“You are looking at Apple’s next iPhone. It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS.”

Hurley from Lost teaches the Internet how to turn a cupcake into a sandwich. With pictures! If this revelation does not spawn at least four food-truck concepts by the end of the week, we all will have failed.

On Friday, when the Goldman Sachs SEC investigation press release went out, I was working in a Starbucks in a small town. There was a rather normal-looking man, and he was whisper-screaming on his cellphone about Goldman Sachs. I could hear phrases popping out, like “finally going to get them” and “those bastards” and the like. He had lost his mind, and the New York Times quickly followed. The Goldman Sachs SEC investigation-which is the sadsack SEC’s unconvincing look at a minor bit of potential malfeasance in a single unit of the company in its transactions with other banks, with a potential fine equal to an extremely small percentage of Goldman’s daily income-has been forcibly evolved by the media into a bizarre and misunderstood scandal. The SEC investigation made the front page, above the fold, of the New York Times both Sunday and today; Sunday’s story was the most ludicrous.

Line by line, the Sunday Times story is composed of hot air and baloney. (Today’s is more informative, at least, if largely speculative.)

The lawsuit “seemed to confirm many Americans’ worst suspicions about Wall Street,” they wrote, which is true, if you consider that the sentence hinged on “seemed,” as no American understands the complaint. (It is only fair to note that I have read it several times now, and spent a lot of the weekend discussing it with people smarter than myself and still I probably do not understand all of it either.) Much of what follows in the Times piece is speculation on the idea of there being possible future lawsuits by other bank-customers of Goldman, and on the growing political machinations for regulation in a completely unregulated market. (Which, great! Looking forward to that.) The SEC lawsuit “raises new questions”! (Questions not really new or raised.) The stakes “couldn’t be higher”! (Oh but they could.) Goldman’s success is “controversial”!

The success is not, particularly, controversial. It is if you are playing perception politics.

And this piece of financial analysis is entirely coverage of perception. It is similar to the current role of the Times in covering actual politics; the paper reports on policies and initiatives by political leaders but renders their decisions in terms of quests for “political capital,” that terrible meaningless and misused phrase so beloved of the Bushes, or in terms of the reaction of the “political audience.” This is a very mistaken position regarding the importance of the public-and a cynical one, too, as it chalks up all actions by politicians or bankers to a wish to court the public, instead of, you know, a wish to actually do something.

The perception is stuck now; and in the intersection of politics and finance, it can safely be described as “a toxic political cloud”-even if nothing ever comes of it, which it most likely will not.

It does not in fact matter too much what the public thinks of Goldman Sachs! If they had a public opinion poll on how the average uninformed American “feels” about the bank, people would report that they feel quite bad about the bank, and that is not liable to change at any time. There are many reasons to dislike Goldman Sachs, of course. Few of them are as elaborate, specific and confusing as this case.

What’s even worse about these stories is the confusion about who is an “investor.” That word gets bandied about quite a bit, and never, in this case, does it mean “people who buy stocks” or “people who are not members of billion-dollar commercial entities.” The game? It “is rigged, the odds stacked in the banks’ favor.” But, but… the game is entirely composed of banks. The game is always in “the banks’ favor.” There are no non-banks involved!

“Any investor who bought these C.D.O.’s and lost a significant amount of money is probably looking at their investment and wanting to know: what were the details behind the sale?” said William Tanona, an analyst at Collins Stewart. “Will they contact the S.E.C. and say, ‘Here’s the transaction we participated in, and we’d love to know who is on the other side of it?’”

The poor uninformed investor! Main Street! Who was the investor so taken advantage of in the SEC charge? IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG-an immense bank, with nearly 2000 employees, that so wholeheartedly bought in to the subprime fad that it had to be bailed out twice.

A look back at Louise Story’s largely excellent work at the Times on the Merrill Lynch-Bank of America craziness showed that that major financial story-which provided real insight into the relationship of the government and the banking system-rarely, if ever, broke out in the paper beyond the front page of the business section (except at least, once-when bonuses were involved). And also “S.E.C. CONCEDES OVERSIGHT FLAWS FUELED COLLAPSE” made it to the front page back in September 27, 2008, which is slightly another kettle of fish but not at all unrelated to the SEC’s rather dismal little investigation into Goldman Sachs now.

