See, They Call It Photoshop...

I spent maybe 20 minutes on this, using artwork that I easily found on the Internet. I think, given our current financial crisis, someone in the federal government might have realized that hiring skilled Photoshop artists (unlike me) and giving them much better photos to work with would be a much better plan than wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars in jet fuel and personnel to fly "Air Force One" and the accompanying fighter jets, answering 911 calls from panicked New Yorkers and spinning the crisis once they realized how much they screwed up.

The Company with a Heart

You gotta be kidding me! Forget the fact that, as someone mentions in the article, globally the titans of commerce have cost us billions of dollars/euros/pounds/yen/lire* and put untold millions of people out of work or on the verge of poverty: €1.30 is $1.65! After 30 years with the same company—even if she stole the money—make her pay it back, fine her, give her a day off without pay as punishment: but let's get some sense of a proportionate response, folks.

Ironically, their motto—Hier schlägt das herz—as near as I can figure using freetranslation and Babel Fish appears to be "The heart strikes (beats?) here."**

*Yes, I do know that lire are no longer used in Italy.
**From my friend, Stefan: "Hier schlägt das Herz is part of hier schlägt das Herz höher (here the heart beats faster) but I think it also schould refer to Herz in herzlich (heartfelt, warm) but maybe also to the heart as the center, the hub, the place where you get your stuff. How you translate that into our beloved English I leave up to you."

Jesse Helms, Conservative Force in the Senate, Dies at 86

The opening sentence from the Times' obituary: "Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday."

In other words, Jesse Helms was on the wrong side of every important issue that faced this country in the latter part of the 20th century. How's that for an epitaph?