Property is theft

Uh-oh.

I checked my Facebook page to find a neighbor from my old cluster in Virginia saying she “is not happy with all the dirty hippies moving in two doors down. Looks like they've been listenin to Mick Jagger music and bad-mouthin their country.”

Seems the people who bought my house—we knew up front that they were buying it for investment property, to rent it out—have already leased it, & to lowlifes.

I’m sorry about that because one property owner in the cluster made a business out of renting his house to trailer trash. There was one set of tenants there for a few years that seemed to be some sort of group home. I mean one middle-aged white guy & a collection of Gen-Texts in succession, parking their junkers in other people’s parking slots, attracting visits from the cops & generally lowering property values.

When they finally moved out the owner literally stripped the place down to the studs because of all the damage.

Then he turned around & rented it to the Clampetts—a clan of Ozarkian proportions & class who immediately let their spawn turn the landscaped front yard into a sea of mud.

So apologies to all my neighbors, but welcome to capitalism.

& I’m still glad that property’s off my hands, if not entirely off my conscience.

Sign of the Times, chapter 2

Okay, the recession has officially struck beyond the living: the LA Times reports that times are so tough people are leaving the bodies of their relatives with county morgues to be cremated on the public nickel.

In LA what this amounts to is paying $352 for collecting the ashes from the coroner after an unclaimed body is cremated. As opposed to $466 for collecting them from the morgue.

(Apparently they’re different entities. Who knew?)

To put this into perspective, claiming a body from the LA county coroner will set you back $200. Then there’s the $1000 for cremation in a private facility or a minimum of $7300 for the most basic of funerals & burials.

Personally, while I find it fascinating to visit graveyards, read the headstones & imagine the lives represented there, I’m not particularly interested in what happens to the body once the anima has departed. But I understand that I’m in the minority in this regard, & that having to decide between honoring your loved one in a way suitable to your beliefs or buying food & paying the rent is a heart-rending choice no one in this country should be forced to make.

So I’m sure these people will take comfort in the good news that the major banks whose crack-brained lending practices caused this whole mess have reported such good financial news that they’re able once again to splash out on extravagant corporate jollies & obscenely large bonuses for management.

(At least the Times had the grace not to serve up the ads for caskets on this story’s that appeared in the report about Farrah Fawcett's death.)

Jerks in the office

Joe Queenan takes on the phenomenon of the office jerk in the WSJ.

While he’s on his typically stylish form, & he’s probably right about people generally not bitching (at least not in the office) about workplace jerks during the recession, he completely underestimates the arrogance of your standard jerk. They’re not holding back, trying to stay below the HR radar; they’re going full bore with their self-promotion, grandiose schemes & backstabbing.

Stupid or not, recession or not, they are as focused as ever on making a name for themselves & leaving a trail of bodies behind wherever they go. There is no interruption in the havoc they wreak.

At least that’s the modus operandi around here.

End of an era

The world has lost one of the best newsmen of the last century. Walter Cronkite died at his New York home Friday at age 92.

First for UPI, then for CBS, Cronkite reported the biggest stories of the mid/late 20th century: the Battle of the Bulge, Nuremberg trials, Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Apollo moon landing, Watergate. He shed light on the world around us without ever inserting himself between it & us.

He was everything Dan Rather wished he could be: measured, objective, intelligent, astute. Most of all, he defined integrity in news reporting. Try to find that anywhere today.

Cronkite set a standard of honesty & trustworthiness from which the news media has been retreating ever since he retired in 1981. Peter Jennings came closest to Cronkite’s level of reportage; when he died four years ago, broadcast news fell completely into the clutches of the corporate bean counters interested only in cutting costs & blown-dried reporters more concerned with the camera angle on their on-camera stand-up than the actual, you know, story.

Try to imagine Cronkite being involved in reporting a story based on unconfirmed documents—the incident that led to Rather leaving CBS Evening News. Or staging of exploding gas tanks that rocked Dateline NBC. In both cases the “reporters” had a story they wanted to tell, & the truth wasn’t going to get in their way.

