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Julie Tilsner
- http://www.badhomecooking.com

Julie Tilsner worked at Business Week Magazine in NYC in the early '90s. The author of four books, she currently freelances for a variety of magazines and is a food blogger.

Julie Tilsner
- http://www.badhomecooking.com

Julie Tilsner worked at Business Week Magazine in NYC in the early '90s. The author of four books, she currently freelances for a variety of magazines and is a food blogger.

Some things never change.

David Sambol, the out-going president of kaput mortgage giant Countrywide Financial Corp., is taking his family on an African vacation -- on Countrywide's Gulfstream IV.

Yes, the guy in charge of the company that sold hundreds of thousands of suspect mortgages to people who couldn't afford them is leaving on a jet plane, for a nice three-week-long vacation in Africa with his family.

But you know, it's been a stressful year for Mr. Sambol, what with his company nearly collapsing and that stressful fire sale to Bank of America (NYSE: BAC). Not to mention being hauled before Congress to account for his part in helping facilitate the global credit crisis.

Marie Antoinette would have understood completely. "Let them take a vacation," she would have said. "An African safari would be nice. The kids will love it."

This post is part of a series on some of the most memorable companies that have disappeared.

What goes up, must come down. It was a cute ad. Who knew it would turn out to be so prophetic?

Pets.com will go down in history as a textbook example of dot-com flame-out, going from IPO to liquidation in nine short months.

Founded in 1998, the company, which had the bright idea of selling pet food and supplies to the public via the internet, went public in February 2000 and raised $82.5 million.

This post is part of a series on some of the most memorable companies that have disappeared.

Back in the heady dot-com days of 1999, any parent who didn't want to brave the holiday season parking lots knew what to do: Get online and buy those Christmas presents at eToys.com. Unlike Toys-R-Us, which had recently gone online itself, eToys seemed to know what it was doing. It offered a vast array of toys at reasonable prices, and it got them to you on time as promised.

But by March 2001, you were back to the Toys-R-Us option -- by then allied with Amazon.com, and doing online retailing the right way. In the end, eToys proved no more durable than the Furby -- much sought-after, priced up by speculators and hype, only to ultimately end up in the backyard, broken and ignored.

eToys went up fast and crashed hard, (not unlike a pogo stick), and in many ways it remains a textbook example of the excesses and "irrational exuberance" of the dot-com era.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

Crocs, those ubiquitous colorful rubber clogs you either love or hate, are perhaps on the road out as a fad. But don't blame the fashion police: blame company shenanigans and a spate of bad PR.

Recent news reports about their safety (Japanese children have reportedly been hurt riding on escalators in their rubber shoes) have only added to the company's woes.

Crocs Inc. (NASDAQ: CROX) has seen its share price plummet in recent months, reaching an all-time 52-week low after announcing it would adjust its first quarter guidance sharply downward. The company recently shut down its rubber plant in Quebec City due to the slowdown in U.S. retail orders. The guidance adjustment shocked analysts, and the stock began to melt like, well, like rubber. Indeed, this once darling of Wall Street has been brought low from all sides. My colleague Zac Bissonnette follows the company closely, (although I doubt he owns a pair himself) and recently wondered why the company wasn't addressing its safety concerns in its 10K.

Rachael Ray went from scraping together the rent as a candy counter girl to a multi-millionaire with her own talk show, cooking show(s), magazine, and books that have sold more than 4 million copies. She's also spawned a lingo all her own. (EVOO for Extra Virgin Olive Oil has entered the popular vernacular). All this in a little under ten years.

How cool is that?

Love her or hate her, Rachael Ray, she of the perky smile and Girl-next-door demeanor, gets major points for translating her love of cooking into a multi-million media empire. People can't seem to get enough of her "regular gal" persona. But her bubbly personality masks some serious business savvy.

Using her mentor Oprah Winfrey as a blueprint, Ray has expanded out of the kitchen this year into many other avenues. Her one-hour daytime talk show, The Rachel Ray Show, is patterned after the perennially popular Oprah Winfrey Show, and was the only syndicated daytime talk show launched in 2007 to be renewed. Her Food Network shows continue to be among the most popular on the channel.

She also cooked up some lucrative endorsement deals with name brands such as Dunkin Donuts and Nabisco -- now owned by Kraft Foods (NYSE: KFT). These media venues help feed her magazine (Every Day with Rachel Ray) and cookbook sales.

These are like the cherry on top of the $16 million Ray took home this year, according to Forbes magazine. By some estimates, Ray's net worth is touching $100 million, but that's hard to verify. One thing's for sure, this gal doesn't need to get out of the kitchen; she's proving that she can stand the heat.

Be sure to check out more Money Winners of 2007.

This post was part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst of 2007. Voting has now closed and readers have chosen Britney Spears as the celebrity most likely to lose everything. Be sure to let us know in the comments if you are pleased with this result.

I read somewhere that when actress Shirley MacLaine finally got her break in Hollywood, the first thing she bought was a four-unit apartment building. That way, she reasoned, when the gravy train stopped, as she believed could happen, she and her mother would have a place to live, plus units to rent out. That was smart planning. And as it turned out, she needn't have worried.

You don't see a lot of that kind of thinking among the celebrity set today.

Think multi-millionaire celebs can't lose it all? Ask O.J. Simpson about his fortune these days. Here are four celebrities in danger of losing it all, thanks to their ongoing shenanigans and lack of planning for a less sparkly, less-in-demand future.

Sleeping pills for children, exploding laptops, lead toys. There is a lot of dubious stuff out there. Lots of dangerous, bad-for you, waste-of-money products that are brazenly pitched to you and me, the hapless consumer. Sometimes the products are so bad you almost have to admire the companies with the chutzpah to put them out there. Almost.

Consumer activists had the same idea. But with a twist. Today, leading global consumer rights groups met in Sydney, Australia to hand out awards for the worst products and the companies that make them. The Consumers International World Congress hopes to hold major corporations accountable for their unrepentant and irresponsible hucksterism.

The envelope, please? And the winners of the 2007 International Bad Products Awards are:

The new home sale numbers came out today, and to no one's surprise, they were uglier than ever. Sales of new single family homes fell by 8.3% last month, according to Commerce Dept. data, the lowest level in seven years.

Year-to-year, new home sales were 21.2% lower than the level in August of 2006, according to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

Oh dear. So much for bottom calling. The housing sector has dragged on the U.S. economy for six straight quarters now, and shows no signs of getting any lighter.

The WSJ's Economics Blog got the reaction of a handful of economists. The language is grim.

"Hideous" Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics said. "Housing is nowhere near the bottom; neither is its wider impact."