Category: Politics, Religion & Money

Now is the time to order your Laura Bush roses from Jackson & Perkins! Why waste your money on, say, Girl Scout cookies? And look! Her mother-in-law, legendary battle-ax Barbara, gets to have her own roses, too. They’re the extra-thorny kind!

I was stunned this morning while driving to work, listening to a story on NPR about a lawsuit in Israel, brought by Jewish women who have been harassed by ultra-Orthodox Jews during bus rides. The story can be heard here.

Gender segregation? The assertion that women should not be educated beyond high school? Fundamentalist Judaism sure sounds a lot like Fundamentalist Islam.

Zillow was started by the ex-Microsoft guys who started Expedia, which is now part of Barry Diller’s empire. I occasionally use Zillow to check on the value of our house.

I’ve cropped out the numbers, but the turquoise line is the median price of homes in my town, the blue line is our house, and the red line is for the county. See how our house started to fall below the median right before we moved there? Good timing, although I admit it was purely luck. We’re in a good town to be below the median. The $ indicates when we bought the place.

A year or so ago property values started to drop, as they did in most places. We’re back down to where we were three years ago, and now I see we’ve dropped below the median for the county for the first time. Well, we’re not moving, so I’m not going to worry about it!

I don’t know if Zillow is truly reflective of property values, but it’s useful for tracking trends, as it does in the chart above. One thing I wonder, however, is if Zillow will do to real estate what the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide once did to back issues of comic books, and start to lead the market rather than follow it. Later, eBay came along, greatly diminishing the utility of an annual price guide. Old comics flooded the market and prices for certain issues collapsed, while the market for one-of-a-kind original art skyrocketed.

This is one possible explanation for why the Indianapolis Colts won Super Bowl XLI! Click here for more winning sports tips! Perhaps we should try this approach in Iraq… or, uh, maybe we already have.

NPR is doing a series this week on the widening gap between the rich and everybody else. Like global warming, there are those who deny the evidence, but that’s only because they’re happy with the way things are. Many working Americans aren’t.

We’ll see at the end of the week whether or not the series is adequately critical of CEO pay and entitlements, as well as Bush’s tax cuts for the ultra-rich. Click here to go to the series home page.