Safe as houses

Today I was to have closed on a condo/townhouse in Seattle. Instead, my realtor & I will be headed out looking at a new list of properties in the Emerald City.

I found out Tuesday that my lender wouldn’t approve the loan—not because of my credit rating or anything like that, but because the condo association doesn’t meet new federal requirements for underwriting loans.

Seems that if you have more than 10% of the units owned by a single person, that’s an impediment. & if more than 25% of the units are devoted to commercial use, that’s another. In this building of six units, two are commercial space, & they’re owned by the same person. Plus—one of the residential owners is eight months in arrears in his homeowner’s dues.

So, as about 99.67% of all I own is currently in cartons in expectation of moving on Monday, I was a bit stunned. There was no intimation that there’d be any problem, but when the appraisal came back it apparently triggered some mechanism that stopped everything until the HOA confirmed that, yes, one person owned the two commercial units. & there’s a deadbeat amongst the owners.

At that point it just ground to a halt.

The thing is, this means that no owner in that building can sell the property if the buyer has to get a loan adhering to these restrictions. As my loan officer explained to me, even if they’d managed to get me an exception so I could buy this place, when time came to sell, I couldn’t for exactly the same reasons.

So I spent Tuesday afternoon cancelling the movers & all the utilities & services for the new place, as well as cancelling the cancellations for utilities & services at the Rambler. (The Brotherhood, to give them credit, were fine with me announcing that instead of moving out as of 30 April, I’m staying on.)

Interestingly, in talking with utility companies in Seattle, I discovered that the seller had told them to start billing me as of Monday, 21 April. That would be four days before the actual, you know, close date.

Can you say, “petty”? I knew you could. (She’d been like that on items in the inspection report, too. That house was on the market since July of last year, mine was the first offer she received, she accepts it within 37 minutes & then starts niggling on inspection items?)

I left it to my agent to inform the seller-side of the situation.

But the saga doesn’t end there because Wednesday morning the seller’s agent started on some sort of unilateral rampage, evidently under the impression that whales needed saving & she was going to do it.

Here’s the first email, addressed to the appraisal company & copied to my agent & me:

“Dear Nate,
“The buyer was rejected for the loan on this condo and we are trying to resolve this. However, the lender seems to have lost your appraisal and won't provide it to the buyer. Can you email the Buyer or her agent or me a copy a.s.a.p. so we can take it to another lender. We were suppose to close on this in 2 days and are now scrambling to find another lender to do it.
“Thanks,
[“Realtor Cow”]

Now, admittedly the inter-agent conversation had been while mine was in her car with a dying mobile phone, so there hadn’t been a lot of explanation as to the reason for the rejected mortgage. Even so, it’s pretty egregious for even a realtor to start demanding private documents to which she’s not entitled & to talk about going to another lender—especially since she doesn’t represent the buyer.

I also love the imperial first-person-plural—like this is some sort of a team effort.

For a seller-side that hadn’t been particularly interested in taking steps that would help move the deal forward before, it’s astonishing how this suddenly became a priority.

But it gets better.

Shortly thereafter Ms. Realtor Cow sent this to my agent:

“CAN YOU SEND ME THE INFORMATION SO I can contact the Lender. We need to find someone else to do the loan. How about the Lender that provided us the pre-approval letter. We should be checking with them. I don't believe this complex isn't lendable and per our contract, the buyer needs to make every attempt to get her loan even if that means with another lender.

“Ask her to contact her Lender and have the appraisal emailed to one of us TODAY. She paid for it, she owns it and they shouldn't be able to keep it.

“Thanks,
“Realtor Cow”

Note the lack of salutation & the shouted first line. (Unless she just can’t figure out how to unlock caps.) Again, the imperial “we”. The implied sense that she alone appears to be on the ball in this situation at the same time imputing a team effort. “We should be checking”, “We need to find someone else”…

Then she starts really getting up my nose: “per our contract, the buyer needs to make every attempt to get her loan even [sic] if that means with another lender.”

