XIOA

The best infographic I've ever seen

2009-07-15T11:07:00.005-05:00

We get Parents magazine here at the house. That's because we're parents, even though the magazine isn't really aimed at all parents, just the lady kind. There's an article in the latest issue about kids without siblings. You know the kind of story: "The only child: Is it an advantage or a disadvantage?" (Useful answer: Both!).

There's an infographic with this story. In my day, I've seen good graphics and bad graphics. I was on hand for the famous "How to Ride an Escalator" graphic at the Register. In another job, I saw someone try to illustrate a story about the proliferation of grand slams in baseball with a graphic about -- I swear this is true -- how many Grand Slam breakfasts were sold at Denny's. So I'm no stranger to WTF graphics. But this piece in Parents is a serious masterpiece:

This is one of the most beautiful, random lists ever assembled. It's like the old "Spy List" feature in Spy magazine. You'd like to say they pulled names out of a hat ... except who would have even thought to put some of these names in that hat in the first place?

Daniel Radcliffe and Shawn Johnson, I understand. They're totally relevant right now, both to grown-ups and kids. Lance Armstrong? Well, OK, but I think he's getting pretty close to his sell date, with the Parents crowd if not everyone else. But here's where it starts going off rails. Alicia Keys is cool -- we saw her in person at the Letterman show -- but ... really? Condoleezza Rice? "Familiar" back when they were planning this feature, maybe, but kind of yesterday's news.

Then at the end, they hit us up with Blake Lewis. Blake Lewis! The runner-up from the hands-down worst season of American Idol. That beat-boxing guy who was on the show three years ago. Him.

I'm not criticizing. This is awesome.

Back

2009-07-15T10:13:00.008-05:00

OK, we're gonna try to get this thing going again. I've learned a few things about blogging since I launched my first blog, the moderately successful but currently dormant football site Down and Distance:

1. It's hard to find time to maintain a blog when you've got a full-time job doing something besides maintaining a blog.
2. It's even harder to find time to maintain a blog when you're self-employed doing something besides maintaining a blog.

I used to write these long, long analytical posts with research and pictures and statistics and whatnot. I don't have time for that right now, because every minute I'm blogging (or playing Spider Solitaire, or cleaning the house, or Googling cheesecake photos of Kellie Pickler*) is a minute I'm not earning income. And I like income.

Nevertheless, there are a still dumb things to say and dumb pictures to post. I'm on Facebook, and it's a great platform for interaction, but there's a certain lack of permanence to it. I'm on Twitter, but, as more and more people are saying, "Twitter is for old people". I'm on MySpace, but ... well, no, I'm not on MySpace. Are you kidding me? So we're going to turn the lights back on at XIOA.

*Kidding!

Oh, and look: You can go through the archived posts if you want, but a lot of 'em are dumb, and some of 'em take cheap shots at the local newspaper. I feel bad about that. People down there are doing the best they can under punishing circumstances.

Carly Smithson is a bad human being

2008-03-27T16:17:00.004-05:00

I suppose everyone watches American Idol, because twice a week Ryan Seacrest pops out of the closet to tell me so. I admit that I've actually been watching for a few years, partly because I get hooked every February by the train-wreck audition shows and partly because I have to watch something. If that big TV sits in my family room day after day and I don't watch it, then I've wasted my money on it, and waste is a sin. (I paid cash for it; in America, you're only allowed to waste money if it's borrowed at 19% APR.)

In short, if you don't watch American Idol, you make Jesus cry, so you can either come along with me, or I'll see you in hell.

I'm moved to write about this ridiculous topic because Carly Smithson is a monster. Not just a monster, but the worst kind of monster: a 100% drum-dyed fraud of a monster. Every week she takes the Idol stage, every week she delivers a technically flawless yet utterly empty rendition of some trite song, and every week she sends shivers up my spine. Brr.

Smithson, as all Idol fans no doubt know by now, is hardly any kind of ingenue, plucked from her job at Chilis and given this once-in-a-lifetime chance to make her dreams (and our nightmares) come true. In fact, she's a professional musician -- one who had a recording contract, put out an album (under the name Carly Hennessy), and was the beneficiary of a $2 million promotional effort by her label, MCA. The reason you probably never heard of her before Idol is not that she was undiscovered. She was discovered; she just wasn't any good. The album sold so few copies that to say it sold zero copies might well be within the margin of error.

This is not what makes Smithson so objectionable. Melinda Doolittle was a professional, too, and though I rooted against her because of it, I didn't hate her for it. (I hated her for entirely separate reasons.) The difference is that Doolittle, even with her noisome so-you-really-like-me? "modesty," was totally upfront about the fact that she was a backup singer with years of performing and touring experience. You listen to Carly Smithson talk on the show, and you'd never have any inkling that she has long experience in the recording industry.

The straw that broke the camel's back came last night, when, during the interminable results show, Idol dragged us behind the scenes to watch the contestants re-record their songs for iTunes. And Smithson, whose studio album Ultimate High is at this very moment available on Amazon, had the balls to pretend that she'd never been in a recording studio before. She spoke with wonder about all the funny dials and switches on the sound engineer's board (I don't think anyone really knows what they all do!), and she giggled over all the funny terminology that the studio crew uses, and she swooned over seeing her own face show up on the screen when she played her song on her iPhone, and I wanted to crawl through my TV screen and knock her teeth down her throat.

She's a flat fucking liar. That's what I hate about her. There's not an ounce of genuineness in her entire wretched body. Even the real stuff is fake. The big tattoo on her right arm? Real, I'm sure (as her husband is a tattoo artist), but totally canceled out by the way she goes insistently sleeveless every week: You will not remember my plain face or my lumpy body or my charisma-less performances, but you will remember my big stupid tattoo. Then there's her brogue. Smithson is Irish. When she first auditioned (in sleeves, BTW), she said it just that way: Irish. Since then, she's gotten more and more Oirish with each week. The brogue, I'm sure, is real, but, just like the tattoo, she hid it until someone told her it would help her stand out. "Be yourself" is a fine motto, one that you can bet Carly Smithson screams at herself in the mirror, but art is about being true to yourself regardless of the circumstances. Smithson is true to herself only when it will get her ahead. But then again, she's not an artist. She's a technician.

Which is probably why her album didn't sell. It was probably full of songs on which every "i" was dotted and every "t" was crossed, but in the end it was cold as a glacier -- and could crush you like one if you didn't get out of the way (which you had plenty of time to do).

I'm not saying you can't get filthy rich ramming bullshit down people's throats. People can be dumb and lazy and will open wide for all sorts of tasty poop, but even dumb and lazy people have lines that they won't cross. They'll put up with Paris Hilton on their TV screens, but they won't buy her album. They'll hear a "Carly Hennessy" song on the radio and might not even change the channel, but they won't be moved to pay real money for the music.

So Ultimate High went and died. Smithson should have looked at what had happened and said: "I had the chance that every singer dreams of, I had every opportunity to make a success of it, and I failed. Maybe the problem is me. Maybe people just don't want to listen to my music." But of course she didn't say that. What she did was: She went to the United States and auditioned for American Idol. Because the true mark of an artist is: When you fail at music on her own, you go out and try to weasel your way onto a show that will manufacture an audience for you.

Smithson first auditioned for Idol two years ago. The judges (including Randy Jackson, who just happened to have worked A&R at MCA while she was making her album there) wanted to put her through, but she couldn't get a work visa. Think about that. Not only wasn't she a U.S. citizen, she wasn't even a permanent U.S. resident, which would have allowed her to work. What business does she have trying out for American Idol? What business do they have letting her through?

Two years later, she shows up again, now married to an American(!), and they put her through, and now twice a week she comes into our living rooms and screams at us.

Now, don't believe for a second that Smithson hoodwinked Idol. They knew full well who she was. They probably picked her because of who she was. Remember, the past two Idol winners have been marketing disasters. Taylor Hicks couldn't sell Kool-Aid in Death Valley and was dropped by his label. And Jordin Sparks, as Seacrest has told us repeatedly, has had her debut album "certified gold." In case you don't know, a gold record signifies 500,000 copies sold. Granted, it's about 499,500 more copies than Ultimate High, but for an album that had the full weight of Idol marketing behind it, it's not much. Last year's Idol finale drew more than 35 million viewers; fewer than 2% bought the album.

Idol badly wants (and, really, needs) another Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood in the winner's circle. It can't abide another Hicks, another Sparks, another (God forbid) Ruben Studdard. It's an embarrassment that losers (i.e. Daughtry) are getting more pub than winners (Fantasia). So this year the producers went out and got Carly Smithson, who has put out an album. They got Kristy Lee Cook and Michael Johns, each of whom had a record deal and lost it for having even less charisma than Carly Smithson. They got Robbie Carrico, who toured with (and perhaps even felt up) Britney Spears back in the day. They got David Archuleta, who won $100,000 on Star Search.

They went out and got a bunch of people who, frankly, if they were going to be pop stars, would already be pop stars. Seacrest can tell us umpteen times that this is the most talented group of Idol finalists ever (and he has). And they certainly are talented. They're also, for the most part, empty and forgettable. Except Carly Smithson, who's empty and contemptible.

Land of job opportunities

2008-03-19T13:59:00.003-05:00

A story in Monday's Des Moines Register rings the too-small-workforce bell yet again. Appearing under the bizarre yet captivating headline "Say hello to big hole in Iowa's workforce," the story explains that our state already has at least 49,000 more jobs than it has workers, a gap that will grow to 150,000 over the next five years.

As someone who is (gainfully, I assure you) self-employed and therefore is always worried that one of these days he'll have to run out and get one of those "real jobs" he hears so much about, I found this to be heartening news. That is, until I got to the charts that ran with the jump. (They're available on the website, but only in teeny-tiny thumbnail JPEG form because the Register's online editors, I assume, are idiots.)

The most telling chart is the one that describes the level of education needed to fill the jobs that will come open over the next year. One-quarter of those jobs require no education whatsoever, and seventy percent of those jobs require no more than a high school education. In other words, Iowa is going to be needing a lot of fast-food clerks, discount store shelvers, prison orderlies and casino dealers over the next year. Wherever are we going to find them?

Iowa economic development officials frequently bemoan the "brain drain" -- the outflow of young people who get an education in Iowa, then move out of state to reap the financial rewards of that education. Those same officials also frequently point to Iowa's worker shortage as something the state can use to lure those young people back here. Just once it'd be nice to see them put two and two together.

Young, educated people move out of the state for two main reasons. The first is simply that they don't want to live in Iowa. There's nothing you can do about that, I'm afraid. If a kid is looking for excitement, he's going to go elsewhere. The second reason, the one germane to our discussion, is that they see opportunities elsewhere that they don't see here. When they look at the Iowa economy, and all they see is one service-sector job after another that pays $22,000 a year, they'd have to be stupid to stay. And they're not stupid.

You know what's pathetic? Utterly, hopelessly, dogshit pathetic? The scene we had a couple weeks back in which a number of Iowa communities went to the state Racing and Gaming Commission to beg and plead for more casino licenses. This is what passes for economic development in much of the state: casinos, prisons, hotels. No one dreams of growing up to be a blackjack dealer, a penitentiary food-service aide, or the night guy at the front desk. All of these jobs are honorable work, but you take these jobs because you have to, not because you want to. If I'm a young person with hopes and dreams and the only work I can see in Iowa is working the window at a slots casino, then I'm getting out of here. I'll go somewhere else. Because if I have to work the window at a casino, I'd rather do it in Las Vegas than What Cheer.

Nobody ever stops to ask: You want to build a casino in some small town in Iowa? Really? Who the hell do you think it's going to serve? You think the high rollers are going to fly in and drop 100 grand? No, your customers -- if you have any -- are going to be locals. Locals spending (we hope) their disposable income in the new casino rather than the restaurant down the street. The big difference being that the restaurant might be locally owned, while I can guarantee you that the casino will not be. So the casino cannibalizes the local economy for a while ... until a bigger and flashier casino opens down the road.

Or you really luck out, and the state decides to put a prison in your town! I told you rapists weren't good for nothing!

So, yes, say "hello" to the big hole in the workforce. Pray that we can scrape together enough illegal immigrants to fill it. Because I want my value meal now!

A shamrock is not a four-leaf clover

2008-03-17T12:50:00.004-05:00

OK, I'll bite: What does a four-leaf clover have to do with St. Patrick's Day?

I ask because on the "Monday" part of the seven-day forecast, Channel 13 has been running a little icon of a rainbow ending in a pot of gold, surrounded by four-leaf clovers. Now, I understand the rainbow and the pot of gold. According to television commercials, which is where I get most of my information, Leprechauns (the technical name for Irish people) keep their pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. But that still doesn't explain the four-leaf clover.

If they were shamrocks, well, then I'd understand. Because according to legend, when St. Patrick came to Ireland to Christianize the natives, he used the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity. Just as the shamrock has three leaves emanating from one stem, Patrick explained, God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit all spring from the same source. They are all one and the same. He didn't say anything about four-leaf clovers.

This is the point where you sputter something about the "luck of the Irish," and I call you a dumbass.

You must be very proud

2008-01-10T00:00:00.000-06:00

I pretty much live for Wheel of Fortune anymore. Every day at 6:30, I'm there, guessing the puzzles, appreciating how Vanna White's sole job was to turn around the letters and she doesn't even have to do that anymore, laughing along as Pat Sajak pretends he's just a harmless buffoon rather than the frothing patron saint of the black-helicopter crowd, and, what I find most enjoyable, passing judgment on the contestants.

