I awoke in the middle of the night with my feet up on the arm of the couch and the roast of Charlie Sheen blaring in the background. I’d been spared the actual roast where people make the same joke over and over about Charlie’s decadent lifestyle with tiny tweaks on the punchline and instead woke at the precise moment of Charlie’s rebuttal. “I learned to want to be an actor from Captain Kirk. Who wouldn’t want to be an actor when they are knee deep in Aldurrian p***y and throat deep in Klingon beer?” And the devastating one-liner “Gene Simmons, you look like an Ewok!” all delivered with a pace and timing that only occurs when read perfectly off a teleprompter. I click the TV off, pat the dog, and finish off the last of my Tiger’s Blood Beer before crashing into bed.
I dream of a blog post of a photograph of a professional photographer taking a picture of a professional photographer taking a picture of a professional blogger blogging about a professional blogger. No one reads the post. No one comments on the post. It’s just content. Filler.
In the dream everyone is a professional photographer, professional blogger, or professional photo-blogger and they are all busily creating content like bees. Snapping photos of someone snapping a photo, preferably at sunset, and adding their logo at the bottom, posting it on facebook as some sort of advertisement in the Little Nickle. “Rob Boss Photography — for all your band, wedding, baby, pet, couples kissing at sunset, photo needs.”
There’s no interaction in this artists community. I just glide through like a ghost. There’s no dialog. People are just wandering around shooting photos and their so-called audience “likes” them. One guy gets lucky and gets a comment of “she’s hot” because he took a picture of one of the many 35 year old women in this town who do burlesque. It’s the perfect system — where people exchange something tangible (work, my life, my dog, my daughter, my 40 year old who lives in Tacoma and loves Soccer-ness) for something intangible (likes, comments).
I wake up to the sounds of Aphrodisiac Jacket on my radio…
Plastic Fantastic Lobster Telephone.
I’ve seen the lobster telephone. Have you? It’s in London, near the Eye, at the Dali museum. You need to see the original surrealists like Dali and Magritte to understand how surreal our every day lives have become. How subverted reality is to the the surreal in every waking moment.
KFC Famous bowls.
There’s an advertisement where they pan through a park and everyone is eating a Famous Bowl. Everyone. The family on a picnic each has their own bowl. If Dali had painted a picture of an entire family gathered around a picnic table and all eating the Famous Bowl, it would have been a mind-blowing surrealist exposition on the disgusting food habits of Americans. But instead, it’s just an advertisement. Something we fast forward over during half time of the United game.
I switch the station to NPR and after a few minutes about how Goldman-Sachs will escape opprobrium for ruining the world’s economy and a bit about how the American wars in Asia have left a legacy of drones flying all over the place Paul Brown comes on the air and reports that Man U have had to cut the cost of their IPO from $20 to $18 to today’s expected $14.
What is more surreal than this Man U IPO? The Glazers leverage buyout one of the most profitable clubs in the history of football and proceed to spend $800,000,000 in interest payments and fees (some of those fees were paid directly to the owners) – money that went directly out of the pockets of fans and into the pockets of banks.
Now, they want to take this 130 year old company and float it on the stock market as if it were an emerging company, which the new shareholders will have no voting rights, in order to raise $300m in cash, only half of which is going back into the club. You read that right, the owners are LITERALLY just asking people to just give them $150m. I don’t know what for. For being such cool guys? Because they were the ones who thought up the idea to leverage buy-out the club? For the life of me I can’t get my head around this absurd notion that they deserve half of the IPO.
And what’s worse, people are going to buy this. I’m not sure they will sell all the shares they are hoping to sell, but there are going to be a number of people who are crazy enough to buy shares and thereby – I want to be perfectly clear here – ensuring that no matter what happens to Manchester United, the Glazers will walk away with a sizeable chunk of money. That’s right, anyone who buys that IPO is paying for a piece of thread in the golden parachute of Malcolm Glazer. Ensuring that if Manchester United folds in 4 years when they can’t pay back their debts because they spent all that IPO money to buy Robin van Persie, at least Malcolm Glazer will walk away with millions of dollars.
Tell me that’s not surreal.
Awesome. What’s also surreal is that even with that scenario I still don’t want to sell van Persie to them. They can crash and burn without sullying my memories of a fantastic player.
Now I don’t want to hear any Gooners complain about the owner and the Board and the Arsenal spending model. But of course they still will, and I will just direct them to this post Tim
It’s not uncommon for existing shareholders to sell some portion of their existing holdings in an IPO. Happened in the IPOs of Facebook, Google, etc.
The original F-1 prospectus indicated that all of the proceeds from the IPO would be used to pay down debt, but the revised F-1 indicated that half would go the Glazers — the change in position, justifiably, raised some eyebrows.
