Those who are familiar with me know that I'm a venerable Whitman's Sampler of hate, containing a wide assortment of slightly different topics in which I can no doubt hate upon. Speaking of which, have you ever notified that there is no actual box of Whitman's candies, only the Whitman's Sampler? Sampler implies that there are unique groups of confections available for sale somewhere, and the Whitman's Sampler is a conflation of all these different kinds of specialized candies. Kind of like how Red Lobster has the Seafood Sampler. However, notice that one never sees a box of Whitman's candies for sale – only the Whitman's Sampler. The whole thing makes no sense. In any event, the point is I hate on things, and today's topic deals with my new bank, Chase.

About five months ago, Washington Mutual, my former bank, had a minor flaw in their business model, in the sense that they went bankrupt. JPMorgan Chase decided to buy them at a discount rate, which meant all the Washington Mutuals would become Chase banks. This was all fine and good, until Chase decided that they needed everything converted from the old Washington Mutual to the new Chase. All the signs came down, all the websites changed, and as of last Saturday, they decided to merge the Washington Mutual customer deposits into the Chase customer deposits. This would be okay if they did it, say, in the middle of the night, and they were quick and efficient about it. However, they decided to do it at 4:00pm on a Saturday. All their ATMs no longer functioned, and of course they closed all their branches so no one could have access to their hard-earned capital. No one, including me, could get access to his or her money at all. Somehow I am the only one who has a problem with this. Some guy named Lefty could have been threatening me with the business unless I paid him off, and I wouldn't have been able to do it, and then would have found myself at the bottom of a river sleeping with the fishes. So thanks JPMorgan Chase for almost killing me last Saturday. I look forward to doing business with you in the coming years.

It's that time of year again – the time in which I congratulate myself for being able to afford the 35 dollars a year it takes to have my unique brand of humor and observation placed on the intertubes. You might have noticed the lack of updates here, except for Burson's posts, whose sole function is to report about sports and sports-like information. This reminds me, are you aware that there is a television program that airs after Portland Trail Blazer games entitled Talkin' Ball? And yes, they really don't include the 'g' in talking. They also don't specify what ball they are indeed talkin'. It could be football, baseball, golf, softball, tennis, croquet, and maybe even cricket. In fact, they could even been talkin' 'bout quidditch. I think quidditch uses flying balls. That's a little bit like an Earth ball. And speaking about the Earth, am I the only one who actually despises Earth Day? I don't really care about the Earth. As someone who isn't going to have kids, I have no vested interest in saving the Earth. When I die, it will be someone else's problem. Let them deal with it. Also, if global warming wiped out all the major cities that were less than 100 feet above sea level, I think that would be a positive thing. Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City can all eat a full bag of it. Speaking of eating a full bag of it, were you aware that there were mass demonstrations of people protesting high taxes in major cities, and they called them tea parties? I was under the impression that everyone loved paying his or her taxes. They referred to this act of civil disobedience as teabagging, which clearly means that no one who organized these protests were under the age of 40. Here is a link to the best article I have ever read regarding this issue, which includes a summary from MSNBC's David Shuster about said teabagging:

He described the parties as simultaneously "full-throated" and "toothless," and continued: "They want to give President Obama a strong tongue-lashing and lick government spending." Shuster also noted how the protesters "whipped out" the demonstrations this past weekend.

Genius. If only they could make every important issue involve crude sexual acts. Also, has anyone else been receiving a large amount of spam recently? Also, doesn't this spam seems awfully specific toward your interests? I've had about 20 emails per day these last few weeks offering me Vicodin, Valium, Xanax, and Zoloft overnighted to me without a prescription. Perhaps Google is the one who sends out these spams based off one's search history. The whole thing fills me with fear and anxiety. If only there were something I could take that would fix that.

Well, that's about it. I can't release too much anger and bitterness in one post. After all, that would make me look like a crazy person, know what I mean? Uhh, yeah, and go!