Every night, after the first toss-up puzzle, Sajak interviews the players. Each player introduces him- or herself, then Pat asks them to "tell us a little something about yourself." That's suposed to be a cue to say something interesting. "I like to skydive," maybe, or "I'm a black belt in aikido, or "I lost a leg in the Panama invasion." Or even, "I'm studying to be a (fill-in-the-blank)." But nine times out of ten, they lead with the fact that they're married -- to a spouse they invariably describe as "wonderful." Big fucking deal. I'm married, too. And she really is wonderful. And our kid is so wonderful that if he happens to crap all over your furniture, I'm just going to laugh it off -- Isn't he CUTE? -- but none of that is interesting in the least. These people are boring and stupid.

But some are even more boring and stupid than the usual, which brings us to the pathetic critter who crawled up onto the set on Tuesday. When the time came to introduce herself, this is what she offered:

"I'm from Oxford, Mississippi, I work for my church, and I love reality television."

And that was it.

Hey, I love reality TV, too. Live for it, even. I watched every season of The Apprentice, including the Martha Stewart version. Survivor, Project Runway, Project Greenlight, Property Ladder, Iron Chef -- they've all been in heavy rotation at our house. And don't get me started on MTV. I've like totally been a little bitch for The Hills, Making the Band and, at one time, The Real World.

But the difference between me and the Wheel contestant is this: I understand that loving reality television is nothing to be proud of. It's something to be ashamed of. They call such things "guilty pleasures" because you're supposed to feel bad for liking them. When you go on Wheel of Fortune (itself a guilty pleasure) and proclaim without even a touch of hipster irony that you like this garbage? Oh, that's just sad.

Needless to say, she wasn't a winner. And she didn't do very well on the show, either.

Beyond belief

2007-11-29T10:13:00.000-06:00

OK, yes, it's been a while. Sorry.

At XIOA, we don't talk politics much. Don't really see the need for it. But with about a month to go before the caucuses, Iowa is awash in political advertisements. For most of them, I just mute the TV and avert my eyes, but one or two spots occasionally poke through. Like this morning, I saw the first ad for Mike Huckabee. In it, he talks about how religious he is. The words "Christian leader," as if that means the same thing to everyone, float across the screen as Huckabee explains that "I never have to wake up in the morning wondering what to believe."

Obviously, it's a shot at Mitt Romney, but when you think about it ... what does it even mean for a president? You never examine your beliefs about anything? You have all the answers? So, Mike, does Iran have the bomb? Is Pervez Musharraf lying through his teeth when he tells us that yeah, sure, he's like totally committed to democracy. What, you don't know for sure? I thought you never have to wonder what to believe.

Huckabee is talking about personal convictions, and that's fine. But really, if someone's running for president, it's safe to say they have a firm grasp of what they do and do not believe -- even if they don't believe in anything, which is a belief system in itself. Huckabee would probably say Romney is willing to say anything, do anything, promise anything to get elected. Well, if that's the case, then that's what he believes -- that getting elected is all that matters -- and he probably believes it to the core of his being. To say you have tons of belief is utterly meaningless if you can't (or won't) tell me what that belief means for the rest of us should you be elected president.

Let this be a warning to the rest of you candidates, in both parties.

"Ugly Vista" was taken. It's in Urbandale.

2007-10-05T09:12:00.000-05:00

Wistful Vista ...

Let the name roll over you.

Wistful Vista ...

What does it remind you of? Breathtaking clifftop views of rolling pastureland? How about a distant skyline seen from the countryside? A brook wandering through a meadow, where deer stop to drink and raccoons pause to wash their food?

Wistful Vista ...

If you're a West Des Moines city planner or developer, it calls to mind acres of asphalt in the Jordan Creek Town Center parking lot, fields of dirt waiting to be turned into big-box stores or trashy 400-seat restaurants, and hundreds of cookie-cutter houses jammed onto the tiniest parcels possible. Wistful, indeed.

The purple chick magnet of Johnston High

2007-10-05T08:22:00.000-05:00

A while back, I wrote a post about how Iowa is either the land where crappy midsize Chevrolets go to die, or the land where crappy midsize Chevrolets live forever. Either way, the roads are full of them -- Cavaliers, Corsicas, Celebritys and Berettas.

Yesterday, I made the mistake of driving past Johnston High School just as school was letting out for the day. I was stopped at a light on Northwest 62nd Avenue as a long line of cars turned out of the student parking lot. At least, I hope it was the student parking lot, because I would pity any teacher who showed up to teach a bunch of teenagers driving the vehicle that I saw pulling out of the lot.

It was a Chevy Cavalier, from the second generation of the vehicle, probably the early '90s. It was purple, which was unfortunate enough, but whatever fool owned this thing had attempted to jazz up the car further with Dodge Viper-style racing stripes. You know: the twin white stripes running over the top of the vehicle from bumper to bumper. Except that the owner of this car either couldn't afford or couldn't figure out how to get the stripes to go down the grill, so they just stopped at the front edge of the hood. And he didn't bother putting them on the back at all, so his high-performance paint job consisted of three feet of white stripes on the hood and three feet on top of the roof.

If you want to see ridiculous auto modifications, just go downtown any Friday or Saturday night, and watch the mouth-breathers scoop the loop in 1997 Toyota Camrys with enormous, fake air intakes on the hood or 1986 Cadillac Cimarrons with blacklight ground effects. There's nothing quite so simultaneously hilarious and pitiful as the sight of a kid driving a Dodge Neon with a two-foot-high spoiler that wiggles when he turns corners. (Because when you get that Neon up to 200, 220 mph, man, it just wants to take off like a jet fighter! You need the spoiler for stability.) And yet, somehow this sad little Cavalier I saw turning out of the Johnston High School lot topped them all. The bargain-basement used vehicle. The fifth-rate aftermarket accessories. It's almost enough to make you cry. Unless you saw the guy behind the wheel, who was so obviously proud to be driving this thing.

Dumbass.

So that's what he's been up to

2007-09-16T00:14:00.000-05:00

The latest edition of the Drake University alumni newsletter came in the mail today. I'm sure it was chock full of stuff that some intern or whatever worked really hard on, but I never read anything but the "class notes" -- the part that tells you who is up to what, who has gotten married, who has had a baby and, increasingly, who you know who has died. You don't need to real all of the class notes, of course, just the ones that cover your time on campus. As a member of the Class of '92, I usually check everyone with a graduation date from 1990 to about 1995.

Lately, I see a lot of people whose big "accomplishment" is merely being mentioned in a newspaper article. Big deal. Just be in the right place at the right time, see a car accident, get quoted by the Register, and then send in the article to the alumni update. Oh sure, some people wind up in the newspaper because they actually do something noteworthy. But others will use any silly little reason. I mean, check out this guy:

This has not been doctored. This is real.

The Keith Murphy Bible Hour

2007-09-04T23:36:00.000-05:00

Look, you know I love Keith Murphy, right? The sports anchor at Channel 13? Unlike most local sports guys, he's actually funny. He'll talk shit about Bachman, Kiernan, Kirk Ferentz, St. Zach, pretty much anyone, and it's always a riot. It's when he tries to be poignant that he gets into trouble. Tonight, talking about Appalachian State's historic victory over Michigan in college football, Murphy said, "This is one of the reasons we love sports: Sometimes, David beats Goliath."

Aw, don't make me go all biblical on you, Keith. Read your Book of Samuel. David will always beat Goliath. Because it isn't a David-and-Goliath story unless David beats Goliath. If he doesn't, then it's just Goliath of Gath, all six-cubits-and-a-span of him, kicking ass and chewing bubble gum.

Golly, I wish I could go to prison

2007-09-04T09:21:00.001-05:00

Today we learn from the Register's Bill Petroski, the best damn reporter in the state, that Iowa's prisons are considering setting up limited e-mail access for inmates. This news is almost enough to make XIOA sponsor its first contest: Guess which politician will be the first to grandstand on this issue by demanding that the Department of Corrections stop "coddling" inmates.

The Register's comment forum is already lit up, of course. To quote one poster, who is no doubt a recognized expert in correctional science:

"Maybe we can get them cushy recliners and Direct TV? Oh and every Sat night can be ribeyes & root beer. My God, these pieces of human debris are in PRISON! Hello! Maybe if we quit making prison like the Marriott we might actually get the point across to these dregs that prison is NOT a place you want to return."

He's right, you know. Prison is just like the Marriott. If you're not getting firehoses turned on you by the Marriott bellhops, you're being sodomized by gangs of other guests, or getting served maggoty fatback by room service, or being tossed naked into a windowless room by yourself for weeks on end for failing to address the screws as "Sir" and really meaning it.

I love it when people work themselves into a lather thinking about prison inmates getting all these "special privileges." The TV issue really brings out the best in them. The idea of murderers and rapists watching fourteen hours of television a day seems to really get under their skin. I mean, what a great life! Sitting indoors, under fluorescent lighting, staring at the idiot box? For years on end? Oh man, that's the American dream, right?

These chuckleheads don't know shit about prison, of course. But there are a few key points that they are really in the dark about. The first is that the purpose of prison is not to punish lawbreakers as severely as possible. It's to keep lawbreakers away from the rest of us until they've "learned their lesson" ... or for the rest of their lives, whichever comes first. By all accounts -- and I do mean all accounts -- the loss of personal freedom is by far the most punishing aspect of prison. Don't like someone telling you what to do? How about having someone tell you when to get up, when to go to bed, when you're allowed to stand, when you're allowed to lie down, when you can go outside (and for how long), when you can eat, what you will eat, when you can shower, when you can take a shit (which you'll be doing in front of everyone), who you can talk to, how you can talk to them, what you can read, and a thousand other things every day that we all take for granted. Plus, those same people will be reading your mail, listening to your phone calls, searching your cell, sticking their fingers up your ass looking for contraband, confiscating whatever meager belongings you have whenever they feel like it, and beating and possibly killing you if you dare to talk back.

Yeah, when you've got a sweet life like that, a little television or some severely restricted e-mail is just icing on the cake. It's like a country club, really.

Another thing these types aren't capable of grasping is that positive incentives work far better than negative incentives. Here's something the corrections people figured out a long time ago: If you tell a prisoner that the guards will beat his ass if he misbehaves, he'll behave just well enough to avoid getting his ass beaten. If you tell a prisoner that he'll get a cookie if he behaves, he'll behave better than he ever has. Want to exert control over a cellblock full of cons? Put a TV in the day room and tell them that if they all behave themselves, then they all get to watch. Not only will most of the prisoners toe the line, they'll also come down hard on those who don't. Television is addictive. So is e-mail. How many times a day do you check yours? What would you do if yours were suddenly cut off? If a prison gets its inmates hooked on e-mail, then that prison has gained another powerful tool with which to control behavior. See, the prison system controls inmate behavior more with persuasion than with force. Clubs, water hoses and "the hole" are only a last resort. But privileges -- outside visitors, phone calls, library borrowing, television, commissary privileges, exercise time, even paid work -- are given out and taken away to fine-tune behavior. So would it be with e-mail.

Finally, let me say this again: Television is addictive. So is e-mail. Jim Hogshire's groundbreaking book You Are Going To Prison makes this point elegantly: "People on the outside may rant and rave about 'mollycoddling' prisoners by allowing access to TV, but prison administrators know it's as good as thorazine for keeping otherwise dangerous men relatively docile." A guy who's staring at Jerry Springer and Divorce Court for eight hours a day is one who isn't getting into fights, isn't fucking with the guards, and isn't raping anybody. If so many people use the TV to babysit their kids, is there any wonder why prisons use it to babysit their own charges? Now imagine a guy who's anxiously awaiting an e-mail from his lady on the outside. He isn't going to do anything today that could cost him his e-mail privileges.

As Petroski's story makes clear, inmates wouldn't get Internet access. They'd simply be allowed to exchange messages with a specific set of e-mail addresses, all of which could be verified by the state. That means no attachments, no spamming. With that in mind, there isn't anything an inmate could do via e-mail that he can't do already, the old-fashioned way. Prisoners are able to run all manner of credit-card frauds, lonely-hearts scams and other classic cons through the U.S. mail. By allowing e-mail, however, the prison can review an inmate's correspondence more quickly and more cheaply than it can examine his written letters. All manner of software is available to scan e-mails for troublesome language. There's actually less risk, and it wouldn't cost taxpayers anything.

I'd wager that the people who get the most outraged over prisoners having certain feeble privileges are the ones who have chosen for themselves a life uncomfortably close to that of an inmate. To you, the idea of sitting indoors in front of the TV day after day, going out only for brief periods, and having someone feed you three fatty, starchy meals a day probably sounds like hell on Earth. To these people, though, it sounds like fuckin' paradise.

Requiem for a mall

2007-08-30T09:55:00.001-05:00

About 15 years ago, when I was living in Des Moines the first time around, I had a girlfriend who was assistant manager of "Everything .99" at Southridge Mall -- one of those stores where everything costs a dollar. The store had originally been "Everything 1.29," but it knocked 30 cents off to keep the traffic coming in. This week, I returned to Southridge for the first time in probably a dozen years. "Everything .99" was gone; in its place was "Filipino Store," a merchant that, obviously, caters to Des Moines' burgeoning(?) Filipino population.

