1. Michael Lewis's latest, outstanding article on the financial apocalypse focuses on Germany. It's 17 pages but well worth your time. Here's a sample paragraph:

This preternatural love of rules, almost for their own sake, punctuates German finance as it does German life. As it happens, a story had just broken that a division of a German insurance company called Munich Re, back in June 2007, or just before the crash, had sponsored a party for its best producers that offered not just chicken dinners and nearest-to-the-pin golf competitions but a blowout with prostitutes in a public bath. In finance, high or low, this sort of thing is of course not unusual. What was striking was how organized the German event was. The company tied white and yellow and red armbands to the prostitutes to indicate which ones were available to which men. After each sexual encounter the prostitute received a stamp on her arm, to indicate how often she had been used. The Germans didn’t want just hookers: they wanted hookers with rules.

OK, here's one more:

This is what makes the German case so peculiar. If they had been merely the only big, developed nation with decent financial morals, they would present one sort of picture, of simple rectitude. But they had done something far more peculiar: during the boom German bankers had gone out of their way to get dirty. They lent money to American subprime borrowers, to Irish real-estate barons, to Icelandic banking tycoons to do things that no German would ever do. The German losses are still being toted up, but at last count they stand at $21 billion in the Icelandic banks, $100 billion in Irish banks, $60 billion in various U.S. subprime-backed bonds, and some yet-to-be-determined amount in Greek bonds. The only financial disaster in the last decade German bankers appear to have missed was investing with Bernie Madoff. (Perhaps the only advantage to the German financial system of having no Jews.) In their own country, however, these seemingly crazed bankers behaved with restraint. The German people did not allow them to behave otherwise. It was another case of clean on the outside, dirty on the inside. The German banks that wanted to get a little dirty needed to go abroad to do it.

2. Kristin Tercek's having an art sale.



3. NPR's top 100 science fiction and fantasy novels.



4. Grantland continues to better than I had hoped. Two great articles today: Whether the Blue Jays are cheating; Whether John Cena has it within him to become a WWE villain, and how that change would impact WWE's earnings. (I'd love to see a chart showing how much traffic ESPN has lost to Grantland. I never even visit ESPN.com anymore.)

READ MORE - Link roundup

1. Taco Bell's business is way down and they're blaming it on that lawsuit that inaccurately described the meat content in their food. Via.

2. Spirit Airlines CEO:

Between New York and Florida, for example, both we and JetBlue fly the A320 airplane. They put 150 seats on the plane, we put 178.

Via.

3. If you're a TMNT fan, here's how to get in to a promotional event at SDCC for the new series.

4. I'd greatly appreciate a Spotify invite if you have one. UPDATE: Got one.

5. New preorders at the BBTS - - The Walking Dead and Gears of War board games.

READ MORE - Link roundup

1. Is this why they're called honeymoons?

In many parts of Europe it was traditional to supply a newly married couple with enough mead for a month, ensuring happiness and fertility. From this practice we get honeymoon or, as the French say, lune de miel [lit. "moon of honey"].

2. This is the kind of place that could star in American Gods (I wonder which god would be in charge?):

The secretive business havens of Cyprus and the Cayman Islands face a potent rival: Cheyenne, Wyoming.

At a single address in this sleepy city of 60,000 people, more than 2,000 companies are registered. The building, 2710 Thomes Avenue, isn't a shimmering skyscraper filled with A-list corporations. It's a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn, a few blocks from the State Capitol.

Via.

3. T-shirts are 17.76% off at Zazzle with the code LANDOFTHETEE. Might I recommend Adam Koford's store.

READ MORE - Link roundup

1. It's not so much the sexting, but the shocking arrogance in who the congressman was following on Twitter that's surprising. I bet any enterprising journalist could have a field day looking at who star athletes follow on Twitter.

2. I love the Ned Stark is stupid meme. Seems like I've been waiting for that feeling to become popularized for years and years.

3. It's all about knowing which rules you can get away with breaking (and be willing to break).

READ MORE - Link roundup

1. Cool Foo Fighters concert t-shirts.

2. Fascinating article at Wired about tech startup incubator Y Combinator, including an anecdote about an investor "who dropped more than $6 million on companies he knows almost nothing about—indeed, some of which haven’t yet decided what business they’re in."

3. A video game company retaliated against a negative review of their game by encouraging employees to write negative reviews about the author's novel. Via.

READ MORE - Link roundup

1. Penelope Trunk explains how she's helping her teenage neighbors start a business:

I told myself I will send them lots of links so they learn about entrepreneurship. But the boys did not have computers. Further, they do not even get homework that involves computers because not all the kids in the local high school have computers at home. They do research for reports only from books in the library.

Then it occurred to me that they don’t read. They can read, they just don’t read.

“What was the last book you read?” I asked Zach.

He couldn’t remember. Then he remembered: “The Scarlet Letter, for school.”

“It sucked,” said Mitch.

I told the boys that entrepreneurs read. They have to read. The problem is that if you don’t read you don’t know where to start reading. I decided we’d have to start with reading about sex, to keep them interested. I gave them Dennis Cooper. They liked it. After a while I slipped in articles about entrepreneurship.

Much more at the link.

2. Not too surprising that the Dark Tower movie/tv series is starting to look DOA.

3. Beautiful pictures from Disney's maiden cruise to Alaska. And speaking of Disney, you can win passes to see the new Star Tours.

READ MORE - Link roundup