Category: Uncategorized

Frightening news from the housing markets:

As housing prices soared last year, an eye-popping 43% of first-time home buyers purchased their homes with no-money-down loans, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Association of Realtors…

The median first-time home buyer scraped together a down payment of only 2% on a $150,000 home in 2005, the NAR found…

[Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research] and other economists are concerned that many lenders have pushed a series of creative but potentially dangerous loans to help more Americans afford a home.

That 43% number is just staggering to me.

Everything silly about 1970s masculinity, wrapped up neatly in one movie named Stunt Rock: heavy metal, stuntmen, dune buggies, car chases…and wizards!

Even better, the band in question is still around!
I’m going to guess that video director Jon Watts saw that movie before helming Jason Forrest‘s “Steppin’ Off”:In fact, I’ll more than guess it, since one of Forrest’s labelmates performed under the name Stunt Rock.

A new term for me: “cottaging.” (Definition here.)
Speaking of gay pop (as the above linked article does), I remember in seventh grade reading, in my school library, a book on the history of rock and roll. (We’re talking 1987 or thereabouts.) The book had been published around 1984, and the author was British. In a section on “The Biggest Bands of All Time,” alongside The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and the like was an extended paean to Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I was a dumb little shit at the time, but even I thought that seemed like a reach. But I guess if you were in London in 1984, it made a sort of sense.
Here’s the famously banned video for their biggest hit, “Relax”:

FGTH is apparently still around, although sans lead singer Holly Johnson.
Finally, while I’m linking to over-the-top gay videos of the mid-1980s, I present the Village People’s “Sex Over the Phone.” (I linked to it obliquely earlier.) The truly astounding thing about this one: No matter how stuffed with homoeroticism the video is — and despite the fact it was shot in 1985, many years after America figured out these Village gentlemen may not all be heterosexual — at the 2:25 mark it completely switches gears and pretends its subject is the glory of straight phone sex. I wonder what the marketing thought behind that one was.

I’m not sure which is sadder:
1. That dead one-hit country wonder Johnny Paycheck, sometime in the 1990s, switched the capitalization of his last name to PayCheck; or
2. That his widow apparently goes by Sharon PayCheck and his son Jonathan PayCheck.
Best paragraph from his New York Times obit (not online, but by Ben Ratliff): “Though he made his first records in 1958, it was not until the mid-1970s that a movement came along that could accommodate his rowdy, jail-prone life. Suddenly, when certain country singers were marketed as Outlaws, it became acceptable for them to look like hippies and act like pirates.”

My old Toronto buddy Katherine — a person I might have tagged, mere days ago, as Friend Least Likely To Appear On A Reality Television Program(me) — is in fact appearing on such a program(me). It’s called Skooled, apparently, and features a bunch of teenagers swapping roles with a bunch of teachers. (Katherine would be of that second group.) She’s blogging about it, too. Local newspaper story here.

Happy July 4th, everybody. (Not that much actually happened on July 4, 1776.)

I spent six weeks in fall 2003 in Zambia as part of a Pew Fellowship. I kept a blog while I was there, but it was taken down by a server crash some time ago.
Anyway, last weekend, I went through the bother of rebuilding it (on a modified version of the new crabwalk.com design). So zambiastories.com is back online and ready for your reading enjoyment.

Here’s my story from today’s paper, on the final closing of the Wilmer-Hutchins Independent School District. Long-time readers know that I’ve written roughly three gazillion stories on Wilmer-Hutchins; because of its many problems, it is shutting down forever at midnight tonight. You might find this story worth your time.

The earthly remains of Wilmer-Hutchins were, in the end, few.

A few broken buildings. Some debts, some indictments. A few thousand kids who learned less than they should have.

Everything that could be put in boxes was Thursday, as the Wilmer-Hutchins Independent School District slipped into the past tense. After decades of mismanagement and crisis, Wilmer-Hutchins will legally cease to exist when the clock strikes midnight tonight. Under orders from the state of Texas, it will be absorbed into the Dallas school district.

“It’s a sad day for the district, but it’s also a new day,” said Donnie Foxx, one of the state-appointed managers who have shepherded the district through its declining days.

The district’s skeleton staff – down to 10 from more than 400 two years ago – went out for a nice lunch at Truluck’s and said their goodbyes Thursday afternoon.

They would have locked the doors one last time. But Dallas staffers were too busy carting off the district’s remaining items of value.

“I think in the long run, kids will have a better chance to get a good education – that’s the important part,” said Ron Rowell, the Texas Education Agency employee who has spent the past few months as acting superintendent.

For decades, his agency was criticized for not doing enough to stop corruption and mismanagement in Wilmer-Hutchins. The district was sick, residents said, and needed immediate attention from TEA.

They got their wish. But most residents hoped the patient could be saved. Instead, state officials chose a mercy killing.

And if you want to stroll down Hutch memory lane, the paper has posted some of the high points of my stories on the district since 2004.

Did you know: Every nation has to have its own tripartite motto, apparently. Ours, of course, is “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The French: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” And what could be more Canadian than “Peace, order, and good government.” (Alternately “paix, ordre et bon gouvernement.”) The Nazis: “Kirche, kinder, küche” (church, kids, kitchen). The Russian revolutionaries: “Peace, land, and bread.” (An echo of “panis et circenses.”)

I take no stance on the Ashkenazi IQ research presented here, but I did find this stretch interesting:

The possibility that Jewish mothers produce smarter children is unlikely in light of abundant evidence that families have no lasting effect on intelligence. Siblings reared together are no more correlated in IQ than siblings who were separated at birth, and adopted siblings are not correlated at all. Growing up in a given home within a culture seems to leave no lasting stamp on intelligence.

Really? “No lasting effect on intelligence”? In other words, drop a given newborn in a crackhouse or in the lap of luxury and it has no lasting effect on IQ? Unless the “within a culture” caveat means that one particular crackhouse has no greater or lesser impact on IQ than any other crackhouse.
In any event, since a given parent can have an enormous impact on a child’s academic performance in school, I suppose this points to the yawning gap between intellectual potential and intellectual performance. In its parents-don’t-matter approach, it reminds me a bit of this Gladwell piece from 1998 on the comparative importance of peers over parents in child development.