Bear Stearns on eBay
Days after the announcement of one of the swiftest corporate falls in history — with 14,000 bank workers expecting to be laid off — some Bear Stearns employees put company memorabilia on the auction block.

According to Forbes, items included, for a limited time, the company's classic stuffed bears, T-shirts and coffee mugs, many of which were available for less than $20, as well as some of the company's infrastructure cast-iron building banks.

"Do not delay — bail a Bear out today," declared one ad for a stuffed Bear Stearns teddy bear, on offer at $5.50. "Be the first to get your paws on classic Bear Stearns memorabilia," the ad continued, adding that the first bear purchased would come with a free New York skyscraper worth about a billion dollars (depending on availability).

The reference was to the Bear Stearns takeover by JPMorgan Chase for a paltry $236 million, which included its corporate headquarters in Manhattan, which alone is thought to be worth $1 billion.

A T-shirt, priced under $20 and available in three sizes, carried the slogan: "I invested my life savings in Bear Stearns, and all I have left is this lousy T-shirt."

Much of this memorabilia, sadly, could now be consider collector's items.

Hangovers and Recessions
There's plenty of bad news out there, what with the panicky Fed and people whispering, screaming or denying the "R" word.

Ever consider the prevalence of hard drinking and the aftereffects during recessions? Slate has:

Hangovers were for a long time associated with stock market crashes; the 1929 crash has been written about as if it were the hangover after the wild 1920s. Whether or not traders are more likely to hit the bottle after precipitous falls in the value of their shares is hard to say — not least because it isn't clear what's going on with markets [...] It's easy to understand why, after a swift turn of fate, some men would resort to drink to numb the pain of the losses. But is it possible that it's not so much the drunkenness these men are after as its aftermath?

Slate's A History of the Hangover notes that Congressional committee chambers in the first half of the 19th century, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sir Kingsley William Amis, the test pilots in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff — all have chronicled, fostered or tried to tackle the unresolved-for-millennia bugaboo that is the hangover.

8 Things Not Taught at Engineering School

8) Other undergrad disciplines have inflated grades, so brilliant engineering students may earn surprisingly low grades while slackers in other departments score straight As for throwing together reports about their favorite zombie flicks.
7) Theory tells you how a circuit works, not why it does not work.
6) Not everything works according to the specs in the data book.
5) Anything practical you learn will be obsolete before you use it.
4) Always try to fix the hardware with software.
3) Engineering is like having an 8 a.m. class and a late afternoon lab every day for the rest of your life.
2) Overtime pay? Ha! What overtime pay?
1) Dilbert is a documentary.

Sources: ASME (Baylor University chapter) and Wired's Science blog

Note: Check out the insane number of comments at Wired's blog, most of which are complaining about their engineering education. Any of them sound familiar?

PSA: Workers' Comp. Fraud is a Felony (and So Are Those Shoes)
A Connecticut corrections officer who was collecting workers' compensation because of a back injury has been suspended from his job and arrested after local news photographers captured him competing in a 40-yard dash ... in high heels.

The 41-year-old man was trying to win Hannah Montana tickets, according to Republican-American (via Obscure Store).

Workers' compensation fraud is a felony, and the officer faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Houdini: First Person to Battle a Robot on Film?
Sarah Connor? The Doctor? Flash Gordon? Only successors in a long list of robot-fighters.

Newly restored Harry Houdini movies show that the magician was actually the first person ever to fight a robot on film:

Source: Boing Boing via Gizmodo

Cheers.