Alright, this is surely jumping the gun and I'm probably going to take it back by sooner rather than later (my money's on this afternoon) but right now, what I'm saying is: the new Wall Street Journal rocks, specifically Page One. Yesterday it was an article on an 150 women taking part in an Assassin-inspired game of competitive knitting ("I got the sock. I'm dead."), today it's a piece the trials and tribulations of putting on a good Nativity scene this holiday season, with a particular emphasis on the issue of animals who are stealing the show from their human co-stars with hijinks so hilarious I'm not entirely convinced they were unplanned.

In Mount Laurel, New Jersey, M and J were headed off to Bethlehem to do their thing when the donkey Mary was riding freaked out and took off. Joe jumped on the ass and tried to stop him but fell off, got caught in the reins, and was dragged for several hundred feet. At First United Methodist Church in Tuckerton, NJ, a camel ate the set. In Orange County, California, at the Crystal Cathedral, a donkey stepped on Joseph's foot and broke his toe. At Mount Olives Lutheran church in Mission Viejo, CA, rehearsals got held up for over an hour because two goats were screwing like animals ("They were just acting very inappropriately," Diane Girard, a co-coordinator of the program said. "We had to break it up.").

What does any of this have to do with business? Don't know, don't care. At all. Maybe I'm just a Jew getting into the Christmas spirit, maybe this article just has me fondly thinking about the time Joseph wrestled Larry to the ground and dislodged a pubic hair from his throat that had been stuck in there for days. I don't know what it is. I just know I like it, and want it to continue. (Thinking ahead for the coming year: how to deal with the ignorant fucks (that phrase should be in the lede) who tell you you've "got some schmutz" on your forehead on Ash Wednesday? The deadly sport of Canasta? These are just for instances, nobody's saying they're going to be used, I'm just trying to get a dialogue going, and you know the 'Journal' likes to come around these parts for story ideas, anyway.)

Awry in a Manger: It Takes a Miracle To Stage This Play [WSJ]

Who: Mario Gabelli, some other industry people

What: Barron's Roundtable Discussion

Where: I don't know, a Sheraton?

When: 23 January 1995

Barron's guy: "Name the most important events of 1994."

Industry people: "Peso devaluation blah blah blah rate hikes blah blah blah."

Gabelli: "The major events of last year, as far as I'm concerned, were Feb. 4, March 14, Nov. 8, Aug. 12, and Oct. 14. On Feb. 4, the Fed hiked interest rates. On March 14 came General Electric's hostile takeover bid for Kemper. That was a big gong sounding for a whole new wave of takeovers -- which I will get into. Nov. 8 was, obviously, when the Republicans came into power. Aug. 12 was the baseball strike. And Oct. 14 was when Pulp Fiction opened."

The only excuse we have to offer re: just now mentioning what happened on Fox Business Friday morning is that we don’t watch Fox Business. Sure, we’ve checked out a few choice clips (50 Cent, Sammy Hagar, Lamb Chop and Jerry Springer all come to mind) but only because they were forwarded to us in convenient link form. The bottom line is that there are three TVs in the office and each one is spoken for (TV1: CNBC; TV2: Nintendo (and the answer to all your, “Why haven’t you guys posted anything?” comments); TV3: A Best of Carney clipshow that was spliced together in-house and plays on loop). We don’t TiVo FB because it’s the sort of thing that has to be experienced in real-time.

Which brings us to this: unless something really drastic happens, like Maria Bartiromo announces that Cutter Associates is buying half of Bear Stearns, or Kudlow and Company is replaced by Paulie Shore and My Biatches, or Charlie Gasparino finally cops to being a drug mule, or Joe Kernen discusses Aquaman, the fictional movie from Entourage as though it were real, CNBC is getting bumped. No longer can we afford to miss Fox Business Morning for Breakfast reporting that Apple is taking an 8 percent stake in chipmaker AMD, contributor Charles Payne analyzing the genius (/imaginary) deal, and Glick correcting the misinformation by noting that “It’s not Apple, it’s Apple Dubai? Apple Dubai? Oh, Abu Dubai.” Yes, yes, Abu Dubai, AKA Abu Dhabi. The best part is Peter Barnes’s magical recovery which, paraphrasing, went sort of like this: “Ohhh, okay, okay, Abu Dubai, which was discovered and named by the Germans in 1904, and of course in German means a whale's vagina.” Your move, CNBC. Transcript (via SAI) and video (via Valleywag) after the jump.

