Bubba Smiles During Lunch Meeting With BarackWhat does the body language of this photo, snapped during their lunchtime meeting in Harlem, tell you about the former president and the Democratic candidate?
The ‘Depreciating Asset’ Strikes Back!Last week we printed an e-mail that was going around, in which a banker (and we think we know who) responded to a Craigslist post from a “spectacularly beautiful” woman who was offering a lifetime of sexy servitude to a hedge-fund type in exchange for a life of uptown leisure. The author of the response took issue with the woman’s offer, saying that “in economic terms,” she was a “depreciating asset” because her beauty will fade while he was an “earning asset” because his wealth would continue in perpetuity. It was awful and sexist but funny, so we all laughed and then that was that. But now, the “Depreciating Asset,” or someone claiming to be her, has written a response to the responseon Craigslist.
If your grasp of finance were not a minority partner with your ego, you would realize that the “outflows” associated with my depreciating “assets” are quite certain, and therefore subject to a low discount rate when determining their present value. In addition, though your concept of economics evidentially failed to move past the 1950s, advancement in plastic surgery is not subject to the same limitation.
Whoever the lady is, she’s not as facile with the economics as she would like us to believe — the post reads like she’s consulting a textbook. But she does get in some good ones!
party lines
Rosie Perez Loves John Travolta, the Gays*Rosie Perez is chill when it comes to being around the tons of buff, nearly naked men in the current Roundabout Theatre revival of the 1975 gay-bathhouse farce The Ritz, which she stars in as a talentless singer. “At first it was a little shocking, but now I see them naked backstage and I go, ‘Move, excuse me,’” she said last night after the opening. Does the 43-year-old Perez, a native New Yorker, have any memories of Gotham in the seventies? “I remember the blackout in ‘77 and going to see Saturday Night Fever three times and screaming for John Travolta,” she recalls. “And there were a lot of drugs and drug addicts and craziness and sex,” she adds. “It was fabulous.” Hmm. So, has she ever been to a real bathhouse? “Not a bathhouse bathhouse,” she says, “but I did go to a fabulous place on 46th Street called Osaka. You wet-steam, dry-steam, then a 300-pound woman walks on your back. It’s great.” —Tim Murphy
* No, we didn’t write it like that ‘cause we think they’re the same thing. Rumormongers!
Related: Kevin Chamberlin of ‘The Ritz’ Discusses Beefy, Naked Guys [Vulture]
in other news
Someone Counted the Jews in the ‘Vanity Fair’ 100Counting Jews in the Vanity Fair 100, the magazine’s annual list of the world’s most powerful people, is not something any sane publication in New York would be caught dead doing. The Jerusalem Post, however, went to the trouble of separating the chosen from the chaff in their Thursday edition. More than half of the world’s most powerful people are Jewish, according to VF (and the Post), although the methodology is laughably murky in both instances: The listers don’t define “power,” and the parsers don’t define “Jewish.” Take, for instance, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who share No. 3: Do they count as, uh, one or two Jews? Page’s mother is Jewish, which is good enough for the Jerusalem Post even if it’s not for Page himself, who says he’s been raised “in the mold of his father.” (The next indisputably Hebraic contender, Michael Bloomberg, clocks in at No. 9.) The Israeli paper seems more spooked than impressed by the results: If anything, it gingerly notes, Vanity Fair reinforces some of the world’s worst stereotypes by calling attention to “their disproportionate influence in finance and the media.” Of course, should they find such ostentatious triumph unbecoming, the writers are welcome to thumb through the Sports Illustrated Top 500 NFL Players list next.
Jewish Power Dominates at ‘Vanity Fair’ [Jerusalem Post]