The evolution of that one storefront sums up perfectly the continued deterioration of Southridge: from downscale retail, to cut-rate downscale retail, to micro-niche retail.

But at least Filipino Store had customers. I counted three people in there (Filipinos, of course), buying groceries and other specialty items not available at Aldi or Fareway. That was three more people than were shopping at "Natural Therapeutics," a jacuzzi dealer whose lone visible employee was keeping shoppers away with some kind of political-rant radio show turned up to full blast, and two more than were browsing the secondhand material at Book Trader, whose lone visible employee was unshaven and disconcertingly bleary-eyed.

Those three storefronts were occupied, though, and at Southridge that's saying something. A visit to the Soutridge Mall website reveals that of 91 specialty retail locations within the mall, 38 are listed as "leasing opportunities," meaning they're vacant. (This count does not include kiosks. When a kiosk is vacant, the mall management just takes it down. So whenever you see a hastily arranged "sitting area" in the center of a mall concourse, it's a good bet there was once a Piercing Pagoda or Sun Tropik on that spot.) Several empty Southridge storefronts are being consolidated into a single large location for discount clothier Steve & Barry's, but even when that project is completed, one-third of the specialty stores will still be vacant.

On the north side of town, at Merle Hay Mall, things are better, but just a bit. On a recent walkthrough, one could see 21 vacant specialty store locations out of a total of about 85, a vacancy rate closer to 20%-25%, compared with 40% at Southridge. While Southridge's vacancies are spread pretty evenly throughout the mall, certain areas of Merle Hay have been hit especially hard. The north end, near Sears, is a particularly stark dead zone. If you ever wondered what a paradigm shift looks like, you can see it here: Empty storefronts still bearing Sam Goody and Suncoast Motion Picture Company signage face each other across a deserted corridor. (In the Internet age, stores like these that sell commodity products are doomed. At a bookstore, at least you can pick up the volumes and page through them. Music and movie stores offer you nothing you can't get online, and in fact much less.)

Southridge is deep into the shopping mall death spiral, while Merle Hay is just starting to slip into the funnel. They show the classic symptoms:

Bejeweled islands. In just about any mall, thriving or dying, you'll find jewelry stores wherever corridors intersect. One major reason is that jewelry is the ultimate impulse buy: People want it, but no one needs it, so the stores are positioned to poach people coming to the mall for other purposes. Also, of the people who do go to the mall intending to buy jewelry, few have a particular store in mind. The stores are pretty much interchangeable. To all but the most discriminating buyers, one 50-point diamond or lump of white gold is as good as the next. Thus, location becomes critical, and stores "on the corner" are best poised to grab those customers prepared to stop at the first place they see. When malls are going through their death throes, jewelry stores hold out longer than most. Perhaps their margins are higher -- one really good sale can carry the entire store for a day. Or perhaps years of exposure to all those corner jewelry stores have fixed in people's minds the idea that malls are full of indistinguishable jewelry stores, so that when people are in a mind to buy, they'll go to a mall they might not otherwise frequent. Whatever the reason, when you walk through a dying mall, it will seem like every other store is selling jewelry. That's because during your walk you see one empty storefront after another (and another and another), then you get to an intersection, and there's a jewelry store on every corner. You can see this in action in a stretch of stores in the northwest corner of Southridge. At one corner, there's a Helzberg Diamonds with three vacant stores on one side and two on the other. Directly across the corridor is a Zales with two empty stores on one side, and two out of three stores empty on the other.

Cellphone clutter. I don't know why this happens, but it does. Dying malls fill up with stores trying to sell you cellphone service. My only guess is that leasing agents are desperate to get some tenant, any tenant, to fill empty storefronts, and that cellphone sellers have very little overhead. Southridge has separate stores for Nextel, T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular; a Shock City Cellular location that offers Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile; a Radio Shack that handles AT&T; plus a kiosk that sells phone holsters and other cell-crap. Merle Hay has Verizon, U.S. Cellular, Sprint, Qwest, Shock City, Radio Shack, Cingular/AT&T and an accessories kiosk. Within five years, both of these malls will have microeconomies based exclusively on people selling each other tennis bracelets and two-year unlimited text-messaging contracts.

No goods, just services. The business model for American malls in the late 20th century was to offer people a wide range of shopping to get them in the door, and then provide services to keep them there. If a person could get their hair cut at the mall, or get something to eat, they'd be more likely to stay longer and arrange to do all their shopping there. A dying mall sees this dynamic reversed. Stores close, and all that's left is the services. People now come to the mall specifically to get their hair cut. That's fine for the salon, but it does nothing for the mall, it creates no "through" traffic. Each of the two malls has at least three hair or nail salons, for example.

Non-retail "store"-fronts. Faced with 40% vacancy rates, a mall will do just about anything for rental revenue. Southridge is now home to two churches, the Iowa Mortgage Association, a temp agency and the Des Moines Jaycees' annual haunted house, a large space that is unused for 11 months of the year.

What's killing the Des Moines malls? The West Des Moines malls, of course. More specifically, Jordan Creek Town Center.

When I first lived here, there were three malls, each with a distinct identity. For lack of better terms, let's just say that Valley West Mall, on what used to be called 35th Street, was the highbrow mall, Merle Hay was the middlebrow mall, and Southridge was the lowbrow mall. The malls' identity reflected their surroundings. Valley West was in the monied western suburbs, Southridge was on the working-class south side, and Merle Hay was on the border of Des Moines and Urbandale. (Snubbed as usual, east-siders have a mall called "Ankeny.") Then, while I was out, Jordan Creek came along to meet a need no one knew existed. Built in the Dallas County portion of West Des Moines (guess which county gets the sales tax revenue), it was to feature high-end retail and restaurants, assuming you consider Dillard's and P.F. Chang's "high end."

With Jordan Creek going up in the western suburbs, which mall stood to lose the most? Here's a map of the Des Moines area, with the pre-existing malls spotted in red and Jordan Creek in blue:

The average person would probably say Valley West. It's the closest of the three, and it targets the same upscale clientele as Jordan Creek. The correct answer, however, is Southridge.

Southridge is what's known in the industry as a "super-regional" mall -- or, it was, before its customer base collapsed. It was designed to be the primary shopping venue for a large area, starting with the south side of Des Moines and extending to Norwalk, Carlisle and Indianola. Indeed, a stroll through Southridge in the early 1990s found it teeming with letter jackets from the high schools in those southern-tier communities. Warren County license plates filled the parking lots. As the southern suburbs became more affluent, the mall underwent a dramatic expansion and renovation, the centerpiece of which was a delightful indoor carousel. Southridge, which had been sliding, was poised for a comeback.

Around this time, Des Moines business leaders, airport boosters and others were again pressing for construction of a southern freeway that would connect Interstate 35 on the west with U.S. 69 on the east, giving Des Moines a true beltway. They would eventually get their wish with the relocated and expanded Iowa Highway 5, a truly beautiful stretch of highway that leads ... pretty much straight to Jordan Creek Town Center. Families that used to come up from the south to shop at Southridge Mall could now hop on this brand-new freeway and in just a few extra minutes be stuffing their faces at the Cheesecake Factory at Jordan Creek. The death of Southridge Mall had begun.

When I was there this week, there was only one child on the carousel.

Merle Hay also took a beating, though not quite as severe. It still has an Old Navy store, a Limited, an Aeropostale, an American Eagle, and an updated Victoria's Secret. (The old Victoria's Secret stores were designed to look like Parisian salons; the updated ones are designed to look like Amsterdam whorehouses.) But there are far fewer people moving through. Merle Hay's proximity to Interstate 35-80 had long brought in shoppers from the north and northwest. Now that same freeway sweeps many of those same shoppers down to Jordan Creek.

What of Valley West? Its website shows just three vacancies out of more than 100 specialty locations, plus two storefronts that are being filled temporarily while Victoria's Secret and The Limited renovate their stores. Closer to Jordan Creek than either of the two other malls, and yet its vacancy rate is under 5%. How can that be? Some theories:

The "my mall" effect. For tens of thousands of people in West Des Moines, Valley West is simply "my mall." It's close by and has all the stores they need. If they really have to, they'll go to Jordan Creek -- say, to get an iPod at the Apple store -- but for day-to-day shopping, there's no need to go any further. Merle Hay may benefit from a similar effect, though its immediate and satellite neighborhoods are neither as affluent nor as populous. Southridge, meanwhile, is surrounded almost entirely by commercial property.
The I-235 advantage. The city of Des Moines is still the population center of the metro area. And for most people in the city, you would get to Jordan Creek by taking Interstate 235, which goes ... right past Valley West Mall. It's a significantly shorter trip to Valley West, and the payoff for going all the way to Jordan Creek is not much greater.
The Southdale strategy. Southdale, in Edina, Minnesota, was "my mall" when I was growing up in Minneapolis. The first fully enclosed shopping center, it was a roaring success from the 1950s until the '90s, when the gigantic Mall of America opened a relatively short drive away down Interstate 494. Despite suffering a sharp initial drop in traffic, Southdale embarked on an extensive renovation plan and an aggressive advertising campaign. The strategy was this: "We can't keep shoppers from going and checking out the megamall. So let them go. When they get fed up with the traffic, the parking hassles, the tourists and the sheer damn size of the place, they'll come back to Southdale." And they did. Twin Cities residents will go to the Mall of America, if they have to, but they don't shop there. Who has the time? Valley West can make this same appeal: Why go all the way out to Jordan Creek, and deal with all the out-of-towners with their Mahaska County license plates and creative turn-signal usage, and park a mile away, and wait at one stoplight after another, when all you need is right here? Valley West has undergone a renovation aimed at looking even more upscale than Jordan Creek. I suspect it will work.

The Des Moines area didn't need another mall, but it got one anyway. Southridge is dying, and Merle Hay isn't looking so hot, either. Who knows? In a few years, maybe we'll need Jordan Creek after all.

We have met the stalker, and it is us

2007-08-28T12:11:00.000-05:00

One of the top stories on Channel 13's noon news today was that police were following up on a report of a strange man who was seen taking pictures of women in the the downtown skywalks. Downtown businesses are so alarmed by this that they are alerting their employees to Mace the living shit out of anyone who even looks like he might have -- or own -- a camera.

The piece included comments from the police department's PIO, Sgt. Todd Dykstra, who said that they want to know what the guy was up to and that it's conceivable he could be charged with harassment. I have no doubt that Dykstra knows damn well that there's almost no way to make such a charge stick if all the guy was doing was takin' pitchers o' purty gurls in the skywalks. (The Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that you have no presumption of privacy in a public place. That's why the authorities, and quasi-authorities like Wal-Mart security, are allowed to keep you under surveillance pretty much from the time you step out your front door.) But I understand why Dykstra said what he did: He'd just as soon not have the skywalks filled with weirdos taking pictures of random women. (The Supreme Court also says it's OK for the police to fudge the truth when their heart is in the right place.)

Which brings us back to the reason Channel 13's report this afternoon was unintentionally hilarious. Someone was stalking the skywalks with a camera, shooting pictures of random women. What did Channel 13 do for visuals for this story? It had someone stalk the skywalks with a camera, shooting footage of random women. If I was Todd Dykstra, I'd have Tased that sumbich.

Back at the studio, fifth-string Channel 13 anchorman Patrick Dix was utterly oblivious to the irony. John Bachman would have been all over that shit.

Third Reich funnies

2007-08-27T16:48:00.001-05:00

Let's hope there weren't any Holocaust survivors reading the Register's business section today. Because here's the main art from the front page:

Yes, that's what you think it is. A cartoon Nazi. (I think it may actually be "Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS.") It accompanied the latest installment of "Workbytes," the semiweekly column devoted to helping young people navigate the world of work. Today's topic was bad bosses. A sidebar included some workplace horror stories, including a truly hair-raising account by a waitress whose supervisor knowingly hired a man who had been stalking her. But none of the bad-boss tales was as shocking as the bathos with which this one was delivered:

"The boss runs the place like a concentration camp. It seems as if we are treated like second-class citizens, since we are on the lower end of the pay scale. For example, every department is entitled to a department outing. Not us. Our department hasn't had an outing for years. We also are to have all our time accounted for, even bathroom breaks. If you are scheduled to be in at 8 a.m. and get here at 8 a.m., you are late. You are supposed to be ready to work by 8, not here by 8. If you come in at 8:01, then you have to stay late a minute to make up your time."

Why, it's just like a concentration camp! At Hitler's concentration camps -- or Stalin's, or Mao's, or Pol Pot's -- people were just burned alive, or worked to death, or made to kill their own parents, or ordered to dig their own graves, or stripped of all their dignity and forced to endure hell on earth. But this guy's department didn't even get an outing. And everybody else's did! And if he comes in a minute late in the morning, he has to stay a minute late in the afternoon! He can't go home until 5:01 p.m.! No wonder the Jews were so traumatized at Auschwitz!

Look, I know hyperbole. I understand that this guy's boss was being unfair and unreasonable. I understand that someone, somewhere thinks it's funny to depict asshole bosses as "Nazis." But there's something deeply troubling about the combination of this pathetic story and the illustration.