Few things get me more riled up than people who shouldn't be having kids. People seem to just keep on pumping them out. In this great nation of ours there seems to be a fascination with extremely large families, and I can't tell if the cultural zeitgeist is bullish or bearish on this trend. When I'm trying to watch a marathon of What Not To Wear, as is my want, I'll often see promos on TLC for Jon & Kate Plus 8, a program that follows the life of a couple whom need to be sterilized, and their eight children, whom will probably need to be sterilized in the future. This program is apparently the second highest rated show on the network, according to an uncited line on Wikipedia (which is good enough for me), so some group of idiots are watching. I would rather watch The Hills than that crap, and The Hills makes me feel like I'm about to suffer an aneurysm. Shame on you America – you shouldn't be encouraging them.

The reason for this post was an article that appeared on the Today Show, home to one of my various enemies. The article focused on the daily life of the Duggars family, a group of tool-users from Arkansas. This family has 17 children, with one more on the way. They are also schilling a book, of course. I've found that in life, the amount of children one has is inversely proportional to the IQ of said person. A person or couple with zero, one, or two children? May or may not be smart. A person or couple with more than four children? Always going to be an idiot. Dumb people are always the most fertile. The husband's name is apparently Jim Bob Duggars, so I'm going to make a wild guess and say that he's not anyone's idea of brilliant. Anyone with two first names is probably not going to be a candidate for MENSA.

In any event, stop having so many goddamn kids, douchebags. First of all, sex with the wife must be like trying to hump it out with a bowl of warm water after 17 kids. Secondly, they do have these things called condoms. Better yet, how about a vasectomy? I'll do it myself for free – all I need is some duct tape and a soldering iron. 

Has the current economic crisis got you down? Has the abrupt drop in the stock market have you baffled? Are you confused as to why your Roth IRA is no longer worth anything? Have you lost so much money that your 401(k) is no longer your retirement savings, but rather the model of assault rifle that you plan to off yourself with? Fear not my friends, because wyvern920 is here to make sense of these crazy economic times.

I wrote of huge long thing about how the banking crisis got started, and why it is happening. However, after reading it, I realized that it wasn't funny. When George Bailey references are the only comedic traction one can get, it is time to move on. You can read the whole thing here if you want. Here is the condensed version of what I wrote; basically a bunch of banks gave a lot of money to people who frequent payday loan businesses, which use inflatable waving arm balloons to draw attention to themselves. These people bought homes with the money. The homes dropped in value. They decided to let the bank take their home since they owed too much versus what they were worth, and now all the banks are bleeding money. Banks then stopped lending money to everyone, and since our entire economic system is based on spending money we don't have, everything went into the toilet. This caused profits to go down in almost every sector of the economy.

As a brief aside, a hedge fund is a lot like a mutual fund, except that you are not allowed to be a part of it. It's the equivalent of a super exclusive country club, except not only are Jews allowed, but they make up the primary membership. Bunches of rich people pool their money together, and they have some guy invest it for them. In exchange for a share of the profits, the guy promises to beat the stock market return by an obscene amount. So when the profits of businesses went down, stocks reflected this. All the rich people got scared and started demanding their money back, which meant that hedge funds had to sell all their assets. Rich people make up a large percentage of the money in the stock market and they were all selling at once, and consequently every tanked.

So to get the stock market rolling again, the government decided to spend $700 billion in money we don't have to give to people. Rather than giving this money to homeowners so they could renegotiate their home loan with the bank at a lower interest rate, the government decided to give the money to banks. It's called trickle-down economics, and it is the equivalent of getting one to the face. Some people have claimed that when the government takes a stake of ownership in a business it's basically socialism, but those people are wrong. Socialism is collecting money and redistributing it to people. We're merely collecting money and redistribution to corporations. It's only socialism when you give it to average people. I'm so glad that I don't pay taxes – otherwise I would be pissed about this.

