I was going to use Munch's The Scream to introduce a post about AIG, but I can't bring myself to write it. For one thing, the AIG debacle is covered everywhere on the web and the MSM media, so my efforts would just be duplicative. And it's frankly no fun to blog gloom and doom and outrage all the time.
Still, it's a nice image, and it offers a different teaching point. The other night I was watching a BBC program, The Private Life of a Masterpiece, on DVD. The segment was about this painting, and I learned to my surprise, that the "scream" referred to in the painting is NOT coming from the man in the foreground.
I had always assumed that the man was screaming.
He's not. He's covering his ears to shut out a scream that's coming from the environment around him. I won't go into any more detail here; there are many places on the web to read about how to interpret the painting.
You learn something every day.