I frequent a number of message boards for language professionals. Last year a young woman joined one of the boards with the username "Copy Nazi." When asked to explain herself, she said that she has very high standards, is very exacting, and demands strict adherence to rules. And I thought: Oh, that's what defined the Nazis? That they were just such sticklers? A bunch of anal-retentive obsessives hung up on rules? Good God. No, what defined the Nazis was the institutionalization of inhumanity. Strict adherence to petty rules was not their problem. To suggest as much just betrays ignorance. And also a lack of creativity: "Nazi" = "meticulous"? Yeah, haw haw haw, you dumbass.

There's a larger lesson here about comedy. When Jerry Seinfeld named a character the "Soup Nazi," he was deliberately going all the way over the top. The name was meant to reflect poorly not on the soup seller, but rather on Seinfeld himself, for so grossly overreacting to the man's strange behavior. Suppose the character had actually turned out to be a Nazi -- death's-head cap, Jodhpurs and all. It wouldn't have been funny; it would have been in terrible taste. It's only because the man wasn't a Nazi and wasn't depicted as one that calling him one made any comedic sense.

When the person quoted by "Workbytes" says his workplace was "like a concentration camp," it's clear he does so without any self-awareness. He just said something ridiculous, but he doesn't realize it. Because in his solipsistic little world, any workplace's adherence to silly rules is on par with the atrocities of Dachau. Probably because he has no idea what happened at Dachau. But you know? I think I could let that slide, too, if it weren't for the fucking cartoon. The combination of historical and rhetorical cluelessness makes the whole thing offensive.

(And yes, I know she's supposed to look like Col. Klink, but Hogan's Heroes went off the air 40 years ago. It's ancient history, and it's no defense.)

Valley wins. Big surprise.

2007-08-19T19:35:00.000-05:00

Perhaps you saw the story about Iowa high school athletics on the front of the Sports section in Friday's Des Moines Register. Here are the first couple sentences, edited for, um, clarity:

"West Des Moines Valley isn't the only team eligible for the 'Iowa's Largest and Wealthiest High School Award,' though it may seem like it. This marks the fifth consecutive year the Tigers have won, and no school has won more since the creation of the competition in 2000."

OK, technically, the honor is called the "All-Sports Award." As the story says, it has been given out every year since 2000 by the Register. The winning schools, the newspaper says, are determined "based on the performance of athletic teams in all sports." But when you stop and think about it, you realize that the award might as well be based on the demographics of the student body, because those demographics have helped hand the award to Valley every year since 2003.

Before we start, let me make clear that the case we will be building here is not against Valley High School. Valley athletics have an indisputable tradition of excellence. To piss on the school for winning championships is to suggest that the Valley kids should be taking a dive out there. They shouldn't. They're good kids. My wife is a Valley alumna, for pete's sake. No, the case we're building is against the Register's All-Sports Award itself.

First of all, let's talk about size. Valley has by far the largest enrollment of any Iowa high school, with about 1,950 students. That's about 15% larger (about 230 more students) than the next-closest competitor, Des Moines East. Does size matter? You bet it does. Because a huge student population allows a school's teams to draw from a significantly deeper talent pool.

Let's assume that athletic talent is fairly evenly distributed through the population (it isn't, obviously, but we're starting from the most basic concepts). For every 500 students, let's say there is maybe one player in a given sport who is a "10" on a ten-point scale. At progressively lower talent levels, there are more and more students. Out of 500 kids, there are, say, two 9s, three 8s, five 7s, eight 6s, twelve 5s, and so on. In putting together a 20-player team, then, Valley has access to four 10s, eight 9s, and enough 8s to fill out the roster. Valley's team average is 8.4, and the median player, the one in the middle of the team, talent-wise, is a 9.

Nearby Urbandale High School, meanwhile, is similar in a lot of respects to Valley but has fewer than half as many students. So it must make do with maybe one or two 10s, three 9s, five 8s, eight 7s and some 6s. Urbandale's team average is just a little lower at 8.2 -- but the median player is only a 7, two full levels below Valley's. Anyone who knows sports acutely would tell you that the median is more important that the average, which is distorted by extremes. You don't win championships with your stars. You win them with your role players.

So Valley's size alone gives it an advantage toward winning the Register award every single year. But demographics is more than just raw population numbers. The reason Valley is so large is that it's the only conventional public high school in the West Des Moines district, which covers more than 60,000 people in West Des Moines, Clive and portions of Urbandale and Windsor Heights. That territory also constitutes the greatest concentration of wealth in the state. Does money matter? You bet it does. Because an affluent student population also allows a school's teams to draw from a significantly deeper talent pool.

Simply put, rich kids (and upper-middle-class kids) have a leg up on poor kids (and working-class kids). In a richer school, students in the aggregate will have more free time to pursue sports of all kinds, far more opportunity to pursue niche sports such as tennis and golf, and more parks and recreational places in which to pursue them. In a poorer school, more students will have jobs (to help support the family, not just to get spending money), more will be unable to afford specialized sporting equipment, and more will be watching siblings before and after school. In those poorer schools, a certain portion of the student body couldn't play sports even if they wanted to, and many are limited in the sports they can participate in.

That's not to say poorer schools can't and don't field teams that compete at a high level. They do. The catch is: They can't do it in every sport. In any given school, rich or poor, the best basketball players will be playing basketball, the best football players will be playing football, because opportunities are present in those sports from a young age. It's the lesser sports -- the ones that colleges refer to as "non-revenue" sports -- where the competition between rich and poor schools breaks down completely. Thousands of kids in the western suburbs grow up exposed to golf, tennis, soccer, swimming, diving, volleyball. On Des Moines' east side ... not so much. Des Moines East can field a decent basketball team and a track team, of course, but how's their golf team? Their tennis team? Their swimming team?

This is key, you see, because the All-Sports Award depends on participation in "all sports." Friday's Register article includes a little sidebar about how Valley won the All-Sports title. In the past year's state tournaments, Valley teams were:

First in girls' swimming
First in girls' softball
First in girls' soccer
Second in boys' track
Third in boys' tennis
Third in boys' soccer
Fourth in boys' swimming
Fourth in girls' golf
Fifth in boys' golf
Seventh in girls' track
Semifinalists (third/fourth) in football
Semifinalists (third/fourth) in girls' basketball

It's a great record, and all the student-athletes at Valley have every right to be proud of their achievements. Again, nowhere in this post am I alleging that Valley athletes have any unfair or improper advantage on the field of play. However, the Register All-Sports Award rests on essentially unfair and improper criteria. You look at Valley's accomplishments, and you see that what won it the award were its golf teams, its swimming teams, its soccer teams, its tennis teams. When you have 2,000 students, you can have a competitive swim team and a competitive golf team and a competitive tennis team and a competitive soccer team. Other schools -- far smaller schools -- can't have them all. The pool just isn't deep enough.

(The Register award, it should be noted, is given out for three categories of schools: "small," those with 1-349 students; "medium," or 350-799 students; and "large," 800 or more. At the lower levels, no school has dominated year after year like Valley has. But those categories have an upper bound, and no school in them has a combined enrollment/affluence edge as stark as Valley's.)

If the award itself is so skewed, why does the Register even give it out? To understand that, it helps to understand a couple things about the media.

First, when people who don't work in the news media see something irrelevant, trivial or otherwise questionable dressed up as "news," they shake their head and ask, "Slow news day?" The answer is usually: Yes. For sports news, you don't get much deader than August. All that's going on is baseball. If it weren't for Shawn Johnson of West Des Moines(!) slaughtering the opposition in international gymnastics, the Register wouldn't have anything to write about at all. (Besides another preview on the Hawkeyes' backup punter, of course.) So they fill column inches with a bogus award.

Second, you may or may not have noticed this, but community newspaper sports sections aren't exactly fonts of creativity. That's why every other sports headline is a brainless pun on someone's name: "Sabbatini has Tiger by the tail." Get it? Cuz his name is Tiger, and tigers have tails! I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that someone in the Register hierarchy saw that some other newspaper somewhere was giving out an annual high-school all-sports award and thought, "Hey, why don't we do that?" But they never stopped to think through the criteria. In California, or New York, or Illinois, or even Missouri, you have a lot of large schools from different population centers that can be measured against each other on a roughly equal basis. Iowa does not. Rating high schools according to the Register criteria is always going to be comparing apples to oranges to plums to cherries to grapes, because there are so few teams with apples.

Valley athletes deserve congratulations for a lot of things, but not this.

Hunka hunka noisome overkill

2007-08-17T09:55:00.000-05:00

Are you sick yet of the coverage of the 30th anniversary of Elvis' death? Tired of the hagiography of a drug-addicted sexual deviant who died on the toilet? Sorry, but there's nothing I can do for you. We'll be getting this same fucking useless, lazy, media-manufactured "story" every August until the last baby boomer is cold in the ground.

WHO's majestic porch

2007-08-15T10:22:00.000-05:00

"Van and Bonnie," longtime radio personalities for the local right-wing station, WHO, can be seen in a new television advertisement for Midwest Construction, a local contractor. Midwest has updated the famous(?) "WHO Crystal Studio" at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. Fairgoers are invited to stop by and check out the new surroundings.

The Crystal Studio. Sounds so chic, so futuristic, doesn't it? The name evokes images of sleek modernism, like the Crystal Cathedral in California, or maybe the Crystal Court in Minneapolis, or even the high rises of Crystal City, Virginia, looking out over Washington, D.C. Really, the Fortress of Solitude is what comes to mind.

Or, maybe it just makes you think of a fucking porch:

There's nothing wrong with the building, per se. If I want to add a nice three-season room, I'll definitely consider hiring Midwest Construction for the job. It's the name that's a pretentious joke. Call it the "Panoramic Studio" if you must give it a name. Or the "Fishbowl studio." Or hey, even "The Porch." Imagine how folksy and inviting that would sound in an ad: "Come out and join us on The Porch at the Iowa State Fair."

But instead, it's the Crystal Studio. As the late Merv Griffin would say, "Oooooooooohhh. That's goooood."

And no shiitake mushrooms!

2007-08-12T20:18:00.000-05:00

We've begun to go through a lot of baby food at our house. The boy who for so long considered solid food beneath him -- and as a result wound up with solid food all over him, and all over us -- is now going through a good 10 ounces of the stuff every day. A lot of it he likes: squash, sweet potatoes, carrots, pears, applesauce, green beans. Some of it he doesn't care for: bananas, peas, anything with meat in it.

One particular concoction has been met with considerable ambivalence: Vanilla Custard Pudding. He'll take a few bites, but he doesn't seem excited about it. It's sweet, so you'd think he would like it, but there's something funny about the consistency. Or maybe it's the label.

See, Gerber baby food now comes in little clear plastic containers rather than the jars of yore. The particular variety of food is printed on an inner lid that you peel off and throw away -- sort of like on a can of Pringles. Because that lid gets tossed, Gerber also prints the variety on the side of the container, so you know what it is if you put the leftovers in the fridge. There is limited space on the side, though, so sometimes they have to abbreviate. "Apples, Strawberries and Bananas," for example, becomes "APPLES STRAW BANANA."

So maybe when we're feeding him Vanilla Custard Pudding, the boy looks at the spoonful of sticky, whitish goo and then looks at the label ...

... and thinks to himself: Ah, no, I'll pass, thanks.

I'm in the 36-to-50 age group, so I'm close

2007-08-10T22:53:00.000-05:00

It turns out that you really are only as old as you feel. As evidence, this week I received my first solicitation to join the AARP, just four months shy of my 38th birthday. The handsome, official-looking packet delivered to my house by government courier* included a flattering come-on, a sturdy plastic temporary membership card with my name on it, and a business-reply envelope so I could send back my enrollment at no cost to me (except the $12.50 membership fee).

I was a little confused as to why AARP Executive Director William Novelli had signed my membership card -- shouldn't I do that? I mean, my driver's license has my signature, not Chet Culver's -- but the matter was quickly forgotten as I read up on all the fantastic services and discounts I could get by joining: 18% off worldwide air ambulance and "medical repatriation" services! 10% off at Best Western! Huge discounts on rental cars! Plus, I remembered what Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming and one of my all-time closet heroes, said about the AARP:

"33 million Americans bound together by a common love of airline discounts and automobile discounts and RV discounts; they're a monstrous organization. ... They're selfish, greedy. They don't care about their grandchildren a whit."

When am I ever going to get another opportunity to join a monstrous organization that guarantees me 25% off at Alamo Rent-A-Car? I mean, al-Qaeda sure as shit isn't going to get me a free upgrade to a full-size car when available, and the damn KKK can't even get the adopt-a-highway to let them pick up trash; no way they're going to offer me prescription benefits.

So I'm going to join this thing. The fine print says I have to be 50 years old, but I'm sure that's just a technicality. I already have my membership card!

Now git them fuckin kids off my lawn or I'm callin the police.

*Mailman

Rant: Your house isn't worth what you think it is

2007-08-09T00:41:00.000-05:00

About a month ago, my wife and I checked out an open house in Johnston. We're not looking to buy a home immediately, but we will be in the market next spring, so we're keeping tabs on what's available, where, and for how much.

The house we looked at was pretty much perfect for us -- and, judging by comments we heard at the open house, for others as well. It was airy and bright, with three large common areas, good-sized bedrooms, a large, open kitchen, a beautiful master suite, a fully finished basement with wet bar and full bath, an excellent space for a home office, and a large back yard with a two-level deck. The home was impeccably maintained and sharply decorated, and it "showed" extremely well. Had we been ready to buy, we would have put in a contract. We'd have been tempted to offer full price, too. The home was that nice.

