We might just pull this off yet

Fake Indian, meet fake president (photo by E. Warren)

Democrats exhume Jimmy Carter and will honor the father of the Iranian hostage crisis at their convention. You have to wonder who was bribed to let this happen, but god bless him for being so corrupt and such a vicious anti-Democrat.

I like Drew Marzullo, but sometimes …

Drew Marzullo Memorial Power Line, Cos Cob edition

Our Third Selectman is demanding to know why electricity comes into town via just one route, the railroad right of way. For one thing, how come he didn’t know this already? (Nah, I didn’t either, but then again, I’m not a public official – if I were, and if I’d been in office, as Drew has, during the previous two town-wide blackouts, I hope I’d have done some learning).

Second, what other paths would Marzullo suggest? This is a politician, remember, who urged Greenwich to sue to block the construction of a 17-foot cellphone tower that was planned for atop of the existing water storage tank on Valley Road. He’ll fight that and yet still support a new high-voltage transmission line through, say, Belle Haven? I don’t think so, I think he’s grandstanding.

One more sale

 

21 Sound Beach Avenue

21 Sound Beach Avenue, $685,000. Very close to I-95 and in need of (a lot of) modernizing, but a decent – enough house and I liked it. $685,000 for what is essentially the bottom of the Old Greenwich market (barely) south of I-95 is daunting, though.

Jane Fonda couldn’t make it?

 

Power to the people right on! Sean Penn’s Malibu bungalow.

Sean Penn campaigns for Chavez in Venezuela. Penn, a fervent supporter Fidel Castro, Hugo and all other communists around the world, has demanded the arrest of journalists who call Chavez a dictator. No word on how he feels about treason, but we can guess.

Although this champion of the poor recently sold his Malibu estate for $8 million (he asked $15 million, the greedy bastard) you needn’t fear for his comfort: no indication that he’s in Venezuela because he passed the proceeds along to others less fortunate and joined the homeless. He’ll be back, ready to join his fellow “speaking-truth-to-power” millionaires in denouncing capitalism and preserving the Hollywood tax cut

Anyone else enjoying interrupted AT&T cellphone service?

This has been going on since Saturday: “no service” messages, followed by spells of service, then plunged back into darkness. My bill’s paid, so is it my phone or is AT&T experiencing difficulties?

Just wondering because it’s annoying.

3 more sales reported

2 Walsh Lane (Belle Haven), $6.9 million. Originally asked $10.3 million in 2011 but still, hardly chump change.

45 Halsey, Havemeyer, sold for $958,000 on an ask of $987,000. Owner paid $950,000 in 2008 and put some money into it last year.

66 Northridge, also in Havemeyer, asked $1.050 million and got $1.050.

“Nuance” from Obama: I came to praise NASA and to bury it. Pretty cool, huh?

Obumpski hails successful Rover landing on Mars, cuts NASA budget 40%. Just days ago he was calling for raising taxes so we could have more space stuff but somehow, I think he’s more interested in raising taxes than he is in wasting money on a program that draws no votes.

Somehow.

It never fails

A house can sit on the market seemingly forever, but when your client expresses some interest in seeing it, you’ll find that an offer has been accepted the very morning you call. Just happened to me on 72 Butternut Hollow Road. I always liked the place but until last week I didn’t have a client for it. A/O reported today, original listing date August, 2011. Asking $1.755, if you’re curious.

Buyers take note: this really does happen quite often, so even if a house has been on the market for months (or sometimes, even years) don’t assume that you’re the only one interested in it. Often you will be and you can bid strategically, but not always.

Sales reported

 

19 St. Claire

19 St. Claire, Old Greenwich, $1.590 sold, $1.795 asked. The sellers paid $1.895 for it in 2004 but it’s been rented out since then and shows it.

15 Pell Place (overlooking Binney Park), full price, $1.695. This had an accepted offer before it hit the broker open house.

Obama lied, people died

Who loves ya, baby?

