Years ago, I used to play poker with friends every so often. This was well before the current Texas Hold’em craze, so we’d play Draw, Stud, Black Mariah, Low-Hole Chicago, Screw Your Neighbor, what have you. Everyone would buy in for $20, chips would ebb from one side of the table, flow the other way, mass in one pile then split into several, as chips are wont to do.

After an hour or two, we’d end up playing either Guts or Ace-Two-Three for the rest of the night. Both games involved playing for the pot, such that one winner takes the pot, one or more losers match it, and it could grow pretty fast. Inevitably, someone would go in (often with a great hand but not always) and lose a pot that would bust ‘em. If they didn’t have the cash to cover, the table had no choice but to let them write an IOU, otherwise the people that had lost real money wouldn’t have a chance to win it back. So, if the busted player didn’t win their IOU back, someone else would own their paper.

Now here’s the thing about IOU’s on our table. If you had to write one out, well, that was that, you were in the hole and we were okay with that. If you held someone’s IOU, you could sell it to someone else at the table for chips, and the bidding depended on whether or not people thought you were good for it. There were some fairly hilarious scenes where someone watched indignantly as their IOU’s were bought and sold for fifty cents or a quarter on the dollar. In some cases, someone might throw down with “I’ve got twenty Woody-bucks for whoever gets me a beer from the fridge.” Woody’s credit rating was less than stellar.

But under no circumstance was it okay to put someone else’s IOU into a pot in lieu of money. The pot would take your IOU if you were busted, but not until your last chip, dollar, and penny was gone, because everyone else was putting real money on the table. The rare attempts to pull such a stunt resulted in shouting and ridicule, with the offender sheepishly replacing the note with chips or cash.

So here we are, with several “too big too fail” companies, bloated with mountains of IOU’s, trying to force we-the-people to buy them with real money that we get from our I-get-up-every-goddam-day-and-go-to-work-for-a-living wages, at what they say is a fair price. For my family of four, they want us to put up somewhere between eight and fifteen thousand dollars to buy these IOU’s at full face value. And we’re going to have to do this because they took these fucking IOU’s from anyone and everyone, over and over again, and were calling them “chips” the whole fucking time.

These Diamond Jim motherfuckers, these blow-thirty-grand-on-coke-and-strippers Wall Street scum, want my real wages in exchange for their shitty IOU’s. The wages I earn by going to work five days out of seven, fifty weeks out of every fifty-two. The wages from which taxes are taken to keep our roads in repair, to fund my children’s education, to give some relief to folks in a jam and a boost to folks who need a hand getting on their feet. The wages that they all said couldn’t support the tax revenue that might give us single-payer health care, subsidize college tuitions, or build up a respectable transit infrastructure.

Well fuck that. Any bill that comes out of Congress seeking to rescue these dishonest, avaricious sociopathic sons of fucking bitches without getting an equity stake, and without giving me my pound of flesh, is unacceptable. Otherwise, I say we let the whole fucking thing collapse.

I like Bernie Sanders take on it. Too big to fail? Too big to exist.

Olberman’s gonna need a few hundred billion to get outta the hole when this thing’s all over…

I like to think that BoingBoing just knew that I needed to see this today.

A dramatization of how bees communicate, and the disappearing honey bee phenomenon.

(h/t Amsterdamize)

Caught this nugget today in a George Will column (which, incidentally, slams McCain, whoa).

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics.

For the sake of argument, I’ll grant Will most of his assertion, but substitute “the political left” with “anyone with a grain of sense that isn’t getting rich swindling his or her fellow Americans”. Because not wanting to get fucked by Wall Street is, you see, a bipartisan value, and one that grows stronger with each passing day.

Now, George, what are we going to do about the fact that the political right always aims to expand their influence on policy with their money?

So you’re reading the newspaper, or watching some blow-dried model read it to you, and hearing a lot about how completely fucked we are economically. But your electricity’s still on, your car’s still in the driveway, the fridge still has food in it, and you still have to go to work tomorrow. So you’re wondering what it all means, really, to folks like us that don’t work at the smoking hole in the ground formerly known as Lehman Brothers.

Here’s what it means. Hopefully it doesn’t mean that we’ll be having lots of nostalgic conversations in 2020 about how we spent most of the 10’s selling used pieces of string on the street corner.

First, Boston loses its shit over a LiteBrite marketing campaign. Then, a year ago, a young woman wearing LED’s on her sweatshirt, carrying a Playdoh rose, makes Logan Airport police shit their pants and sets the nation’s Homeland Security Threat Level to “Orange”. Here’s her side of the story a year later.

“But but but, she had little lights on her sweatshirt!” Home of the brave, indeed.

We took a ride this weekend a short ways up the C&O Canal to Fletcher’s Boathouse. I may write it up later, but there’s a good chance I won’t have time until it’s no longer fresh in my head, so here’s a full-size slideshow. Care for a small teaser? Okidoke, here y’are:

It was a splendid day, we had a great ride through Columbia Heights, Rock Creek Park, the C&O Canal Trail, back through Georgetown, down to the National Mall via the Lincoln and Washington Monuments, and back up to Brookland via 4th St NE for a little over 21 miles of toddler-laden longtail touring.

This would make a spectacular cargobike convoy day tour.