Moreover, Cronkite knew his job was to report the story, not be it, which is a rare quality in any form of journalism these days, print as well as broadcast or Internet. It’s gone way beyond the mixing of facts & opinion; it’s about thinking you’re more important than the news. That was something that never occurred to Cronkite.

Well, we’re all the poorer this week for his passing. & perhaps a bit more ignorant.

Just when you thought it was safe

I’m not going to say that I’m astounded by this story in the WSJ, because I’m an adherent of H.L. Mencken’s dictum that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Even, evidently, MBAs.

Fortunately, my employer has cancelled the company picnic this year, due to belt-tightening, so I don’t have to lay out a sartorial strategy. But I recall very well a former employer’s sales conference in Cyprus, where the event planners arranged all sorts of group water activities that required swimsuits (or else getting drenched in your civvies).

I went off to see the antiquities. Much preferable to viewing my Euro colleagues in the near-buff. & soaked.

As it was, they were plastered pretty much all the time. Which is probably the case at these company outings described by the Journal reporter.

At any rate, I offer it as something for you to take under consideration in your climb up the corporate ladder.

Dulce et decorum est

A letter to the Washington Post brought to the attention of the world Lt. Brian Bradshaw, who was killed in Afghanistan on 25 June. He was 25.

Bradshaw’s parents agreed to the publication of this letter, written by members of the Air National Guard transport crew who flew Bradshaw’s casket out of his deployment base to Bagram.

You can see a photo of Bradshaw at the Post’s Faces of the Fallen site. The Post does the best job of humanizing the Bush administration’s wars of any paper I know. Whenever they amass enough photos of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to fill a double full-page spread, they print them in the order of their deaths. (As the names appear on the Vietnam Memorial.)

I think they have enough to print every couple of months, sadly.

The description of Bradshaw’s final trip out of Afghanistan reminds me of a story in Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Home Front. The essay is by a Marine colonel who accompanied the body of a 21-year-old Marine killed in Iraq home to his funeral in Wyoming.

It also makes me think of the funeral in the aptly-named town of Comfort, Tex., of Spec. James M. Kiehl, described by his aunt, Vicki Pierce.

You can see Kiehl’s Faces of the Fallen page here.

It’s fitting and proper to keep their faces in our thoughts.

Liberté!

It’s been a harrowing six weeks, but I’m back to being a single-property owner. On the advice of my amazing real estate agent, I put my Virginia house on the market the first week of June, & we closed yesterday.

I can’t tell you what a relief it is—even having it rented for most of the past year, & even having allegedly professional property managers allegedly managing it, there’s always a strain to check on what’s really happening, rattle cages because they’ve messed up, worry about repairs, etc. I’m not good at being a nag & I especially don’t like being one to people whose job it is to manage all the bits & pieces.

It’s an odd market. As late as April my agent (Craig Lilly, of Prudential) was advising me that if I didn’t have to sell, I shouldn’t. I mean, a year ago Northern Virginia was the vortex of foreclosures & short sales. Even Fairfax County, the champ of inflated property assessments, devalued my house this year by about 30%.

But for some reason, in May, when I checked again, he told me that things seemed to be picking up & I decided to go ahead & see if I could sell. Initially we talked about a price in the low-$200s, but by the end of May he came back again & said that he thought that was too low, & we went for about $30K more. So that’s what we did.

&, blow me if I didn’t get an offer about two days after the sign went up on the property. Not full, but close; & of course that bloody "seller's subsidy" that benights the Virginia real estate market.

There was the usual back-&-forth on repairs & a serious glitch at the end when the electronic appraisals didn’t match the human one, & they had to be reconciled. But papers were signed yesterday & I don’t have to worry any more about two homeowners’ associations, the paint police, the Clampetts living across the way & the rest of that Old Dominion nonsense.

I have to say that I wouldn’t be a realtor for quids—Craig managed the sitting tenants, the contracts, the repair estimates & the repairs; all I had to do was sign about a gazillion papers & ask a few questions. It was as close to painless as you can get in anything involving real estate.

I do miss Virginia, & that house was really good to me. But since I’m in Pacific North-hell, I have to focus on here now. Perhaps it’s appropriate that it ended on Bastille Day.

& major props to Craig!