Emails show that Obama, UAW responsible for terminating pensions for 20,000 non-union auto workers.

Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company.

The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions.

The internal government emails contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding the termination of those non-union pensions, and that administration figures violated federal law.

In the meantime, the Obama Campaign is running an ad blaming Romney for killing a laid-off worker’s wife by laying him off, making it impossible for him to continue his medical coverage. Medical insurance is not known to be a cure for, as in this case, a stage-four cancer that killed in 21 days, but never mind: how many of those bankrupted autoworkers still had their insurance after Obama finished paying his debt to the UAW?

Yesterday was just a foretaste of what’s to come

This space unintentionally left dark

No telephone or internet service, no working gas pumps, no a/c, no food stores open, no McDonalds, yet we as a country remain woefully unprepared for the failure of our national grid, a failure that could last months, even years. It would take billions to harden the infrastructure and a huge amount of political will, both of which are lacking, so don’t expect  anything good to come of this.

On the infrastructure-hardening front, approaches range from the obvious, like burying power lines likely to be brought down by storms and making sure there’s enough generating capacity to meet peak loads, to the less obvious, like ensuring that there are adequate stocks of important components (like transformers) to do disaster recovery. Keeping those stocks is hard, because the parts are expensive and nowadays often imported from overseas. Earlier this year, for example, power industry and Homeland Security engineers practiced bringing in and installing three “recovery transformers” in a test to see how quickly they could replace the big transformers found at power substations in an emergency.

The experiment was troubling: Although engineers have the technical skills to do the job, the transformers often have a two-year order horizon. The substation transformers are so big that they have to be shipped by rail, and to make things worse, rail no longer serves many areas where existing substations are found. So the U.S. is having to pursue alternative means: The “recovery” transformers split the task of one unit into three smaller ones that are easier to move. They’re also developing transformers that work in multiple applications, to reduce the number of different models that will have to be kept in stock.

Right now, if more than a few transformers were knocked out at once, the affected areas could be left without service for months or even years. These current efforts will reduce the time to recovery, but only if the U.S. begins maintaining sufficient stockpiles. That’s only the beginning: Other issues involve securing power-control and other utility hardware against hackers (current security is often embarrassingly poor) and the physical security of control centers and key components against sabotage or accident. Addressing these issues is important, because a major grid-down incident lasting weeks or months wouldn’t just be an inconvenience. It would be a catastrophe.

Stopping the power from going out should be our first priority, but it’s also smart to prepare for a “soft landing” when blackouts do happen. Here there should be two priorities: first, systems that fail gracefully rather than catastrophically; second, long-term backup power for critical systems.

Read more: U.S. Woefully Unprepared for a Blackout Like India’s: Analysis – Popular Mechanics

Wells Fargo strikes out again – and again

Yesterday marked the second and third time in a week that Fargo failed to fund a loan at the promised time on the promised date. My own client’s closing was screwed up by this bank last week and twice yesterday – before the power outage, so no excuses here – they did it again.

Nice brokers working for the firm, but “nice” doesn’t go far if their back room can’t deliver. Find another lender.

Obama blasts chief bundler for outsourcing

These guys are sooo stupid, eh Jeff?

Not yet, of course, but with news that Dreamwork’s founder and chief Obama fundraiser Jeffrey Katzenberg is setting up in Shanghai, can denouncement be far away? Will Obama return the millions donated his campaign by Katzenberg? The tens of millions collected by Katzenberg on his behalf? “We’re waiting to review his tax returns,” White House spokesman and rumored pedophile Harry Reid said, “then we’ll see.”

Remember when Indian gambling was about reparations?

Well no, it was always about Lowell Weiker and graft, but the ostensible reason for giving casinos to black folk posing as Indians was to compensate them for harms done to people they’d never known or descended from.

Now, with profits down by 2/3, the whoo whoos are moving onto that other traditional Siwanoy stomping ground, Atlantic City and will run a casino there. Don’t you feel better?