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March 07, 2005

Trashing Infospace

The Seattle Times is in the middle of a 3-part story, accusing Infospace's former management of being stock-price-manipulating crooks. Part 1, "Dubious Deals" was yesterday, and today we had Part 2, "Insiders flee". This is really bad stuff if it is true, and makes Martha Stewart's alleged misdeeds seem minor. You've got executives struggling to pump up earnings with shady deals, asking to be demoted so they could sell their stock, equivocating in analyst presentations...here's an article about the legal hoops they had to go through to unseal court documents.

There was a side story about people making lots of money and buying damn-fool crap with it. One guy dropped $100K in a Dodge Viper, then spent $150K more to send it to Hawaii to have a custom paint job on the hood. Wait, it gets better, because the web version of the article has a link to photos of the car, which the guy is trying to unload. Here's a close-up of the dolphins. The thing was painted by Christian Riese Lassen, whose ads were all over the tourist magazines when we were in Hawaii -- he specializes in that unique brand of schlock nature art that people only seem to buy when on vacation.

The guy also wanted some bling-bling so he started designing rings: "His first creation featured a 4-carat diamond surrounded by gems representing the colors of the flags of France, his heritage, and Italy, his Ferrari's." He made a ring symbolizing the union of his car and himself? Does that mean he, like, married his car?

Posted by AdamBa at March 7, 2005 03:22 PM

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