The automakers (not all of them, just the bad one i.e. the American ones) then decided they needed money to build more cars that no one wants to buys. Apparently the H3 Hummer or the Canyonero just weren't selling anymore. Luckily, the government didn't give them a bailout (as of now, and I hope it stays that way). I don't understand why not – doesn't it make sense to give money to companies that are run poorly and lose billions of dollars a quarter? My Fundamentalist Christian homosexual abortion service business lost money, but it didn't get a bailout. I can't figure out why it failed either. Oh well. They say a lot of people would lose their jobs if the automakers fail, but the way you could fix that is in the following way: take the money received from tariffs on foreign cars (the ones that are in place to make domestic cars more competitive. Hah!) and give them back to the foreign automakers as a tax incentive to build cars in Detroit. Problem solved. I will say that if the automakers are allowed to fail, the stock market is going to drop by a huge amount. It would probably lose 20%, or until trading halted, which it is supposed to do in times of crashes. I think it would be kind of exciting to watch. I don't need to retire, so what do I care? Plus, seeing rich people panic makes me happy. It's an upper.

Now that businesses are lining up for a piece of that handout pie, I've decided I'm going to get in on this. I'm officially declaring this website a bank holding company, with depositors and home assets. I've found the application (As a quick note, this application seems exceedingly short for the amount of money involved in this crisis) to apply for TARP (Troubled Asset Recovery Program), and I am going to ask for a cool million – I'm not greedy after all. By the time the government figures out that this site isn't a real bank, I will be long gone to Mexico using the name wyvierno920. It's the perfect plan.

Often times, people will say that those who can't do teach, and those who can't teach teach gym. However, Corporate America is the only place I know where one can make millions of dollars a year as a CEO and epic fail at your job, only to get a severance package worth millions of dollars. Clearly if I wasn't going to be a hedge fun manager, I would be a CEO. I bet I could only lose half as much as the other guys. I think that qualifies for a raise. 

Last week, Newsweek had a fascinating article about the rise of geeks in the pop culture, and more specifically, the rise of female geeks. I would encourage all of you to read it, but I wouldn't invest that much time in doing so. The article is a bit tedious, even boring if you will. It does however bring up a wide range of responses and questions.

First off, the article confuses the terms geek and nerd. These two things are not interchangeable – they can be totally different things. Most people probably don't even think that there is a difference, but there is. A geek is anyone that is passionate about a certain subject. It is generally used in pop culture to describe someone who is into comic books, science fiction & fantasy novels, Dungeons & Dragons, or video games. However, a geek could hypothetically be passionate about anything, such as cars, music, or even Tae-Bo. Generally, a geek will be socially awkward to an extent, but is able to get along extremely well with other geeks.

All of this differs from nerds in the following ways: a nerd is someone who generally has a higher than average IQ, knows a lot about computers, and is extremely good at mathematics and science. Nerds generally tend to be social outcasts, have terrible social skills, and have difficulty in associating with others – generally because the vast amount of humanity are borderline retarded, and are not worth the time of day. One can be a geek, a nerd, or a geek and a nerd. However, just because one is a nerd doesn't mean that they are geek and vice-versa. These are pretty clear-cut differences. If anyone tries to tell you otherwise, they are lying – be sure to kick them in the junk for me.

Now that we have that cleared up, there is the matter of the content of the article: the thesis that there is a rise of girls that are "smart, techie, and hot". Just because there are three girls in Boston that are smart, and happen to be attractive doesn't mean that there is a huge social movement afoot. Don't take this as resentment however; I wish there were more nerd girls. Nerd girls are hot. I just don't see any wherever I go. I see a lot more Heidi Montag-wannabes than I do honest-to-God nerd girls. I don't think they really exist; they are simply a concept made up by the media. Kinda like SARS, killer African bees, or Amy Winehouse.

In conclusion, nerd girls don't really exist – they are simply something made up by the media in order to move papers. However, if they do exist, and you are one, be sure to drop me a line to prove your existence… maybe a picture too. Err, yeah.

