monkeys and money

Tom Waits interviews himself on NPR, and leaves us with this pearl;

Q: What's wrong with the world?
A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley's dog made $12 million last year... and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio, made $30,000. It's just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.

Yeah, so, whatever that means, Tom. Your hazmanhatten is a treble clef.

I watched a re-run of The Passionate Eye last night, in which it stated that there were 2 million families in the US whose houses were in foreclosure. That was in October 2007. At ~ 2.4 kids per family, that is around 9 million people "out on the street". That is a huge number of people. Add on the people who were displaced (oh, so gentle and sanitized a term) by Hurricane Katrina, and the smell of civil unrest begins to permeate. Of course, that has nothing to do with us here. We have the moun...the Olym...the weath...running out o..., well, you know... We're special.

anon. left a link to the Seattle meltdown in the comments section of the last post (go look, I'm too inebriated to provide a a link - just kidding about the inebriation), and I particularly liked the reduction on this one;

Total Loss: $132,000 Percent Loss: 19.4%
Asking Price: $548,000
Bedrooms:3 Baths: 2.5 Sq. feet:1888

Previous Sales:
Sold on 2008-04-25 for $680,000
Sold on 2007-02-26 for $1,850,000

Some of the numbers don't quite jive, the listing detail says that it was built in 2008, but the sale of February 2007 says that it sold for $1.85 million, and it is now listed for $548K. That's about a 70% reduction from peak, by my quick math. Yikes!

Last week this reckless, classless little blog got the most visitors in one day, ever, as far as I know. I don't pay too much attention to those numbers, but it made me curious; was it some kind of notoriety, or infamy, for my part in taking out a blog that spewed more nonsense than I do?, or is the general populace exhibiting a sense of the trembling of the tectonic shift in their "net (if un-actualized) worth" - vis-a-vis their RE holdings, and checking the Interwovennet for anything with the term Real Estate in it? I guess they did not read the (un)real part of the blog title. Did they read that 40 Year/0% down contract comprehensively?

Something about Waits' allusion to monkeys and money starts to become more clear.

The keyboard has been drinking, not me...