The actual complaint is unshocking. Our German friends told Goldman Sachs that they weren’t interested in purchasing CDOs that didn’t have a trusted collateral manager; GS hired and negotiated with a trusted collateral manager to create the CDO packages that they then sold to the bank. That there was another party involved helping pick the package that was chosen by the Germans doesn’t seem all that shocking-even while that other party “bet against” the package. (A legal act, mind you.)

The Merrill-B of A story was a real story about how the financial crisis went down. This story, on the other hand, may be the beginning of a long series of confusing, irritating lawsuits-although we’ll see how many there are, in light of the fact that Goldman is likely to win this one without even really trying too hard.

“Dr. Masterson became so well known as an expert on narcissism that he sometimes attracted patients for whom only a high-profile therapist would do — in other words, narcissists. In the 1980s, after The New York Times cited him as an authority on the disorder, he received a dozen calls from people wanting treatment.”
-James Francis Masterson, a psychiatrist whose theories about the importance of early maternal attachment in behavioral development helped change the way personality disorders are treated, died last week at the age of 84. You have no idea how profoundly this passing affects me, Alex Balk.

The always-number-crunching Nate Silver has compiled a chart of fast-food items’ relative unhealthiness to KFC’s Double Down. The winner as far as pure gluttony goes: Wendy’s Triple Baconator (pictured), a three-patty lots-of-bacon-and-cheeseburger that has 1,350 calories, 90 grams of fat, and 2.78 grams of sodium — the equivalent of two and a half Double Downs, if you want to get mathy about it. If only it came on a lattice of bacon instead of a bun. It would be so much more bloggable that way! Someone get on that, OK?

“Despite the cloud of volcanic ash, the pope was able to travel.” Alright, Pope! Is there anything he can’t do? Oh, yeah, comfort the victims of priestly abuse to their satisfaction, which is what he flew to Malta in an attempt to do.

New York runs a story today by Awl pal Doree Shafrir about the “new generation of tech entrepreneurs in the city” who are “trying to overthrow old media and build a better New York.” Naturally the piece is headlined “Tweet Tweet Bang Bang,” a reference to the San Francisco-based Twitter. This is probably because most journalists only know two emerging tech companies, and “Foursquare” makes for lousy punning. Not satisfied with taking just one Twitter headline off the table, New York doubles up, referring to the story on the cover as “Life Is Tweet.” As a service to those of our friends in the media who are desperate to sex up a story with a headline featuring some variation of Twitter in its title, we’ve compiled a brief list of what’s already been taken, and a shorter selection of what’s still available. HURRY.

Already Used
“We Got The Tweet”
“Such Tweet Sorrow”
“The Tweetest Thing”
“Rinse and Retweet”
“How Tweet It Is”
“Tweeting a Dead Horse”
“The Tweet Sheet”
“Tweet and Lovely”
“Cheap Tweets”
“Trick Or Tweet”
“Advance and Retweet”
“Tweets Don’t Fail Me Now”
“If You Can’t Stand The Tweet”
“Tweet of the Drum”
“No Mean Tweet”
“Tweet Week”
“Meet and Tweet”
Most variations of “It’s Not The Tweet, It’s The Humidity”
“I Twit You Not”

Still Good
“Tweeter Than Honey”
“As Tweet As They Come”
“Tweet and Sour”
“Home Tweet Home”
“On The Hot Tweet”
“Body Tweet”
“Tweets of Strength”
“Victory and Detweet” (also, “Detweet is an Orphan”)
“Tweetings From Asbury Park”

“Tweet, Pray, Love,” while not yet having been used as a headline, is in fact an actual Twitter feed, so you’re gonna have to make a judgment call on that one. Otherwise I suggest sorting through the titles of old Looney Tunes shorts: there are bound to be a bunch of Sylvester cartoons that haven’t been used. Probably the really racist ones. Good luck!