Further, the sellers had priced the house aggressively, and I mean that in a good way. From their asking price, it was evident that they wanted this thing to sell quickly, and that they weren't going to make the mistake -- epidemic in the current market -- of trying to squeeze every last nickel out of the property at the expense of thousands of dollars in carrying costs. Here is the sale history of the house, according to the Polk County assessor:

6/11/1998: $211,530
5/5/1999: $205,000
6/28/1999: $208,000

The sellers are asking just a little under $268,000, meaning they hope to realize just a 28% profit on a home they've owned for eight years (just 20%, if they have to pay the 7% commission that crooked Iowa realtors are trying to get). That is such a ridiculously reasonable asking price that these people should have their heads examined. This property is the definition of "priced to sell," and when we walked through the home, we commented to the agent handling the open house that it wouldn't stay on the market long at this price.

A month later, it's still on the market. No contract pending. We're watching to see if the price drops as summer bleeds into autumn and the pool of potential buyers (families with kids) grows shallower for the duration of the school year. I wouldn't be surprised if it does, because that "housing bubble" you've heard so much about over the past year or so is very real and has been punctured -- and the damage will not be confined to Southern California or the Northeast.

To be sure, real estate in Iowa has not seen the kind of appreciation that caused housing prices on the coasts to go berserk, but the psychology behind the bubble has manifested itself here. For example, they're building townhouses in cornfields in Grimes. Townhouses -- so named because they maximize the housing capacity on scarce urban land -- are going up amid acres and acres of farmland, much of which is also for sale. With nearly new single-family houses languishing unsold on the MLS for comparable prices, who thinks it's a good idea to be bringing hundreds of $150,000 townhouse units into the inventory in the middle of nowhere? Today, no one. But two years ago, when these things were being platted out, it seemed like a great idea. When have realtors ever been wrong about anything?

Still, Iowans did a far better job of keeping their heads screwed tight on than did other regions of the country. That's why it's too bad that the bursting of the housing bubble resembles an atomic bomb: Even regions not directly in the blast radius are going to get hit with the fallout. And it's the fallout that is keeping that beautiful house in Johnston from selling. To understand how this all fits together, we need to go back and reconstruct the housing bubble one step at a time. Come along, friends ...

Step 1: Don't trust any loan under 30

For decades, the U.S. housing market was driven by conventional mortgages. A buyer made a down payment, traditionally 20% of the price, and financed the rest with a fixed-rate mortgage. He shopped around for the best interest rate he could find, then locked it in for the duration of the loan -- usually 30 years, sometimes 15. Because the rate was fixed, the buyer's payment remained steady. Each month, he paid a little less in interest and a little more in principal, but the total amount of the payment never changed. It was one thing he could count on in a world full of things he couldn't.

For many people, the biggest obstacle to buying a home was coming up with the money for the down payment. On a $150,000 house, for example, they needed to scrape together $30,000. Lenders required a down payment for three primary reasons:

First, it demonstrated a certain level of financial discipline. Before cutting someone a check for six figures, a bank wanted some kind of assurance that the money would be paid back. Someone who had demonstrated enough self-restraint to save up $30,000 toward a down payment represented a significantly better credit risk than someone who spent all their disposable income on pretty bows and ribbons.

Second, by requiring borrowers to put up a substantial chunk of their own assets, the bank ensured that those people had some skin in the game. People are surprisingly quick to default on their obligations when the bank is holding the entire bag. But when you have your own money tied up in a house, you will dig deeper, fight harder, work longer to keep it. It's just human nature.

Third, and most important, a down payment is the lender's hedge against depreciation. Say you put down $30,000 and the bank writes you a loan for $120,000. For all intents and purposes, you own 20% of the house and the bank owns 80%. But if the price of the house falls $10,000, you don't share that loss equally. It all comes out of your share. You now own 14.3% ($20K out of $140K in value) of the house, and the bank owns 85.7%. But the important thing is that if you need to sell the house, the bank will still get all its money back. Barring a collapse in housing prices of greater than 20%, the bank is protected. It's using your equity as a cushion. You're protected, too, because if you absolutely have to, you can still sell the house, pay off the loan, avoid foreclosure, and keep your credit rating intact.

Over the past few years, this aspect of the down payment requirement -- the depreciation hedge -- came to be viewed as a quaint relic as the entire real estate market bought into the delusion -- as it periodically does -- that housing prices never do anything but rise. That delusion had taken hold as money began growing on trees.

Step 2: Refi-fo-fum, I smell low rates

Around the turn of the 21st century, interest rates on conventional mortgages were about 8%, close to their historical averages. Over the next few years, though, rates fell through the floor, hitting 5.5% by mid-2003. Money was cheaper than it had ever been, which allowed people to borrow greater amounts that ever before. The homebuyer above who had borrowed $120,000 for 30 years at 8% interest had a monthly principal and interest payment of $880. At 5.5% interest, however, that same buyer could borrow $155,000 for the same monthly payment.

So, because he was able to borrow about 30% more money, he was now able to buy 30% more house, correct? Move up to a bigger slice of the American dream? Not at all, because the cost of money had gone down for everyone else, too. A buyer who could have borrowed $155,000 at 8% could borrow $200,000 at 5.5%; a buyer who qualified for $200,000 at 8% could now get $258,000; and so on all the way up the scale. Everyone had access to more money, which pushed housing prices up. And that inflation started at the very bottom. In any given market, there's a certain threshold price below which you just won't find decent houses for sale. That threshold price defines the entry-level home. When money is cheap, the number of people wanting entry-level homes outpaces the supply of such homes. The threshold price rises -- and the prices of all other houses rise along with it. Where did all the $70,000 houses go? They became $140,000 houses.

At the same time low rates were driving up home prices, tens of millions of people who had taken out mortgages in the 1980s and '90s at significantly higher rates were rushing to use the cheap money to refinance their homes. Doing so allowed some people to cut their payments by as much as half -- provided that they borrowed only enough money to pay off their old loan. That was a big proviso, however, one that too many homeowners never lived up to.

Here's the smart way to refinance: Someone who had borrowed $120,000 at 9.5% interest in 1995 (a typical rate for the time) would have had a monthly principal and interest payment of $1,009. In 2005, after ten years of payments, he would have still owed about $103,000 in principal. Refinancing that remaining principal at 5.5% for 30 years would have dropped his monthly payment to $585. Or he could have refinanced for 15 years at 5.25%, giving him a payment of $827. This simple refinancing would have saved him $2,200 to $5,000 a year in interest payments.

(But, you ask, what about the mortgage interest tax deduction? Yes, what about it? The idea that you should carry a higher debt-service cost just so you can deduct it from your taxable income is one of the more vile canards offered by those with a stake in money-lending. Our borrower above may have lost a $5,000 tax deduction by reducing his interest payments, but that deduction was worth, at most, $1,600 in tax savings. That means he has at least $3,400 more to save, invest, or just spend on other things. People fail to understand that the mortgage interest deduction is not a tax credit; it doesn't offset your tax bill dollar for dollar. It just allows you to reduce the amount of money subject to tax. So which would you rather do? Have an extra $5,000 in taxable income, which would net you at least $3,400? Or pay $5,000 extra in interest just to get $1,600 back at tax time?)

Unfortunately, for every borrower who refinanced the smart way, there was another who used the process to turn their house into an ATM -- one with tremendous hidden fees. Let's go back to the borrower above. It's 2005, and he owes $103,000 at 9.5% interest. If he put 20% down back when he took out the mortgage, then he now owns $47,000 worth of the $150,000 house. But wait! It's been 10 years, and the house has grown in value. Assuming just a modest 3% annual appreciation, the house is now worth $201,000. So, really, he has $98,000 in equity. If only he could get his hands on some of that money! Think of all the pretty bows and ribbons he could buy! So he finds a lender to write him a new 30-year mortgage for $178,000 at 5.5% interest. Why $178,000? Because that's how much he can borrow at the lower rate without having his $1,009 monthly payment go up. So he uses $103,000 to pay off the original mortgage and walks away with $75,000, all without reducing his monthly cash flow. It's like free money! Except it's not. He now owes more money on the house, has less equity in the house, and is 10 years farther away from paying off the mortgage.

Hundreds of thousands of people refinanced their homes like this -- and not just once. As rates continued to fall, and prices continued to rise, some people refinanced two, three, four, a half-dozen times, each time pulling money out of the property. Occasionally that money went back into the house -- to pay for a new kitchen or bathroom or to update the systems, something that added value. More often, however, the money went into the operating budget rather than the capital budget. People used the equity in their homes to pay for vacations and big-screen TVs and just to pay the bills they racked up by living beyond their means. Their ability to keep the cycle going, however, rested entirely on the assumption that rates would stay low and the house would keep appreciating. What? Interest rate increases? Hey, Jimmy Carter isn't president anymore! And who ever heard of housing prices falling? Cousin Larry, don't be ridiculous!

Meanwhile, one of the little-examined aspects of the refinancing explosion was its tremendous psychological effect on the housing market. "You can always refinance" became a 21st-century mantra, one used to drown out troubling questions such as "How long can I afford these payments?" and "What do I do when the balloon payment comes due?" and "What happens if my adjustable rate mortgage actually, you know, adjusts?" The answer was: "Just refinance!" That was an easy answer when rates had fallen 45% in the past decade; but rates weren't going to fall like that again. They flat-out couldn't.

Low interest rates breathed air into the housing bubble from several directions. First, and most simply, low rates made more money more available to more people. When the supply of money expanded faster than the supply of housing, simple economics dictated that the price of housing must go up. Second, low rates triggered a wave of refinancing, during which people took their single greatest asset (which was not their homes, but rather the equity in their homes), converted it to cash and spent it on gewgaws. Finally, low rates created a false assumption in people's minds that money not only would always be cheap, but would get even cheaper with time ("You can always refinance"). This assumption went hand in hand with the myth that housing values always go up -- a myth that was becoming a religion to the entire U.S. population.

Step 3: Home loans for everybody!

Low interest rates convinced Americans that there was never a better time to be in the housing market. Longtime renters rushed to become buyers, longtime owners rushed to trade up to bigger homes (and bigger mortgages), and competition for housing intensified. The media took notice of the rising prices and began warning their audience that if they didn't buy soon, they'd end up "priced out" of the market. Speculators jumped into the market in hopes of flipping properties for quick profit. Lenders were writing loans right and left, then quickly repackaging the mortgages into securities and selling them to investors. Mortgage brokers were pulling in ever-greater commissions. Realtors were skimming a percentage off increasingly large deals. The money was really flying.

But something was threatening to halt the carousel: The supply of buyers was dwindling. Regardless of how easy financing is to obtain, there comes a point where just about everyone who can buy a house has bought a house and isn't looking to move again (especially when prices are so high). If the housing market was to keep expanding -- if realtors were to keep pulling in commissions, if lenders were to keep bundling mortgages into securities, if builders were to keep cranking out shoddily constructed $850,000 McMansions -- then it was going to need a new pool of buyers. Like maybe ... people who heretofore had not been able to get financing. People who were less than prime credit risks. "Subprime," you might even call these people. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The first group the real estate industry looked to were those who had reasonably good credit but couldn't (or wouldn't) meet strict documentation requirements for income and assets. For these folks, lenders offered "stated-income" loans. Such loans had long been available to people who, for one reason or another, refused to open their books to underwriters. (Take a wild guess.) They tended to be high rollers -- folks with significant means but not the right kind of paper. In lieu of providing documentation, these people swore out a statement of their income and/or assets, and the lender vouched for them to the underwriters.

Stated-income loans are known in the financial world as "Alt-A" loans because the statement is an alternative to traditional documentation. Stated-income loans are also known in the financial world as "liar loans" because the statement is often pure fiction. Guess which was the more accurate description of the loans issued over the past five years?

Once these liars (figuratively speaking, of course) had gotten their fill of loans, mortgage lenders cast about for yet another pool to drop their hooks into. At this point, there was really only one group of people left who had yet to buy homes: those with bad credit histories or no credit histories. These people had long been unable to buy a house because their credit reports were stacked with question marks, overdrafts, defaults, late payments, nonpayments, and maxed-out instruments. This was the now-famous -- nay, infamous -- subprime market.

Anyone who tells you that there was no way to predict the current disaster in the subprime sector is lying, stupid, or both. (And to tell this lie with a straight face, you'd have to be stupid. Or evil.) By definition, subprime borrowers are people who can't be trusted to pay back the money you lend them. The hadn't been able to buy because they shouldn't have been able to buy. And yet as the bubble grew and grew and grew, lenders, needing ever more loans to bundle, lent them hundreds of billions of dollars -- and they did it on outrageous terms that diminished their chances of repayment even further.

Lenders, it turns out, were getting exotic.

Step 4. It'll cost you an ARM and a leg

As lenders made their way toward the bottom of the barrel, they were creating millions of additional buyers. As a result, the demand for housing to purchase skyrocketed much faster than the supply of housing for sale. That was pushing prices further upward -- to the point where they were beyond the means of the subprime buyers. In more rational times, these people would have been told that it just wasn't in their best interest to buy. They'd be better off renting. These were not rational times, however.

