The image isn't great but it gives you an idea of the effect. Who's got the backstory on who made this ad and how it came to be? We bemoan the intrusion of advertising into every living surface, but it's cool to see a little piece of magic like this in an otherwise boring situation.

First raise the price, then take the discount off the inflated price. Calphalon saucepan was on sale for $124.99, but the label underneath was for $109.99. Rachael Ray cookware, $199 on top, $179 on bottom. Curtain scarf $39.99, old price $27.99. And at Circuit City, it was the same story. It's less about actual deals, and more about manipulating buyer behavior. The only thing getting liquidated at a liquidation sale is your wallet.

Going-Out-of-Business Sales Not Such a Bargain [Good Morning America] (Thanks to Nancy!)

Vermont courts found that Wyeth hadn't given adequate warning to doctors and patients that one particular injection method, the one used on Diana, greatly increases the risk of gangrene. Wyeth is trying to use Federal preemption to win the case, arguing that patients is that consumers can't sue a pharma company if the drug has been approved by federal regulators. The case, Wyeth v. Levine, is before the Supreme Court. The Alliance for Justice has made a 22-minute documentary about Diana Levine so you can learn more about her story. Watch it in its entirety, inside...

Access Denied [Alliance For Justice]
PREVIOUSLY: Big Pharma Goes Before Supreme Court To Get State Lawsuits Banned

According to some of the vocal feedback, particularly on Twitter (just search #motrinmoms), babywearing is neither fashion statement, nor does it cause any particular pain. In fact, a number of women say they do it because it is a less painful way to carry around your baby. In response to the uproar, Motrin posted an apology on its website and has pledged to excise the universe of any and all brand material associated with the campaign. Good luck with that, Tornado Girls, because the shit is already in magazines on newsstands. The controversial ad surely soon to be removed from YouTube, inside...

Motrin Mania Ignited on Twitter, Mad Moms Mobilize [AdRants]

Engine-flushing is supposed to clean out the gunk and deposits in your engine, but breaking these up is like dislodging a blood clot - they can jam up other sensitive components. Honda calls fuel-injection cleaning an "improper repair procedure" as it can damage other injection parts. They and other makers have sent notices to repair shops telling them not to perform them. Despite this, KNBC received complaints from across the country from consumers with cars damaged after getting upsold into the potentially dangerous service. See more in their video report, below:In a statement, both JiffyLube and EZLube say it wasn't acceptable for employees to lie and say services were recommended by the manufacturer when they weren't, and the employees caught would be fired.Could This Damage Your Car? [KNBC]

BeatMyPrice [Official Site]

Margin calls and the financial market's decline [Marketplace]

RELATED:
How Short Selling Works
Credit Crisis As Antarctic Expedition
What Are "Collateralized Debt Obligations?" Watch These Champagne Glasses.

• Promises of fast and easy money
• The person who brings you in gets a cut of your profits, and then you get a cut off new people you bring into the system
• Requires large upfront fees before you really understand what's going on

Buyer Beware [On The Money]

"Great selection" - Maybe what you're looking for is on the shelves, maybe it's not.

"Friendly advice" - Try gum-popping and monotone.

"We'll beat any price from any other store, any membership club, anybody." - We beat ANYONE, except for retailers who are online or farther than 10 miles away.

"We all have one goal: pleasing you" - We all have one goal: spiffs.

"Service is state of the art" - No, but the cigarette sculpture people are help building in the alley out back is pretty amazing.

More reasons why Circuit City is dead.

Getting naked in short selling [Marketplace]

I am attracted to the moment when consciousness ceases: the moments of survival, of animal intensity, of violence, when there is no multiplicity, no potential for different levels of thought: there is only one—the present in its absoluteness.

Violence is one of the most intensely lived experiences and, for those capable of giving themselves over to it, is one of the most intense pleasures. There on the streets of Fulham, I felt, as the group passed over its metaphorical cliff, that I had literally become weightless. I had abandoned gravity, was greater than it. I felt myself to be hovering above myself, capable of perceiving everything in slow motion and overwhelming detail. I realized later that I was on a druggy high, in a state of adrenaline euphoria. And for the first time I am able to understand the words they use to describe it. That crowd violence was their drug.