Recently we received an email from a reader asking for good short recommendations. We're not in the business of stock analysis. Sure, we called Vonage correctly but that was about as hard as scoring with a sailor during fleet week. But we're always looking to help readers, and so we thought we might as well marshall the wisdom of this particular crowd. Here's what our readers asks for.

I'm looking for good short ideas if you have any material, non-public information about turnover in C-level positions, deteriorating balance sheets, dilutive follow-ons, etc, etc.

Feel like publicly engaging in insider trading? Drop a comment below and lets make public some non-public information!

Ernst & Young with another entry into the Teambuilding Unintentional Humor Hall of Fame (thanks to a reader tip). If you missed yesterday's spiritually transcendent entry, or if you just need a pick-me-up, click here. The new entry is sans-video, but makes up for it in lyrical genius. The primary verse is "E-Y, E-Y, Ernst and Young! From top to finish, we're gonna be number #1," only with about 10 other interstitial vocal tracks coming in and screaming out a few syllables in a pitch I can only describe as Mariah Carey punched right in the baby maker. Much like Jimmy Page's guitar playing in "Ten Years Gone," a veritable wall of sound is created.

Listen here.

The constant repetition of "E-Y, E-Y" also makes the song sound like a rejected track from Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits.

PS - Time Bandits, if anyone recalls, has perhaps the greatest ending of any movie ever - where the main character's parents literally blow up, in a rather casual manner as far as exploding parents go, and then Sean Connery as a modern fireman (and pre-modern King Agamemnon) drives up and winks (can anyone find a clip of this?). That "your parents just exploded" wink. Credits. George Harrison chanting. I swear a couple of my staffers at JPM were directed by Gilliam. You have a stomach ulcer? Wink. Staffed on new project. Credits.

We’re a little late to this (via Valleywag via M&A++), but here is an Ernst & Young offering to the Teambuilding Unintentional Humor Hall of Fame. This one may be better than HSBC’s “Let’s Live It.” The video, slick “how do you pack all those classic 80’s hits on one CD!?” production quality and all, is a four and a half minute send-up of the Gospel favorite “Oh Happy Day.” The lead, less Mahalia Jackson and more a person picked to play Amy Grant in the fifth run of an off-Broadway musical about her life, takes us to a very special place with lyrics like, “When Ernst & Young… (wait for it) When Ernst & Young …(second verse same as the first)… When Ernst & Young… (ok, seriously?).“ At least “when Jesus washed” contains a verb, unless Ernst-ing is something cool I haven’t heard of yet.

Corporate Culture – [M&A++]

Never let it be said that The Economist doesn’t enjoy taking people for a ride. In that vein, the publication would like let you know about a special little deal they’ve got going on. “In a nutshell,” they write, the ‘Mist has hired a “small team of employees,” put them in a room, and said, “go on: mental masturbate to your heart’s content come up with whatever you want, even something entirely unrelated to The Economist Group—as long as it is innovative and online.”

Now they’re not saying they’ve spent all this time getting high and not coming up with anything—in fact, they tell us that the think tank “already has some ideas, of course.” But they want more, and they want you to come up with them for them. Since they’re champions of free markets and everything, and “abhor the concept of a closed system.” That’s why you should submit an idea by March 25 that is “as simple or complex as you like…a product, a service or a business model.” Whatever, really!

