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Posts Tagged “

Recession

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save your life, cheap!

How The He's Just Not That Into You Guy Actually Helped Me Get Over My (Married) (Strip Club DJ) Ex-Boyfriend

Tormented? Driven witless? 99 problems but therapy bills ain't one? Welcome to "Save Your Life, Cheap!" in which we write about the dumb things that get America's uninsured through hard times. AA meetings, James Joyce, Ani di Franco, suicide hotlines…anything nonalcoholic can apply, the more embarrassing the better. Which brings me to: self-help. In our first installment, Sephora Spy's Loren Hunt reviews the $1 book that got her through the worst breakup ever.

So, it's probably safe to make the baseline assumption that self-help books are not the kind of thing that anyone reads because they think it's cool. For some reason, self-loathing became more inherently cool than trying to fix problems, which would explain the aura of lameness surrounding self-help books: the corny covers, the corny catchphrases, the corny jacket photos, and the corny titles, which are invariably presented in a corny (and really large, readable) font. There are no cool self-help books. Cool people do not write self-help books. Happy people write them. And they could give a fuck who thinks they're cool. And you know who else doesn't give a fuck who thinks they're cool? A 23-year-old stripper who just used up every last shred of self-regard finally "breaking up" with the three-timing strip club DJ she had been fucking for the past year. And that, friends, is how I came to appreciate It's Called A Breakup Because It's Broken, the second offering from Greg Berendt of He's Just Not That Into You fame.

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3:30 PM on Thu Jun 26 2008
By Moe
9,321 views, 101 comments

A Little Ribald Humor... On Monday we posed the question as to whether it was advisable for balding men to 1. do nothing 2. spend thousands of dollars on emasculating and/or libido-killing drugs/procedures or 3. just shave their heads a la Mike Bibby. Well, Gramercy Tavern chef Tom Colicchio's wife brought up a point in favor of the lattermost option that you can read if you click his bald mug. [NY Mag]

91 comments

I am generally ashamed of my weakness for those "what's in your bag" features, since they sort of represent the basest forms of useless information purveying/commodity fetishism, but. Sometimes they offer exotic little ripples of texture — sort of like Bumble & Bumble Surf Spray, only without the ensuing dreadlocks — as the July Marie Claire's exploration into the contents of Kristen Bell's beach tote demonstrates. Click the pic for more worldly possessions, and be sure not to miss #8.

80 comments

the hairline recession

Bald Dudes And You: 6 Male Patterns To Discuss

Sunday's Page Six Magazine offers up a first-person Balding Dudes and the Bonerkilling Drugs They Take To Stop Balding So They Can Get More Women To Embark Upon Unsatisfying Sex Romps With Them. Of course, by "investigate" I mean "not really," since it's Page Six Magazine and the story is basically that the author, Jeff Novich, starts balding, then spends five grand on Propecia, but gets neurotic when he hears that Propecia is supposed to lower your sex drive, I guess because baldness is linked to an overabundance of testosterone in your hair follicles, so in addition to Propecia, a lot of guys use Viagra and just learn to deal with sex lasting longer. Jeff even uses it as a pickup line (i.e. "I've never experienced any impotence problems, but don't take my word for it.") (Yeah, it didn't work.) Anyway, there are a few obvious discussion topics here, starting with "What is it about bald dudes?" moving all the way down to… "Doesn't Jeff know that getting Propecia covered is one of the easiest forms of insurance fraud known to modern emasculated man? More »

3:00 PM on Mon Jun 9 2008
By Moe
8,288 views, 138 comments

Latest by katiebug: my husband is bald and it's hot. It works when they just shave their heads and embrace it. It's super manly and they never have bad hair (seriously no hair is so much better than bad hair). more »

news roundup

Would It Kill You, America, To "Surprise Us, And Let A Black Man Guide Us"?

  • Nas wrote a song about Barack Obama and sampled Tupac. I couldn't figure out what the fuck Tupac was saying but I finally found the lyrics and apparently it's "Although it seems heaven-sent we ain't ready to have a black president." Then Nas references Calvin Coolidge to remind you, oh yeah, maybe we have gotten a little less racist since Tupac "died", which got me wondering, has hip-hop gotten less misogynist since Oochie Wally Wally? [XXL]
  • Yeah and meanwhile some people who have not gotten less racist since the nineties work for the Clinton campaign, according to erstwhile Hillary supporter Rob Andrews, who now says her campaign was…well, uh, it's kind of vague, but whatever it was, it didn't work out, so I guess I should just move on to… [NJ]
  • How it was a bad day out in the economy. The unemployment rate hit 5.5%, which is pretty bad when you consider how many people hate their jobs — unrelated: was anyone else unaware that the world's highest jobless rate belongs to Nauru? — and it was the biggest month-to-month rise in 22 years. Just in time for graduation! And, you know, the Dow fell 400 points and oil futures rose eleven bucks. [WSJ]
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7:00 PM on Fri Jun 6 2008
By Moe
7,047 views, 336 comments

