The FDIC is luring retired former employees back to work as they prepare for an expected increase in bank failures.

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Artist Erik Nordenankar put a GPS tracking device in a briefcase, and sent it round the world to create a portrait of himself.

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Metaphorically, we are a nation on steroids. Is it any wonder so many of our heroes are on performance enhancing drugs?

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Foreclosure filings in Connecticut rose 54.5% in 1st qtr 2008 compared to 1st qtr 2007.

We sold our house in Connecticut recently. The area we were in, the Farmington River Valley outside of Hartford, is mostly unaffected by the current collapse in real estate. We sold the house for a bit more than we paid for it 16 months ago. But if foreclosures are up sharply, one wonders how much longer prices there can continue to rise.

Ballaro said he thinks the biggest obstacle is financing. Lenders, stung by loans that went bad, have tightened their standards, he said. Two deals Ballaro was working on fell through at the last minute because of financing.

Our escrow closed 16 days late, and much of the reason was extreme scrutiny by the mortgage company and bank. They check and double-check everything now and are in no rush whatsoever. It’s not 2005 anymore, when seemingly anyone who could sign their name got a no-money-down no-docs mortage, no questions asked.

While our move to Connecticut didn’t work out as planned for a number of reasons, it did save the equity in our house. We sold our home in Los Angeles in Jan 2007, just before the bottom dropped out. Had we stayed in L.A., that equity would be gone. And for that, Sue and I will always be grateful to the Farmington River Valley.

We rent an apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area now. No more real estate for a while! We, by dint of blind luck more than anything, have dodged the collapsing real estate market bullet twice (because Connecticut prices are going to fall.) It’s time to enjoy apartment living as Sue gets her Masters in Taxation.

I’d thought apartment living might be a jolt, but so far it’s great. No worries about needing a new roof in a few years or the aging furnace giving out or nosebleed property tax rates that keep going up. Plus we really like San Francisco.

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From the remembrance on his website.

Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure.

Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country. His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.

Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his “elders” with having provided a philosophical framework around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.

I saw him perform in Michigan in the early 70’s. He was amazing. Highly political, a Wobbly at heart, howlingly funny too.

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