Recycling the World of Interiors

Sarah was coveting Matt and Miranda’s subscription to The World of Interiors.  This is a high-end, expensive (at least $100 for the year’s subscription) British design/decoration/architecture magazine.  The photography is beautiful and they somehow seem to avoid the typical design-porn cliches — it’s not just a sequence of rich person after rich person’s predictable homes.
Some [...]

Battery-operated Guinea Pig Unfortunately Does Not Poop

There’s this one detail from the NY Times article “Our Love Affair With Shopping Malls is on the Rocks” that Sarah and I were laughing about because it seemed such a sadly apt emblem for the U.S. economy.
The economic crisis has caused shoppers to go into an essentials-only mode. But the mall has never trafficked [...]

Feckless Budgeting and Bad Math

This is an amusing article (with a poignant side):
Kathy Peel, a Dallas-based family manager (that is, a life coach whose niche is training families to run their homes like businesses), said that incidences of feckless budgeting and bad math seem to be on the rise, at least judging from the reports of coaches trained in [...]

Alan Greenspan/ Thomas Gradgrind

Sorry for all the Dickens-related posts, but this amazing scene of Alan Greenspan admitting the failure of his free-market ideology reminds me of Thomas Gradgrind’s anguished confession to his daughter Louisa, whose life he has destroyed with his inhumane utilitarian philosophy:
“I have proved my — my system to myself, and I have rigidly administered it; [...]

Whether McCain Deserves Blame for the Meltdown

Matt Taibbi and Byron York Butt Heads Over Whether McCain Deserves Blame for the Wall Street Meltdown
This is hilarious and great:
M.T.: I’m saying that you’re talking about individual homeowners defaulting. But these massive companies aren’t going under because of individual homeowner defaults. They’re going under because of the myriad derivatives trades that go on in [...]

Kudos to Paul Krugman

I was psyched to learn that Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize.  Reading his NY Times columns, it’s sometimes been easy to forget that he’s not just a pundit/commentator but a world-class economist.  He must have a swelled head now.  He and Al Gore can have private little “I Won a Nobel Prize on [...]

Perpetual Garage Sales in Elkhart, Indiana

Sad NY Times article about hard times in Elkhart, Indiana:
To understand just how grim things have gotten in this northern Indiana town, consider a new law passed last month by the City Council that limits residents to one garage sale a month.

It seems the perpetual garage sales — which for scores of people in [...]

Shopping at Aldi

Do you know Aldi Foods, my yuppie friend?
They are basically Trader Joe’s for non-yuppies.  We were on the West side for some reason a month or two ago near our local Aldi and Sarah mentioned that her deeply-broke painter friend Annie loves it, so we decided to give it a try.  I was a bit [...]