Answers to questions nobody’s asking

 

Wake me when it’s over

Things you may not know about Peter Tesei. Going for the Pulitzer again, I see.

Exactly as predicted

Mustn’t take what isn’t yours, you bad boy, you!

State workers who defrauded Connecticut taxpayers get their jobs back.

In a major victory for union members, many state employees who were fired in a high-profile food stamp fraud controversy will get their jobs back, officials said Wednesday.

The workers had been fired soon after Gov. Dannel P. Malloy announced on a Sunday afternoon in December that state employees had falsified their income and improperly received emergency food stamp benefits following a major storm that knocked out power across the state.

The arbitrator, Susan R. Meredith, ruled in many of the cases that the state employee “made a mistake and did not commit fraud,” according to a copy of a ruling given to a union employee.

Meredith wrote: “The discipline imposed was too severe. The dismissal is hereby reduced to a thirty (30) working day suspension without back pay.”

They keep their seniority and benefits too. Eight hundred state welfare “workers” rushed to the trough for aid intended for the unemployed, 640 got off scot-fee and now the rest are forgiven. The state kleptocracy is at full throttle and out of control.

I said this would be the result on December 7th, but maybe I was just feeling gloomy and cynical on Pearl Harbor Day.

True or not, it’s the end of cycling in the US

If the riders are forced to race again, can it be said that they’re re-cycling? Just asking.

Drug charges filed against Lance Armstrong. I found the guy’s story inspiring but after so many winners being eliminated, so many investigations revealing that everyone on the tour from the riders, their trainers, mechanics and pets dopes up 24 hours a day, who’s left to care about this “sport”? Maybe the French but the world needs the French like a sports lover needs a bicycle.

UPDATE: Ha! 92% of Frenchmen want Obama reelected. See above.

 

Does this mean that Elizabeth Warren has to relinquish her tenure?

You gotta problem with that?

Martin Luther King Association accidentally awards scholarship to a white boy who, under pressure, gives it back. The recovered funds were passed on to a less-deserving, but black, girl, and order was restored to the world of color blindness established by Dr. King.

Blind leading the blind or the joy of being stubbornly stupid

Raveis has numbers out for Greenwich’s May sales:

(all numbers for single family homes)

Unit Sales               May 2012                  May 2011                 increase (decrease)

49                                  57                              (14%)

Avg. sales price          $2.254                                                         (5.4%)

Average List price   $3,841,539                                               + 1.4%

Inventory                             738                                                             +5.4%

Months of Inv.                   17.7 mos.                                                  +8%

I put two of these figures in bold because I thought perhaps sellers and their agents aren’t aware of them.

Greenwich Realtors of the Year (Photo supplied and approved by GAR)

Finally, an accepted offer reported

 

GAR approved photo

5 Bridle Path Lane, Riverside waterfront, asking $5.975. Started at $12 million in April 2004 but given enough time, even a Realtor can figure out the right price.

Smart jobs

$700,000 grant for electric car charges for  Syracuse Democrat Chairwoman’s company, they’ve failed after a few months and are being replaced. In fact, though, no one’s going to notice because there are only 30 electric cars in the entire county, none of which were ever observed using the original chargers.

So if you had a pile of taxpayer dollars to burn through, would you give it to a woman with no experience in a particular business but who happened to be the head of a local political party, or, say, refund the money to the people you’d taken it from?

Uh huh.

Going to any lengths to silence this blog

Former headquarters, Greenwich Association of Realtors

The GAR Evil Princess will apparently stop at nothing to keep me from writing about Greenwich real estate, even to the extent of shutting down the market entirely! There’s been nothing to report so far this week and as of 11:30 this Wednesday morning, there still isn’t.

I think that’s overkill.

Got that right

 

Mike Bloomberg’s grandmother?

InstaPundit:

THERE’S STILL A WOMEN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION? Apparently so. That’s interesting. Now shut up — you people caused enough trouble in the last century. . . .

Where’s the ACLU on this one – hiding?

He booked me, Danno!

Anti-gay Muslim claims discrimination.

A would-be police recruit who checked “yes” to the question whether he felt homosexuality was a sin and that homos should be incarcerated is suing the Police Department for discrimination because they won’t hire him.

Alu akbar, baby.

