Donald Trump: Magnificent Bastard

By Scott Adams

It has come to my attention that there are still a few people in the world that I have not offended. I’d like to fix that by endorsing Donald Trump for president. But not for the reasons you might think.

This morning I read a news item saying that some folks at NBC think Trump might be pretending to run for president to boost ratings. The story noted that ratings for his TV show are up 20% lately. I laughed out loud because sometimes I forget that at least half the country doesn’t realize he’s just screwing with the media.

The magnificent part of this whole thing is that he’s putting no effort whatsoever into concealing his prank. That’s what I love about the guy. He knows that no level of clownery in a field of clowns will single him out as the one clown that doesn’t really mean it.

Take Trump’s recent empathy with the so-called birthers. That’s the most brilliant part of his plan. It’s a dead giveaway that he’s just screwing with the media, and it has the added benefit of concentrating most of their attention on that one trivial issue. He doesn’t even need to study up on the other issues. While Romney is writing position papers, Trump is golfing.

If you are not a student of practical jokes, you might not know they have a specific formula. A proper practical joke is more than a surprise or a lie. The magic part of the prank formula involves leaving enormous clues that are obvious to everyone but the target of the prank.

For example, if you have a coworker who likes to whistle little tunes in his cubicle, his blind spot is that he imagines other people are impressed and delighted by his whistling prowess. You could use that blind spot to engineer your prank. For example, you might have a friend call this fellow at work, pretending to be the director of the local symphony. Your co-conspirator could say the symphony is looking for an accomplished whistler to do a solo when the President of the United States’ is in town next month. The payoff is getting the whistler to show up at the local symphony and ask the receptionist where he should go for the whistling audition.

The thing that makes the prank work is that no one in the solar system, except for the whistler, would find this scenario credible. He alone could imagine that word of his whistling talents have started to get around town. And he alone would imagine that the President of the United States would want to hear his whistling solo.

Continued here

Grand Theft Wall Street: Now Better Than Ever

The latest update makes Grand Theft Wall Street even more realistic.

In this update of Grand Theft Wall Street, you’ll engage in a single-player campaign to spread as much human misery and destroy as much value as possible, all while trying to shift the blame to the most unlikely scapegoats. In the series cheered (and criticized) for glorifying incompetent financial risk management, you’ll make horrendous blunders, lose massive sums of other peoples’ money, bitch slap your female interns, associate with other Wall Street lowlifes and do many, many other bad deeds. GTWS gives us characters with a level of superficiality so realistic, you’ll think you’re right on the trading floor of a Wall Street casino.

You play as Yaniv Blumenfeld, a mercurial, belligerent, stateless, undocumented Middle Eastern third-tier banker with a dark past. Socially and financially inept, you nevertheless recruit a team of unpaid interns who soon discover you may have fibbed a bit in your tales of success. You parlay your talents and a $1.0 million stake from demented elderly relatives into a $35 million pyramid of debt you’ve named Glacier Global Partners. Along the way you pick up some very bad habits and associates. The longer we stay with Yaniv, the more we see that there is a broken human being inside, one who would give anything to escape the person he once was.

Bugfixes in this update of the Grand Theft Wall Street action-adventure video game:

• fixed an intermittent bug where a virtual subordinate did a good job but the Yaniv Blumenfeld character malfunctioned and failed to feel threatened and make it his mission to destroy the character, thereby undermining the game’s realism
• fixed a bug which allowed disabling of the Yaniv character’s ‘narcissistic sociopath’ and ‘prima donna’ behaviors, resulting in unrealistic gameplay scenarios
• fixed a bug where the Yaniv character tipped generously at a strip club
• fixed a bug where the Yaniv character fucked up a financial projection spreadsheet causing a deal blew to up in his face (so far, so good; Where’s the bug?). BUT then not only did the Yaniv character intermittently fail to detonate a hissy fit, he failed to go into scapegoat mode (i.e., trying to blame a broker, colleague, subordinate or Hamas for his own blunder); shitstorm mode also failed to engage
• fixed an intermittent bug where the blundering Yaniv character failed to enter ‘enhanced’ scapegoat mode (i.e., the Yaniv character spreading malicious false rumors about his intended scapegoats, sniping at the scapegoats in meetings, displaying the scapegoats’ severed heads on pikes, using their blood for his cave paintings, and leaving their bodies unburied to be devoured by dogs, etc. ‘Acts of God’ added to the list of targets the Yaniv character can blame for catastrophes resulting from his own negligence or stupidity.
• fixed a graphic error which caused the stocky, diminutive Blumenfeld to appear taller than Joe Pesci and R2-D2
• fixed an intermittent bug where the Yaniv character uncharacteristically put in a full day’s work while allowing a subordinate to leave early for a gynecological appointment