What a superb piece. Hat’s off.
ManUre’s previous sponsor was AIG. See what happened to AIG when the global economy crashed.
http://mobile.philly.com/news/opinion?wss=/philly/opinion&id=165531096&viewAll=y#more
Who is going to bail out ManUre when they crash?
@James, Facebook IPO, currently trading at around 55% of its float. As a Gunner I can only pray the MU one goes th same way!
Lol. It would be nice, but as a practical matter, United will be fine, even if the share price is halved. While the implied value of the team would go down with the share price, it is still an enormous cash machine, as evidenced by its recent shirt sponsorship deal with GM/Chevrolet ($559m over 7 years).
This has been a long time coming btw. Now it looks like the first stirrings of the destruction of the ‘Biggest Club In The World’.
4 years sounds about right for Sir Drunkalot to retire and with him also the club.
I’m not that upset about it either.
I actually dreamt that I was at a party with nothing but pantsless men who all carried around flopping sausages which mirrored their very visible penises. How come no one ever tells you that kind of dream? They are always like “I had a weird dream last night about you. We were married and living in bliss. Isn’t that weird?”
what’s surreal is that we saw the seeds of this at andersred blog years ago, and still ended up with this guy:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/arsenal/8861428/Arsenal-owner-Stan-Kroenke-says-Manchester-United-are-streets-ahead-of-Manchester-City-off-the-pitch.html
I don’t want United to be destroyed. I just want them to fade into mediocrity, and see their fans choke on their tears and sense of entitlement.
Having said that, if United – a club that has enjoyed sustained success because it has generated its own wealth – falls away, while the likes of City and Chelsea are allowed to continue with their vain and self-centered destruction of our beloved competition, then the world will have truly gone mad.
There was a mouse in our kitchen last night. I screamed like a little girl. Incredible reaction. I haven’t screamed like that since I last read Finnegan’s Wake. Anyway, does peppermint oil really work?
I can’t believe I’m asking this on an Arsenal blog.
United in financial meltdown in 4 years? Schadenfreude!
As the Economist stated, minimal voting rights and no dividend, an offering for “fools and fans”.
Having tripled its earnings since the Glaziers took control, and given its iconic status (yes I know it sucks) the team really need to fail badly on the field until 2018 for it to come unstuck. How real is that?….. Food for thought.
nice one, thanx.
*like*
Arsenal players “hit the pool” today, and not a single picture of Giroud?
http://www.arsenal.com/news/news-archive/recovery-session-in-the-pool-pictures
Get your head out of your ass, MacFarlane!
He’s there, hanging out behind Santi like a badass Commander Shepard type.
Makes Santi look a bit like a drowned rat, there.
Djourou is doing his best Phelps impression except that he looks more like Jar Jar Binks.
Utd is a cash cow, so they will always have money to be competitive. Maybe not the kind of money that Chelsea and City will have but who will? What is for sure though, s that they will not be the dominant force either on the field or the transfer market that they once were. At worse, I see them doing a Liverpool. I think Fergusson has made a pact with the devil, and will live up to be 180 years old.
This whole IPO is a joke. They are using only 75MM of it to pay down their debt. The Glazers will pocket 150MM. Maybe they will use the rest of the proceeds for football operations, maybe the wont. At the end of the day the IPO really doesn’t change things too much for them. It’s less than 15% of the shares. The only guys are are sure to lose money are the idiotic investors/fans who will buy the stocks out of loyalty.
Rene Magritte is may favorite surrealist. To see his work in an Arsenal blog is the absolute pinnacle. Man U is be praised for an IPO that is hyper-surreal.
We can now add the Glazers to the list of names which contain Madoff and Forte.
Interesting article on CNBC and the manure IPO and the fact that it traded in a $0.05 range almost the entire day. It was MANipulated by a syndicate Bid that propped up the price so it didn’t fall below the $14 mark.
I still think they would have done just as well to sell ” stock certificates” in their gift shop. All neat and framed for $50. It’s a scam. It’s value will only fall to a point that the club is valued at a reasonable level.
And park chu scores for korea, yet again. Pretty good goal. Gets them the bronze
+2m transfer value? I mean think about it, his goal-game ratio in the last year can’t be that bad (considering he never plays for us, and every time he plays for Korea, he scores…)
It’s unfathomable to me that someone who scores at will for his country and previous clubs can’t get into a game over Chamakh.
Has to be something happening behind the scenes we are totally unaware of.
Magritte is pretty cool. And Tim so are you, I really enjoy your thoughtful and insightful perspective on things, be they football related or just about life as a whole.
Maybe Usain will buy a few shares as unfortunately, he is a big Manu fan and can certainly afford to do so.
He could frame the certificates and give them to his parents as a gift