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“Diehard Phillies fan — gorgeous tall buxom blonde — in desperate need of two World Series Tickets,” she allegedly wrote.

Describing the price as “negotiable,” she ended the ad flirtatiously: “I’m the creative type! Maybe we can help each other!”

Investigators stumbled on the ad, and an undercover officer set up a meeting, during which Finkelstein offered to perform sex acts for seats to the game.

“She was willing to do anything, she said,” Bucks County public safety director Fred Harran told KYW Newsradio. “And she told the officers that she would engage in sexual activity with two individuals for two tickets.”

She now is charged with prostitution and related offenses.

Source: NY Daily News.

Several years ago, I bought a big chunk of ‘distressed’ debt in a major company and landed on the creditors committee when it filed for Chapter 11. Shortly thereafter, the bankers who were hired by senior management told me that I would have to pay retention bonuses to keep its top managers from leaving.

The company, they warned, would crumble if these star managers left. Nine had already threatened to march out the door if they didn’t get substantial bonuses. I told them I was fed up with retention bonuses. Where was the line waiting to hire these “star” managers who were responsible for bankrupting the company in the first place?

… To make a long story short, we eventually replaced these allegedly irreplaceable managers and restructured the company. The net result? We saved $500 million in costs over two years and the company is in much better shape today than is has been in years.

What is great advice for AIG and the US bail-out, certainly also works for the still struggling UK economy. Luckily we online already see a turnaround. Hopefully it won’t take two years for the UK gouvernment to realize. Two years, just as long as it took them to see the crunch arrive and realized it had already hit them in the face. Politics.

A chat with Darice today led me to a brilliant quote by Dan Cederholm.

“I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here.”

For a really long time this year I have been thinking about what went wrong with blogging over the last years. Some years ago blogging was all about having an opinion, participating to the conversation, being opinionated. I used to call bloggers online columnists.
During my time at Splashpress Media it was important to me that every writer would add personal comments to their posts. Some authors were thanked because of their boring reporting style. Certain blogs felt like reading classifieds. Often I missed the blogging element.

When I joined SPM I was interviewed by Michael D. Pick, of WordPress.tv fame, and I think there are some money quotes in that interview. Particularly this question from Michael:

One of the things that set apart your blogging for me, when I first encountered your work, was this total fightclub disregard for kissing arse, going through the motions and formalities, or even following any kind of pattern other than one you set yourself. It reminded me of what blogs were before everyone got so full of themselves and started acting like stuffed-suit journalists. What’s the motivation or thinking behind that, and is that still the way you like to work?

In the interview I expressed what would soon become my general feeling, one of the main reasons I needed a change in direction and left the network.

Blogging is about opinions and being honest to yourself. Don’t write for people who might discover your site, bring you your five minutes of fame, but publish *your* thoughts, be honest with yourself otherwise you’re writing for an online magazine and not blogging.

Blogging certainly needs to reincarnated and we need to fight the battle for the quick buck, return to old values. Put blogger back in blogs.

During the month of November I will feature a series ‘What went wrong with blogging‘ on frankylicio.us.

I can not promise that I will not offend anyone.

Something, or in the words of John Gruber a little bird, tells me this might be very welcome for use in the future.

Nobel Peace Prize? Christ, he really is just like Hitler.

John Gruber, with whom I have a love-hate relationship par excellence, tweeted above quoted line, only to implicitly retract it some hours later, linking to Obama’s acceptance speech.

The great thing about Gruber’s tweet is that it reminds of all the qualities Hitler abused to gain power and establish himself in Germany: perfect retorics, demagogy and a great sense of timing. Obviously great speeches with lots of promises are more rewarded in challenging times.

But the danger only comes when people take on roles they are not assumed to take on.

And even as we strive to seek a world in which conflicts are resolved peacefully and prosperity is widely shared, we have to confront the world as we know it today. I am the Commander-in-Chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war and working in another theater to confront a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies. I’m also aware that we are dealing with the impact of a global economic crisis that has left millions of Americans looking for work. These are concerns that I confront every day on behalf of the American people.

Sometimes I wished Obama was more like a Putin and would concentrate his efforts on national concerns and not try to rule the world but rule the US instead.
His complete acceptance speech is loaded with words trying to increase his popularity. Just like Gruber tweets… he’s just like a [young] Hitler.

Does it take away from the value of the Nobel peace Price as many arm chair critics said? Possibly.

An arrested Australian couple have been caught having sex in the back of a police paddy wagon while being driven to a Territory cop station. Hannah Walker was driving behind the police car and said she was shocked to find the couple bonking in the back when she pulled up behind them at a red light. Police said they had no idea about their randy rendezvous.

Source: NTNews.

I admit it: I’m a bigot. A hopeless bigot at that: I know my particular prejudice is absurd, but I just can’t control it. It’s Apple. I don’t like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers. Awful people. Awful. Stop showing me your iPhone. Stop stroking your Macbook. Stop telling me to get one.

Seriously, stop it. I don’t care if Mac stuff is better. I don’t care if Mac stuff is cool. I don’t care if every Mac product comes equipped a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you’ve got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminum. There’s a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute MONSTER.

Charlie Brooker for The Guardian in what is probably the best description why someone does not like Apple products or their users. Funnily enough I spend quite some time earlier today to explain to an author I worked with how NOT to introduce your hate for certain products.

Mac fanboys like to parrot Apple’s claims that Macs are more secure than PCs. This should come as a nice kick in the balls to those smug bastards.

