Remember during the height of the recession, when it was considered gauche to drop a few thousand a night on three bottles of vodka and a carafe of cranberry juice? Harrowing times those were but today brings some heartening news. Despite the fact that a whole bunch of New York-based financial services hacks are about to get laid off, it’s once again considered socially acceptable to buy bottles marked up 100% so ladies will be open to talking to you/using your table to sit down. At the MeatPacking district’s Gunbar (named and designed as “an homage to rock clubs past” and also because while there you’ll probably wish you had a gun), $300 bottles of vodka “unapologetically sit atop almost every table” and people “party like it’s 2007,” or “like peacocks” rather than the “pigeons” of 2008-2009, a patron claimed recently.
According to nightlife operator Jamie Mulholland, whose livelihood is based on this statement being a fact and not bull shit, “When the economy crashed, everyone stopped doing it…But now, there’s definitely a resurgence.” Investment banker Chris Silverman agrees, to a point. Continue reading »
The 44-year-old ex-heavyweight champion is in bed by 8 and often up as early as 2 in the morning, at which point he takes a solitary walk around the gated compound in the Las Vegas suburb where he lives while listening to R&B on his iPod. Tyson then occupies himself with reading (he’s an avid student of history, philosophy and psychology), watching karate movies or taking care of his homing pigeons, who live in a coop in the garage…As part of his cleaning-up campaign, he has been adhering to a strict vegan diet for nearly two years, explaining that he doesn’t want anything in him “that’s going to enrage me — no processed food, no meat.” He says that he can no longer abide the smell of meat even on someone’s breath…If Tyson misses his high-rolling days, he isn’t letting on: “If you make a lot of money, you end up being around people you don’t want to be around,” he says. “Guys on allowance. It takes years to gather the audacity to get rid of them.” [NYT]
Say what you will about Canada but their Ponzi scheming set is willing to tread where its more southern counterparts have not. Yeah, we have big number schemes but no one really thinks outside the box. Like pigeon-farming scams. Have we ever had one of those? No, we just feed the damn things rather than think about exploiting them for cash.
An Ontario man accused in an alleged $1-million pigeon breeding scheme has been charged with fraud and violations of bankruptcy laws. Arlan Galbraith, the 62-year-old owner of Pigeon King International, was arrested Wednesday after surrendering to police in Kitchener. Galbraith, from Cochrane, Ont., is charged with one count of fraud over $5,000 and four counts under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. Police allege Galbraith defrauded people in Canada and the United States out of a total of $1 million between 2004 and 2008. It’s estimated about 1,000 people invested a total of $20 million in the purchase of pigeons while allegedly being promised guaranteed financial returns.
You want to hear more, right? Some sort of business plan at least. Continue reading »
