I’m not sure I want to discover my Irish heritage

The Fountain Family Tree, Donegal branch

Received an email offer from Ancestry.com offering a DNA test for $199.00. I don’t think so, but my, two hundred bucks for a DNA test? I have no idea how extensive this test is, but didn’t even simple ones cost thousands just a few years ago? I’m surprised.

If I had a million dollars …

54 Doubling Rd, in happier times

I might toss most of it at a bid on this house at 54 Doubling Road, now foreclosed and owned by CitiBank (or Citi, or one of those guys). It sold for $1.5 million back in 2003 and those purchasers rather unwisely priced it at $2.295 million in 2008, without effect. The foreclosed mortgage was $1 million, and presumably the second mortgage of $230,000 was erased by the foreclosure of the first.  This wasn’t a bad house at all, but I didn’t find much of its 1839 origins remaining except the cramped rooms and low ceilings. Apparently no one else found those features charming either, or they didn’t at $2.3 million. At, say, $975,000, that view might change.

UPDATE: Just noticed that the old, expired listing I link to promised the following amenity: BATH W/TUB & SEPARATE STEAM SHOWER. Not too many homes in Greenwich with genuwyne baths these days, and I wonder why this wasn’t snapped up?

Probably nothing the Brits can do to stop them

 

 

The end of Fredonia as we knew it

Argentina steps up pressure to claim the Falklands. A crazed populist desperate to divert her citizens’ attention from her ruinous economic policies vs.  a weak, dispirited Britain with no capable military force (and no navy at all), and no Thatcher and Reagan to stand side-by-side. In fact, our imitation president has taken to referring to the Falklands as the “Malvinas”, just as he (and the milksop White House press organ, our “mainstream media”) call Burma “Myanmar,” out of deference to its dictators. Game, set match, Argentina.

Mandatory gun counseling for educators

Well they certainly didn’t cover THAT in my education classes

In the wake of the tragic episode in Maryland last week where a teacher mistook a  Pop Tart for a dangerous weapon, and the suspension of the seven-year-old who possessed said pastry, a bill has been introduced granting students the right to point fingers at each other and chew their food into any shape they like, with mandatory counseling for teachers and administrators who can’t tell the difference between a real gun and a toy (or a Pop Tart).

Protection for me but not for thee

 

I don’t care you been to the moon and back, you still have to wait two weeks, sir

Gabby Gifford’s husband orders an AR-15 (and some high capacity magazines).

He now (after word got out) claims that he was buying it “as an experiment” to see how easy it was to do so, but since he’s been complaining all along about the ease with which can buy such a weapon, was he really surprised that he, a retired military office and astronaut with no criminal record ,was able to submit a background check application? And note that, even being who he is, he couldn’t simply walk out of store with his new self-defense gun but was subject to the same two-week waiting period federal law imposes on every non-licensed purchaser. A better “test” would have been to stop a homeless, deranged bum and ask him to try to buy one, and then await the results of the background check.

Of interest to me is that the anti-gun activist says he was actually in the store to purchase a semi-automatic pistol, a Colt 1911A, which he indeed did. Even he doesn’t pretend that that was merely a “test run”, and God bless him: everyone should be able to protect himself, but wouldn’t a Biden gun have served the purpose just as well? You know, the defense system where he just sends Gabby out on the porch to fire two shots in the air and scare the bad guys away?