Poached from the Vodpod page of Oddjob Nation.

• Michael Spafferty video resume – Spafferty’s experience in Project Management, Product Management, Management Projects, and Management Management makes him the perfect hire for your enterprise.
• “Bearish” – truly a song for the times, with apologies to The Association
• Page 3′s Recession Song – sung by some guys who look like they just met and started singing spontaneously
• 40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 min. 15 seconds – must-watching on the day of your performance review

Odd Job Nation: Go for the job listings, stay for the web series.

If you’re looking for employment, we’re not sure Odd Job Nation’s the right place. For a site that bills itself as “the ultimate resource for today’s growing army of part-time opportunists,” there aren’t very many jobs listed—aside from re-posted ads from the “gigs” sections on various regional Craigslists.

But the real action is on the “Odd Jobs” web series page. There you’ll find three webisodes, featuring Nate, “a neurotic, recently laid-off investment banker” and Joe, “his unemployed, morally questionable, hustler roommate.”

While this may sound like a good candidate to go 404 at any time, the three episodes posted to date actually yield a fair number of laughs. Episode 1, for instance, features a brief snippet from “Diff’rent Strokes – The Musical,” a flop that causes Nate (Jeremy Redleaf, who is also the series writer/director/producer) to lose his job. In episodes 2 and 3, Nate and Joe (Devin Retray, a sort of impoverished man’s Jack Black) work as extras in a rap video. And are we crazy, or is that “Finn” from “The Sopranos” playing the video director? Boy, times are tough.

“Odd Jobs” can be a little on the crude, even offensive side, but if you like your Web comedy nasty, brutish, and most of all short, then it’s a fine way to kill a few minutes when the search for employment’s got you down.

Does today’s negative unemployment report offer evidence that this year’s giant stimulus bill isn’t working? And if so, is that because it wasn’t big enough or because more government spending isn’t the antidote to what ails us? A sampling of economists’ online opinions shows most sticking to their ideological guns, whatever the make.

Robert Reich, for example, is calling for a New Deal-like massive injection of new government spending, the deficit-be-damned:

So why is unemployment and underemployment so high, and why is it likely to remain high for some time? Because, as noted, people who are worried about their jobs or have no jobs, and who are also trying to get out from under a pile of debt, are not going do a lot of shopping. And businesses that don’t have customers aren’t going do a lot of new investing. And foreign nations also suffering high unemployment aren’t going to buy a lot of our goods and services.

And without customers, companies won’t hire. They’ll cut payrolls instead.

Which brings us to the obvious question: Who’s going to buy the stuff we make or the services we provide, and therefore bring jobs back? There’s only one buyer left: The government.

Let me say this as clearly and forcefully as I can: The federal government should be spending even more than it already is on roads and bridges and schools and parks and everything else we need. It should make up for cutbacks at the state level, and then some. This is the only way to put Americans back to work. We did it during the Depression. It was called the WPA.

Yes, I know. Our government is already deep in debt. But let me tell you something: When one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, this is no time to worry about the debt.

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Aye caramba, oy vey, and ah fudge. The September unemployment report? Not so good. The jobless rate hit a 26-year high of 9.8% and the economy shed another 263,000 jobs, worse than expected.

If one of those positions was yours, you could probably give a rat’s rear end about what the economists are saying. Hunched over your checkbook, trying to telekinetically will a decimal point one digit over to the right… Dry statistics cranked out by the government and pontificated on by experts do not tell your story. And who needs a PhD’s analysis to drive home what you already know: A good job is hard to find.

So if you’re already in a bad mood, just skip this post and click here. See? It’s not so bad!

Now on to the dismal scientists and their early commentary on the bad news.

Economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research is decidedly downbeat about what this report foretells:

The data in this report indicates that a turnaround in the labor market is not imminent. Continuing losses of jobs and declines in hours, coupled with stagnant or declining real wages, means that workers’ purchasing power is still falling. There are no further tax breaks scheduled to boost demand and state and local governments are cutting back and raising taxes to address budget shortfalls. The immediate future does not look good.

On Capital Gains and Games, Dartmouth economics professor Andrew Samwick also laments:

From the BLS this morning, everything you would like to be heading down moved up, and everything you would like to be heading up moved down…Digging a bit beneath the headlines, the labor force participation rate fell to 65.2 percent and the employment to population ratio fell to 58.8 percent. Recent media attention has focused on…an alternative measure of the unemployment rate designed to include marginally attached (including discouraged) workers and those employed part-time for economic reasons. It rose to 17.0 percent.

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One month ago we wondered: Would the stock market suffer a September swoon? If you answered yes to that question and acted on it, then you missed out on a nearly 4% gain in the S&P 500, a whopping 6% on the Nasdaq, and 2% in the Dow, which had its best quarter since 1998.

