Oh, Goodie!
Obama will require high school and college students to perform community service. There was once a time in this country where only people convicted of crimes could be sentenced to involuntary servitude; all others were permitted to live their lives as they pleased. That old fashioned notion is gone now, thank goodness, and we’re all just tools for society’s great redistribution plan, as designed and run by the majority’s elected representatives.

How’s it going to work out? If you go to the link, which is the official Obama transition site, click over to his health plan and try this: match his wonderful goals: universal healthcare, lower insurance costs for everyone, a cure for cancer, cavities and love handles, with actual details of how he’s going to accomplish them. Not there? Don’t worry – your countrymen didn’t care about such niggling details; nor should you.

Oh, darn!
There’s long been a wide-spread belief in the local real estate community that mysterious foreigners backed up our market by paying ridiculous prices for houses here. Certain firms even marketed themselves as having a secret “in” to these people with the implication that, if you listed with them, they’d find an Irishman hiding under a wheelbarrow somewhere in the rocky fields of old Eire who wanted nothing but to buy your place. I never quite believed this hype and, while real estate agents are still flogging the idea, this article suggests that if these unsophisticated, rich foreigners ever did exist, they no longer do. On to the next myth.

Turns out it was a good day to go fishing
Not much went on according to the Greenwich Multi List. Fourteen price reductions but people are still thinking in the 5%-9% range which, in my opinion, isn’t going to do it. There was one contract, 324 Overlook, which is of interest only because I wonder if my own Board isn’t beginning to play games. The computer listing shows that its last asking price was $1.995 million and that its original ask was $2.375, Fair enough, but when I went to the property’s history only the $1.995 price shows up – no mention of the previous price and searchin two other, different ways yielded the same result. Is it possible that the Realtor’s Board is sanitizing pricing histories in order to make things appear better than they are? They wouldn’t do that, would they? Nah – must be a computer error.

Chris Mathews: “It’s my job as a journalist to make the Obama presidency work. As I said to a liberal friend just this morning when he was extolling the virtues of bi-partisanship, it would have been nice to see some of those sentiments during the past eight years. But oh yes, that was when McChimpy Pretzlechoker Bush was president. him, we don’t like.

Tautog for now!

I was out fishing all day (hey, if you’re not going to buy a house from me, I still have to eat). Caught two tautogs (blackfish) one bluefish and a confused scaup (porgie) who didn’t realize that scaup season ended last month. The blue and the scaup were returned from whence they came; the two tautogs stayed for dinner. All of which is by way of explanation of why there have been no new postings today. I’m about to check out our MLS hot sheet and if anything interesting has happened, you can read about it here later. In the meantime, I see that there are 9 new comments, so someone’s been working.

I also just discovered that Blogger’s much vaunted Google algorithm has decided that this blog is a spam device, which is going to make posting difficult until an actual human intervenes, probably sometime in the next century. The last time Google screwed up my blogging in a different way I went as far as setting up a new account with a better system, Wordsmith. I stopped that process when Google got things going again but round two of this nuisance is probably going to send me over. I’ll let you know.