the housing crash

By Mark | March 26, 2007

As I’m still under doctor’s orders not to blog, I’m just going to pass along this brief clip from our friend, the brilliant Jim “Fuck You” Kunstler’s most recent post on the collapse of the subprime mortgage market:

From the Florida Sun-Sentinel:

BOCA RATON — Retired Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, speaking at a Futures Industry Association annual conference here on Thursday, said the problems of the subprime mortgage market had more to do with home prices than easy credit. “If we could wave a wand and housing prices go up 10 percent, the subprime mortgage problem would disappear,” he said.

What kind of a rock does this fucking idiot Alan Greenspan live under?

The median price for a house in my region of the US (northeast) was $380,000 in the third quarter of 2006. Median annual income, meanwhile, was about $46,000. If, by some miracle (in a land of negative savings) someone with an income of $46,000 had managed to save enough to make a 20 percent down payment ($76,000) on the aforesaid median-priced house and got a 30-year mortgage for the remainder ($314,000) at 7 percent interest, his monthly payment would be $2089. Add to that $250 a month in local property and school taxes and insurance and that brings it up to $2339. That adds up to $28,068 a year in house payments. Let’s say the poor bastard pays $8,000 a year in combined income tax and FICA witholding. That leaves him with a grand total of $9,932 for everything else. Then there’s the yearly cost of owning a car, including installment payments, insurance, gasoline, and maintenance: around $6,000 a year. Oh yeah, if he’s a prudent fellow, he’s got health insurance, let’s say a practically useless high-deductible policy costing $3,000 a year. That leaves approximately $57 a week for groceries, laundry, the collection plate at church, and everything else. (Too bad he can’t afford cable TV and the Internet)…

Yeah, Jim doesn’t take into account that most households have two incomes these days, but it’s still a damned fine point. Alan Greenspan and company are fucking idiots if they think people haven’t been borrowing way too much, for far too long, on homes they couldn’t ever hope to afford in saner times. And, it’s completely in-sane to suggest that the “real” problem is just that housing prices haven’t continued to jump 10% a year.

And, as long as we’re on the subject of the Michigan housing market, did you see that Detroit just got Metafiltered? Apparently people elsewhere in the country don’t think it’s so great that you can buy a house for less than a car here.

Posted in Observations | 7 Comments

my body makes maple syrup!

By Mark | March 25, 2007

I’m not dead. I’ve just been locked inside my house, sick. (And thus inable to get out back to the shed that houses my “blogging apparatus.”) This is by far the most tenacious cold I’ve ever had. It’s been two and a half weeks now. I went to the doctor yesterday, and he said that it had crossed over to an infection of some kind. Thursday morning, when I awoke, I couldn’t get my eyelids to separate. They were swollen closed and fused with something like maple syrup. (After wasting about ten minutes scrubbing at them with an old toothbrush, I set out to construct a makeshift waterboarding setup from an assortment of Clementine’s tub toys. Thank God for waterboarding. That’s all I have to say.) Around that same time, I made the decision that it wasn’t worth fighting it off any longer. If the cold wanted me that badly, it could have me. For two weeks I’d tried to coexist with it, and keep on doing everything that I normally would, but I’d had enough. I just decided to let the cold do what it had to do so that it could move on. So, I slept a few days straight, took some sick days from work, coughing violently and filling trash bag after trash bag with a veritable kaleidoscope of mucus. Yellow, red, green, brown. And I sweat like a motherfucker… So, now it’s Sunday evening and there’s an end in sight. I’ve somehow pulled a muscle in the part of my head that connects it to my neck, so it feels like I’m getting an ice pick to the brain every time I cough, but, otherwise, things are good. The higher spots on my face, which had become a constantly bubbling bog of phlegm, are now relatively dry. My handkerchief is no longer dripping blood. My eyes are clear. My hearing is back… And, so, I anticipate that my sixth sense (the blogging sense) will be back within a day or two as well. Just be patient, and enjoy the MM.com-less time with your families.

In one of my first post-sickness posts, I will be selecting another blogger to receive the clothes I have been wearing these past several weeks. If you have a suggestion as to who you would like to see them on, leave a note. Otherwise, just trust me. I think I’ve got a pretty good plan… The idea would be that these thoroughly infected clothes of mine would travel to another blogger, who would wear them for 48 hours. If he or she proves strong enough to fight off the illness, they’re then forwarded on to someone else, and the chain continues. If, however, the blogger becomes ill, the clothes are to remain on his or her carcass until the very end. They are never to be washed. In the instance of death, I will have the responsibility for choosing the next recipient. I will, of course, take into consideration the wishes of the deceased’s family.

And thanks to all of you who sent notes over the last week to check up on me. It was nice of you to have taken the time from your real lives to check in on my online one.