(This is a good place to stress that when we talk about skyrocketing demand, we are only talking about the demand to buy houses. That demand was soaring, especially at the entry level, but the overall need for housing was not. All through the bubble and up to today, the United States had more homes than it had people to live in them. This is true in all markets, and particularly so in a place like Iowa. People did not have to buy houses. They could have gotten more space for less money by renting. They chose to buy houses. They made this choice because they were being told over and over that they had to buy now or get "priced out" and forfeit their chances of ever owning a home. They were told over and over that they were "throwing their money away" by renting, which was a stone-cold lie. They were getting shelter in return for their money. You don't "throw away" rent money any more than you "throw away" the money you spend on food that you can eat only once. Here's how you really "throw away" money on housing: By buying a house as an "investment property," trying to flip it, then spending $3,000 a month on carrying costs as you wait in vain for a buyer.)

Anyway, back to all those subprime buyers who were watching prices escalate beyond their means. All but the craziest lenders will insist that borrowers be able to at least make the payments at the beginning of the loan. (You want to get a least a couple payments out of somebody before they go deadbeat on you.) But a conventional mortgage for $400,000 -- a fairly typical house price in many markets -- at 6.5% interest carries a monthly payment of $2,528. Subprime borrowers, of course, are charged even higher rates because, well, they're subprime. At 8%, the payment would be $2,935. And if they had the kind of cash flow needed to make those payments, they wouldn't be subprime now, would they?

So lenders offered these people adjustable-rate mortgages, in which the interest rate periodically resets. Sometimes ARMs are a good idea. When rates began to fall from the stratospheric highs of the early 1980s, homeowners with ARMs saw their rates -- and thus their monthly payments -- decline fairly steadily; every reset period left them with more disposable income to spend on Rubik's Cubes and Chipwiches. When interest rates are already low, however, ARMs are just dumb. And to refresh your memory: During the housing bubble, rates were at historic lows.

The ARMs peddled to subprime borrowers typically started with a low introductory rate -- a "teaser" -- that reset after a while. Perhaps the most popular breed of these mortgages was the "2/28": The teaser rate was guaranteed for two years, then the loan would reset to (obviously) higher rates for the next twenty-eight years. Other ARM varieties included 3/27, 5/25 and 7/23. They worked in similar fashion.

So our subprime buyer applies for a loan (Over the phone! No SSN needed!), and the lender writes him a 2/28 mortgage for $400,000. He gets a nice, low teaser rate -- say 2.5%. For the first two years, his monthly payment is $1,580. That's pretty pricey for a family making only $50,000, because it eats up 38% of their gross income. (Personal finance experts say you should keep it under 28%.) However, if they scrimp here and save there, they can manage it. But then, two years in, the loan resets. To 9%. Overnight, their monthly payment nearly doubles to $3,115, or 75% of their gross income. They cannot make the payments.

In the industry, the 2/28 is known as a "suicide loan."

Why would someone take out a loan like this? Several reasons. First, some people are simply delusional. Two years is way in the future! Who knows what will happen by then! I could get a $50,000 raise! Second, some people are easily fooled. Their commission-seeking mortgage broker, perhaps in cahoots with an unscrupulous realtor, kept talking about $1,580. If he mentioned $3,115 at all, he didn't do so very loudly. And third: You can always refinance! Housing prices always go up! Didn't you notice? Rates have been falling! By the time this thing resets, why, I bet you'll have 30% eguity and be able to get a conventional mortgage at 2%! Don't worry about it! It's the American dream! Just sign the papers! Sign, goddammit!

Step 5. One hundred percent, pure love

Weak credit or nonverifiable income doesn't necessarily spike your chances of obtaining a conventional mortgage. The greater your assets, the greater the willingness of lenders to work with you. It goes back to the down payment psychology we discussed earlier: If you have $80,000 in cash to put into a deal, you'll probably find someone to float you four times that, provided your credit report isn't completely radioactive. Your $80K drastically reduces their exposure.

As housing prices climbed, it became essentially impossible to pull together a 20% down payment. Lenders recognized this, and they eased the requirements: 15%, then 10%, then 5%. Some lenders were accepting down payments of 3% for a conventional mortgage. When you're buying a $750,000 house, though, 3% is $22,500. That's real money, not a token payment, not something you easily walk away from.

Of course, subprime borrowers usually don't have those kinds of assets. It's yet another thing that defines them as subprime. A lender could drop its down payment requirement to 1%, and many subprimers would still struggle to pull together $3,000 to buy a $300,000 house -- and you can forget about the $10,000 to $15,000 for closing costs. If lenders were going to get these people into houses, they were going to have to do something that had been utterly anathema to generations of mortgage bankers: They were going to have to front 100% of the purchase price.

Like ARMs and stated-income loans, 100% financing had been around for years, but it was only available -- or advisable -- for a certain kind of borrower: a very experienced, very knowledgeable, very trustworthy real estate investor with good credit and a good relationship with the lender. When a bank loans 100% on a real estate transaction, it is assuming all the risk. If the property doesn't appreciate immediately, the borrower will be "underwater," owing more than the property is worth. If he can't make the payments, the bank can foreclose and sell the house at auction or put it on the market. But if the house has gone down in value, then there is no way for the lender to recoup the money it loaned on the property. One hundred percent financing is a dangerous game, because the lender is running the risk that, if the property declines in value or the payments become to difficult to make, the borrower will simply walk away.

So what happens if the home "owner" simply walks away from the house and allows it to be foreclosed? Well, it goes on his credit report. That can have terrible consequences. Unless you already have bad credit. Like a subprime borrower.

It will come as no surprise by now that 100% financing swept through the mortgage industry like a virus. Bad credit? No credit? No down payment? No problem! Sign here! No money for closing? No problem, either! Just roll the closing costs into the loan itself! By writing loans for the entire purchase price -- more than the price, if closing costs were included -- lenders were not just betting that the bubble would continue inflating. They were staking absolutely everything on it ... at least until they could get the loan bundled and sold to some fool as a "mortgage-backed security." (Sounds safe, doesn't it? Mortgages are the bedrock of the American dream! If this security is backed by mortgages, it must be safe! People wouldn't just walk away from their obligations, right? They'd ruin their credit!)

And lenders had people lined up around the block to sign up for these ridiculous mortgages. As the air comes out of the bubble, and the horror stories roll in, people ask how a guy with a $14,000 yearly income could buy a $720,000 house. This is how. Buyers didn't have to provide proof of income, they didn't have to put up any money of their own, they got payments they could only make for a brief period (long enough for the broker and the realtor to cash in their commissions), and if anyone asked any questions (which no one did), the answer was always: Don't worry about it. Prices always rise. You can always refinance.

One would think that 100% financing was the height of the insanity, that there was no possible way for lenders and borrowers alike to act more irresponsibly than they already were. You'd think that 100% financing, stated-income suicide loans were the last damned straw. But as Yoda told his realtor: No, there is another.

Step 6. This will hold your interest

On a typical loan, a certain portion of the payment goes to pay off the principal -- the actual amount of the loan -- and a certain portion pays the interest. At the beginning of the loan term, the largest chunk of the payment is interest. This sucks for you, but it's fair. If you had $150,000, you could have bought that house outright, but you didn't, so you asked the bank for it. The bank is going to make sure it gets paid (in interest) before you do (in principal, which becomes equity in the house). As mentioned above, with each payment, you pay more in principal and less in interest, a process known as amortization.

But what if you never paid anything on the principal? What if you just paid the interest every month? First and foremost, you could borrow a lot more money. Let's go back to that $150,000 house we were talking about before. If we're considering an interest-only loan, obviously we don't have any money to put down on the house, so we'll be borrowing the whole pot. For simplicity's sake, let's say we can get the same rate for a conventional mortgage and an interest-only mortgage. To finance $150,000 at 6.5% conventionally, your monthly principal and interest payment would be $948. On an interest-only mortgage, just $812.

Let's say $950 is a reasonable monthly payment for you. For that amount you can get a conventional mortgage of $150,000 -- or an interest-only mortgage of $175,000. By going interest-only, you instantly boost your borrowing power by 17%, which means you have 17% more money to bid on houses. When the number of people with interest-only mortgages hits a tipping point, that $150,000 house simply becomes a $175,000 house, because the amount of money available to people in the $150K market has now become $175K.

But wait, there's more. What if you not only didn't pay any principal, you also didn't even pay the whole interest bill every month? Then you'd have what's called a "negative-amortization loan," which is a fancy name for a hole that you simultaneously dig deeper and bury yourself in. In a NegAm loan, you pay less than the stated interest rate, with the difference tacked onto the principal. These loans allow you to borrow even more money for the same payment, which forces prices even higher.

With both interest-only and NegAm loans, the principal does (theoretically) have to be paid back. Usually, at five years into the loan, the terms are recast to a fully amortizing schedule of payments. The payments, of course, explode at this point, but as with all the other batshit-crazy loan products, the assumption is that the borrower will have refinanced or sold the house or done something else to pay the piper before the piper sends the sheriff over to his house with a set of padlocks, a box of nails and a roll of yellow tape.

Step 7. The overvalued house of cards tumbles down

One hundred percent financing, interest-only and NegAm loans all fall into the category of "exotic loans," a term used to describe species of mortgages that mutated in the unnatural environment of the housing market. But one of the most common assumptions about these loans -- an assumption repeated daily in the media throughout the inflation of the bubble -- is dead wrong. That assumption: Exotic loans became necessary because demand was so high and prices were rising so fast that it was the only way for many people to buy houses.

No, no, no. The truth is: Prices were rising so fast because exotic loans, loose credit, and subprime lending created artificial demand. People who had no business buying homes were allowed to borrow vast sums of money that they had no hope of repaying, on terms they had no chance of meeting. They used that money to bid the prices of homes far beyond their value. Then there was a domino effect. When the guy who qualified for a $150,000 conventional mortgage instead got himself a $175,000 interest-only loan, that forced the guy with $175,000 to get a suicide loan for $250,000 to compete for the same house. The family who could have gotten a conventional mortgage for $250,000 then needed a 3/27 ARM for $315,000. A buyer who could have gotten $315,000 then had to take out an exotic mortgage for $400,000. And the daisy chain just got longer and longer and longer. As the prices got higher, in came the speculators and flippers and panicked renters, who inflated demand further and committed to even sketchier mortgages, and the carousel spun faster and faster and faster.

Until ...

Until a lot of things started happening at once. Until the first ARMs began to reset, and people couldn't make the payments, and they began putting their houses on the market. (It's happening in the subprime market now, but Alt-A and prime borrowers' ARMs will be triggering over the next few years, and it will be bloody.) Until interest rates couldn't fall any further, and the refinance ATM suddenly was out of order, and people began putting their houses on the market. Until people who hadn't intended to sell their homes started seeing for-sale signs pop up and decided they'd better get out now. Until all the flippers and speculators saw what was happening and decided to unload their investment properties. Until builders recognized that the resale market was stagnating and began slashing prices and upping incentives, undercutting the very people they'd sold to just months earlier. Until the MLS was bloated with inventory, and homes stopped selling for inflated prices, and then homes stopped selling for any price, and people who could have bought decided to rent and wait to see how far prices fell. Until the subprime market began to collapse entirely, and lenders began tightening credit, and word got out that because of the lending mistakes of the past decade, some 20% of the buying market -- one-fifth of all buyers -- would not be able to obtain mortgages of any kind in the future. No huge irresponsible mortgages, no huge irresponsible bidding wars.

But, really, what put the brakes on the carousel, what popped the bubble, was the simple fact of supply and demand. Financial chicanery had goosed the demand, and herd psychology had created a false belief that supply was short.

Epilogue

So here we are in Iowa. Drive through Beaverdale, Urbandale or Clive, and count the for-sale signs. Stand at the corner of Merle Hay Road and Northwest 70th Avenue, and look at the valley filling with empty houses. Go to Grimes and watch the townhouses grow in the rich Iowa soil. Watch as the supply of housing grows faster than the population. Listen to the Iowa Association of Realtors stress the relatively steady raw number of sales but softpedal the growth in the inventory. See the real estate industry point to still-high median sales prices while neglecting the fact that the median has only remained high because sales at the low end of the market (the subprime end) have dried up.

No, Iowa didn't see the kind of appreciation they saw on the coasts, but in today's world, you can still suffer the symptoms even if you don't have the disease. Too many houses are waiting for too few buyers. Too many ugly, characterless, cheaply built houses are crowding ugly, characterless, cheaply devised developments. Too many overpriced houses are filling the listings.

And, sadly for their owners but perhaps happily for my family, too many beautiful houses that should have been snapped up are languishing on the market for months and months.

I'll give you $240K for it. And I expect help with the closing costs.

We just mix it all with Sprite, anyway

2007-08-08T00:36:00.000-05:00

A story in Monday's Des Moines Register described a display cabinet that was recently built in the offices of the Iowa Alcoholic Beverages Division in Ankeny. The cabinet holds one bottle each of the top 100 brands of distilled spirits sold in the state. The idea is to promote the sale of premium liquor. The division acts as the wholesaler for all hard liquor sold in the state, so the more top-shelf booze that gets sold, the more money the state makes.

One could argue that it's scandalous for the state government to spend $14,000 on a custom-built liquor cabinet to promote high-end spirits. The real scandal, however, is that it's in the interest of state government to encourage people to drink more liquor. If people aren't going to get exercised over a disgrace like that, then they shouldn't bother being upset over the financial specifics of how the state chooses to promote alcohol consumption. (If we were to go down that road, we could also ask how much money the state makes on cigarette taxes. I don't know the answer, but I will flat-out guarantee you that it far, far, far exceeds the amount of money the state has spent on tobacco-related health problems.)