Yaniv Blumenfeld partying in 'Grand Theft' style.

• fixed a bug that generated a scenario in which the Yaniv character competently and courageously landed a stricken U.S. Airways jet airliner in the Hudson River and acted selflessly to save the lives of all the passengers (yeah, in what alternate universe?)
• fixed an intermittent bug where a Glacier Global Partners LLP real estate deal inexplicably made economic sense, investors were pleased and nobody got ripped off
• fixed a bug where the Yaniv character paid a sincere compliment to a female colleague instead of spreading vile rumors about her to his cronies
• fixed a bug where a toady didn’t let the Yaniv character win at Halo during a Glacier Global partner meeting
• fixed a bug where the Yaniv character went off his anti-psychotic medication and nothing unusual happened
• fixed a bug where the Yaniv character started paying his bills in full on time for no particular reason
• fixed an intermittent bug where the Yaniv character’s face failed to turn red and become grotesquely distorted during a clusterfuck sequence
• fixed the bug where instead of pretending that you never told him important information that you for certain had told him and being angry at you, the Yaniv character pretends you told him good news that you never did and is pleased with you
• fixed the bug where instead of it being all about the Yaniv character all the time, it was a little bit about someone or something else occasionally
• fixed a bug in the graphic algorithm which, during brown-nosing mode, caused the Yaniv character’s head to appear less than fully embedded
• corrected a bug in the rate of speed that disconsolate investors fall after leaping to their welcome deaths from the Playgirl Building. Corrected bounce height and trajectory of investors hitting the pavement and motor vehicles on Second Avenue. Corrected audio to replace fart sound with splat.
• for added pomposity added reverb effect to “I have spoken!”, the phrase the Yaniv character tacks on the end of his every statement.
• fixed a timing bug in which the Yaniv character would say, “Who did that?” before farting himself

My Calculator is All Yucked Up!

Do the math!

Welcome to Pernicious Island

Of course you know Yaniv Blumenfeld ...

The Lighter Side of Pernicious

Keep them coming! -hp

Shitcan Your Financial Advisor

Mrs. Turdley, fired financial planner.

All you really need to know about managing your money was written down in simple language on one page by the guy who does that Dilbert comic strip. A cartoonist had to spell this out for people, because the greedy, sneaky professional money management grifters aren’t going to give up their scams. If you need just one reason to fire your financial planner, here it is: undisclosed fees. Even the index mutual funds are in on this. They steal from you. You’d get fired if you stole from your employer. So fire their asses.

Let’s make this the year that the financial scoundrels starve and have to switch to honest work. Here’s the one-page plan that do it:

1. Make a will.
2. Pay off your credit cards.
3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.
4. Fund your 401k to the maximum.
5. Fund your IRA to the maximum.
6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.
7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account.
8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement.
9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio.
10. Shitcan your financial planner and/or stockbroker.

That last item, number ten, was my own.

More here.

New Advisory Board Members Named

helgabluth welcomes three talented additions to its Executive Advisory Board:

• YaVaughnie Wilkins, visionary publicist and advertising guru, recently of Phillips & Wilkins.
• Janet Cooke, Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post reporter.
• Jason Blair, convention-breaking former New York Times reporter.

If you know any of these creative people, please ask them to email us some good ideas.