Just a few last thoughts… I do not like Burt Lancaster as an actor. The British television show, “The Prisoner,” is probably not best appreciated after being confined to your home for five days straight, thoroughly incapacitated by found cough medicine and homemade antibiotics. Thank god for the inexpensive oil and cheap migrant labor that brings 18-pound bags of grapefruit to Michigan for $5, and for Turner Classic Movies (the saving grace of basic cable). My Michigan Design Militia friends and I were featured in a very nice writeup in Metromode. My head, you will notice if you follow that link, appears to have been fashioned from a 25 lb. block of yellowish-grey lard. (It’s not the fault of photographer Myra Klarman, by the way, that I look like I do, so please don’t send her angry letters.) Oh, and here’s hoping that none of you ever have the experience of being dreadfully ill and peaking out your window to see another local blogger in front of your house, sneakily casting glances this way and that, trying, I assume, to suss out what’s the matter with you. On one hand, it’s nice that people care (assuming of course that he wasn’t just looking to make a move against my little empire), but on the other it’s kind of creepy. (And, for what it’s worth, after 6 hours of “The Prisoner,” it looked pretty f’n creepy.)

Its nice to see that life, however, has gone on without me.

Off to bed.

Posted in Mark's Life | 17 Comments

don knotts’ cat could be mine!

By Mark | March 20, 2007

One of the biggest failures in my life, if you can call it a failure, is that I never got to sit down and talk with Don Knotts. I got pretty close on a few occasions, but things just never seemed to work out… Anyway, a reader of MM.com in Texas, knowing of my fascination with Mr. Knotts, just sent the following.

As I know you’re a Don Knotts fan, I thought that you might find this of interest. Up until last week, I lived down the street from his sister-in-law. Unfortunately, I have to say that she was my least favorite neighbor.

Yup, the sister-in-law is gone, but Don Knotts’ cat is still loose somewhere in our neighborhood. Right before the sister-in-law moved away, she was taking care of the cat that had belonged to her sister and Don Knotts before his death, and it got out. They put up signs all over our neighborhood offering a $1000 reward if somebody found this cat. And they hired some “pet bounty hunter” tracker woman with a cat-sniffing beagle to come find it. I don’t think they ever did.

I’m not sure what the point of this post is. It’s not, as I suggest in the title, that I want to obtain this cat. While it would be fun to organize all of my readers in the area and send them on a covert cat-finding operation, I just know that I’d end up giving it right back to these people that lost it in the first place. I couldn’t interfere with the deathbed wishes of my hero. Maybe the point of this post is just to illustrate how small the world is, and how pervasive the internet has become. It’s truly amazing to me that I can broadcast my obsessions through this website, and then things like this come back to me. There’s something very beautiful in that.

All in all, I just find this whole story horribly sad though. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I’m picturing this cat as Don’s best friend, always curled up in his lap, always there with a reaffirming purr. Then, Don dies and the cat gets sent to someone who doesn’t care that much. It gets out of the house. And, not to be overly dramatic, but it most likely gets eaten by a raccoon… As if a fancy pants Hollywood cat even had a chance in the mountains of Texas.

It’s not the cat I feel bad for though. This story just makes me sad for humanity. (Did I mention that I’m also drugged-up on cold medicine?) The simple fact of the matter is that when you die no one else is going to give a shit about what you hold dear. It reminds me of that final scene in Citizen Kane, where the sled, Rosebud, the signifier for Charles Kane’s lost youth, the last thing to cross his mind as he lay dying, gets shoved into a furnace. This cat was probably with Don Knotts when he died, but once he was gone, that was it. When he left, the cat just became a cat.

Posted in Special Projects | 12 Comments

i could have been in turkish movies

By Mark | March 20, 2007

When I was about 20, some friends and I got Eurail passes and bummed around western Europe for a few weeks. Since there isn’t a train to Greece, we took an ancient, huge and very slow moving boat. We’d bought the cheap seats on deck and it was cold as hell. The two guys I was traveling with were somehow able to fall asleep. I couldn’t, so I paced around in the public areas that were heated. At some point during the night, two men in suits approached me, asking if I’d ever done any acting. They said that they “made films” in Turkey. They offered to buy me a drink. As I suspected the movies they made featured young American backpackers being forcibly sodomized in Turkish jail cells, I declined the offer, found my friends, and never left their sides again… Anyway, now I think I may have been too rash in blowing them off. Apparently, there really was a brilliant Turkish film industry at the time… Anyway, as I’m sitting here now watching this incredible stuff, I can’t help but think I may have missed the greatest opportunity in my life that night. (For more on Turkish cinema, see Posted in Mark's Life | 3 Comments

request for information about local independent insurance agents

By Mark | March 20, 2007

Linette and I have gotten our home and auto insurance through Allstate for the past 6 years. We’ve never filed a claim, so we don’t know what they’re like to deal with in those instances, but they seem decent. And we like our agent well enough. Lately, however, we’ve been thinking that we should probably head out and start interviewing independent agents, who aren’t captive to any particular company’s products. Like everyone else these days, we’re whittling at the household budget wherever we can, and we’re thinking it’s likely that we can get the same quality from another insurer for a few dollars less through a broker/independent agent. Even as little as few dollars a month, after all, really does start to add up. Anyway, if you have an agent in southeast Michigan that you’d like to put in a good word for, let me know.

Posted in Other | 11 Comments