If your “idea” is accepted, it immediately becomes the property of The Economist Group in every way, shape and form you can think of (or not think of), including movie rights, video games, and Second Life distribution. What’s in it for you? As a “small token of [The Economist’s] appreciation” you and yours (actually, just you) will receive a free six-month gift subscription to Economist.com. Not the actual magazine, of course, as that would be embarrassingly too generous.

The Economist seeks fortune tellers [Project Red Stripe]

No. This isn't just a gratuitous swipe at the front page reporting of the Wall Street Journal. It seems that the folks at Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company, are teaming up with Barry Diller to create a personal finance site for younger audiences. Diller's IAC bought up a stake in "girls gone wild"-style humor site College Humor so he's, like, totally an expert on what the kids want. We can see the marketing campaign now: cue hot girl in undersized t-shirt reading "I Don't Believe In The Retailization of Hedge Funds."

[Photo above is from College Humor sister site BustedTees.com, which sells t-shirts by putting them on cute girls.]

Wall Street Journal Lite [New York Post]

We've talked before about the role of myth in business news and history. Every so often a company, individual or event will come to stand for something, and often what it comes to stand for is quite distant from the reality. The map is not the territory, as they say. And the myth is not the thing. Which isn't to say that maps and myths aren't helpful. Just that we should keep the distance between them and the actual territory in mind.

Increasingly, Amaranth has come to stand for something. It's becoming the mythological beast of hedge funds. This probably doesn't make Amaranth founder Nick Maounis very happy, and probably won't help him raise any money for the new hedge fund he is rumored to be contemplating. But the video above does a good job of showing how, in front of the right audience, a speaker can simply use Amaranth as a shorthand for overconfident, speculative-predictive investing and the audience will know exactly what he's talking about.

There's also a nice tidbit about Boone Pickens take on Brian Hunter, which is really what got our attention.
Quick Video Note on Amaranth [MichaelCovel.com]

Just because you’re a billionaire doesn’t mean you need to pilfer away your clams like a sailor on leave in the name of style, substance or safety. Carl Icahn doesn’t believe in buying $23 million jets anymore than he does in having a pair of limited edition Juicy Couture leopard-print skivvies (just kidding—he’s got one for every day of the week). Anyway, in a recent interview with Avenue magazine, Icahn recalled a flight he took with Leon Black and his wife Deborah, on a leased jet, during which he shamed Black for wasting his money in the name of jet-ownership, and played a round of Hide the Salami Smoke Coming Out of the Engine from Deborah.

"And while I'm saying this [$23 million is too much to spend on a plane], I hear a pop. I'm not kidding you. I look out the window, and it's like in the war movies. There's smoke coming out of the engine . . . I close the drapes. Deborah says, 'What's that?' And I say, 'Nothing. Nothing.' . . . I run into the cockpit, and the guys are yelling, 'Mayday! Mayday!' Leon asks if anything is wrong, and I say, 'Nothing, nothing, Leon.'

And then Deborah was like “Carl, I'm not a doctor, but should I be worried about the fact that the wing looks like it’s about to break off?” And I was like, “No, no, that’s nothing, look, a shiny object!” But she wouldn't stop harping on it, so I shot her. What?

AT LEASE THEY LANDED SAFELY [Page Six]

We kinda love Andrew Ross Sorkin (pictured left with DealBreaker's John Carney and CNBC's Charlie Gasparino at the DealBreaker launch party, as photographed by Gawker's Nikola). We literally wake up with him every morning, frantically composing an aggregation of his aggregation of business news over at DealBook. He’s a nice guy and seems to be one of the smarter people doing business writing. I mean, we like him so much that when we last ran into him and he asked about our very own Bess Levin, we offered to introduce him to her. If you have any idea how closely we protect Bess, you know this is a very big deal.

But his essay in Sunday’s New York Times Business Section on management buyouts this weekend was a bit, uhm, innocent. Not clown-suit, Ben Stein level stupid. But just a bit too bright-eyed student essayish. After the jump, we dissect brother Sorkin’s Sunday sermon.

