Author: Aaron Weber

I know the financial district, by its very nature, is infested with over-moneyed d-bags, and I was warned in advance that Vintage Lounge was pricey, but fifteen dollars for one shot of Jameson?

As part of my new job, I’ve been reading up a lot on student loans and how they’ve been affected by the recent turmoil in the credit markets. Turns out that a lot of lenders have been pulling back on making student loans, even those guaranteed by the government, because they simply don’t have the liquidity to do more business. FinAid.Org has a list of what happened when, and looking through it, I was surprised to see this:

An Form 8-K SEC filing by CIT Group attributes $120 million in losses to student lending “reserves for private (non-government guaranteed) loans, principally to students of a pilot training school that filed bankruptcy during the quarter.” It also said that “Non-performing assets increased to $87 million from $8 million in the prior quarter reflecting the student loans affected by the bankruptcy of a pilot training school,” and that “Reserves for credit losses for our private student lending portfolio were increased by approximately $120 million (to approximately $138 million at March 31, 2008), primarily due to the previously discussed establishment of a reserve for loans to students of a pilot training school. There are no other large single-school exposures within the private student loan portfolio.”

In other words, they had eighty million dollars in outstanding loans to students from a single for-profit professional-training institute. Sure, that could be students from ten or even twenty years, given consolidation, but even so, you’d have to be pretty much the sole lender for students at a very expensive flight school to build up that kind of exposure. And it seems likely that the decision of the company to cease making student loans was more related to the school’s losses than to anything going on at Bear Stearns. It just seems bizarre.

Another thing I learned today: You can get a federally guaranteed student loan to get a degree in casino blackjack dealing.

Today I spent about six hours reading through letters that get sent to borrowers at every stage of the student-loan repayment process: From “you’re out of school, time to start paying up” through “congratulations, you’re paid in full, keep this for your records,” and all the millions of things that can go wrong along the way. And oh man, are there things that can go wrong. Misdated checks, payments from 45-190 days late, defaults, loan rehab, multiple defaults, wage garnishment, you name it. I have a lot of post-it notes and ideas for how to make the letters clearer. It’s kind of fascinating, and it also makes me feel a lot better about my own financial situation!

Tomorrow: Reading and revising every email newsletter and website.

Well, I just quit my job at MeeVee and jumped ship to do communications for American Student Assistance, a student-loan guarantor. I think it’s the right kind of job for me: Useful, not flashy, heavy on writing. I start Monday and I’m feeling a mix of elation and terror.

The isle of Lesbos is home to some 250,000 Lesbians who are gay, straight, and otherwise, and until now it hasn’t been much of an issue that there’s both a place and an orientation named after that place. But at least three Lesbians are annoyed that people confuse people from Lesbos with, you know, lesbians.

They want the national courts to force a name-change on the Homosexual And Lesbian Community Of Greece. It’s not that they have anything against lesbians, of course. They just want them to be described as homosexual women so as to avoid implying an official endorsement of lesbians by the Lesbian government.

Meanwhile, across Europe: The town of Champagne, Switzerland, is having some similar troubles. Their wines and crackers cannot legally be labeled as coming from Champagne, even though they do, in fact, come from Champagne.

This Chinese desert highway, maintained by hundreds of workers who live totally isolated lives for years at a time, isn’t just an incredible public-works project. It also seems like a uniquely Chinese solution to the problem. Drifting sand? I know, we’ll irrigate the desert along the edges of the highway, and post people to live at the roadside every few kilometers to maintain the irrigation system! For years at a time! Labor is cheap, the desert isn’t worth studying, nobody has to do an environmental impact survey, and nobody has any say in the matter, so why the hell not?

I’m probably generalizing, but I guess like everyone else in the West I’ve been thinking about China a lot recently. The Olympics, of course, are the focal point, but it’s everywhere. I’m halfway through a galley of The Last Days Of Old Beijing, by Michael Meyer, which I got from Bookdwarf, and it goes nicely with Peter Hessler’s book “Oracle Bones” and Fuschia Dunlop’s book on Sichuan cooking and Chinese society.

The video and the explanation of the road I found on Fogonazos – which has a convenient English translation for the text, if not the video.

According to the internets, this is a southern white-faced owl trying to appear larger or smaller than other birds by ruffling its feathers in different ways. The first display in particular seems sort of adorably Cthuloid to me.

I told you so! Evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds! Suck it, Ben Stein!

Scary art: One, Two.

Somehow, NYC is not on fire. I don’t know whether that’s a good sign that calm minds have prevailed, or a bad sign that apathy has ruined us all.

The Blue Zone test says I should buy some long-term care insurance. I don’t recommend the test to anyone else though: There isn’t a good way to unsubscribe once you’ve signed up.

I am so part of the problem.

Every time I think I’m a little too crazy, I come across a story like this one. You know, you could run a simple experiment: If medication makes the voices go away, then they weren’t real. Same with that whole Congolese penis-snatching epidemic.

And every time I think I’m a little too dirty, I come across a story like this one. His lawyer’s argument is that he was just crossing the park to get back to his hotel. But if you’re picked up for “loitering” at 3:45 AM in Central Park with a dildo in your boot, a bag of tina in your pocket, and a rope tied from your cock to your neck, Mary, you are not just taking a shortcut home. But you know what they say: Tina is such a bitch. (Although some people will insist that she’s merely a diva).