One is a funny intro, the other one is totally offensive an does not promote the credibility of said author.

Academy Award winner and directing legend Roman Polanski has been arrested on Saturday by Swiss police. The Polish-French director planned to attend a film festival featuring a retrospective of his work but instead was arrested upon arrival in Zurich said the Swiss police.

The Paris inhabitant had fled the US after he was convicted in 1978 of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl whom he had lured to the home of Jack Nicholson and drugged. An international warrant had been outstanding ever since.

Polanski is most known for his movies ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Rosemary’s Baby’.

Source and photo credit: NYT.

What, I hear you think? Hotlinking images. Recently I discovered a nice pinkishly blog using the bandwidth with an image from the tip jar entry.

Nobody cares about some stolen bandwidth anymore nowadays and there are plenty of scripts taking care of this issue, but don’t you think the pink SAHM design is much more appropriate for a big black massive cock than a tip jar [NSFW obviously]?

I wonder how long before she notices.

View the video in (phone camera) HD at Vimeo and those of you who speak German can read more about the whole demo and incident at Nerdcore (otherwise get help from Google Translate).

Definitely Dumbass of the Week.

Yarr! We know there are plenty of you out there downloading pirated digital booty, especially in Windows land. But it’s never been convenient to be a pirate compared with being a paying customer. For example, if you’re a legitimate buyer purchasing movies off iTunes, you can easily stream your media to your legitimately purchased Apple TV. If you’re a pirate, you’d have to go through roundabout programs and hardware to re-create the experience.

Windows 7 is an OS practically made for pirates. Want to display your movies, photos or music on your TV? Bam! Windows Media Player will do that out of the box if you have a Wi-Fi enabled TV, or an Xbox. No extra programs to install: Windows Media Player seamlessly communicates with your Wi-Fi device to display your illegal content in all its glory on your fancy HD TV.

And sharing media is easy, too. Want to download all of your brother’s music? Bam! HomeGroup, an easy networking feature included in Windows 7, will make that super easy between computers running the OS. Immediately upon plugging in to your network with Ethernet or Wi-Fi, HomeGroup will ask if you wish to join the group on the network, allowing you to set up easy file sharing in minutes.

Via Information is Beautiful.

So what did Amazon do? They bought Lexcycle, the developers of Stanza. I would expect that any time now, Amazon will come out with a new version of Kindle for the iPhone that will, in effect, be a rebranded version of Stanza. Some things do get through the cracks, however. Amazon now owns Lexcycle/Stanza, Stanza sells current books through Fictionwise. Fictionwise is owned by Barnes & Noble. I didn’t believe it either, but it’s true. Amazon is making money for B&N, at least for now

Via TUAW.

And here’s me thinking that the tattoo boob job silly was.

Via DeadDog.

The solution is simple, when sending an email to a gmail user include a sentence or two that mentions catastrophic events or tragedies. Google does not use humans to read your email, only computers. These computers search for keywords that trigger the advertisements, however, if they hapen to find a catastrophic event or tragedy Google errs on the side of good taste and removes the ads altogether.

You may want to make mention of what you are doing so the recipient is not alarmed by your sudden Tourette’s-like outburst. You can link to this site by way of explanation if need be.

From now on every email I send will have this line at the bottom of the message

These words are designed to kill advertisements: suicide death 9/11 murder.

Read more at Joe McKay’s.

If you are on Mac X.5, AKA Leopard, and want to change the default login background, open Terminal (Applications -> Utilities) and type following:

cd /System/Library/CoreServices
sudo mv DefaultDesktop.jpg DefaultDesktop_org.jpg
sudo cp /Path/to/picture/you/want/to/use/image.jpg DefaultDesktop.jpg

Note: You will be asked to login with your admin credentials. To make things easier, for the last command, you can drag&drop the image in to the Terminal window.

If you feel even more creative, you can also change the default ‘Apple logo’ during boot with the free BootXChanger application. Return to the coloured Apple!

Download the complete pack here [Rapidshare link]. Pictures above are linked in full size.

Amsterdam police is deeply concerned about a new craze in which vandals toss parked cars from the Smart brand into the city’s canals.

The so-called ‘Smart tossing’ takes place mainly during the weekend, when many youths are out for a night on the town.

According to locally-published newspaper De Telegraaf police has not wanted to publicize this form of vandalism for fear of copy-cat incidents. However, police officers are paying extra attention to Amsterdam’s canals, especially during the weekends.

Source: Dutch Amsterdam.

In a new installment of our Dumbass of the week award the honours go to an American hotel guest of the Hilton Garden near Orlando Airport. After having received a prank call about suspicious gas smell, the hotel guest ripped the toilet tank out in order to find hidden gas mask and afterwards threw he toilet trough the window of the room. He also broke a mirror, bashed trough a wall with a lamp and threw the mattress out.

Damages were as high as $5000 but the hotel did not ask the family to pay for done damages. Police report has been filled against the anonymous prank caller.

More over at Orlando Sentinel.

Photo credit: RedLeader.

I asked for 56 stars and initially adored them. But when my father saw them, he was furious. So I said I fell asleep and the that the tattooist mad made a mistake.

Body artist Tourmiantz now has withdrawn the offer to pay half of the removal costs and also admitted having received ample publicity for his studio during the tattoostargate case. In the future he will insist on getting written permission before tattooing anyone else.

Via The Telegraph.