Anyway, here is a picture of the cabinet. I cannot believe that the Register didn't post a high-res photo. I'd imagine a lot of people would be curious to see where their favorite poison ranks in Iowa's top 100. But the newspaper did run a sidebar with the top 10 (which can be seen in the top left corner of the cabinet). From this list, it appears Iowans could stand to drink a lot more premium liquor -- and the Register could stand to learn a little more about cheap disgusting liquor:

1. Black Velvet Canadian Whisky
(Ewww! It's sad to say it, but alcoholics are the prime driver of sales of distilled spirits, and Black Velvet has long been the alcoholic's favorite. Why is Black Velvet -- which makes even the cleanest glass taste dirty -- the top-selling Canadian whiskey in Iowa, rather that Crown Royal, Seagrams VO, Calvert, Canadian Club, or every granddad's favorite, Windsor Canadian? Because it's the cheapest, of course. Meanwhile, AP style buffs will note that only Scotch is whisky. Everything else is whiskey. Don't blame the paper, though; the Black Velvet label says "whisky.")

2. Captain Morgan Rum
(Captain Morgan makes half a dozen varieties. Which one are we talking about? Captain Morgan's Original Spiced Rum, naturally. One million puking coeds can't be wrong.)

3. Hawkeye Vodka
(An old European proverb holds: "If you can't get your vodka from Russia, get it from Poland. If you can't get it from Poland, try Sweden. If all else fails, try Marshalltown." Hawkeye may or may not be Iowa's nastiest vodka, but it's certainly our cheapest, which is why it's the well vodka of choice for saloons between the rivers.)

4. Five O'Clock Vodka
(Another well vodka, one with an even more troubling name than Hawkeye. "Oh my God, are you drinking?" "Yes, but just vodka." "But it's too early in the day!" "No, it's Five O'Clock!" "Oh, OK, then." Always think twice before choosing a product whose very name is designed to make you feel less like the dissolute alkie you probably are.)

5. Jack Daniel's Black Label
(You know, you can't really argue with this. I was always partial to Jim Beam, but if you prefer Tennessee whiskey to Kentucky bourbon, one can't go wrong with Jack. By the way, if you're one of those people who sadly refers to your bottle as your buddy -- "Me 'n' Johnnie Walker was sitting out on the porch ... " -- remember that the guy the distillery is named after was "Jack Daniel," not "Jack Daniels." The brand name is a possessive: Jack Daniel's Old No. 7 Brand Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey.)

6. Bacardi Light Rum
(You could do a lot worse in a rum. But you could also do a lot better.)

7. Smirnoff Vodka
(The vodka that nearly killed me. Smirnoff's classic red-label, 80-proof vodka has been rechristened "No. 21," for some pretentious reason. It's a step above the Hawkeyes and Popovs of the vodka universe, but you still might find it in the well in some places.)

8. Barton Vodka
(If you're going to drink a cheap vodka, then at least get one with a funny, inappropriate name -- Hawkeye, Five O'Clock -- or a fakey old-country name -- Popov, Smirnoff. Don't waste your $6.89 on something named after your fourth-grade teacher or that bald white guy who lives on the other side of the cul-de-sac.)

9. Jägermeister
(Oh yeah, there it is, baby! Sometimes you just want to close your eyes and drink like it's 1993, and do it out of a shot glass with some kind of sticky residue on the outside. Jäger was the Captain Morgan of the '90s.)

10. Jose Cuervo Especial
(This is another one that's totally fine. Cuervo Especial is the No. 1-selling tequila in the world. I'm sure some connoisseur somewhere can rattle off a dozen better-tasting, less-headache-inducing tequilas, but come on. It's Cuervo!)

So there's the top 10: Four cheap vodkas; two trendy-trashy Greek Week favorites; three perfectly acceptable staples; and atop it all, that sweet, golden relapse from Canada. No wonder the state is trying to get boozers to move up the scale. It's a matter of pride.

BONUS
I'm trying to identify the other bottles in the picture. (The top shelf is Nos. 1-20, left to right; the next shelf down is 21-40; and so on.) Here's what I have so far:

11. ???
12. Seagram's 7
13. McCormick Vodka
14. ???
15. Crown Royal
16. ???
17. Jim Beam
18. Canadian Ltd.
19. Southern Comfort
20. Popov Vodka
21. ???
22. ???
23. Absolut Vodka
24. Skol Vodka
25. Kessler Blended Whiskey
26. Ten High Bourbon
27. Malibu Rum
28. ???
29. Canadian CLub
30. Paramount Peppermint Schnapps
31. DeKuyper Peachtree Schnapps
32. ???
33. ???
34. ???
35. Chi-Chi's Margarita
36. Juarez Tequila
37. E&J Brandy
38. ???
39. DeKuyper Pucker Sour Apple Schnapps
40. ???
41. Windsor Canadian
42. Grey Goose Vodka
43. Hennessey Cognac
44. ???
45. Bailey's Irish Cream
46. Paramount Gin
47. Kahlua
48. Tanqueray Gin
49. Chirstian Brothers Brandy
50. ???
51. Bacardi Limon
52. ???
53. ???
54. ???
55. Cuervo Strawberry Margarita
56. ???
57. ???
58. Old Crow Bourbon
59. ???
60. ???
61. Juarez Tequila Gold
62. ???
63. ???
64. ???
65. ???
66. ???
67. ???
68. ???
69. DeKuyper Hot Damn Cinnamon Schnapps
70. Ancient Age Bourbon
71. DeKuyper Buttershots Schnapps
72. ???
73. Absolut Citron Vodka
74. Rumple Minze Peppermint Schnapps
75. Tortilla Tequila
76. ???
77. Seagram's VO Canadian
78. ???
79. Tequila Rose
80. ???
81. Skyy Vodka
82. Stolichnaya Vodka
83. ???
84. Everclear
85. ???
86. ???
87. Maker's Mark Bourbon
88. ???
89. Gilbey's Gin
90. Wild Turkey
91. ???
92. Paramount Triple Sec
93. ???
94. ???
95. Bombay Sapphire Gin
96. Gordon's Vodka
97. Gordon's Gin
98. Calvert Extra
99. Svedka Vodka
100. ???

Bottoms up.

Hurry up and die (1st in a series)

2007-08-04T17:51:00.000-05:00

Some baby boomers need reading glasses! Katie Hafner of The New York Times is all over the story. Me, I'm frankly more concerned about the ones pissing all over the elevator.

Thanks for noticing

2007-07-31T15:16:00.000-05:00

I'm holding in my hands a flier from a home-improvement company called "Worth-In-Ex Corp." It reads, in part:

To Whom It May Concern:

If you are reading this, you are probably contemplating some form of significant home maintenance or improvement project -- typically not an inexpensive or pleasant process.

Where did I get this flier? I found it stuck under the welcome mat outside my front door. Which means someone from Worth-In-Ex was in the neighborhood, saw my house, and concluded that it was in need of "significant maintenance or improvement." Or, better yet, concluded that by leaving such a flier, Worth-In-Ex could make me sufficiently ill-at-ease about my house to call them.

Well, joke's on them. It's a rental! And it isn't in bad shape, either.

Attached to the flier is a letter of reference and recommendation from some presumably satisfied Worth-In-Ex customers. What I want to know is: How would "Bob and Lori Erickson" of Clive feel if they knew that the letter they so graciously agreed to write for Worth-In-Ex was in fact being used to spam their neighbors?

The trouble with templates

2007-07-30T20:56:00.000-05:00

They don't call it dummy type for nothing ...

A tip for print media designers everywhere. If you run David Broder's column -- or anyone else's -- regularly, invest the two minutes it will take to create a separate sig with his name on it.

Steak stupidity

2007-07-30T15:31:00.000-05:00

When I see a restaurant that's gone out of business, it usually strikes me as sad. I mean, someone poured all their hopes and all their dreams -- and probably all their money -- into that establishment, betting that with a handful of good recipes and a lot of hard work they could write their own American success story. But, as happens with most new restaurants, the place eventually brought in more bills than customers. Unable to tread water, the owner sold off the equipment and pulled the plug on his dream. So sad -- but like I said, usually.

Then there are those times when all it takes is one look at a boarded-up restaurant to make my lip curl into a sneer, and I laugh contemptuously and spit out, "Serves them right." Such was my reaction when I first saw the closed Texas Cattle Co. restaurant on Merle Hay Road, just north of the mall. And it's all because of the sign over the door:

"No Ties Allowed," it says, below a pair of cartoon scissors hacking off a cartoon necktie.

No ties allowed. Oh, really. And why is that? Let me guess: Because this is supposed to be a casual, laid-back, fun-loving place, right? Because the kind of people who wear neckties are always uptight and snooty and not the kind of down-to-earth people you want at your authentic "family steak house" out by Burlington Coat Factory and the Hobby Lobby, right?

And because nothing encourages customers to leave their stresses outside quite like a pissy sign over the door announcing a dress code.

A truly casual, laid-back restaurant opens its doors and says "come one, come all." Whether you're in jacket and tie or jeans and tennies, you're invited to drop in, pull up a chair and stuff your sinuses with food. No one gives you a hard time if you're wearing a tie or if you're not wearing a tie -- because that's what it means to be a casual, laid-back restaurant. There's no dress code, either prescriptive or restrictive. Just friendly service and decent food.

Texas Cattle Co., on the other hand, announced that neckties just don't fit in. Oh, I don't think there was actually a ban on neckties. But I'm pretty sure the place was set up to make a big, stupid fuss whenever a fellow from Charles Gabus Ford up the road came by for dinner and forgot to take off his tie after a ten-hour day on the sales floor. And, after being razzed stupidly for the faux pas of wearing the tie that his job requires him to wear, he smiled resentfully but manfully, left a 10% tip and decided never to come back to this phony grubhole.

And that phoniness is the ultimate irony here, isn't it? The "No Ties Allowed" ethos, ostensibly a swipe at pretense, is itself pretentious by several orders of magnitude.

Something tells me the "Texas Cattle Co." -- which I assume specialized in 16-ounce steaks burned to a crisp and served with an enormous basket of home fries -- wasn't likely to have a problem with High Society types coming in and killing the atmosphere, regardless of what the sign over the door said. All the sign did was make people self-conscious and encourage them to go three blocks up Merle Hay to the Ground Round, or three blocks farther to the Perkins, or another mile or so to the North End Diner. Hell, two miles north takes you to Trostel's Greenbriar, where you actually can see people in ties dining alongside people in shorts and T-shirts, and everybody gets along.

So the Texas Cattle Co. went out of business just like everything else that once existed at its location (including the Pumpers nightclub, which shut down after the bouncers killed a guy for partying while black). Today there is a for-lease sign out by the road and weeds a foot high growing through cracks in the pavement of the parking lot. And watching silently over it all is that big, proud, dumb sign saying: "Your tie isn't welcome here, nor is your business."

If who got married?

2007-07-27T21:03:00.000-05:00

The first thing I should say here is that I know that game shows determine their questions in advance, long before the producers even know who will be answering them. I learned this nearly 30 years ago watching Tic-Tac-Dough when an Air Force pilot was playing and the category "Plane Talk" came up. Wink Martindale hastened to reassure us that the show wasn't piping questions in favor of the flyboy; that's just the way it shook out. (Just as it wouldn't be fair to give a guy certain questions because they'd be easy for him to answer, it would be unfair to take away certain questions because they'd be easy to answer.)

I get all that -- and normally I'm fine with it. But sometimes I'd like them to bend the rules, because sometimes the shit I see on game shows makes me uncomfortable. And television is supposed to protect me from being uncomfortable.

We're going down this road because tonight, for the first time ever, I watched part of a horrible game show called 1 vs. 100. The details of the show aren't very important, except to say it's kind of like Deal or No Deal: There's a lot of shouting, the contestants yammer too much, hundreds of thousands of dollars go to something besides cancer research, and the host is someone who used to be really funny (in this case, Bob Saget).

I saw two different contestants. The first was a squirrelly looking white guy who answered a whole bunch of multiple-choice questions correctly and went home with $343,00o. Here are two of the last questions he had to answer:

What material is Michelangelo's original statue of David made of? A) Marble. B) Granite. C) Bronze. (The answer: A.)

What actor received Emmy nominations for playing the same character on three different series? A) Carroll O'Connor. B) Kelsey Grammer. C) Ed Asner. (The answer: B.)

So this fellow leaves with a wheelbarrow full of money, and the next contestant comes onstage. He's an affable, confident young African-American named Kwame. Here's the very first question he's asked:

If Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima got married, what would guests throw at the couple after the ceremony? One of the answers was "rice and syrup," but I missed the other two because I was choking.

When my wife and I watch Wheel of Fortune, we often joke that during their regular "theme" weeks, the puzzles should be really ham-handedly offensive. Like, during College Week, one puzzle clue could be "Activity" and the answer would be "SLIPPING HER A ROOFIE." Or during Military Week, it could be something about Abu Ghraib. The point being that someone in the production office is so blind to what's going on around them that they let something like that get through. Well, it happened for real on 1 vs. 100 tonight. Again, I know that the question was written long before they knew a black guy would be answering it (at least, I hope to God it was). But still. Perception is reality. If it looks like they did it on purpose, then they might as well have done it on purpose.

Was Kwame offended? Oh, probably not. He also probably wasn't offended when Saget asked him: "So, Kwame, do you think you can trust the mob?" Which is an unfortunate thing that they say frequently on the show. For what it's worth, I wasn't offended either.

