A shared (and maybe funny) misery

Matthew Robison is having difficulty finding full-time work in his new hometown of Madison, Wisc. A bank foreclosed on his parents’ California home last year.

But Robison has found a way to laugh - at least a little - at a misery that's shared.

Robison's web site, The Brokers With Hands on Their Faces Blog, got 50,000 page views last Friday by showing, well, just that. He tells the New York Times Peter Lattman that the site, which he started in 2008 during the last big financial calamity, sprung from him getting some laughs from a few photos of anguished traders.

You know the rest of the story: A few clicks later, he was viral. .

“With these photos there are a number of layers to laugh at — the poor broker, the photographer waiting to take that perfect photo of the poor broker, the media who love to run with these photos,” he told the Times. “And then there’s me, this guy who collected them and made a blog, which is totally ridiculous as well. People can laugh at whichever part they want to laugh at or maybe they’re not laughing at all. Maybe they think it’s beautiful, or horrible, or stupid. All of them are probably right.”