Endless Innovation

The Olympics and Innovation

The cover story of the current issue of Business Week looks at how the Olympic Games have fostered innovation across a wide range of sectors and industries: "Sometimes innovation pops up in unexpected places—from ticket technology to starting guns. Makers of these goods hope to get an added marketing boost from their ties to the Olympics."

Is it just a coincidence that GE - the parent company of Olympic Games broadcaster NBC - is mentioned prominently in the article?

[image: Business Week] 

Bohemian Rhapsody, the Wall Street re-mix

For those of you who been following the whole sub-prime meltdown on Wall Street and the spectacular collapse of legendary investment bank Bear Stearns this week... a Bear Stearns employee has re-mixed the lyrics of the song "Bohemian Rhapsody" to describe the current fiasco on Wall Street:

SING TO THE TUNE OF 'BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY' BY QUEEN

Is this the real price?
Is this just fantasy?
Financial landslide
No escape from reality 

Open your eyes
And look at your buys and see.
I'm now a poor boy (poor boy)
High-yielding casualty
Because I bought it high, watched it blow
Rating high, value low
Any way the Fed goes
Doesn't really matter to me, to me

Mama - just killed my fund
Quoted CDO's instead
Pulled the trigger, now it's dead
Mama - I had just begun
These CDO's have blown it all away 
Mama - oooh-hoo-ooo
I still wanna buy
I sometimes wish I'd never left Goldman at all.

(guitar solo)

~~~

I see a little silhouette of a Fed
Bernanke! Bernanke! Can you save the whole market?
Monolines and munis - very very frightening me!
Super senior, super senior
Super senior CDO - magnifico

I'm long of subprime, nobody loves me
He's long of subprime CDO fantasy
Spare the margin call you monstrous PB!
Easy come easy go, will you let me go?
Peloton! No - we will not let you go - let him go
Peloton! We will not let you go
(let him go !)
Peloton! We will not let you go - let me go
Will not let you go
let me go (never) Never let you go - let me go Never let me go – ooo
No, no, no, no, No, NO, NO ! -
Oh mama mia, mama mia, mama mia let me go
S&P had the devil put aside
for me
For  me, for me, for me

~~~

So you think you can fund me and spit in my eye?
And then margin call me and leave me to die Oh PB - can't do this to me
Just gotta get out - just gotta get right outta here

Ooh yeah, ooh yeah
No price really matters
No liquidity
Nothing really matters - no price really matters to me
Any way the Fed goes.....

A big hat tip to Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture!

[video: "Bohemian Rhapsody"]

Creative Destruction in Las Vegas

Is this what Joseph Schumpeter had in mind when he coined the phrase "Creative Destruction"? Today, the Las Vegas Strip's first mass-market casino-hotel, Stardust, was imploded to make way for Boyd Gaming Corp.'s $4.4 billion megaresort Echelon: "Hundreds of people partied beneath tents and on makeshift patios before Boyd chairman Bill Boyd's four grandsons pushed a plunger to detonate the former Stardust casino. The blast generated a massive dust cloud that chased the revelers into cars, buses and nearby casinos."

Hey, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

[image: Yahoo! News]

Al Sharpton and the Six Degrees of Separation

Mix together tabloid sensationalism in the world's largest media market; the academic theory that any two people in the U.S. are linked together by, at most, six degrees of separation; and the current fascination with genealogical research powered by the Internet, and you get something like this... Over the weekend, the New York Daily News broke the story that Al Sharpton, the incendiary civil-rights activist, is descended from a slave owned by the relatives of the late US senator Strom Thurmond:

"In a revelation that will stun the nation, the Rev. Al Sharpton, one of America's most powerful black leaders, has unearthed a shattering family secret - his ancestors were slaves owned by relatives of the late South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond. It is an ironic twist of fate that inexorably links one of the most vocal civil rights activists and an icon of Deep South segregation."

Anyway, throughout the article, Sharpton consistently refers to the news as "chilling" and "shocking" and "amazing" -- and agrees to pose on the cover of today's newspaper edition holding a cover of yesterday's edition. In the fine print of the article, the New York Daily News notes that the study into Sharpton's past was sponsored by Ancestry.com. What started as an innocent game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon has now been transformed into a game of political and media exploitation. What's next, Hillary Clinton claiming that her ancient forbears were domestic house servants of the British during the Revolutionary War?

[image: Al Sharpton's secret]