Rewriting the Rules for Buyouts [New York Times]

Fortune didn’t return any of our phone calls this afternoon so we’re just going to go ahead and run this possibly false but not evidenced to the contrary statement: Geoffrey Colvin is full of shit.

According to Colvin, who penned “What It Takes To Be Great” for the mag’s “Excellence Issue,” the secret to greatness lies in—get this—“painful and demanding practice and hard work.” Holy shit! Someone should have told us this a long time ago. Dad always said it was “great legs and the third martini.”

The rogue journalist goes on to say that “You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years.” Right, and next you’re going to tell us Hanukah Harry was something our parents made up to exculpate themselves from getting us the inferior Barbie Dream House back in ’89 (“This is Harry’s doing, Bess, it’s out of our hands entirely!”). Stick with us because the man-who-makes- outrageous-and-downright-ridiculous-claims goes on:

In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness.

The irresistible question - the "fundamental challenge" for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University - is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields.

The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It's nice to believe that if you find the field where you're naturally gifted, you'll be great from day one, but it doesn't happen. There's no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.

We suspect Colvin has some unresolved anger over not being being fast enough to coin his saying, damn it! 'there's no such thing as a free lunch,' but honestly, it's irresponsible and hate-fuckingly obvious articles like this that are giving business journalism a bad name.

Update: This article was, like, totally already written back in May by the Freakonomics folks Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt.

Update Update: And, what’s more, to the extent there’s any non-obvious, controversial claim here, it’s probably wrong! Steve Sailer shot so many holes through it, it might as well be Dick Cheney’s hunting partner.

Well, that was a close call. For a few moments we were worried you might miss out on Aleksey Vayner's now world-famous (or at least Wall Street famous) video "Impossible Is Nothing." His site went down and the video with it. Aleksey may have had second thoughts. Or maybe all the traffic it was getting crashed it.

No need to worry. The video is back, courtesy of the gang at IvyGate who were thoughtful enough to preserve the video on YouTube. (Link here.)

You might also want to check out the website for his, uhm, "hedge fund." As commenter Mike pointed out, the "Our Philosophy" section is a work of wonder. The key to success at "Vayner Capital Management, LLC" is that they will "Never Lose Money."

And one last note: we still cannot get over the nagging feeling that somehow this is an elaborate set up. We've had confirmation from a Yalie that he's for real but still. The name is so Dickensian-perfect it's unbelievable. Vayner? Vain-er?

This black clad young man [in the photo we have now replaced with a small picture of a dancing kitten] is Aleksey Vayner, Yale student and prospective investment banker. He recently applied for a job at a major investment bank (at least one) and included this video resume entitled “Impossible Is Nothing.”

It’s set up as a faux-interview with Aleksey. He begins by instructing us with all the confidence of a motivational speaker: “Success is an internal transformation. It’s not an external event.” We see him lift weights (complete with subtitles telling us that he’s bench pressing 405 lbs). He skis. He plays tennis. He even dances! (“If you’re going to dance, then DANCE! But do it with passion,” he says.)

Watch closely. You may be interviewing young Aleksey soon.

Impossible Is Nothing [AlekseyVayner.com]

Update: Sadly, Aleksey's site is down, and the video with it. The links above are dead.

Updatier: Horray! The smart kids over at IvyGate made a copy and put it up on YouTube. So if you haven't see it yet you can hurry over there or watch it right here at DealBreaker.

Daniel Gross follows up an earlier column on dumb corporate cost cutting measures with a collection of items sent in by readers.

The desire to cut costs by saving or recycling paper clips aroused the most incredulity and anger. Former Bear Stearns employee B.B. recalls being given a bag of paper clips on his first day "with the explanation that the firm would never buy paperclips … This was on the direction of [legendary gazillionaire CEO] Ace Greenberg, and the company seemed almost proud of this inane cost-cutting measure." A former Bank of America investment-banking analyst recalls that the megabank "once told its employees to use paper clips instead of staples because paper clips could be re-used to save money." According to one correspondent, managers at a data center of a different firm were asked to "keep a listing (on a piece of paper) of each clip that we used, and the reason for the use!"