The bears can barely bear it. A month ago, the Reformed Broker asked “Did we fall off the bull today?” But he ended his September commentary with this “Bearslaughter” post:

Still, October is here, and it’s often no picnic. The market crashes of 1929, 1987, and 2008 all occurred in October. Over the week of October 6 last year, the Dow fell 1,874 points or 18%, its worst weekly decline in history. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 fell 20%.

Yet, Mr. Bull, a technical trader, is currently optmistic:

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Personal home pages, blogs, podcasts, video; over the past decade, a lot of self-publishing tools have come online, and here’s one more: Many Eyes, created by IBM’s Collaborative User Experience group, allows anyone to upload data, then turns it into a nifty visualization. As you can imagine, economic information is especially conducive to this type of transformation. Some examples:

• Per capita expenditures of health care by state
• Richest Americans and their wealth source
• Canadian income distribution
• Price level/Sales ratio on Amazon.com
• U.S. Household Income by State

Great for illustrating hard-to-understand statistical data, not to mention impressing friends at parties. The FAQ on how to turn those hard cold numbers into pleasing shapes and colors right here.

And remember: A picture is worth a thousand words, especially when you’re talking about Major Themes in Pop Music by Decade.

Okay, we’ve been at this two months now, so seems like a good moment to take a look back at some of our favorite posts and user-generated material. Click away:

• McKvetch – McDonald’s Talk provides a forum for those who toil under the golden arches to grouse about their employer.
• Haikus for the times – Bad economy/means no big bonus for me/
  Must steal more staplers
• Wikipedia: Featured business, economic, and finance articles – from Panic of 1907 to Tulip Mania, the best biz-related content by the King of All User Gen sites

• Gold fever! – regular people looking for their own Eureka! moment
• Clunker love – video of reluctant participants in the Cash-for-Clunkers program
• Chronicle of a personal financial crisis – The Love in the Time of Foreclosure blog tells the ongoing story of one couple’s experience navigating the rocky waters of financial collapse .

• Signs o’ the times – Brian Lehrer’s Uncommon Indicators logs signs of the recession as observed by folks in the New York City area.

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Here’s a site we really like. Blogging Away Debt autobiographically chronicles the financial trials, tribulations, and triumphs of Beks, who started out in May with $38,495.86 in debt and has since whittled that down to $21,768.53. Along the way, she has documented in consistently honest, thoughtful, and entertaining posts the situations that many Americans — carrying an average $8,329 in credit card debt alone — will relate to.

Take, for example, the False Alarm post:

Yesterday we received a call I thought we’d never get. A call from…

A COLLECTIONS AGENCY!

‘This message is for XXX, we have an urgent matter to discuss with you. We’re calling from Blankety Blank Collections, please call us immediately!’

I called my husband in a panic. ‘Honey, you’ve got something in COLLECTIONS! Can you call them the second you get home!!??’

I dialed again.

*ring*

‘Hon, don’t give them your Social Security Number!’

*ring*

‘Hon, don’t give them your credit card number!’

*ring*

‘Tell them we want something in writing or an office address!’

To which he finally said, ‘Sweetheart, I can’t call them unless you stop calling me.’

Oh. Oops.

A few minutes later, he called me back and said…

‘Same name, wrong person.’

Hey Collections folks, thanks for making not only people with who can’t pay their bills miserable but also everyone else who shares their name.

I can only hope they won’t be calling back.

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Got ‘em? You’re not alone. Culled from YouTube: A bunch o’ people all singin’ their own version of songs titled “Recession Blues.”

Best of set (if you’re David Lynch)

First sentence from today’s AP story on Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe’s growing prominence in the health care debate:

We haven’t come across that nickname yet, but a perusal of various online opinion shows a marked obsession with the Senator most-likely-to-secede from the closed ranks of the Republican caucus on health care. With 60 votes needed to shut down a likely Republican fillibuster, and considering the uncertainty about Democrats’ ability to hold together all 60 of their members to do just that, Snowe’s vote has become the perceived Holy Grail of success or failure to the whole shebang. That gives her, conventional wisdom says, more leverage on this ever-evolving legislation than any single politician in America, including, perhaps, President Obama.

Snowe’s status as one of the dwindling number of Republican moderates has ensured that she will alienate two sets of constituencies, not just one, however she wields her clout. As one of three Republicans to cross party lines and vote for the Obama stimulus bill earlier in the year, she earned the wrath of conservatives, who have pegged her as a “RINO“: Republican-in-name-only.” To progressives, however, she’s merely another roadblock to creating a “public option,” a government health plan that can compete with the private insurance sector, which Snowe opposes.

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