Allons, enfants

Today is the 220th anniversary of the quintessential revolutionary statement, the storming of the Bastille. Really, unless you’re of the First or Second Estate, ya just gotta love the idea of the riff-raff of Paris rushing to a moldy old prison, releasing all the prisoners—all seven of them—& basically destroying the arch symbol of l’Ancien Régime.

Bugger the fact that none of the inmates was actually a, tu sais, political prisoner (unless you count “the accused conspirator, Tavernier”). Nothing but a few forgers, one aristo committed by his family (possibly for pecuniary reasons—the Bastille was good in that regard), another (a putative Englishman) & two lunatics.

Well, after all—we’re talking les Français, mes chers amis; symbolism is reality.

Anyhow, oubliez les Sans Culottes; this is an excuse to drink wine , eat snails in garlic butter & shout revolutionary slogans.

Vive la Révolution!

Bookish broad

As some of you may know, I have books. I don’t seem to be able to go anywhere without picking up one or two…or twenty.

There’ve been trips to London where I went up and down Charing Cross Road buying books—to the point that my luggage had to be hand searched at Heathrow because the X-rays wouldn’t penetrate the dense layer of literature. Once I had to buy a gym bag at a London street market to accommodate all my additions.

And then there was the trip to Paris, when I bought so many at museums and bookstores I had to take a taxi to the Gare du Nord because I knew that even with wheeled bags I wouldn’t be able to get across the correspondance of the Métro (where there are beaucoup de stairs). The guy who helped lift my bags onto the Eurostar is probably still walking funny.

Or the jaunt across the Channel to Normandy. On my return the boot of my car was filled with equal weights of books and Champagne.

When my London household was being moved back to the US, one of the packers commented that he’d never seen so many books. (Or shoes, but that’s a different matter entirely.) I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was only packing three bookcases and I had five more at home.

Luckily my Virginia house had two stair landings large enough to accommodate two bookcases each, and I was able to put six cases in the office upstairs for history and reference; three downstairs for fiction, poetry and psychology; two on the upper landing for arts and children’s lit; and two on the lower landing for travel, literature, classics, drama, etc. Oh—and one on the main floor by the kitchen for cookbooks.

The books were the prime challenge when it came to finding a permanent home here. Once I liked a place I had to start imagining where the cases would go, and one by one the prospects got crossed off the list. With some people it's the grand piano; with me it's the books. (At least 70% of them and all but five of the cases spent the last ten months in storage, so getting them out where I can read them is a major endorphin rush.)

Okay, so on this last move, distributing my collection over the three floors, it occurred to me that perhaps it’s time to cull the collection some. I mean—I did give away a couple of cartons worth when I left Virginia, things that were really tatty or duplicates. And I got the collection down to around 2700. But I thought maybe I could cut back some more.

So I went through with a machete—I mean, I was utterly ruthless, hacking left and right on three floors. (The landings here aren’t big enough for bookcases.) and I’ve pulled out a grand total of…twelve books.

I refuse to confess to being pathetic. Maybe it's a Bas Bleu thing.

Phoning it in

In the category of nice-try-but-not-going-to-happen, some business etiquette consultant has declared July “National Cell Phone Courtesy Month.”

To give you an idea of how futile this concept is, she made this unilateral declaration in 2002.

Yeah, you’ve noticed how many folks have taken up the idea in the past seven years, haven’t you?

This woman states the blindingly obvious—turn the damned thing off during meetings, movies, weddings & funerals; remember that when you’re in public your call is, too; not every call takes precedence over your real-time companions; etc. She puts numbers on them, like that’s going to imbue them with greater force than just being sensible imparts.

But the very fact that she has to state the obvious is an indicator that mobile phone users don’t give a toss about courtesy, sensibility or even the obvious.

& she doesn’t even go into the whole thing about people driving with one hand holding the triple shot mochaccino & the other the iPhone, weaving through traffic as though the Almighty Himself were clearing the way in a T-34. Those morons are the 21st Century justification for the Second Amendment. In fact, we should be issued 9mm pistols just for the purpose of removing them from the gene pool.

So, observe the made-up month-long focus however you see fit. Don't make me a lick o' difference, since I only use mine to check my email.