'imagine-that!' news

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And, in the imagine-that! category...

-- David Guterson, an American author I've never heard of, has been awarded the annual Bad Sex in Fiction prize at a gathering in London. Leave it to the Brits to maintain a sense of propriety and excellence in an age so rife with various kinds of bad taste and poor performance.

-- Sage economic/investment minds appear to be in agreement that the fallout from income disparities between rich and poor is likely to come around and bite the rich on the ass.

Speaking at Reuters 2012 Investment Outlook Summit, taking place in New York, London and Hong Kong this week, the investors said four years of financial crises, austerity and rising unemployment in the West had exposed rising income and wealth gaps that damaged the sense of fairness required to bind societies.
The potential instability from damaging the broader social contract ultimately threatened those at the top of the pile as well as the aggrieved majorities.

The story leaves me flabbergasted in the sense that it appears so blatantly obvious -- so d'oh -- that the idea of holding a 'summit,' much less making a news story out of it, is ludicrous. I suppose that says more about me than it does about the summiteers or the organizations that make news judgments.

The situation depicted in the article reminds me of a female comedian I saw once who did a riff about people engaging in a variety of blatantly stupid activities. She punctuated each or her examples with an explosive comment that went, approximately, "what the fuck's the matter with you?!" Stick your fingers in an electrical outlet ... "what the fuck's the matter with you?!" And likewise, when shrewdly and insistently acquisitive and relatively well-educated men and women shoot the goose that lays the golden egg ... "what the fuck's the matter with you?!"
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