The Today Show ran a story about a vehicle safety bill in Congress that is supposed to protect children. The focal point of the story is some dad who accidentally ran over his child in the family SUV. Because of his mistake, the government wants to force automakers to install rearview monitors or alerts that warn the driver what is behind the vehicle when the vehicle is backing up. They also want to install a protection that forces a driver to press down the brake to be able to put the vehicle into gear, thus preventing children from putting the vehicle into neutral. Finally, they want to have sensors in power windows that detect if a head is in the way when the window is rolling up.

It's times like these that my seething compressed black ball of rage erupts. I hate everyone and everything in this story. A bunch of goddamn idiots cause inconvenience for everyone. First point: because some idiot father can't keep track of his kid, and can't be bothered to actually look behind his goddamn SUV, now everyone has to be bothered. Second point: why should we press down the brake to put the car into gear? How about using the parking brake douche? And if your kid puts the car into gear and releases the parking brake, then I don't really think that it's Ford's problem; it's your goddamn problem. Control your little bastard of a child. Finally: why do we need detectors in power windows? Last time I checked, all vehicles with power windows have this thing called a 'child lock' that prevents children from using the windows. Technology should not be a substitute for poor parenting, unless that technology is forced sterilization.

Millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett has gone missing after his single-engine plane disappeared around the hellhole known as western Nevada. He was apparently scouting the terrain to set some other world record for something that no one cares about.

I don't know, but for some reason I've always hated Steve Fossett. Ever since I was little I would have this unexplained loathing for everything he does. The first time I remember hearing about him was when he was trying to ride his goddamned balloon around the world. The problem is that he would always fail, and we would be subjected to news stories detailing this failure. The sad thing is no one cares about who traveled around the world in a balloon. I don't care, and you sure as hell don't care. You know who cares, besides the man himself? Fifth grade boys who borrow the Guinness Book Of World Records from the library and go through the pages meticulously trying to find stupid records that no one cares about.

The other thing he did was to fly around the world once without refueling. Too bad he did it when no one really cared, and when he didn't have a son young enough to kidnap. Magellan should have just behaved like all old people; he should have sat around in a retirement home lamenting how no one visits him, play bingo, and keep around old butterscotch candies.

So just remember – when they find him dead, and the media starts talking about all his accomplishments, keep in mind that none of them were worth anything, and his entire life was pointless. The End

My friends, something is rotten in the state of Oregon. Not only has Oregon been royally screwed out of a Kwik-E-Mart location, but also now we won't even play host to the world premiere of "The Simpsons Movie". First of all, how can Portland of all places not get a Kwik-E-Mart? Take a look at the list of cities that do have one. Why does Los Angeles get two? Screw them. Orlando, Florida? No one is even young enough there to know what the hell "The Simpsons" are. They are more concerned about the early bird special at Dennys. Vancouver, BC? Why should the Godless Canadians get one? They can take their socialized medicine and eat me. New York City? There was an episode that was solely based on how much Homer hated New York. Las Vegas? The Portland Metropolitan Area is 17% bigger than Las Vegas. The whole thing just infuriates me to no end. The Simpsons were created here, and yet we get dicked. I mean even Washington, DC got one. I wasn't aware that the Kwik-E-Marts were going to be selling handguns and crack. Son of a bitch.

And now comes word that "The Simpsons Movie" premiere isn't even happening here. Goddamn Springfield, Vermont beat out Springfield, Oregon. Now, granted, Springfield, Oregon is a bit of a dump, but where else should it take place? Not some ice cream loving hippie state if you ask me. This whole thing has left me bitter and angry.

In other news, keeping in mind that I don't want you supporting 7-11 after their great misstep in not giving the city that "The Simpsons" universe is based on a Goddamn Kwik-E-Mart, but you can help reduce their profit margin by getting a free 7.11 oz Slurpee today, 07-11-2007. Also, I believe Beck takes one more step toward manhood. Why not send him some love?