But good God, Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima?

Celebrity sighted on Corsica with a Beretta

2007-07-27T10:07:00.000-05:00

I spent nearly a decade in the Washington, D.C., area before coming back to the Midwest this spring. Upon returning, a lot of differences were immediately apparent: less traffic, fewer people, lower housing prices, no pro sports. But there were other, more subtle differences that took time to emerge. One of them is in the types of cars on the road. I didn't detect it until after a couple months' worth of driving.

In both places you'll find expensive cars. Although luxury vehicles aren't as prevalent in Iowa as they are out East -- there just isn't the kind of fuck-you money here as there is there -- Des Moines does have its share of Cadillacs, BMWs, Mercedeses, Land Rovers, even a few Jaguars. Both places also boast plenty of affordable cars: Ford Focuses, Toyota Camrys, Nissan Sentras and Dodge Neons by the thousands. But there's one category of automobile in which Des Moines motorists appear to have the entire East Coast beat.

The shitty midsize Chevrolet.

Living out East, it's easy to forget that Chevrolet makes anything but the Tahoe and maybe a pickup or two. People just don't drive Chevy cars, at all. Even the poor putt-putt around town in battered Ford Escorts and 20-year-old Honda Preludes rather than be caught dead in a Chevy. Then I come to Iowa, and the roads are positively overrun with them. In particular, they're overrun with cars from the Golden Era of Shitty Midsize Chevys: the mid-1980s to the mid-90s. Four models stand out like ... boxy, oil-burning thumbs.

The Celebrity

God, isn't she beautiful? The first car I ever owned was a 1986 Celebrity. It was white like this one -- but mine was a coupe. And the only thing uglier than this white Chevy Celebrity is a white Chevy Celebrity with only two doors. It was OK, though, because nobody ever rode in the back seat. Get yourself a white 1986 Chevy Celebrity with a burgundy interior and see how many friends you have. (These people can barely contain their excitement about Celebrity ownership.)

The Lumina

The Lumina replaced the Celebrity in 1990 as Chevy's designated middle-class crapwagon. General Motors licensed Disney characters to sell the car, and paid to have it made the official car of Walt Disney World, on the theory that Americans were itching to drive Donald Duck's car. The Lumina sedan was homely. The Lumina minivan -- preposterously dubbed the Lumina APV -- was hideous. This one appears to have gotten a ticket on general principles.

The Corsica

Corsica is a popular tourist island in the Mediterranean. Though now part of France, it was once a territory of Genoa, so its culture reflects both Gallic and Italianate influences -- influences that are evident in the sleek, sophisticated European styling of the Chevrolet Corsica.

The Beretta

The Beretta was just a Corsica with slightly different styling, two doors rather than four, and an Italian, rather than French, name. So it was sportier! (The one in the picture is missing a hubcap, but really, all Berettas are missing a hubcap, even if just a hubcap of the spirit.) The summer before I started college, I came down to Des Moines for freshman orientation at Drake University. My roommate for the weekend was a fat fella named Darren from Scottsbluff, Nebraska. For high school graduation, his parents had given him a new Beretta. I thought that was pretty cool, but I was only 18. The Beretta was the pace car for the 1990 Indianapolis 500, and Chevrolet made a replica model available. I haven't seen one of those yet on the streets of Des Moines, but I guarantee they're out there ...

F_CKING A, SH_RTY!

2007-07-26T19:04:00.000-05:00

There was a "little person" on Wheel of Fortune tonight, which helped answer a question that's been nagging us for a while: What happens when a contestant's arms can't reach the wheel? (He has a partner spin it for him. In this case, it was his standard-size fiancee.)

Anyway, the little person smoked the competition and advanced to the bonus round, where you have to guess the final puzzle based on six letters they give you -- R, S, T, N, L and E -- and four you pick yourself.

The four letters he picked: M-I-D-G.

Honest. I swear to God. I wish I had a screencap.

Gen X makes a stand on wobbly knees

2007-07-25T10:09:00.000-05:00

The name Karen Mracek might not mean anything to you now, but in the future, when all your friends have XIOA bookmarked on their browsers and you're bragging that you were there right at the beginning, you'll thank her. Because it was her recent column in The Des Moines Register about "Generation X" in the workplace that prompted us to set up shop.

(Disclosure: I worked at The Register once and bear it no more ill will than I do any other media outlet. This ain't Cityview, which constantly berates the local daily for being owned by an out-of-town concern, yet gives the local TV stations a free pass on their absentee ownership.)

Mracek is one of two writers of The Register's "Workbytes" column, which, according to the press kit, aims to address workplace issues of interest to young workers. (The other writer, Larry Ballard, frequently uses the space to audition for a coveted spot at The Onion.) In Monday's column, Mracek takes it upon herself to introduce Generation X to the baby boomers who may come across these odd creatures in the workplaces and unemployment offices of Iowa. Upon reading it, I naturally assumed that it was still 1992 and that my 15 years in the workplace, my wedding, my old cat, my bitchin 1996 Dodge pickup and the birth of my son were just events from a very long dream. But no, the newspaper page said July 23, 2007.

So let's take a look at what she has to say, hmm? Excerpts from the column are in italics:

We came up with some things you need to know about Generation X workers:

To which my wife would respond: "Well, one of them hogs the covers, that's for sure." Meanwhile, everybody in every workplace everywhere in Iowa is saying: "Thanks, but I've already learned enough from the Gen-Xers who have worked here the past 20 years."

1. We don't plan on being at this job for the next 30 years. It just ain't going to happen. If we don't win the Powerball and say "see ya" to this cube farm, then we'll probably find something else that strikes our fancy (a.k.a. when Heineken comes looking for a beer taster.)

I sure as shit hope we won't be in this job for the next 30 years. Demographers generally peg Gen-X as people born from 1961 to 1981. Those in the middle are in their late 30s to early 40s. Besides, when did the majority of people ever stay in a job 30 years? Hint: Never. This is a lie we'll revisit later.

Beyond that nit, however, are a few horrifying assertions. One is that everyone works in a "cube farm." Look, just because your workplace is a miserable shithole doesn't mean everybody else's is. Second is that we all hate our jobs and can't wait to quit. I've had jobs I hated. I've had jobs I loved. Sometimes on alternating days. You tell me how that makes Gen-X any different from every other generation. Third is that members of Generation X move from one job to the next not because it's what's best for us and our families but because something "strikes our fancy." Fuck you, lady. Some people have mortgages and kids. They'd love to go sell vibrators at the State Fair or something, but those hungry little mouths don't feed themselves. Lastly, she infantilizes an entire generation by offering as an example of our dream job "Heineken beer taster." Not only do we prize beer above all else; it isn't even good beer. Come to think of it, that's pretty much Juice's editorial philosophy, isn't it? Oh, and just because I'm in a mood, that "a.k.a." should be an "e.g."

Seriously, this probably won't be our last job. The average employee in his or her late twenties, for example, has already switched jobs five or six times. Disclaimer: I have had four since I graduated from college. (But I really like this one.)

How do you reconcile "it just ain't gonna happen" with "this probably won't be our last job"? You can't. Because it's not a message for the reader. It's a message for her own boss, one that earns bonus points with parenthetical ass-kissing. Also, that's not a disclaimer. It's a disclosure. But now I'm just being a dick.

Xers just don't see job-jumping as a bad thing. It doesn't mean that we aren't contributing while we're there. And many of us are happy living on the cheap. (I can't speak for the whole generation on that one. After all, I am a journalist.) We do pick up skills along the way and want to make a difference at the company we are working for, whether we work for three years or three decades. It doesn't mean we aren't loyal, but it does mean that we value different things. We prefer job satisfaction over job titles, work/life balance over tenure, and happy hour over making sure our boss sees us at our desk at 5 p.m., even if we are just watching the latest JibJab.

Guess what? Nobody really sees job-jumping as a bad thing anymore. The boomers' entire work experience taught them -- and us -- that loyalty is only as good as the checks it's printed on. No one believes in the company-loyalty model anymore -- except the companies that would benefit from it, and workers are wise to them. Really, It's disappointing that a workplace columnist is so out of touch with what's actually going on in the workforce. But cut her some slack: She's a member of Generation X, and they only just started working!

The business about being happy "working on the cheap" because she's a journalist is just depressing. One of the many scandals in America's J-schools is the way the faculty have convinced students that they will be making less money because they're involved in some sort of noble pursuit. I was told many times, "There isn't any money in journalism," which is a stone cold lie. There's tons of money in journalism -- even now. It's just that the money in most places isn't shared with the newsroom hoi polloi, who have been conditioned to think that ... there's no money in journalism.

Toward the end of the passage, she makes some good points about what Gen-Xers value, then pisses all over it, twice -- first with another boozy reference, and then with a caricature of Gen-X as slackers. (We're watching JibJab, though, so at least it's not 1992 anymore; it's 2005!)

2. We can listen to music and carry on a conversation at the same time. It's not that hard, really. We grew up with Walkmans and MTV and have spent the last 20-plus years only listening to what we think is relevant to us. ... What's that I hear? Lattes?!? Wait for me. OK, I'm back. More important, music usually helps us focus. It also makes us able to multitask. So as long as we aren't humming along to K-Fed, who cares?

Look, I don't know how to break this to her, but if you need music ("usually") to help you focus, maybe you should try Ritalin. I have absolutely no idea why so many people my age have chosen this particular hill as the one they want to die on. If your boss lets you wear headphones, then great. But if she doesn't, that's your problem, not hers. Maybe she doesn't want to have to shout to get your attention. Or maybe, because she's paying you for your time, she wants you to be listening to what's relevant to her, not "what we think is relevant to us," whatever that means. Nice K-Fed reference, though. Only eight months too late.

3. 9 to 5 is not part of our vocabulary.

This is the lead-in to a pretty reasonable discussion of flex-time, so good for Mracek. That still doesn't excuse this stupid opening line, though. Is she aware that tens of millions of people work in service positions that require them to be "on the job" even when there's no work to do? Not everyone works in an office. Even dirt-poor journalists can be elitists, it seems.

4. We're not all the same. Just like all generations, we can't be characterized as a homogeneous group.

Uh, OK. Maybe she should have made that No. 1, and stopped there. Because what she's been doing for far, far too many words now is trying to paint an entire group of people with a broad brush. You can't have it both ways. You can't say "Gen X does this" and "Gen X likes that," then turn around and tsk-tsk the world for trying to stuff us into a box. And as it turns out, saying "No one speaks for my generation" does not actually make you a spokesman for your generation.

The term "Generation X" was the title of a popular book written in 1991 by Douglas Coupland. It is a fictional work about three strangers who decide to distance themselves from society to get a better sense of who they are. He describes the characters as "underemployed, overeducated, intensely private and unpredictable." And those characteristics can describe 48 million people in United States? I don't think so.

Generation X was also the name of a late-1970s/early-1980s punk rock band that was fronted by Billy Idol and, more important, was the precursor to Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Idol's first hit, Dancing With Myself, was actually a Generation X song. I'd describe the music as "pop-inspired yet trending toward a harder edge." And those characteristics can describe 48 million people in the United States? I don't think so.

It's not clear what she's trying to accomplish with this. Yes, the Coupland book was where the media -- and, most influentially, marketers -- got the term. No one ever said the characters in the book stood in for an entire generation.

5. We do care. Having more than one job in a lifetime may be seen by older generations as disloyal, but I would beg to differ. We are loyal, it's just not a blind loyalty to a company. In a study released by Catalyst, a nonprofit corporate membership research and advisory organization, 47 percent of Generation X professionals say they would be happy spending the rest of their careers with their current organization; 85 percent care a great deal about the future of their organization, and 83 percent say they are willing to go beyond what is normally expected to ensure the success of that organization.

Why, that's a mighty big straw man you have there, dear. Again, I call bullshit on these hypothetical "older generations" sitting in their rockers somewhere wagging their gray heads at the disloyal ingrates of Generation X. Old people got fucked by their employers, too. A lot of them lived through the Depression, where they got fucked by the system as a whole. A lot of them continue to get fucked by having the pension and health care benefits they were promised yanked out from under them. They know exactly why we're free agents: Because we saw what happened to them.

The statistics she cites are interesting. Frankly, she should have led with them. But how interesting would it have been to lead her column with, "People of Generation X are pretty much just like everybody else"?

For me, if a company treats me well, I will do the same by it.

In case the boss missed it the first time around: I'm not talking about me! I'll eat your shit and smile, too!

Ultimately what's so disappointing about the column is that it's bleeding with the very solipsism that Generation X is so frequently accused of. Mracek enters a workforce that Gen-X has been demonstrating its abilities in for close to 20 years, and she takes it on herself to introduce the boomers to "her generation." She figures that because she hops from one job to the next, everybody does it -- and does it for the same reasons she does. She figures that because she makes shit wages, everybody does -- and is happy about it. She figures that because she needs music to help her think, everybody does -- and no one has a right to tell her otherwise. And she figures that because getting off in time for "happy hour" is more important to her than being taken seriously at work, everybody else has those same priorities.

Actually, I suspect she doesn't believe that last one, but that doesn't mean she isn't going to attribute it to everyone else in Generation X.

This column was hackneyed a dozen years ago. Where's Larry Ballard and his fart jokes?

Aw, man, thisisgonnabefun.