Eddie Bauer made its mark selling rugged apparel and outdoor gear, but it's having a hard time surviving this economic climate.

Shortly after filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, Eddie Bauer Holdings Inc. got a visit from a knight in shining armor: Private equity.

CCMP Capital Advisors LLC has bid $202 million in cash for Eddie Bauer's assets, including 371 retail stores, most of which CCMP says will remain open if the deal goes through. Other buyers can also bid on the company while in Chapter 11.

Eddie Bauer has been saddled with debt and slammed by the recession, but is it even still relevant?

Its TV commercials would count this as "no flags": Six Flags, which operates 20 amusement parks, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Saturday.

It's been one long downhill ride for the thriller, which has been battling debt for years. The past few months have seen the park's embattled CEO, Mark Shapiro, giving high-profile interviews (like this one with CBS) about the company's dire straits that were, investors knew, de facto warnings of the coming filing. Even the parks' TV pitchman, the elderly Mr. Six, is aging and arthritic.

Despite the filing, the company's optimistic public face hasn't changed. "We can assure you that this is a corporate issue, and it does not affect the day-to-day operations of the parks," said a company rep. "Our parks are open this weekend, and will continue to be open with more new rides and attractions and longer hours all summer."

The company plans to file a reorganization plan that aims, mostly through deleveraging, to clear $2.4 billion in debt. Six Flags keeps some soggy books, and that started even before it had to write off an entire park in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Says Shapiro: "We are cleaning up the past and positioning the company for future growth."

So it's back-office accounting, and not attendance, that is the issue. In fact, thanks to the continued addition of new banner attractions and aggressive price-cutting, some of its parks posted record attendance last season.

On Tuesday, the casino resort developer, Fontainebleau Las Vegas LLC announced that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

This resulted from the company's failure to get a lender to complete $800 Million of funding for the construction of a $2.9 billion property on the Vegas strip. This is not Fontainebleau's first dispute with creditors.In April, it filed a $3 billion lawsuit against several lenders including Band of America, JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank, to pay 3,000 construction workers.

The major Vegas project was set to be completed and open for business by October, but the financial gridlock put a halt to construction. Fontainebleau stated that its main goal is to secure funding to complete this project and work to restructure its current debt. The Miami Beach property is not included in this bankruptcy.

It's like some kind of bizarre right of Spring; the annual running of the brides through Filene's basement. And while "Running of the Brides" technically takes place the end of February, it's a tradition that deal-seeking brides everywhere would be loathe to lose. But with the retailer's bankruptcy filing in May, it looked like the traditional running would become a thing of the past.

Brides-to-be have one less thing to worry about: Filene's has been rescued from the dust pile of history by an unlikely source.

The Men's Warehouse picked up the retailer's remaining assets in an auction, pending final court approval. Filene's Basement filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 4, and the retailer had already closed many locations. But Men's Warehouse plans to take 20 of the 26 remaining stores, and will pay $67 million for the honor.

Although the thought of racing hundreds of other girls and wrestling for dresses makes me wince, I do regularly go elbow to elbow for good designer deals. But for those who enjoy the blood sport that is the bridal gown event, start training for next year. Game still on.

We guarantee it.

Susan Docherty, vice-president of Buick and GMC, is working seven days a week trying to revive General Motor's ailing brands, she tells BusinessWeek, and she has a message for her subordinates: "I tell my staff: 'If you're not comfortable with the pace, get with it or get out.' "

CEO Fritz Henderson said that the message behind the company's new ad campaigns -- which are tilted heavily toward the internet (check out GMReinvention.com -- is that "the GM that let too many of you down is history.")

The New York Times reported on a new GM commercial that deals with the bankruptcy head-on, beginning with the line "Let's be honest. No company wants to go through this. But we're not witnessing the end of the American car. We're witnessing the rebirth of the American car."