The credit crisis as Antarctic expedition from Marketplace on Vimeo.

RELATED:
What Are "Collateralized Debt Obligations?" Watch These Champagne Glasses.
Untangling credit default swaps [Marketplace]

Crisis explainer: Uncorking CDOs from Marketplace on Vimeo.Basically, the CDO manager has a champagne bottle filled with mortgages. Every month when the debtors pay their mortgages, it fills the bottle with payments. The cork pops off and he pours the bubbly over a tray of glasses, each one representing a tranche of increasing risk.

The glasses at the top, rated AAA, get paid first and the least amount, and the bubbly flows down to AA, BBB, BB and equity, the tray at the bottom.

The party gets bad when people stop paying their mortgages. Now the bubbly only reaches the first levels, and the BB and the equity don't get paid at all. To make it worse, we have a SECOND CDO manager.

His bottle, instead of being filled with the mortgages, is filled with the BB-rated securities. When a few people stop paying on the first bottle, that means his bottle has no juice at all. He has a whole champagne glass tower with glasses rated AAA through BB like the first one, but it's not getting filled up at all. Then the champagne towers fall over and crash and Wall Street evaporates and there's runs on the bank some wisenheimer paints the Wall Street bull's balls blue. That's CDOs for you.

If you enjoyed that one, he also made another video explaining Credit Default Swaps, which are what brought AIG down.

Crisis explainer: Uncorking CDOs [Marketplace]

The owner kept the monkeys as pets, but saw one of them copying him one day, so he handed him a hot towel and watched him bring it to a customer. Now he's deliberately training three more, which actually concerns us a little. Two monkeys is hilarious, but put five monkey waiters together and you're risking a monkey union, which we imagine won't be quite so enjoyable—imagine Sally Field throwing her poo at the other factory workers instead of scribbling on cardboard.

"The Amazing Monkey Waiters" [Daily Mail via MetaFilter]

For the deaf, those without speakers, people at work, or people too impatient for video, here's a handy caption of what it says:

We also wanted to show you a rather grim sign of our times. It's not far here from here in midtown Manhattan. The national debt has grown too large for the national debt clock.

It went up back in 1989 when the nation's debt was less than 3 trillion dollars. The debt has been piling up so fast lately they had to drop the dollar sign to make room for an extra digit, as the number turned over to more than 10 trillion dollars now and counting every second.

A whole new clock with two extra spaces will go up next year.

"U.S. National Debt Grows Too Large For Clock" [YouTube via Towleroad]

Haven't seen the movie or read the book. Perhaps there's a selfless reason why she's opening open the frozen credit card. In movieland, that's why we call a "round character."

Also, judging by the trailer, their version of a "comeuppance" is for Becky to pad her resume and land a job at a personal finance magazine, and then fall in love with a wealthy young entrepreneur who shares her love of Prada. (Scene: "Oh my god, you speak Prada?" Their eyes meet. Kismet.)

Tales of money struggle, definitely a ripe area to till. Though I would of course prefer something much more raw and real, and punctures the hoax that you can debt your way to the good life, none of which you're likely to find in a Chic Lit flick.

(Thanks to Toland!)

I also learned something about myself this morning, which is that I don't enjoy watching other people fart half as much as I enjoy making up French phrases.

"Extended Stay Makes a Passing Reference" [MSNBC Ads of the Weird]

What Is Money? (1947) [YouTube via Get Rich Slowly]
(Photo: Ryan McFarland)

ANNOUNCER: The uncertainty of getting a home loan made Paul irritable.
Paul pops child's balloon.
ANNOUNCER:Then he went to Washington Mutual. Thanks to their flexible lending rules, he got quick approval. Now he's always in a GREAT mood.
A series of horrible things happen to Paul, but he remains cheery.

"Flexible lending," there's an understatement. Full video below.

[via Wall Street Fighter]

[YouTube via The Soup Blog]

My husband and I found live maggots and larva in a bag of Purina Beneful last week. I bought it at a Petsmart in Kitchener last Sunday, and opened it on Wednesday. I had already fed our two labs two meals of the infested food before realizing there were numerous maggots and fly larva. When I called to speak with Purina about this the response I got as..."as soon as our food leaves our factory, it's no longer our problem." ...disappointing.