Dear Mr. McCormack,

I’m sorry for rejoicing over the prospect of your hometown being destroyed.

I should never have been in the class you were teaching in the first place. French 2, at Red Bank Regional High School, first semester 1986. The teacher who had taught the French 1 class I had taken the previous year, my freshman year, had been something of a pushover and either didn’t notice or didn’t care that I had been cheating on pretty much every test he gave, and so awarded me a passing grade even though I hadn’t learned how to say much more than Je m’appelle David-oh, and the words for “to dance” and “to sing,” dancer and chanter, for some reason those always stuck in my head.

So that very first day, when you greeted the class in French (and with such a perfect accent-you were actually from France, I was surprised to learn!) and kept talking to us that way, like we were supposed to understand what you were saying, well, I had a pretty good idea that I wasn’t going to be able to bluff my way through for very long. It being the start of a new school year, we students were rambunctious-laughing, joking, still half-fried from summer. You asserted your authority. Standing at the front of the class, not smiling, you spoke to us sternly, all these crisp, mellifluous words I didn’t understand. It took you a long time of repeating yourself, and some help in translating from some of the more conscientious students, but eventually I was made to know that you expected us all to write a one-page essay about what we did over the summer, in French. You handed out paper. I looked around. Were you serious? There was no way I could do anything like that. Could anyone else? Just how far behind had all that cheating left me? Quite far, apparently, as most of the class set themselves to writing. You sat down at your desk.

I stared at the empty page, marveling at how hopeless my situation was, thinking about the old saying about how when you cheat, you’re really only cheating yourself. Well, here I was. I decided to give it my best shot.

Je m’appelle David, I started. Mon vacacion de summer c’was magnifique…

I wrote more like this, sprinkling the few French words I knew amongst the mostly English bullshit. Le weather was tres bien. I wrote the letters as big as I could, gave myself two-inch margins, took up as much space as possible with cross-outs. Still, I looked at the page, a quarter full; it was ridiculous. So I decided to make it more ridiculous. I stood up and walked up to your desk. “Excuse me, Mr. McCormack?”

You corrected me. “Escusez moi-”

“Escusez moi, M. McCormack. Where are you from in France? What city did you grow up in?”

“D’ou venez vous…”

“D’ou venez vous…”

“Je suis Nicoise,” you said, with a quizzical expression. “Je suis originaire de Nice.”

“Merci,” I said. I knew Nice was the name of a city in France. I even knew it was spelled like “nice.” I went back to my seat, sat down and started writing again.

Mon favorite du jour de la summer, I wrote, was when le president de Etas Unis, monsieur Ronald Reagan, declared war on La France. La jour de tres joueoux! When president Reagan dropped le bombs on le cite de Nice, all le garcons y all la femmes dances y chantes!

Terribly obnoxious, and about half as clever as I thought it was. (Although, considering it now, I wonder whether Reagan ever did harbor a secret desire to attack France-or at least announce something like that while recording a soundcheck for a radio address.) I cringe a little when I think of what my face must have looked like as I passed my essay in, what yours must have looked like when you read it. The next morning, during homeroom, I was called down to principal’s office where I was told that you did not want me to come to class anymore, and that my mother had been called in for a meeting with you and me and the superintendent, Dr. Nogueira.

My mother was not happy to come to such a meeting, of course. And you and Dr. Nogueira were both frowning when we all sat down. I avoided eye contact with everyone and tried to suppress the smirk that so often crept onto my face when I was being reprimanded-a nervous reaction that was rarely taken for what it was. That day, though, I admit to feeling a bit of pride when you told my mother that you’d never been so personally offended in your career. My mother, who was a teacher herself, a professor at Rutgers, looked very sad. I was punished that night at dinner-a short grounding.

My guidance counselor switched me out of French 2 and into Spanish 1. And I’m sure the next three years were better for it for all involved. You didn’t hold a grudge. You were actually a very nice guy, one of the teachers at the school who seemed to honestly like and care about the kids. Seeing each other in the hallways, or on the class trips you sometimes chaperoned, we eventually developed a friendly rapport-in English of course.