Uh, excuse me? Buyer most assuredly does not have to get a loan from any lender she has not chosen & who hasn’t offered her the deal she wants by way of interest rates. Does RC expect me to go to a guy named Guido & pay double-digit APR just to buy this place that no one in the world wanted?

News flash: you don’t represent me, you don’t dictate what I will or won’t do outside the terms of the contract & you don’t try to coerce me into a deal that’s patently not in my interests.

& when the plug has been pulled, the water flows down the drain. So get over it.

(This RC had been practicing minor deceptions throughout, which I put down to lack of attention to detail. Things like citing features in the official MLS listing that didn't in fact exist or weren't in fact included. & in the matter of one of the inspection items, which hadn't been fixed, she had the unmitigated gall to send us a statement for signing agreeing that it had been fixed, with the verbal assurance that it would be. Either she had the impression that I'd been lobotomized, or she just thought she could try it on.)

I’m sure it’s a shock to the petty seller, who now finds the place a permanent millstone round her neck. But the idea that you can jump in & jam it through after it’s been made clear that it’s not going to happen is delusional, even in the goofy world of real estate.

So, I’m back in the old property-hunt saddle again, & have to try to figure out which cartons have enough clothes in them to get me through a few more weeks.

Thank God I hadn’t got round to packing the coffeemaker.

Freddie CFO suicide

You’ve probably heard that the acting CFO of Freddie Mac has apparently committed suicide. David Kellermann, 41, who took over the post last September, was found by his wife after hanging himself in their Reston, VA home.

He didn’t leave a note, so as of this writing, we don’t know the cause of his action. Could have been his Freddie work, despair over his stock portfolio or losing the power table at Morton’s.

A Euro friend of mine commented that this seems to be happening “more & more” in the corporate world.

Alas, I don’t see it.

To commit suicide you have to feel remorse.

To feel remorse you have to have a conscience.

To become a C-level at a major corporation you have to have your conscience surgically removed or chemically shrunk.

Viking funeral for vodka

Eric Felten is just redolent with schadenfreude: vodka, it seems, is dead.

In his most recent column in the WSJ, Felten crows unabatedly that Food & Wine’s Cocktails ’09 has documented the decline of vodka-based drinks. He heaps scorn upon the faux-martinis that dotted the barscape since the turn of the millennium.

Well, take a look at the ingredients of said concoctions: they weren’t about the vodka, they were about the sweet, colored crap that went into them, and the snoot-factor of making such a mish-mash, giving it a loopy name and charging $10 a pop.

I mean—anything with blue curaçao is de facto going to be nasty to look at and to drink.

Felten’s animosity to vodka is of long standing. A couple of years ago he reluctantly and somewhat sullenly discussed a few types of the liquor. He does this periodically to various quaffs—Irish whiskeys, gins, aromatic bitters… But with these he couldn’t even be bothered to rank or price them.

Presumably that was because at a tasting “hosted by the head of a prominent luxury liquor house”, “I found myself hard-pressed to discern much difference.”

Well, whatever. If vodka cycles out of fashion, it’ll be replaced by another mindlessly “in” liquor, in over-priced cocktails marked by nothing so much as the chutzpah of the bartenders.

A couple of the examples Felten cites from Cocktails ’09 bear this out: Strawberry-Basil-Balsamic Daiquiri (is that a drink or a salad?), the Autumn Daiquiri (spiced rum and cinnamon syrup) & La Bomba Daiquiri (pomegranate molasses and muddled raspberries).

Felten loves obscure ingredients—he’s particularly big on elderflower liqueur in this column. Well, as someone who moved from a state with no free-market liquor stores to one with even more dire state-owned liquor stores, I know I have no hope of ever finding this stuff. Or even the Calvados or mescal.

The remembrance of genocide

This is a big week for the memory of genocide. Today is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. At 1000 local time, the vibrant life of the entire state of Israel will come to a halt for two minutes, as people stop whatever they’re doing and remain motionless in silence.

Last year my inaugural post was about Robert Rozett’s five best picks of books on the Holocaust. I won’t add to that list, or to the ones I suggested then. But it wouldn’t be a bad thing if you took a couple of minutes at 1000 your time to stop what you’re doing and think about the triumph of evil when good men choose to do nothing.

