Source: Businessweek
Like restaurants across the country - from Table 8 in Los Angeles to Liberty Bar in Hoboken, N.J. - Cole Durbin, owner of Padre’s Modern Mexican in Phoenix, Arizona, is offering up a Recession Happy Hour. But he has added a twist: Anyone who arrives at Padre’s with a foreclosure notice can have [...]

An Orlando man has traded the naming rights to his unborn son for a $100 gas card.
Source: Local 6 (Orlando, Florida)
David Partin recently heard that local radio station 96.5 WHTQ (Classic Rock Station) was giving $100 worth of free gas to the listener who called in with the most interesting item to trade. Radio hosts [...]

LOL at the Drudge Report:

Starbucks to close 600 stores!
Starbucks Corp. has announced it’s closing 600 underperforming stores in the United States. The Seattle-based premium coffee company also announced Tuesday it expects to open fewer than 200 new company-operated stores in the United States in fiscal 2009. The company says it will try to place workers [...]

Bye, Bye, Bye
Source: Orlando Sentinel
Boy band mogul Lou Pearlman was sentenced this morning to 25 years in federal prison for running a lengthy, systematic con that artificially inflated his net worth and cheated people out of $300 million.

During Pearlman’s sentencing in U.S. District Court this morning, Senior U.S. District Judge G. Kendall Sharp offered Pearlman [...]

Mills bags £24.3 million from McCartney

From the Daily Mail:
She was less than four minutes into the rant when everyone started to pray for another gagging order. Surely Heather Mills couldn’t drag out much longer a simple statement to convey her joy that the case was over and that she was more than £24million richer? Oh [...]

I’ll buy that for 2 dollars!
We don’t normally do economic or financial news stories here at Odd Culture, but this one is a doozy. Remember when you read this story that Bear Stearns was trading around the $80 per share range only a few weeks ago:
J.P. Morgan to Buy Bear Stearns:
J.P. Morgan Chase agreed to [...]

Yes, this morning, AOL dropped eight hundred and fifty MEEEEEEEEEEEEELION dollars on Bebo.
Bebo, a social networking site with even less content than Facebook and MySpace. Bebo, a video site with videos lamer than YouTube.
Bebo.
Of course, with the dollar sinking below 100 yen this morning, it’s not as if that $850MM is really worth all that [...]

Another Odd Year Goes By.
Lots of crap went down in 2007. Much of it disturbing - Bhutto’s assassination, the Virginia Tech massacre, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, Microsoft Vista.
Some of it was funny. Or strange. Or both.
Here are the top 10 oddest stories:
10. Bad Newz: Michael Vick gets busted for dogfighting.

In July, Atlanta QB Michael Vick is [...]

“I don’t understand why this hasn’t ended up on ‘CSI: Miami’ yet” - Jim Cramer

New York Times has a story about Seth Tobias, Circle T hedge fund manager, found dead in his pool at his Jupiter, Florida mansion.
Mr. Tobias, a native of Philadelphia, once worked at Cramer’s former money-management firm. He formed Circle T in [...]

We can fix this:

See? It’s all how you look at it.