This year, as it turns out, I’m (maybe!) going to France for a vacation-five days in Paris, my first time there since my short stint in your class. From what I’ve heard, it’s a place where speaking French comes in handy. So I will be at a disadvantage. Once again, I’ll be reminded that it was only myself I was cheating all those years ago. I fully expect some waiter at a café will insult me to my face without my ever knowing. Hard to say I won’t deserve it.

The NBA postseason kicks off tomorrow in Cleveland at 3 PM. Can you feel the excitement? You can! Awl publisher David Cho was going to put together a playoff preview, but he ran out of time when we were all, “Dude! Go get us some MONEY!” He suggests that you read this instead. My own personal prediction is that the Cavaliers will finally win it all, because the league wants to see LeBron in New York and giving Cleveland a championship would make for a much easier parting. Expect some very generous calls for the Cavs. But what do I know? As a Celtics fan my hopes for the playoffs are mainly that the Lakers do not win another title. It’s been that kind of year.

In February, a Philadelphia-area teen and his parents sued the Lower Merion school district for allegedly spying on the 15-year-old via Webcam-enabled tracking software that had been installed on his school-supplied MacBook. The district, countering, claimed that the software was there to find lost or stolen computers, and that Blake Robbins’ machine was being watched via Webcam photos (the one at left that was snapped while Blake was napping with his laptop, according to the Robbins family) and screenshots because of his failure to pay insurance on the laptop. The district was pretty adamant that it had done nothing wrong-until earlier this afternoon, when it released a statement saying that, oh, yes, there actually might have been some inappropriate remote surveillance going on, and that its servers were actually storing thousands of images culled from students’ computers. Oops?

This all started over some confusion regarding the narcotic nature of the somewhat gross candies known as Mike & Ikes.

Blake Robbins, a Harriton High School sophomore, says Assistant Principal Lindy Matsko confronted him in Nov. 2009 for engaging in “improper behavior” at his home.

The 16-year-old from Penn Valley, Pa. claims Matsko showed him photos remotely taken with the built-in webcam on his MacBook, according to the suit.

In the photos, the teen was allegedly holding two pill-shaped objects, says Robbins’ attorney Mark Haltzman. School officials believed they were drugs, while the family maintains they were simply Mike-N-Ike candy.

“They were trying to allege that…those were pills annd somehow he was involved in selling drugs,” Halzman said Friday.

When the family protested the webcam use as an invasion of privacy, the district claimed they had the right to “24/7 access” to the systems, the suit says.

Whether or not the family was part of some grand icky-sweets-related coverup, the district denied charges of spying and a number of parents seemed to side with it, organizing against the Robbins’ lawsuit and generally grumbling about the Waste Of Their Tax Dollars that would result from a protracted legal action.

But then one employee of the school — Carol Cafiero, the information systems coordinator who the school district placed on leave in March — irritated the Robbins’ lawyer by attempting to quash a subpoena last month and then repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment (you know, the one about self-incrimination) during her deposition last Friday. Even though she hadn’t been personally named in the initial suit. Which meant it was time to go through her inbox! From a motion filed yesterday and subsequently granted by a Federal judge:

Second, emails suggest that Carol Cafiero may be a voyeur. For instance, in one email, when one IT person commented on how the viewing of the webcam pictures and screen shots from a student’s computer was like “a little LMSD soap opera,” Cafiero responded “I know, I love it!”

Man, for someone who “works in tech,” Carol Cafiero apparently is not so good at hiding potentially incriminating e-mails. Not to mention leaving somewhat-cheeky speculation about why one might be engaging in certain behaviors for non-online conversations!

Lower Merion’s statement noted that all those students who were caught playing unwitting roles in the “soap opera” would be individually notified as the district’s internal investigation unfolded over the coming weeks. (The parents, for their part, have yet to respond.) It’s like drama club callbacks, only with no auditions!