But Yom Hashoah isn’t the only day of remembrance for this week. On Friday, 24th April, we commemorate the day in 1915 that the “modern” Turkish government led by the Young Turkey movement began the racial cleansing of Armenians within the Ottoman Empire.

By the time they were done, 1.5 million Armenians were dead.

These systematic massacres were documented at the time. Diplomatic and military representatives of Turkey's allies in World War I, Austria and Germany, wrote about and deplored the murders. But nations of the world community were busy either fighting or avoiding fighting in the war, and they averted their moral eyes.

Well, except for one young corporal serving as a runner in the Western Front. In 1939, when Adolf Hitler's generals questioned the opprobrium his command to wipe out every Pole (man, woman, child) who stood in the way of blitzkrieg would engender, he sanguinely asked, "Who now remembers the Armenians?"

Ever since then the Turkish government has consistently and vehemently denied these acts of mass murder. The most you ever got from them is that “some Armenians died along the route as we were resettling them away from the front.”

They’re so adamant about this that they imprison and punish their own citizens for bringing up the topic—to this day. And of course, if you want the Turks as your “allies”, you daren’t mention that little disturbance way back in the mists of time.

I come from Pasadena, a city with a very large Armenian population (increased during the Lebanese civil war in the 70s). We ran a couple of our grape vines out back to our neighbors' yard, so they could make dolmas without walking around the block to get the leaves.

It’s part of my home-memory that periodically there’d be news of some official from the Turkish consulate in LA being found dead in a burnt-out VW or the like a few blocks from where I lived. I didn’t understand it then, but I’ve come to see that it’s not just the genocide (and that’s what it is—after about 700K, you’ve moved from mass murder to genocide) that infuriates the Armenian community. It’s the denial of it.

And in the congress of nations this refusal to acknowledge the past not only impedes whatever forward progress Turkey might make. It seriously puts into doubt the country’s reliability as an ally, as NPR’s Scott Simon points out.

I understand that we need friends in the Middle East. But I’m not convinced that a nation that can eradicate 1.5 million of its citizens like spraying for roaches, and then spend the next 90 years refusing to admit the crime really has genuine friend potential.

Who now remembers the Armenians? We should.

Faux eaux

Two views this past week on alcohol-free cocktails. The WSJ’s Eric Felten has no use for them, and lists his many reasons why in his column of 3rd April.

The Washington Post’s Johnny-come-lately drinks writer, Jason Wilson, does a me-too on the 15th, although he thinks the virgin versions are just fine. Especially for serving to his 4-year-old and 7-year-old sons.

Wilson brings into the mix a Dutch bartender who’s created a cocktail book for children and an American blogger who’s created a book of mocktails for the enceinte set, called (and I am not making this up) Preggatinis.

Not only is that title a little too fey for me, but this woman actually reverse engineers her virgin drinks back to real cocktails, like you need instructions to chuck in a slurp of vodka or rum.

Uh…whatever sells your vanity-press-published books.

Frankly, her recommendations for pregnant women seem too sweet—if you’re not suffering from morning sickness, you’ll puke after drinking a “Cosmom” (OJ and orange syrup to add to the cranberry juice) or the “Folic Fizz (cantaloupe and strawberries).

Wait—isn’t the latter just a, you know, smoothie?

I am not mocking people who don’t want to ingest alcohol for whatever reason. But I pretty much hold with Felten: drink what you like without pretending it’s a cocktail wannabe.

That screenplay in the trunk of your car...

Security maven Bruce Schneier is running his fourth annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest.

The deal is, you submit your idea for a movie about some threat to Civilization as We Know It. Schneier stipulates, “The goal here is to be outlandish but plausible, ridiculous but possible, and—if it were only true—terrifying.” The submission has to be in the form of a news story & you’re limited to 150 words.

Shouldn’t be a problem for the Twitterati.

Looks like submission is via the comments section on Schneier’s post. No material gain, just the recognition that you really have a handle on the reality of post-modernist life.

& who knows—there might be an actual film deal involved.