Of course that ad has already sparked a parody (see below), and I have to ask: Given all the negative publicity surrounding GM, will any amount of advertising be enough to combat it? It would almost be better for GM to try to clear out its inventory with aggressive price cuts and then shut up, design new cars, and come out with a slick new ad campaign. Is telling us that there was a time when GM's cost structure was competitive but now it isn't really going to convince anyone to buy a car? It seems so obvious -- and that GM feels like it needs to announce something everyone else figured out a long time ago almost makes the company seem even more out of touch.

If you're really have a lot of time on your hands, you can follow GM's turnaround on Twitter.

But I'll put the question out there to WalletPOP readers, because it's possible that I'm just a cynic: Are these GM TV ads and Twitter ads having any impact?

Chalk one up for corporate accountability. Kmart's former leader has been found guilty of misleading shareholders as the retailer sped toward a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing.

All this happened in 2001, but Charles Conaway, Kmart's CEO at the time, has been on trial for misleading investors prior to the bankruptcy protection filing in January 2002. He had been in charge for less than two years.

It's not like Conaway is being blamed for pushing Kmart into bankruptcy, that all started long before he arrived. He was found guilty of not being honest about how bad things were at a very specific moment -- a conference call with Wall Street analysts in November 2001.

See, the company had prepared and filed a quarterly report with the Securities and Exchange Commission identifying excess inventory and problems paying vendors for merchandise. But on a call to report those financial results, Conaway never mentioned any of it. In fact, his defense was ignorance, saying he didn't write the report or even read it.

Um, what?

There's really no scenario that makes sense. Either he knew and deliberately misled investors or he wasn't paying attention; you know, doing his job. As for his punishment, that's still to be decided. Apparently he could be banned from ever serving as an executive at a public company.

Aren't punishments supposed to fit the crime?

A lot of people are having a tough time paying their taxes these days, but that's still not likely to generate much sympathy for the former Wachovia bank in Shoemakersville, Pennsylvania. After the branch -- the rural town's only bank -- closed last month, an enterprising local reporter started digging through public records and discovered that the property was sold at auction the previous September after the bank blew off its tax bills for two years.

Wachovia, a big player in the mortgage market before the credit crisis hit, had been on the rocks and was bought by San Francisco banking giant Wells Fargo last September. Wells Fargo took $25 billion in TARP bailout money from the government, yet the subprime scofflaw managed to avoid paying a comparatively measly $9,600 in back taxes.

In the coming years, many books will be written about the subprime fiasco -- most of them reported from the outside of the bubble looking in. If the authors look close enough, they might see Edmund L. Andrews staring back out at them.

It will be hard for any chronicle of the bubble to match the stomach-clenching verisimilitude of Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown, Andrews's account of his own mortgage disaster. Andrews (right), an economics reporter for the New York Times, was covering the market meltdown as a journalist -- and, to his dismay, living the meltdown at home. Turns out all the economic expertise in the world couldn't keep the subprime crisis from tearing apart his personal finances and his new marriage.

The phrase, "America is over stored" gets bandied about a lot. And there was a lot to indicate that was true, even before everything really hit the fan last fall.

And it's all shifted into high gear now, as the Wall Street Journal so thoroughly points out. Brian Florence, co-founder of deadmalls.com, says mall failures have definitely picked up in the last few years. Many of these locations had been in trouble for years but when the economy hit the skids, stores started closing and with them, the malls.

What does this mean for us, the shoppers, the ones whose communities deal with the empty buildings, vacant lots and lost taxes?

Divorce appears to be one business that is recession proof according to statistics released by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Though Wisconsin has one of the lowest divorce rates in the country, there were 16,458 divorces in Wisconsin in 2007. Milwaukee County, which has Wisconsin's largest population, granted 2,565 divorces in 2207 and 2,584 in 2008. Divorce filings haven't gone down in Milwaukee County in 2009 either, with filings constant through the first two months of the year.

This is too bad, as I have long held the position that at least half of the marriages that go belly up could be saved with a little work. And divorce isn't cheap. I don't mean the legal proceedings, though they can cost a bundle especially if children are involved.

