Update: How about the Golden Fleece? Nice classical ring to it, play on the original meaning. More TV friendly than....

Golden Ejection? In the spirit of bailing out before the plane crashes, and pulling the eject lever, how about Golden Ejection? OK, so it sounds vaguely sexual, but not overtly. In the end, I guess we are seeing that the captains of industry don't go down with the ship.

Original post:

Platinum Escape Pod? That's my entry, as per Josh's front page challenge. I like the notion that as the spaceship is about to explode, a lucky few jump into the pod and escape, Star Wars style.

Need a Catchphrase

In our new economic era, I think we need a new catchphrase for CEOs like Mack Whittle of the South Financial Group, who pushed up his retirement ahead of schedule so he could bag his mega-Golden parachute a few weeks before he sent his company hat in hand to the government for bailout funds.

Total bailout for Whittle's company: $347 million. Total parachute for Whittle: $18 million.

Seriously, what's the catchphrase? Because I think we're going to see a lot of this.

Anyone else have an idea?

Courtest Jed Lewison of the Jed Report.com, and Daily Kos:

...and John McCain under 46%. Here's where the numbers stand right now:

Obama: 67,065,042 (52.7%, 365 EVs)

McCain: 58,420,587 (45.9%, 162 EVs)

Remember how things looked on election night at around midnight ET?

The numbers are stil growing, but are already at historic proportions. Can we call it a mandate yet?

I'm guessing that heads are exploding all across Deep-Red America today, following the release of the latest al-Qaida video rant in which Ayman al-Zawahri refers to Barack Obama, Colin Powell, and Condeleeza Rice as "house negroes." From the article in today's Huffington Post:

CAIRO, Egypt -- Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader used a racial epithet to insult Barack Obama in a message posted Wednesday, describing the president-elect in demeaning terms that imply he does the bidding of whites.

The message appeared chiefly aimed at persuading Muslims and Arabs that Obama does not represent a change in U.S. policies. Ayman al-Zawahri said in the message, which appeared on militant Web sites, that Obama is "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X, the 1960s African-American rights leader.

It strikes me as being somewhat ironic that an extremist fundamentalist Muslim terrorist takes delight in using the same kind of hate-filled language as some of our own well-known right-wing fundamentalist extremists. After all, hasn't Rush Limbaugh been refering to now President-elect Barack Obama as "Barack the Magic Negro" for over a year now?

What must it be like, to be such a proud, chest-thumping American, and to find that those who you proclaim as your most hated enemies, share the same, hate-filled thoughts and speech as you do, and hate the same people as you do? I wonder what it is like for these people to look at themselves in the mirror, and see the face of Ayman al-Zawahri staring back at them. 

I love lists, and history. Especially lists of tech history. Maybe you do too:

The path to modern-day computing is longer than many suspect, and strewn with interesting nuggets of information. These include:

- the inventor of e-mail can't remember when he got it working
- Pac-Man was modelled on a pizza and called Puck-Man until vandals forced a name change
- the first hard drive had a 5MB capacity and could only be moved by a fork-lift truck
- in 1980, The Times reported with wonder that a word processor could be bought for £3,500
- Deep Blue's chess victory over Garry Kasparov was described as a 'psychological triumph'.

For full details of these milestones, and other gems from the Times Archive, read on...

http://timesonline.typepad.com/technology/2008/11/top-25-days-in.html