Latest by citymuse: @circlelinelovah: It's really a shame that his religion is even an issue. I long for the day when we won't even blink an eye voting for an atheist for POTUS. @SinisterRouge: And all I'm saying is, making a blanket statement more »

news roundup

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Hates His Nose In This Picture

  • Khalid Sheikh Mohammed thinks the courtroom artist drew his nose too wide. He lost a bunch of weight on the Guantanamo diet and totally turns out to be one of those secretly vain terror masterminds. [USA Today]
  • This will shock you: Bob Dylan is voting for Barack Obama. Okay, I was kidding about the shocked part. [Times]
  • There was this whole movement afoot to strongarm Barry into picking Hillary over some of his other bros but I think Hillary took a step back and said, "You know, this is bullshit, I don't care anymore, if he wants me he wants me," and although the hardest part about doing that is always the realization that he's probably gonna be all "It ain't me babe," I'm glad she did that. [NY Times]
  • You just have to accept that in the Catholic Church shit takes awhile, and that if a priest is accused of pedophilia it might take a few years or even decades to remove him. Now, if he mocks Hillary Clinton and it ends up on YouTube, on the other hand, now that is when you gotta sever all ties right away. [Chicago Tribune] [The Root]
  • Well this is a new one: alcohol cutting your risk of arthritis. I pretty much always thought gout was arthritis, and that you get that from wine, so this is pretty awesome news, not that I would even notice I had arthritis what with the shakes and whatnot. [BBC]
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6:40 PM on Thu Jun 5 2008
By Moe
3,929 views, 322 comments

Latest by n/a: I think it's interesting that out of all the rights the US government has rifled away from their "terrorist" captives, they've maintained the always-strange right of approving your court room rendering (Nicole Richie, incidentally, also exercised the "redraw" command on more »

Doggone Shames

Animals Are The Latest Casualties Of The Sagging American Economy

Since you're always haranguing us to show more pictures of puppies, here you go…but it goes with a totally depressing story about the recession. According to the Associated Press, pets have been some of the the littlest, non-human victims of skyrocketing food prices and the housing crisis. The AP digs up a tearful grandma, Diana Bardsley of Franklin, Massachusetts, whose Social Security income doesn't stretch far enough to feed her spaniel and her two Siamese cats. "I know a lot of people will probably say, 'Well, if you don't have enough money to be able to feed your animals, that you shouldn't have pets,'''Bardsley says, and adds, "Just because financially you may go downhill a little or a lot, doesn't necessarily mean you have to give up the part of your family that you love." If that little anecdote doesn't crack your stony exterior, maybe this will. More »

9:30 AM on Tue Jun 3 2008
By Jessica
6,495 views, 188 comments

Latest by bluepotatoes66: @howdybeep (runs with monkey wrenches): Things like that make me really upset. All of the cats that have been in my life for more than about a year have been black kitties. And they were so wonderful. more »

crap email from a jobseeker

Do The Nation's Jobless A Favor: Send Us Your Desperate Cover Letters!

The economy is imploding! And today's New York Times is here to tell us people are so fucking desperate for work they are resorting to insane cover letters. “I will give you more than a million dollars for a well-paid sales job," one guy wrote. A PR lady wrote a David Letterman-style Top 10 list. User-generated content idea time! See, I personally am something of a master of the desperate cover letter genre, having had approximately 93 jobs and the obsessive need to tailor them ever-so-specifically to the job at hand that I rarely even end up sending them, hence the desperation emanating from the ones I actually do, because by that point I am fucking broke as fuck. So readers, if you would allow me to take the unseemly step of commencing a series of other authors' works by a few paragraphs from my own great cover letter canon (and the unseemlier step of allowing how I'm reminding myself of Norman Mailer in the process), I'm sharing with you my Jezebel cover letter. More »

3:00 PM on Thu May 29 2008
By Moe
11,559 views, 160 comments

Latest by awinoforever: this just motivated me to write a long(ish but tolerable) cover letter for this job that i am PERFECT for at an art museum in louisville. like the kind of thing where you read the job description and you're like more »

news roundup

Only Coloreds And Communists Are Going To Vote For Obama, Cont'd…

  • "Whether it’s Billy Ayers or Bernadine Dohrn, Tom Hayden or Jane Fonda, or any of the other lesser-knowns, 60s Marxist radicals are lining up behind Obama." [National Review]
  • And like check this quote from Francis Fukuyama that acid-dropping borderline ecoterrorist: "It needs to do some symbolic things like, we shouldn't torture people." [Yahoo! News]
  • "I haven't sat through a single Obama speech without ideologically wincing at something…So why do I find myself still longing for him to win?" (Wild guess: he is hot.) [Andrew Sullivan]
  • And another Obamican meme blowing up the internet now. [Excons.org]
  • McCain gave a speech on nukes that was somewhere to the left of Bush and to the right of the Obama/Kissinger (?) side of things and it was high on protesters and low on specifics except that he would "never surrender in Iraq." Oh, Bravo. [Wash Post]
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6:30 PM on Tue May 27 2008
By Moe
1,873 views, 60 comments

Latest by watereatsrock: COLOREDS????? thanks for ruining my day. more »

crappy hour

War Is Hell, But Troops Are Hot!

