Daily Briefs: The Thrifty Nickel of urban bohemia

By CHRIS PACKHAM

I heard ’round the way that the Dow dropped below 10,000 this morning for the first time since 2004, and nobody’s really surprised. At least I’m not. When I was five years old, my dad sat me on his knee and said, “Son, as long as you live, you will never, ever have to see Gene Hackman go down on a floozy.” %{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”57150c3b89121ca96b95f7de” data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%And I think we all know what happened with that whole thing: A lot of time passed, one thing led to another, and in 1997, Absolute Power came out and I knew that my innocence was gone like the last shreds of toilet paper, leaving behind a cardboard tube through which I could hoot disconsolately, like a megaphone. Thanks, Clint Eastwood, I wasn’t using that “faith in my dad” for anything important, like for instance as an emotional buttress against the ravages of a grim world. On the other hand, Million Dollar Baby was great, seriously, way to go with that.

Now that civilization is finally winding down, we can move on to something else, like model railroading or teaching crows to use vending machines. It was great, y’all, loved the strong central government and all the bootstraps I could use for pulling on. After the jump, consumers react to the end of the world, some penny pinching tips, and a seriously unfunny movie. Click here, or the good, clean humor of a bygone era: