Bidding war on a bank owned property

 

38 Duncan Drive

38 Duncan Drive. Bank started at $949,900 and when that didn’t work, dropped it to $899,900. Winning bidder paid $910, 180. Owner bought it for $1.150 in 2004, so I’m not sure how much of a bargain this buyer got, but the bank made out well: it had just $920,000 into the property.

Price cut on Meadowcroft

 

11 Beechcroft Meadowcroft

11 Meadowcroft is now down to $6.950, after starting the year off at $8.8. It’s a beautiful old house, but Meadowcroft lost much of its appeal, to me, when spec builder Mark Mariani discovered it. With just a few ugly buildings, Mariani reduced what had once been one of the most beautiful spots in Greenwich to a road whose only real claim of advantage is that it’s “close to town.”

Still, this house and its grounds still retain their charm. I’d chop off the ill-advised indoor pool, but the real problem, as I see it, is the extra, 3-acre lot to the side of this one that’s not included in the sale. If Mariani were to discover it’s there ….

11 Meadowcroft, rear

 

The Koch Brothers – Is there ANYTHING they can’t do?

Harry Reid: “Koch brothers main cause of global warming. ”

They’re feeling desperate down there in the swamp, dragging out bogeymen, charges of racism and of course, “the war on women” – anything to distract attention from a five-year record of failure.

If the Koch brothers aren’t enough to bring out the base, Reid’s perfectly prepared to bribe his voters, calling yesterday for a return to pork barrel politics. At least that’s something he’ll get bipartisan support on.

If they had a single viewer, this would be disturbing

 

Democrat and certified idiot, Krystal Ball

MSNBC hostess: “Animal Farm” is about evil corporations and their dominance. Does NBC still claim ownership of this wretched outlet?

Here’s HotAir:

“Via Twitchy and Mediaite, which has a transcript in case the thought of sitting through even three minutes of this on video is too much. Last week she claimed that “Animal Farm” was about fatcat capitalist vampires keeping the working man down; this week she acknowledges that it’s technically about communism, but now that the commies are all gone, the book can safely be repurposed for other leftish ends. Because if there’s one thing George Orwell stood for, it’s distorting the plain meaning of words to advance your collectivist political agenda.

He wrote another book in which that theme figured prominently, in fact. “1984,” about the horrors of libertarianism.

At its heart, Animal Farm is about tyranny and the likelihood of those in power to abuse that power. It’s clear that tendency is not only found in the Soviet communist experience. In fact, if you read Animal Farm today, it seems to warn not of some now non-existent communist threat but of the power concentrated in the hands of the wealthy elites and corporations…

As new research shows that we already live a sort of oligarchy that the preferences of the masses literally do not matter and that the only thing that counts is the needs and desires of the elites, Animal Farm is a useful cautionary tale warning of the corruption of concentrated power, no matter in whose hands that power rests.

No, it’s really not, and if it were it wouldn’t be remembered. “Concentrated power is dangerous” is so prosaic an “insight” that it barely qualifies as one. The special insight of “Animal Farm” is that utopian left-wing solutions to concentrated power can and will produce even more dangerous concentrations. In the name of “progress” and “equality,” the utopians end up building a system more oppressive than the one it replaced. That this book is being used on this network to obscure that point rather than illuminate it is itself Orwellianism 101. Coming soon to MSNBC: A disquisition on how “Fahrenheit 451″ reminds us that some speech is dangerous and should probably be banned as hate crimes.”

Contract in Riverside

32 Welwyn Rd

(For readers who complain about my supposed emphasis on Riverside, I’ll point out that Riverside’s the area currently providing most of the sales and thus, the news, so that’s what gets reported here.) So with that explanation, 32 Welwyn Road, Riverside, has a contract. A split-level on a half-acre, it tried $2.375 million in January, then dropped its price to $2.250 and found a buyer.

New kitchen, good street,still a split-level, but there it is.

Brother Gideon’s on a tear

One Grove Lane

Besides West End Avenue, he now reports a deal on One Grove Lane, asking $3.445 million. A grand old home, but right on Dearfield, and noisy to my, but not to these buyers’ taste. Gideon is still friends with the owners, despite helping them “win” a bidding war on this property in 2006, when they bid $3.505 on a $3.350 asking price. Insult to injury, they then put another million or so into it.

But what’s money, anyway?

Contract

 

16 West End Avenue

16 West End Avenue, Old Greenwich, $1.050 million, ask. I had a number of clients interested, but none wanted to tear down the 1798 house on the property and couldn’t figure out what to do with it. I hope someone has.

Is there anything Gen X parents can figure out on their own?

 

Drink it or die, kid

Concerned about picky eaters, parents hire food coaches for their kids.

Leslie Springer was tired of acting like a short-order cook for her twin girls in second grade and daughter in preschool. Day-Glo orange mac and cheese was a staple. Snacks consisted of Goldfish crackers, Cheez-Its, potato chips and Oreos. Her girls devoured french fries but wouldn’t touch other kinds of potatoes. She would offer cauliflower and carrots only to get rebuffed.

Ms. Springer sought help from food coach Tara Roscioli, who had recently begun a Fit Moms group in New Jersey geared at encouraging healthier choices for mothers. Ms. Roscioli suggested some initial substitutions: steel-cut oats with a pinch of brown sugar and raisins instead of heavily presweetened oatmeal packets. Brown rice instead of white rice. Apple chips instead of potato chips.

“When Tara suggested this, I thought, ‘This is never going to happen,’ ” says Ms. Springer, a clinical social worker in Maplewood, N.J.

But it did happen. Nadia, one of the twins, has grown to love sweet potatoes. Quinoa regularly makes an appearance on the dinner table. To coax them to eat it, Ms. Springer includes olives, which she knows they like. Juice used to be her daughters’ drink of choice, but Ms. Springer has replaced it with water or seltzer with just a hint of juice.

“There was protest in the beginning, but then it just became the norm,” she says.

The key, she learned from Ms. Roscioli, is mixing familiar foods with unfamiliar ones and involving the children in prep work. In a cooking class Ms. Roscioli held for Ms. Springer and her daughters, they learned to make homemade granola and ice cream from frozen bananas with a splash of coconut milk.

SAT coaches, greif counselors, golf tutors, the list goes on.

Land available in central Greenwich

6 Plow Lane

Shore & Country (Nancy Healy) has brought 6 Plow Lane, off of Old Church Road on the market at $1.339 million.0.66 of an acre in the R-20 zone, great location. I haven’t seen it yet, but it looks like a nice building site.

One item of curiosity: listing says “do not enter house” and, later, “wood stove excluded”. How would we know there’s a wood stove inside if we can’t enter, Nancy?

Price pressure on Whole Foods

Typical Greenwich Whole Foods shopper bargain hunting

Not in Greenwich, certainly, but today’s investors’ conference call made it clear that in other areas of the country, Whole Foods is feeling the pinch. Wait til Walmarts gets its organic food program going. It purchased Whole Food’s former division, Wild Oats, and it’s going to kill WF in every town except those where the ladies still wear furs with their Spandex.

Whole Foods reported disappointing earnings yesterday, and shares are collapsing. CEO John Mackey blames mounting competition from other retailers selling organic groceries, and suggested that the company would lower its prices to draw in more customers. But his explanations were not enough for Wall Street analysts, who ripped into the company on the earnings conference call.

New listing in Riverside

 

59 Indian Head Road

59 Indian Head Road, $4.595 million. A great old (1917) house with a commanding street presence, but probably hasn’t been renovated since the early 90s, when the wife of the couple doing the work fell in love with the contractor and ran away with him, leaving the husband and children behind. That family sold long ago, but still ….

Sales

 

17 Windabout Drive

17 Windabout Drive, asked $3.250 million, got $2.250 four hundred days later. It sold for $3.250 in 2002, when it was valued as a house. Today, it’s land value. 2.8 acres, not all of which is readily usable, in a 2-acre zone.

 

141 Riverside Avenue

141 Riverside Avenue, on the other hand, sold for full asking price of $2.295 after ten days on the market. I saw it come on and didn’t bother notifying any clients because (a) I didn’t think it was worth what was asked and (b) I knew it’d sell for that anyway.

The only honest global warming profiteer out there

 

“Tiptoe, through the tax breaks, past the rail cars, with the pols I love …”

Warren Buffet:

“I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate,” Buffett told an audience in Omaha, Nebraska this weekend. “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

That’s small consolation for those of us who don’t have the wherewithal to build windmills, especially considering that Mr. Buffet advocates the “Buffet Rule” of higher taxes for us plebes.

 

Ceding sovereignity

 

First delivery of General Tso’s chicken

Chinese police coming to France to patrol its streets.

Well, the French haven’t had much claim to (justifiable) national pride since the Franco-Prussian War, so why not?

Still, it’s sort of sad to see the flag lowered. After all, sovereignty was a French term, once.

Because they haven’t discovered PCBs on the site – yet

First Selectman Tesei and town officials proudly participate in the new fire house groundbreaking.

No one showed up to take responsibility at the ceremony marking the beginning of construction of the music hall: “who, me?”, Tesei deadpanned at the time. This time, different story. Hell, they even brought along the town flag to mark the occasion.

MISA groundbreaking no show – where IS everybody?

We’re over here!

Damn it, the media and our children’s teachers are going to have to revise their propaganda sheets AGAIN!

 

Doing their bit to illustrate the dangers of climate disruption, the First Family jets off on vacation

Let’s call it “climate disruption”, White House suggests.

This fraud’s name is changing almost as fast as a contemporary map of Eastern Europe,and far faster than the world is actually, you know, warming.

First there was “global warming.” Then many researchers suggested “climate change” was a better term. Now, White House science adviser John Holdren is renewing his call for a new nomenclature to describe the end result of dumping vast quantities of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into Earth’s atmosphere: “global climate disruption.”

“I’ve always thought that the phrase ‘global warming’ was something of a misnomer because it suggests that the phenomenon is something that is uniform around the world, that it’s all about temperature, and that it’s gradual,” Holdren said yesterday at the annual AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy in Washington, D.C.

Instead, he said, “we should call it ‘global climate disruption.’ Although the rising average global surface temperature is an indicator of the degree of disruption that we have imposed on the global climate system, what’s actually happening involves changes in circulation patterns, changes in precipitation patterns, and changes in extremes. And those are very different in different places.”

We used to attribute  “changes in circulation patterns” to  El Niño, an ocean circulatory phenomenon that’s been around forever, even in the pre-fossil fuel era, and by golly, another one’s set to form again, this year.  Forget that you ever heard that term; you won’t hear it again.

We lost “global warming” when the great hockey stick hoax was exposed, and “climate change” when people began noticing that what we were actually talking about was weather. So they’re trotting out a new phrase. How long before the media toes the new line and substitutes “weather disruption”? My guess is only as long as it takes for the first severe storm to hit the United States.