I then brought this up with Petsmart's main office, who claims it is not their responsibility either.

My husband and I are furious...our dogs have been sick for 4 days now...they have chronic diarrhea and are not themselves.

CTV picked up the story, but Purina didn't seem interested in talking to them either:

(Photo: Getty)

"We didn't piece any of this together. We just taped it to hold it together. None of this has torn through at all," Amelia McBride said.

"You get the wrong people get a hold of this information, oh my gosh! They could have a heyday with this one box," Michelle McBride said.

"I was just in shock. I just couldn't believe that they're using shredded up checks as packing material," Amelia added.

The McBride's contacted the company that shipped and packed the peppers, WHH Ranch Company.

Owner Bill Hamzy says the family owned and operated business has been using shredded paper from the same Texas bank for years.

He says the McBride's are the first to notice the problem and one he will fix immediately.

It's great that WHH Ranch agreed to stop packing goods in shredded checks, but what sort of insanely reckless bank was handing them out to begin with?!

Packing material poses threat to customers of one Texas bank [KTKA] (Thanks to Aaron!)

Mark Watts summed up the experience for CBS:

Abandoned! We're here in like, a foreign country, you know. And we're sitting on the ground by the tarmac with a roof over our heads with no sides on the building, and we refuse to get on a bus that was going to take us to the front of the aircraft to give us our luggage and say "see you later." And it's dangerous, man!"

Passenger Mike Maney sent us this brief missive from the island nation:

Battery dying but usairways is abandoned 200 of us in Dominican republic and saying we have to leave airport without any hotel. Pasengers including kids concerned about safety.

He later added:

We're still in the airport after being kicked out of the airport last night by armed security (they threatened to arrest one passenger who was demanding answers. We ended up sleeping in a bus because they couldn't find any hotel rooms. Seemed all they wanted was for everyone to leave the airport. Rather than fly in a fresh plane US air left 274 passengers scrambling all night to try to get back home. Sounds like all flights are overbooked. US air should be ashamed more than I suspect it normally is, as should the Dominican republic tourism agency.

And:

Also, we were told at first it was weather related but also that the crew had burned through their hours. Flights were going in and out. Absolutely no acceptable excuse on either the airline's or the airport's part. The weather only exacerbated the logistical and human incompetence of both organizations.

It is unclear when the passengers will be able to return to the United States.

Dozens of Philadelphians Stranded in Paradise [CBS3] (Thanks to Tim!)

Our tipster says this recording used to get passed around at Canadian high schools during the 80's and 90's. You know, they say you shouldn't curse because you can communicate better by using specific, and clean, language. I think this recording transcends the form... it's a free-form jazz riff on the the four-letter word, a magnum opus of expletives. And in the end, the customer wins.

Still, file under "hilarious, but don't try this at home." Jokes aside, he probably could have gotten it fixed much quicker if he had just known how to use executive customer service.

(Thanks to Scott!)

Ely used the material from our posts and used it to break his ETF without fee. Now he gathers together all that information into easily-digested video format (he's also blogged it (posts 1, 2, 3).

This video talks about Verizon, but most of the tactics can be applied to every national cellphone carrier. Just lookup the relevant verbiage in your contract and replace it with what Ely quotes.

Video Tutorial: How to Get Out of Your Verizon Contract Without an Early Termination Fee [Crastinate]

How should people invest?
One guest said that you should diversify your portfolio and invest globally. While this is true, here's something that will actually help you: Get into index funds - Vanguard is a good to get them from - because you will get to keep more money over time instead of losing it to fees. Here's how most stock pickers and fund managers are ripping you off.

Also, with the global economy being so intertwined, investing globally doesn't reduce your risk as much as it might have in the past.

One guest recommended putting the same amount of money in the stock market because it is a "tried and tested" method of investing. What he's talking about is "dollar cost averaging." The idea is supposed to be that some months the stock is up, and some it's down, but if you invest the same every month, over time the difference averages out. While investing regularly is great and definitely better than not investing, and trying to time the market can be disastrous, you actually make more money if you buy your stock in one lump sum. Here's the study.