New Death Star to Sport Glacier Global Partners Logo

Despised symbol of galactic malice, the newly-christened Glacier Global Partners Death Star

Special to helgabluth

By S-Bek

The Galactic Empire’s newest superweapon will be named the Glacier Global Partners Death Star. In an unusual cross-marketing deal, the most destructive force in the Universe will team up with a tiny, obscure White Plains, NY-based financial firm with only limited destructive potential.

The Death Star is a moon-sized space station and superweapon capable of destroying a planet with a single destructive beam. A flawed predecessor, the Enron Death Star, was destroyed by the Rebel Alliance in 2001 during a dispute over financial accounting abuses.

K-Pax, a spokesman for the loathed interplanetary dictatorship, said the Empire sees the move as a way to enhance its malicious image. “We wanted a malignant brand like Glacier Global that would reinforce the fear and loathing people associate with the Galactic Empire.” Despite Glacier Global’s egregious reputation, the Empire’s new link to a hapless local firm that is by all accounts barely scraping by could, however, erode its perceived invincibility, industry sources said.

Technology upgrade: Glacier Global's ColecoVision home game console will be replaced with a Galactic Empire-supplied Nintendo Wii in a major enterprise information system overhaul.

Glacier Global (slogan: “Quietly losing shareholder value”) was identified by the Empire’s longtime advertising agency, B-Ad, based on a single focus group quirkily selected from a narrow segment of the Earth’s human population. The focus group consisted of construction tradesmen, consumer credit collection agents, forensic house cleaners and Girl Scouts all from the White Plains area of New York. Group members supplied horrific anecdotes that quickly convinced Supreme Galactic Emperor and convicted war criminal E-Palp to shortcut the selection process. The deal was cemented when Glacier Global’s co-founder, Y-Bum, reportedly bonded with E-Palp’s equally diminutive astromech droid, E0-BO. Y-Bum quickly agreed to terms that included Glacier Global’s promise to betray the rest of the human race when the time comes in return for immediate delivery of a new Nintendo Wii electronic gaming console.

Cat Angered By Obama’s Unfulfilled Cheezburger Promise

Cheezeburger Cat: "I can has cheezeburger?" Obama: "Yes you can."

A group of concerned Seattle cats met for a community forum-style debate this evening to discuss the lack of cheezburger assistance from President Obama’s White House.

Obama had previously promised citizens quick cheezburger reform and dispersal via his Cheezburger Stimulus package. But the deal, signed into law this past February (as reported by the Kitty City Gazette) has cats asking ‘where’s the beef?’

Cats are up in arms over the lack of cheezburgers made available on the open market to cats in need. Billions of cheezburgers have been doled out to financial institutions and even the auto industry in the largest company bailout in worldwide history, but no one single cat has yet to benefit.

More here.

PLAYGIRL Welcomes Glacier Global Partners, Yaniv Blumenfeld to The Playgirl Building

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEW YORK — The Playgirl Building, 801 Second Avenue, New York, is pleased to welcome new tenant Glacier Global Partners, LLP. Glacier Global Partners is in the business of, we are informed, Turd Mining.

PLAYGIRL Magazine is known around the globe as the primary source for hot nude men, male hunks and muscular studs. The solo male videos, high definition male model pictorials, in-depth articles and interactive content make PLAYGIRL.com the most popular website celebration of the male body anywhere online!

PLAYGIRL welcomes Glacier Global Partners, LLP to The Playgirl Building, 801 Second Avenue, New York.
Above: The Men of TransAtlantic Capital Advisors.

This space reserved for 'The Men of Glacier Global Partners,' an upcoming PLAYGIRL pictorial.

Gentlemen of Glacier Global Partners: please email your portfolios to editorial@playgirlmag.com. Or better yet drop down to the ninth floor for an audition. We know you can use the extra cash to pay for things. Especially since most of you seem to be unpaid interns.

The Playgirl Building extends its best wishes to Glacier Global Partners for a fully rent-paying occupancy.

Management also wishes to remind tenants to be aware of security on the premises. Now more than ever you should keep your suite entry doors locked and make sure all purses, wallets and other valuables are secured.

In connection with Glacier Global Partners’ Grand Opening, the 22nd floor restrooms will be open to the public indefinitely.

More here.