Herding Cats: Beer-soaked Rats, Baseball Fans Spend Beaucoup Bucks and Copyright Lawsuits as New Business Plan for Newspapers

Now that the honeymoon phase with my new Droid X has subsided (it gobbled up 350MB of data in under a week, and I barely streamed any music or videos...), I guess I can return my attention to the task at hand. Keep reading for your ridiculous roundup of Friday finance stories!

Consumerist: Combine Your Loves For Alcohol & Taxidermy With Beer Packed In Rodent Carcass - That is a hell of a headline. How could I possibly not have clicked on it? Anyways, Ratty Light (pun very much intended) comes from the same demented Scottish brewers who released Tactical Nuclear Penguin (32% alcohol by volume) and Sink The Bismarck! (41% ABV) earlier this year. But this time they've outdone themselves. "End Of History," named as such because it will be BrewDog's last foray into "extreme brewing," is a whopping 55% ABV and sold for $760 per bottle (I mean carcass) before their supply ran out. So if you're still looking for something ridiculous to drink, maybe you can try a delicious microwaveable milkshake instead!

Forbes: The World's Most Valuable Teams And Athletes - I don't actually have the patience to go through the slideshow of the 50 most valuable sports franchises (mainly because the idiots at Forbes made each slide its own slowly-loading page), but maybe you do. Amazingly, all 32 NFL teams made the Top 50, which also includes five MLB teams, two NBA teams, two "motorsports" teams (I'm assuming that means NASCAR) and nine soccer teams. The NFL's dominance is largely due to the fact that every franchise shares national TV revenue equally, meaning teams like Buffalo and Jacksonville still rake in tons of broadcast cash despite being in relatively tiny markets. That's right--the planet's most powerful sport is...wait for it...SOCIALIST. Oh, the beautiful irony. As Stephen Colbert would say, "the free market has spoken." Marx 1, Smith 0.

MainStreet: The Priciest Baseball Parks In America - Speaking of sports dollars, it costs two Red Sox fans $287 to see a game at Fenway (two left field tickets, two hot dogs, two sodas, and parking on a Saturday), while a fan in Pittsburgh could do the same thing seven Saturdays in a row at PNC Park for less money. Granted, going to a Pirates game will probably make your eyes bleed and leave you in a catatonic state of existential confusion, but that's some pretty insane pricing disparity. I would instead recommend taking in an Angels home game for just $41 (they've been perennial contenders for almost a decade), or maybe visiting brand-new Target Field in the Twin Cities, where you have 5:1 odds of witnessing a very rare specimen in its natural habitat: Carl Pavano's mustache (it has its own Facebook fanpage!).

Wired: Newspaper Chain's New Business Plan: Copyright Suits - Daily Show reporter: "What's black and white and red all over?" New York Times employee: "A newspaper?" Daily Show reporter: "No, your balance sheets!!" Naturally, the Broadsheets are looking for a new way to not-go-bankrupt, but given that they're a totally dead medium, suing the pants off of everyone who re-posts their articles on personal blogs probably isn't a long-term way to cling to life. We all know how well this strategy worked out for the RIAA (just kidding, they spent $64 million on legal costs to recover $1.3 million back from illegal file sharers, a -98% ROI) and it totally doesn't engender any resentment at all, from anyone. I guess this will be the print media equivalent of executing all the hostages even though the cops are going to pump you full of lead regardless.

Lifehacker: Buy Cheap Sunglasses Without Sacrificing Quality - I lost numerous pairs of expensive sunglasses back in the day, and eventually swore I would never again waste money on such fragile and misplace-able luxuries. I've subsisted on knock-off Ray-Bans for several years now, but WiscoVixen recently gave me an informative ocular health lecture on the importance of opting for the real thing for the 100% ultraviolet protection and polarization they offer. I don't know though... I think I'd rather have the sun rot my retinas than me lose or break another pair of $75 Spys.

Gizmodo: Some German Tech Companies Know Their Target Market Too Well - If you've ever been to the Old World, you know that there are two awesome things about European television: the first is that all their commercials are shown in big blocks at the end of the program. This means you can get up and spend 7-8 minutes making yourself a sandwich or something--but you might not want to because the second awesome thing about Euro TV is the gratuitous, explicit and often graphic sexual overtones of their ads. This German ad for a VPN/WAN access router is a perfect example. If we could find a way to loosen the FCC's icy puritanical grip, maybe we could have nice things in America too!

Have a killer weekend, kids. Your local grocery store knows what you'll be up to and is more than happy to help out.