Are credit card companies going to keep on lending briskly?
Warren asked a guest if credit card companies are going to keep lending money at the same ferocious rate they have been. The guest said yes, because their mailbox was still full of credit card offers. This is flat out wrong. Credit card companies are tightening standards and reducing their exposure. They're raising interest rates, canceling and freezing people's home equity lines of credit, and canceling credit cards for long-standing perfect customers.

Secondly, if your mailbox is full of credit card offers, you need to go to optoutprescreen.com and with a few keystrokes you can be unsubscribed from probably about 98% of the lists of companies sending you offers.

Who is to blame for the mortgage meltdown?
"There's enough blame to go around for everyone," responded one guest. While this might have made sense, say, back in December, by now it's pretty apparent that there was much more fraud and deception going on with the mortgage brokers and resellers than from the consumer side. Don't believe me? Listen to this episode of This American Life while watching this slideshow. If you're in a rush, just read this insider document of a Chase employee telling other employees how to game the computer system to get loans approved that shouldn't have been approved.

[via CNET]

RELATED: Who would wait a week in line for an iPhone 3G? [Fortune]

Inflating Home Appraisals: Buyers could borrow enough to cover closing costs, but ended up owing more than the house is worth.

Flipping Loans: Moving unqualified buyers to loans that don't require documentation, knowing they couldn't afford it

Coaching: Brokers told buyers to overstate or even double their stated income in order to qualify for loans.

Watch the clip, inside...

[via Today Show]

My wife let out a full-throated scream that I've only really heard in my nightmares when she is being carried off by a giant squid or something and both of my legs have been cut off and I can't help her...she bent over, her trembling hands on her knees and spit out what was in her mouth onto the floor...my wife's box of Goobers was ALIVE and crawling with maggots...I peered inside the box and saw lumpen, misshapen Goobers with maggots or some kind of larvae crawling everywhere.

Naturally, the blogger took a video, available in all its disgusting glory, inside...

Nestle's Maggoty Goobers [SAVANNAH RED] (Thanks to Rob Walker!)

PedEgg Accused Of Gross Injustice [The Smoking Gun]

Shrinking packaging costing you more [Fox 13]

Basically, what we learned from the video is that this stuff might be ok if you're drunk which could probably be said for a great number of things. We are anxious to see how Pepsi will torture Japan's taste-buds next year.

Pepsi Blue Hawaii [HikanNinja]

The article says,

The clip, which has been viewed more than two million times, shows 25-year-old Lauren Bernat hula hooping in time with the fitness video game.

Rumours that the clip was a clever marketing ploy for the Wii Fit spread after it emerged that both Miss Bernat and her boyfriend, who filmed the footage, work in advertising.

Giovanny Gutierrez, 30, works as director of interactive media for Tinsley Advertising in Miami, Florida. According to his biography on the firm’s website, he "creates web, e-mail and interactive marketing solutions that perfectly integrate with television, radio and print campaigns."

"Gio is a master of e-commerce, having created web portals for scores of businesses," the biography adds.

Miss Bernat works as an account executive at Tinsley Advertising, where her duties include "evaluating the responses to our Internet advertising".

But Nintendo has denied that the footage is part of an advertising campaign. "This has and is absolutely 100 per cent nothing to do with Nintendo," a spokesman said. "Nintendo did not create it and were not aware of it until it was brought it to our attention."

Mr Gutierrez has also denied that it was a viral advert for the Wii Fit.

The game, which allows Nintendo Wii owners to do a range of exercises and stretches under the guidance of on on-screen fitness expert, hardly needs the free publicity, having sold more than 300,000 copies in the UK in its first two weeks on sale, and sold out in many parts of the world.

But the YouTube affair has done much to boost the profile of Mr Gutierrez and his agency.

The evidence that this is an organized marketing campaign seems circumstantial to us. However, advertisers are always coming up with new ways to turn attention toward new products so who knows? We'll just have to keep watching the video until we figure it out.

Wii Fit underwear girl: A marketing hoax? [The Telegraph]

Envelope System Video Tutorial (Step By Step Guide To Using The Envelope System To Manage Your Cash) [No Credit Needed]

RELATED: Dave Ramsey's Envelope System [Dave Ramsey]

New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less[The Onion]

(Thanks to Clokeisgod!)