Now Where Was I?
Alrighty, no posts for over a week. That’s not good. The last week and a half has been a flurry of visiting family, traveling of my own, and then more visiting family, all of which will quiet down after Thanksgiving and probably feel very quiet and wrong, but has meant for the last several days I have just not had time to think, much less read the news. I have had time to skim through Facebook, though, and I’ve noticed on this month that a lot of people have been doing  “today I’m thankful for” status updates. That sounds like an Oprah thing, but I’m not curious enough to check and make sure. It’s a nice idea, but not something I&#

Perfect Storm
A few stories about different aspects of the housing industry made their way to me over the last few days, thanks to friends who either sent them directly or posted on Facebook, and when you put them all together, it’s enough to make you want to scream, cry, laugh, or perhaps try all three at the same time.  It sure doesn’t look like we’ve learned our lesson – or our Critters haven’t, at any rate. I’ll just go in chronological order of story release, just so you don’t get the impression that I am any more or less pleased about any of them. The first story is about JPMorgan Chase, my favorite

From The “Should We Really Need A Rule For This?” File …
On Thursday, the Federal Reserve released new rules that will prevent the banks from signing you up for a potentially devastatingly expensive program unless you actually agree to it. From the New York Times: Under the rules announced on Thursday, consumers must be given a notice that explains the debit card policies, including fees. Without permission from the consumer, the card issu

Cable Is For Suckers
How much does a basic cable/satellite package go for these days? According to a report from April (which came up on the first page of a Google search for “average cable rates 2009″ and was about as far as I wanted to go with search time), the average bill was just over $70 by the end of 2008. That represented about an 8% increase overall for just that six month period, well above the rate of inflation. Interestingly, it didn’t go up really at all for the year and a half before that. There are other intriguing bits in the rep

Wow, People Really Can’t Stand These Guys
I know I am not the only one out there who is thoroughly sick of the swine flu news epidemic. It’s an easy bit of filler for the media to throw in some new twist on the swine flu, even creating some issues on their own. Take, for example, “swine flu anxiety.” Vaccine shortages, taking too many sick days when unemployment is breaking 10%, schools shutting down because there just aren’t enough kids who can com