Welcome back reader(s.) While you were drinking Bloody Marys to soothe the damage inflicted by your spirited displays of appreciation for our troops and/or the house you bought last year, this guy was fighting the Taliban. Yes there are still 34,000 American troops doing that! But supposedly, this time, they are winning, which would sort of lend credence to Bill Kristol's assertion that the media is covering up the inspiring success story that is the war, which is sort of why I don't really buy it, since Bill Kristol's assertions about media cover ups are probably about as grounded in reality as Bill Clinton's assertions about media cover ups, which is to say: yesterday Bill Clinton said the media was covering up the fact that Obama can't win. This stands in contrast to Hillary, who thinks he might win as long as he doesn't get assassinated first like back in 1968, the year two Egyptian med school students met and formed the modern-day jihad movement. Much has changed since then, as stories in this week's New Yorker and New Republic about jihadists' disenchantment with killing people will illuminate (also for instance, Megan and I were born.) So your life could be complete upon clicking through to the jump! More »

10:30 AM on Tue May 27 2008
By Moe
3,909 views, 124 comments

Latest by n/a: @Russell's old room: Yes, I do. A phony apology is meaningless. These are people who were part of a group who blew up buildings 35+ years ago, during an intensely radical time in our history. What they did has to be viewed more »

i thee dread

Can't Afford Your Dream Wedding? Take Out A Bridal Loan!

April marks the fourth straight month of job losses in the United States, so what better way to cheer yourself up than to take out a massive wedding loan to finance the princess fantasy of your dreams! Those fuddy-duddy finance nerds at The Street want to rain on your wedding parade, though; they point out that taking out a wedding loan is a fucking terrible idea. "While getting a wedding loan may seem like a good way to bridge any shortfall a couple has, it's one of the biggest financial mistakes they can make," says writer Jeffery Strain. "There is nothing worse than starting off married life tens of thousands of dollars in debt, especially if student loans and other debt is also being brought into the marriage." More »

12:00 PM on Thu May 15 2008
By Jessica
6,638 views, 183 comments

Latest by n/a: We did what we could afford, which was get married on my best friend's back porch, with me in an old dress, officiated by a co-worker who used to be a judge. Affordable, but sad; it's been nearly four more »

Recession Possessions A recession is coming, and hoarding rice is not going to take your makeup off at night. An occasional series by Sephora Spy stenographer Loren Hunt on the cheap beauty supplies that will carry you through a credit crisis. •Cetaphil Gentle Skin Cleanser: So ubiquitous that there is probably not a woman over 25 who has not already tried it, Cetaphil Gentle Skin Cleanser has made its name by being the all-purpose, can't-fuck-it-up, good-for-everyone workhorse of the skin cleanser universe...[Click pic for more]

139 comments

news roundup

Yeah, Your Day Wasn't Really That Bad After All

  • The Sichuan earthquake has probably killed 9,000 people, and let 80 tons of toxic liquid ammonia out into the streets, but if I know you guys it's the panda stuff that is really going to get to you. [Wash Post]
  • But — thanks investment banks! — it probably won't have that big an impact on the economy! [WSJ]
  • Or Beijing's standing as the number one toilet metropolis. [Xinhua]
  • Meanwhile in Burma the UN is projecting a death toll of 100,000, and Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon can't get junta leader Than Shwe on the phone so he actually just sent a letter, and the US is still trying to get them to accept aid at all...[Wash Post]
  • Hillary is going to win the white vote by landslide margins in West Virginia because they're still coming to grips with the notion of the first Muslim president down there. [FT]
  • Well it's about time Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson vowed lifelong commitment.[US Weekly]
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6:30 PM on Mon May 12 2008
By Moe
2,574 views, 71 comments

