So we’re better judges of character than women – what’s new?

Guilty as charged

Study: Male jurors more likely to find fat female defendants guilty.

New York State to ban all modern weapons?

That seems to be the promise. . A total ban on “assault rifles”, which is a meaningless term but presumably means anything that looks scary, and all guns look scary to anti-gun nuts, and the outlawing of any gun, handgun or otherwise, with a magazine capacity larger than seven cartridges. Modern semi-automatic pistols, even .22s like my own Ruger Mark III, have 10-round magazines. Revolvers hold just six, so apparently Jesse James can come back from the dead and terrorize the residents of Deadwood with impunity. That’s assuming murder will be legalized, of course, but the New York legislators don’t seem concerned with those kind of laws.

“The legislation will require owners of guns that become illegal under the stricter statute to register their weapons and that the new laws will prohibit transfer of those weapons.”

Confiscation. And state Republicans aren’t even attempting to fight back but instead are squabbling about pork money for schools. Time for a new party.

Gun statistics

These seem to be useful for anyone interested in the current gun debate, pro or con.

And why is our highway “trust fund” going broke?

Obama and his crowd want to impose a user fee for highway use and scrap the more visible gasoline tax. Nothing wrong with paying what’s necessary to maintain our roads and bridges, but I’d like to see how much (One third? Half?) of the money currently being collected is diverted to light rail projects in California and high speed trains to Springfield, before we triple our taxes.

This is interesting

From reader EOS, who is one of the most sensible contributors to this site:

Just had an experience that freaked me out. Tractor trailer delivery for son for which the driver needed a signature. No problem. BUT, when I reached for the clipboard, what did I see under the receipt but the JOURNAL NEWS map of gun owners, our house circled!!!! I was afraid to confront him and ask what the hell he was doing. Instead, my instinct was to whistle to our pit bull to come sit by my side. She obliged. Nicely.
I think the gun map is an open door policy for any and all users – from truck delivery men who want to see if a house is armed, to Craigslist, to Match.com first dates.

Riverside continues to perform

October contract, but 7 Dorchester Lane, a 1950 house on 1/4 acre, asked $995,000, sold instantly for $1.025. I’d say “gosh”, but there’s no inventory in this price range.

29 Long Meadow

29 Long Meadow Road, over in NoPo in a good neighborhood, started at $1,099,000 in August and still won’t sell. It’s marked down to $837,000 today – I thought it was a decent value back when it was in the high 8s and I think it’s an even better deal now.

And to think of all I’ve tried to teach him

A client of mine sends along these pictures of 11 Park Avenue with the large commercial building behind it Phtoshopped out and replaced by clouds. He seems to be surprised by such duplicity! A really nice guy, but a slow learner.

As seen on TV

Sale, accepted offer, reality check

15 Winding Lane

15 Winding Lane has sold for $4.558 million. Nice house, good sale, but this is one of those $5 million homes I mentioned that never quite achieve their owners’ dreams. This one started at $5.5 million.

41 Deepwoods Lane

41 Deepwoods, Old Greenwich, has an accepted offer. Last asking price was $1.895, asked $2.395 back in 2010. Owners paid $1.2 for it in 1999 and then did some nice renovation work to it more recently. I’d say they made out just fine. Renovated homes in this development sold for about $2.1 million between 2004 and June, 2012, but this one didn’t.

435 Lake Avenue

And 435 Lake Avenue is back, this time asking $8.5 million, down a tad from the $12.750 it claimed to be worth in 2008-2009. The listing says it’s been renovated since then.

D you remember when the Americans With Disabilities Act was promoted as merely a tool to treat all people fairly?

Young terrorists tormenting Ms. Maria C. Waltherr-Willard

Well no, of course you don’t – that bogosity had a half-life of just nano-seconds, but here’s where we are today: a teacher claims disability because she suffers from fear of children. Hey, works for me, even if she won’t.

Eeek! A child! Who could expect to encounter one of THOSE?

 

$5 – $10 million range

Looks as though we had 52 homes priced in this range go to closing this past year, vs. just 38 in 2011. That’s good news for would-be sellers in this range (and there are either 94 such homes or 80, depending on whose statistics you use), but a word of caution: most of the increase in sales activity is from houses that dropped their prices from the $7s down to the low $5s. There’s a lesson there.

And whose fault is that?

Totally at sea

Half of all Brits wrongly believe that you can get AIDS from being bitten, spat at or standing on a needle. only 40% know that 95% of all cases are contracted during unsafe sex. 

This ignorance is the direct result of gay activists, abetted by their media pals, to destigmatize homo behavior and generate huge amounts of research funding by falsely claiming that AIDS afflicts all of society. Look, I don’t care what people do in the privacy of their own closets, and I certainly don’t blame gays for their media efforts. They were dying like flies, and society wasn’t going to care so long as the disease was seen as something confined to homosexuals and drug addicts. If funding to discover a cure were to be supported, the general population had to be convinced that they were at risk too.

All of which is fine by me: I lost friends and children of friends to the disease and I’m delighted that AIDS is no longer an immediately-fatal malady. But having watched the media work so assiduously since 1980 to create this myth I find it annoying that it now makes fun of the general population for believing the lie.

Just sayin’.

Coming our way

45-year-old twins euthanized in Belgium at their request. They weren’t in pain, or even dying, it’s just that they were both going blind and couldn’t see a pleasant future. I’m not against suicide as a general principle, but when the state does it on request, it seems a reasonable suspicion that the decision to live or die will soon be handed over to “quality of life” panels. Got to get these costs under control and as society claims an ever expanding “right’ to control individuals: what we smoke, how we exercise, whether we wear seat belts, the size cola we consume, and so forth, won’t the insistence of an old man on consuming scarce financial resources be seen as the selfish act it is?