One of my friends (who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) recently got a job cooking at the ESPN Zone in my neighborhood. They wanted him to fill out a pesky I-9, so he went down to Pilsen and got a fake resident alien card and a phony social security number. He said they just pick a number at random so sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It cost him $60.

Around the same time, he also got ahold of some sort of bootleg card for his satellite TV. Apparently this card goes in your box somehow and you get every single station, all the pay-per-view, all the porn, all the pay channels. He said it cost him $500. I guess that’s the black market for you- supply and demand plus technical sophistication means sixty bucks for the key to the riches of the land of opportunity, and once you get it, five hundred bucks for unlimited porn and boxing.