Latest by n/a: Um, people liked the Clinton economy/ideals/reforms. A lot of people I've spoken to that are Democrats feel that Barack doesn't have enough experience or they don't know him well enough to vote for him. For most, it isn't about him more »

jezenomics

American Women Are Gaining (Low Wage, Dead End) Jobs As Economy Falters

When it comes to American women and the potential and/or already-existing recession, there's good news, and there's bad news. The good news, according to Business Week: American women aged 20 and up gained nearly 300,000 jobs from November to April, while American men in the same age demographic lost nearly 700,000 jobs in that time period. In addition, in the private sector, the employment level for women went from 58.1% to 58.3%. Now the bad news! The jobs these women are getting aren't particularly good ones. Eileen Appelbaum, director of Rutgers University's Center for Women & Work, tells BW, "We had an expansion of jobs for home health aides, retail clerks, child-care workers. They're low-wage, they're dead-end, and they don't have any benefits." In addition, the pay gap is widening: the past year, median weekly earnings for men rose 4.6%, while it only grew 3.1% for women. Over 75% of those making over $100,000 are men, BW notes, even though women are graduating from college at higher rates. So what does this mean for the economy as a whole? More »

9:30 AM on Thu May 8 2008
By Jessica
2,722 views, 122 comments

Great American Exports The U.S. economy may be lagging right now but some U.S. companies are making up for lost profits by selling their products overseas. The eye- and skin-care products company Allergan has seen it's overseas Botox sales rise and the company has more than doubled its net income. Thank God for the insecurities of Latin American, European, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern women: Their fear of natural aging will keep the beauty industrial complex afloat! Is their any other neurotic beauty obsession we can export to these people? Gluten-free diets? Vagina "reconstruction" surgery? Pubic hair dye?[WSJ]

68 comments

recession possessions

Introducing Recession Possessions, Our Guide To Beauty Products That'll Get You Through Your Credit Crisis

A recession is coming! Oil and food prices are skyrocketing! Consumer confidence has never been lower! (Well, it has, but not since, like, Karen Carpenter was alive.) Which brings us to: rice. Rice is the main thing Americans have been stockpiling in case of economic apocalypse. Have you no imagination, America? Is RICE going to exfoliate your skin at night? Okay, possibly, but rice is NOT going to flush your cheeks with a healthy glow, it is not going to make your eyelashes thicker, and when your water gets turned off for nonpayment, it is not going to mask your body odor! Which is why we're introducing Recession Possessions, a series in which Sephora Spy stenographer and chronic broke person Loren Hunt offers a few of her own personal cheapo drugstore classic products to get you through the rough times. More »

4:00 PM on Tue May 6 2008
By Moe
14,244 views, 282 comments

Latest by jezebelacious: @ASmallTurnip: I got a really fabulous cut at...>gulp< Harrod's a couple of years ago. It was 50 quid then and may be ri-dick-ulous prices now, but you get all the nice stuff: beverage, scalp massage, veddy civilized atmosphere, unlike the more »

the week that was

This Week, People Scared Us And We Scared People

• We met an Austrian man who locked his daughter and their children in his cellar for 24 years. Sometimes the eyebrows can reveal the psychopath inside! • Sometimes we eat our trash, it is sort of like recycling! • We told old people to get off Facebook or at least un-tag us from unflattering boozy pictures! • Miley posed in a sort-of sexual picture in Vanity Fair, Disney blamed the lesbian. • But where was the widespread outrage when Annie Leibovitz was casually racist, again and again and again? • Tyra introduced us to a dad who not only pimps out his daughter but also gives her at-home bikini waxes. • We met 5 types of extreme shoppers, all of them annoying! • We met some scrappy young sorority girls who brand pledges in the groin with forks. • We took a look back at our favorite Tyra episodes with almost as much glee as she has in talking about herself. • We told Elisabeth Hasselbeck to STFU already. • We found out we aren't in a recession! But the world is going to shit. • Oh yeah! And Mimi got married! And, uh Latina magazine broke the story?

4:40 PM on Fri May 2 2008
By maria
893 views, 2 comments

Latest by justwanttohave: Disney probably couldn't recognize how the racist comments would be a worse insult, because they couldn't "register" a racist comment... That's what comes from living in The OC! more »

jezenomics

7 Reasons This Is Not A Recession

Surely you've heard by now but we'll pat our aching, aging backs one more time because we're just so elated — America is NOT IN A RECESSION! The American Gross Domestic Product actually grew last quarter, which was a huge disappointment to the whining Marxist doomsayers so intent on making Americans forget they are living in the greatest civilization that ever danced with the stars. Well, we've seen the data, Americans. We've scanned the fine print and scoured the blogosphere so you wouldn't have to, and we are here to tell you: it's true. The American economy grew last quarter, and we know exactly why. So don't listen to the haters! In lieu of the usual evening news roundup, Jezebel is here to bring you the seven reasons this great nation is still on the upswing. More »

6:30 PM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Moe
21,445 views, 68 comments

Latest by B_boy: @Moe: Don't say that. I've more or less abandoned my "Finance" tab on iGoogle because of your economic-insights delivered in a refreshingly jaded, but also cavalier and witty format. No more CNNmoney, WSJ.com business, Morningstar, "The Street", none of it. more »

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