I'm talking about when the dust settles and both partners start rebuilding their lives. Women are especially at a disadvantaged as they often experience a drop in their lifestyle. In spite of "equality" in the workplace, women still earn less money than men.

Ah, Sunday morning! It's nearly upon us again. The languid wake-up. The mocha java. The nova and cream cheese. The tangy mimosa. The New York Times. The New York Times Magazine. The New York Times Magazine's Money Issue. The glance at the table of contents. The flipping ahead. The credit and credit cards. The ballooning debt. The inevitable bankruptcy. The creeping dread. The moist paranoia. The undulating queasiness. The pushing the bagel aside. The not finishing the mimosa. The crawling back into bed. The curling into fetal position. The whimpering and weeping. The desperate wishing that it were All a Bad Dream. Ah, Sunday morning!

If you're a Times reader, get ready for a page-turning, stomach-churning weekend. The Money Issue -- given everything, the editors might as well have called it the Credit Issue -- taps into our nightmares of financial nuclear winter, on a wide level and a personal one too. The paper's economics reporter Edmund L. Andrews provides a personal tale of his experience of buying a house outside Washington, in Silver Spring, Maryland. He was supposed to know better, he says -- he was, after all, reporting on the subprime mortgage crisis -- and yet he jumped in anyway, enchanted by the lure of easy homeownership and easier money. (Andrews' article, tellingly, excerpts his forthcoming memoir, Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown.)

For most of my life, I've been attached to a newspaper. With little exception, ever since high school (when I was the editor of The Baysider in the New York City borough of Queens), I've written or edited for a newspaper.

As I watch the negotiations over the life and death The Boston Globe -- one of America's most storied newspapers (and one for which I write a weekly consumer column) -- I think about all the dreams that have been crushed in the wonderful business that journalism was... and hopefully can become again.

Many of the people who toil in newsrooms do it because they feel a calling. Journalism for us has never just been about having a job, but about righting wrongs and getting satisfaction from providing people with a service that could help them in their lives.

At least Lou Carlozo can't say he was unprepared. As the Chicago Tribune's assistant feature editor and writer of the popular "Recession Diaries" blog, he knew better than most what the suddenly cash-strapped have to look forward to.

Still, it didn't make it any easier when on Wednesday he got his pink slip along with 52 other newsroom workers, many of them veteran newsmen like himself. And perhaps because the Universe loves irony, that same day the Trib's parent company OK'd $13 million in bonuses for its executives.

Fortunately, Carlozo has found another outlet for his skills, posting news of his layoff on the True/Slant blog. He also mused about how a mere 10% cut in the Tribune Corp. bonus pool, $1.3 million, could have kept him and 20 other rank and file workers employed for another year. Can't imagine the fat cats currently winding down the late, great Chicago Tribune would have allowed that to be printed. It's a brave new world for the old world media out there. Good thing reporters can roll with the story.

If General Motors is going bankrupt, why are we still pumping taxpayer money into it? Beats me, but now the word is that GM is well on its way to bankruptcy and the government (that's us, taxpayers) will have to kick in $77 billion to help that bankruptcy go smoothly.

Here's how it supposedly will work: GM will file bankruptcy around June 1. The type of bankruptcy it will file won't mean that GM will be out of business. Rather, it will restructure (hopefully with a business model that is actually sustainable). In addition to the $13.4 billion GM has already gotten from the taxpayers, another $77 billion would be added to the tab.

I actually rented a DVD from Blockbuster Video last weekend, for the first time in three years. Not because I missed going there, it was because my Netflix had not arrived in Saturday's mail and I was bored.

I'm like many people who have traded bricks for clicks when it comes to renting movies. I agree with fellow WalletPop blogger Barbara Bartlein about Blockbuster's screwy pricing policy. Plus, when Netflix offers everything from obscure Italian horror flicks to Season 1 of "Six Feet Under," it's hard to be impressed by Blockbuster's three-wall display of "New Releases," most of which have been rented, and its remaining few aisles of "Favorites" that are continuously airing on cable networks like TNT and USA for free.