You can’t go Bangor again

Welcome to Bangor

The story (below) of the Swede accidentally invited to a dinner party and her warm reception reminded me of the story of Erwin Kreuz, the wayward German who in 1977 became an accidental tourist in Bangor Maine. The story doesn’t end well because the poor guy tried recreating that accident in time again and failed, of course, but he did experience a magical touch of grace and even one such moment is a miracle in itself.

A brewery worker from a village near Augsburg, Bavaria, Kreuz spoke no English and had never experienced international travel…when he boarded a World Airways charter flight from Germany to San Francisco in October 1977. When the plane stopped at the Bangor International Airport to refuel and allow passengers to clear American customs before re-boarding, Kreuz mistakenly believed he had arrived in California, and took a taxi into the city. For four days, he vainly searched for the Golden Gate Bridge and other San Francisco landmarks. The only sight which resonated with his prior image of the California city were the two local Chinese restaurants. He concluded he was in a suburb of the metropolis, and only realized his mistake when a taxi driver somehow communicated to him, in response to his request to be taken to San Francisco, that it was a 3,000 mile journey. He ended up in a German-themed restaurant in nearby Old Town, Maine, whose German-speaking owner, Gertrude Romine, was the first to hear his story and give him a complete picture of where he was. The Romines found him a hotel room in the nearby town of Milford while trying to figure out what to do. His story was picked up by the local press, and soon went national.

Bangor’s Response

The people of Bangor were so touched and amused to be mistaken for San Francisco that over the next 10 days Kreuz was transformed into a local celebrity. He was the guest of honor at an Oktoberfest event sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, was made an honorary member of the Penobscot Indian Tribe and Old Town Rotary Club, given the keys to the city, and flown to the state capital inAugusta to meet the governor and secretary of state. Kreuz’ 50th birthday was celebrated at a gala party located, at his own request, at a McDonald’s restaurant. He was allowed to flip the hamburgers. A growing circle of local ‘friends’ organized sight-seeing trips for him around the region, accompanied everywhere by local press. Kreuz was by all reports impressed, grateful, and charming. He also received three marriage invitations, and a couple in the northern Maine town of St. Francis gave him an acre of land.

Obama’s handlers would have demanded $37,000 bucks

Swedes invite the wrong lady to dinner.

One of the invited was the former Minister for Agriculture Margareta Winberg. However, the government accidentally invited the wrong person, a 67 year old woman in north Stockholm with the same name.

The “wrong” Winberg went to the dinner party and since she actually had been invited, she was let in and was even allowed to be part of the official group picture afterwards. The right Winberg did of course not show up since she had not gotten any invitation. She said however to DN that she has been to many government dinners before, while this Winberg hadn’t, so no harm done.

The Winberg who was at the dinner party, said afterwards that “everyone was very nice”

The host, Minister for Enviromnment Lena Ek described the incident as “extremely funny”.

I do like the Swedes.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this hedge!

Who among us doesn’t want a larger backyard?

Neighbors expanding their backyards by removing fences, walls.

How much do you like your next-door neighbors? Enough to share your backyard with them?

A surprising number of homeowners are bucking the notion that good fences make good neighbors and taking down the fences in favor of bigger gardens and more space to entertain.

I like the idea – back on Gilliam Lane as a kid in the 60′s our backyards ran together so we had about six acres, rather than one-and-a-half, to run around on, play baseball, tag, and all that. Of course these days children aren’t allowed to do any of that unless supervised by the resident Filipino, but a large combined yard would still offer a sense of space, and that’s rare in the modern Riverside quarter-acre lot.

But Realtors hate the idea, knowing that most of their clients want to be walled off from their neighbors – they want vegetables, they’ll send the nanny to Whole Foods, for crissake, rather than grow the damn things themselves (even if they knew how). That’s the new reality, I suppose, and I think it’s too bad.

Communal living does tend to give real-estate agents pause. “Before I’d put this property on the market, they would have to have a legal document” spelling out ownership and rights, says Sandy Yeatman, a real-estate agent in Kennett Square, Pa.

Yard-sharing is rare in new developments of single-family homes, big builders say, with privacy fences often required under community covenants and building codes.

A shared yard could damp an individual home’s value and prolong the time spent on the market, says San Jose, Calif., real-estate broker Denise Shur. When a fence isn’t there, she says, “potential buyers instantly start calculating the cost” to build one.

She says she would advise neighbors to restore fencing when either home is offered for sale. It is best to install the fence before listing the home, she adds, “as some buyers will not want to be the bad new neighbor who required a fence.”