Ugh. There might even be an LBO signal here. When a corporation is uncreative enough to seek savings by denying employees things like paper clips, it’s probably a good sign that management needs to go. If there’s any underlying value in the company, get rid of the guys eliminating the post-its—and their corporate cars too.

If you’ve got a good story of idiotic cost cutting, send it our way. Tips (at) DealBreaker (dot) com. We won’t tell anyone you told us.

More Idiotic Corporate Penny-Pinching Measures [Slate.com]

Floyd Norris writes today about the Los Angeles Times standoff with the Tribune Company, which has demanded layoffs at the paper. Unfortunately, Floyd Norris’s blog is buried behind the Times Select firewall (you know, that weird system in which the Times jams its own signal so that no one can find out what some of its most interesting writers are saying).

Fortunately, Romenesko today provides some choice excerpts. Our favorite is the claim that "Companies that follow [Wall Street's] advice, and still do not produce results, are treated far worse than those that produce results after ignoring Wall Street."

This strikes us as fitting into the category of probably true. We haven’t seen any studies on it—it’s hard to figure out how to even begin to quantify something like “following Wall Street’s advice—but it makes sense. If a company balks at the Street’s advice and continues to have trouble, well there’s probably still some value left in the company just waiting to be unleashed by better management (ie, management that will listen to Wall Street). If a company follows the Street’s advice and still fails, well you might just have a broken company on your hand.

"Trying to keep Wall Street happy did little for Tony Ridder" [Romenesko]

By the time we arrived on the scene, “conglomeration” was a dirty word and talk of “synergies” was usually treated as nonsensical magical thinking. So reading about the excitement of the days of conglomerates is educational in the sense that the conventional wisdom and standard business model has often gone very, very wrong. Maybe one day people will ask how we all thought we could keep making money through taking companies private, down-sizing and installing star managers.

On LewRockwell.com today, University at Buffalo finance professor Michael S. Rozeff looks back at the age of conglomeration.

Remembering the Conglomerates
[LewRockwell.com]

The ever delicate blogger T.A.N. explains a recent Washington Post piece on the “race savings gap”:

So, it would figure that higher-income African Americans are also newly higher-income African Americans. And perhaps they read the WSJ, but there's still a nagging in the back of the head, a lynched negro hanging from a tree telling them that anyday now an old white man is going to bust into their house and say, "HAHA! We got you ni**a!!! Suckers. Just colored suckers, all of you!! *pulls out three fruity lollipops for ironic effect* You fell for the old 'buy & hold' Melanin-Man. Sheeeit, that's the oldest caucasian-con in the book. You give us your money, and we'll hold it for ya. HAHAHA!!! Well back to poverty with you negro. Black Tuesday bitches. Dems the breaks. You read the fine print. 'Past history is no guarantee of future results.' Game over son. Yeah that's right, we're gonna continue to appropriate the cool slang from your culture too ... SON! All us caucasoids are gonna split up your money. Here's a 'Ken Lay Is Still Alive' t-shirt for your trouble."

And thus you get:
"Black investors have focused on real estate and have not incorporated the stock market to the same degree as their white counterparts," said Lisa Toppin, director of human resources and diversity programs for Schwab.

They Say There's A Stock Market, But My GrandPappy Says If You Can't Touch It, You Can't F*ck It [T.A.N.]

The Race Savings Gap [Washington Post]

Work for the gays, says Kirk Snyder. According to his studies, employees supervised by gays are much happier than everyone else. “I’m super, thanks for asking,” was presumably the favored response. [Warning: link plays a probably NSFW song from a popular film.]

Why Gay Men Are Outperforming the Good-Old-Boys in Business [Huffington Post]