’d sit Odenkirk down with Vulture‘s own Julie Klausner to get his thoughts on some of the country’s best so-bad-they’re-good lawyer ads. Prepare yourself for green-screens and jingles galore!

Read more posts by Abraham Riesman

Filed Under: bob odenkirk
,breaking bad
,saul goodman
,vulture with julie klausner
,video
,better call saul

via Vulture http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/bob-odenkirk-breaking-bad-lawyer-videos.html

Brooklyn renters are feeling the pain. The hotly sought-after borough saw its average rent climb to $3,035 in July, a hefty 8.2% jump from July 2012, according to a report from Douglas Elliman.

via NYDN Rss Article only http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/brooklyn-rents-soar-closing-gap-manhattan-article-1.1420948

Yes, yes, we know that China has a lot of fake handbags, knockoff watches, and pirated DVDs. That’s ho-hum, but the country seems to be all about pushing the envelope and testing the limits of what can be faked. Let’s take a look at the 9 most outrageous things ever faked in China.

1. Fake Receipts

Photo: China’s Ministry of Public Security

What? Why in the world would anyone need phony receipts? To claim fake tax deductions and defraud employers for reimbursements, of course! In fact, fake receipts or “fapiao” is big business in China – for example, employees of the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline managed to submit $6 million worth of fake receipts over the years.

You can get any kind of fake receipts you want. Need travel receipts? How about something more, uh, specialized like waste material receipts? Not a problem – in fact, the business of forged receipt is so consumer friendly (after all, it is a service industry) that you can get special discounts and same-day delivery of the goods. [Source: NY Times]

2. Fake Businessman or “White Guy in a Tie”

Writer Mitch Moxley was approached by a friend of a friend in Beijing and offered a sweet deal: “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s going to be doing any quality control. You in?”

He was, and the deal was indeed very good. Moxley was paid $1,000 a week, put up in a fancy hotel, wined and dined. All he had to do was be himself, a white guy in a tie:

… so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.” [Source: The Atlantic]

3. Fake Apple Store

The Apple Store in Kunming, China sure looks the part: gleaming iPads displayed on minimalist beechwood tables, crisp marketing graphics and eager associates in blue shirts ready to assist you with the latest gadgets. But something juuuust doesn’t seem quite right, as blogger BirdAbroad noted.

Well, as you’ve guessed, though the Apple products were real, the store itself was completely fake. But you know what’s amazing about the level of fakery? Even the employees working there believed that they were actually working for Apple!

4. Fake IKEA Store

Photo: Reuters

If you think about it, Apple Stores are small and therefore quite easy to copy. But how about the Swedish furniture behemoth IKEA? Now their warehouse-styled stores are SO huge that they’d be impossible to knockoff, right? Not in China!

Meet 11Furniture, which has copied not only IKEA’s products but also its signature blue-and-yellow color scheme, 100,000-square feet warehouse complete with showrooms, mini pencils, and cafeteria-style restaurant! Well, at least they don’t have products with unpronounceable Swedish names … [Source: Daily Mail]

via Neatorama http://www.neatorama.com/2013/08/08/9-Most-Outrageous-Things-Ever-Faked-in-China/

The Discovery Channel kicked off their annual Shark Week week last night with Megalodon: The Monster Shark That Lives. The last two words of that title were particularly telling. See, Carcharocles megalodon was a giant shark -but it is extinct. The show was a “mockumentary” that raised the possibility that C. megalodon may still be alive. Brian Switek at Laelaps puts that idea to rest:  

The fossil record for C. megalodon peters out in sediments about 2 million years old. The only teeth so far found in younger deposits have been reworked from older strata. Furthermore, there are no giant, fresh teeth littering the seafloor, no whale carcasses with distinctive bite marks washing up on shore, and no tangible evidence whatsoever that the shark exists. And all the stories… are just stories. Tales such as those Stead shared are not evidence that C. megalodon or other monster shark lives.

Christie Wilcox at Science Sushi is angry.

Here’s what I don’t get, Discovery: Megalodons were real, incredible, fascinating sharks. There’s a ton of actual science about them that is well worth a two hour special. We’ve discovered their nursery grounds off the coast of Panama, for example. Their bite is thought to be the strongest of all time—strong enough to smash an automobile—beating out even the most monstrous dinosaurs. The real science of these animals should have been more than enough to inspire Discovery Channel viewers. But it’s as if you don’t care anymore about presenting the truth or reality. You chose, instead, to mislead your viewers with 120 minutes of bullshit. And the sad part is, you are so well trusted by your audience that you actually convinced them: according to your poll, upwards of 70% of your viewing public fell for the ruse and now believes that Megalodon isn’t extinct.

And Wil Wheaton thinks Discovery should apologize to its audience.

And then I realized why I was (and am) so angry: I care about education. I care about science. I care about inspiring people to learn about the world and universe around us. Sharks are fascinating, and megalodon was an absolutely incredible creature! Discovery had a chance to get its audience thinking about what the oceans were like when megalodon roamed and hunted in them. It had a chance to even show what could possibly happen if there were something that large and predatory in the ocean today … but Discovery Channel did not do that. In a cynical ploy for ratings, the network deliberately lied to its audience and presented fiction as fact. Discovery Channel betrayed its audience.

Facebook users are upset. In fact, the whole internet is mad about the fake documentary. Some people are calling for a boycott of Shark Week. Did you watch the show? Is this reason to believe that Shark Week has jumped the shark?

POLL: Has Shark Week jumped the shark?

• Yes, the Discovery Channel should be ashamed of themselves.
• Yes, but this is not unexpected, considering their programming the rest of the year.
• No, they can apologize and go back to educational shark offerings.
• No, I enjoyed the show.
• I don’t know! Just show me the answers.

via Neatorama http://www.neatorama.com/2013/08/05/Has-Shark-Week-Jumped-the-Shark/