Muttroxia

Increasing numbers of homeowners figure instead of fighting foreclosure, they should just maximize the time they can live rent free. The average foreclosure takes 438 days to finalize, 14 months of zero rent rent.

Screw ’em all. You signed the loan papers. The bank didn’t force a pen in your hand. Maybe they were deceptive, but maybe they weren’t. Maybe you were an idiot. Being an idiot isn’t good. And now you’ve decided to go a step further, and just be a liar and a cheater.

It may be a rational step for some, but you can’t feel good about the ridiculous logic and complete lack of morality. The featured couple in the article is taking weekend trips and hitting the casino.

But the couple also refinanced at the height of the market, taking out cash to buy a truck they used as a contest prize for their hired animal trappers. It was a stupid move by their lender, according to Mr. Pemberton. “They went outside their own guidelines on debt to income,” he said. “And when they did, they put themselves in jeopardy.”

Did they really say it was a stupid move by their lender!? How delusional do you have to be to think that? It was a stupid move by you! And you don’t get to throw out a deal because you think the other side shouldn’t have offered it. Too late. The time to bring that up was before you shook hands.

If it was just between the borrowers and lenders I would care so much. But it’s not. My tax money is subsidizing all this garbage. The people who bought houses they could afford don’t get government money. We get higher tax bills to bail out all the morons. Fantastic.

Both our washer and dryer broke this month. We quickly figured out the new ones we wanted. Because the memorial day sales were coming up, we decided to wait a week. I brought a weeks of laundry to the laundromat. We had 38 pounds of laundry, and it costs $34 to get it cleaned at the laundromat.

The new washer and dryer cost $850. ($740 for the units, plus tax and hoses and whatnot.). $34 divided into that is 25. In other words, the new washer and dryer pay for themselves in less than six months. That’s pretty damn good!

Too big to fail

Yo-yo trickster genius

Ads for porn network (funny, and safe to watch)

Bad day

Frank Sinatra’s letter to George Michael. (By the way, Listen Without Prejudice is a great album.)

Atheist cats, and my faithful sidekick…

Then there’s Denny

Amazing optical illusion

Oh Tiger!

Pinky is driving

Ceremony fail

Illusion of the year

Can this be true? Percentage of homeowners with negative equity, by state

This job is hell

Sports fail

He’s still cool

Hailstorm in pool.

Now that’s a “server down” page

Amazing mountain-climbing move

The evolution of privacy on Facebook

Color pictures of Czarist Russia

Howard Beck get the idiot of the month award for this column. It is about how likely LeBron is to end up on which team. The reasoning is fairly good, but then he makes the mistakes of actually putting in numbers.

Knicks: 40%
Bulls : 75%
Nets: 40%
Heat: 30%
Cavs: 60%

That adds up to 245%. As great as LeBron James is, he can’t play for more than one team at a time. Howard, you’re a moron.

Update:
I guess I’m not the first person to call him out on this. I was working from the print edition. The online version has different numbers.
Knicks: 3-1 (25%)
Bulls : 2-3 (60%)
Nets: 5-1 (17%)
Heat: 7-1 (13%)
Cavs: 5-7 (59%)
Which adds up to only 175% or so. That’s quite an improvement!

Graphs on the internet. I honestly lol’d several times.

Every Woman’s magazine

How to make Visa obey you.

The truth comes out

Couch cushion architecture

Where’s Homer?

Dolls vs Action Figures

Running with the Bulls: Never again

14-year old new kid takes on school bully

He’s giving a stock webinar while the market crashes, goes absolutely insane

Minimalist superhero posters

It’s a trap!

The internet was right, this is a great instrumental.

Things Bears Love

Bad prediction

A sportswriter unleashes some perspective.

Who else uses Google, the most powerful index of the sum of human knowledge, as a spell checker?

French reality show recreates Milgram’s experiments. They are also willing to kill just because someone asks them.

The average American family

If at first you don’t succeed…

Guilty: She was applying nail polish while driving, struck and killed someone

Saying no to bouncers

Gravity

Working in tech support

How to draw hands

Stacking bricks in Bangladesh

Underwater river.

Fun with secret questions. (I already wrote how to do them wrong.)

Understanding the oil spill, 1 and 2.

Against expectations, The Celtics took one from the Cavaliers yesterday, on their home court. The boys in green now hold home court advantage.

Obviously, the huge factor is that LeBron’s elbow is bothering him so much. It goes without saying that their team is LeBron and a bunch of guys. The Celtics may not be able to beat The Cavaliers, but we can beat a bunch of guys at any time.

Other things going for us:
a) Rondo is amazing. Here’s a very small ferinstance. Glen “Big Baby” Davis steals the ball with an all-out effort. He runs down the floor with the ball, then drops it off for Rondo behind him. At that exact second I thought, “Rondo is going to get the ball back to Davis for an easy two. I don’t know how, especially since their whole team knows it, but he will.” Sure enough, Rondo drove and somehow slipped the ball back to Davis for an easy two. Rondo rewards the big men for running, every time.
b) The Celtics are healthier than they’ve been in months. Garnett looks like a deer out there, hopping around and jumping all over the place. Pierce isn’t playing that great, but he has the energy that’s been missing. Allen is a killer. Not only is he scoring consistent points, but he’s doing it efficiently.
c) Wallace? Rasheed Wallace? Sports Guy nailed him exactly. Wallace has sucked this year. Sucked to an incredible degree. I can’t count how many times I’ve yelled at the tv or snorted in disgusted. Last night, he was great. I’m not greedy, I don’t need him to be great. I just need him to not suck. Can you do that for me Sheed?
d) LeBron is injured. More important than any of this.

I will say this. If the Cavs get knocked out, LeBron will be downright suicidal. How much more can one man do? If they get knocked out due to a freak injury, that will be very sad for him.

The Celtics couldn’t take game 1, where
a) LeBron was off his game
b) Rondo played out of his head
c) Cleveland didn’t know how we’d play

It’s over. There’s no way we’re stealing a game on their home turf now. It was a good season.

Friday night we went to see My Morning Jacket at Chastain. They are a modern current band, but a lot of their music is drawn from the same vein as the 70’s classic rock I like. Thanks to the wife’s connections, we were in the 9th row, and were able to walk through in front the front row a couple times.

The internet is amazing. The next morning I was listening to the show already, check it out. I recommend Where to Begin. Mrs. Muttrox accurately nailed it as Neil Young sounding (the slide guitar is straight out of Harvest).

Good times!

Off to My Morning Jacket tonight!

Fighting a particularly horrible parking ticket

Why all records sound the same

How to make a Nicholas Sparks movie

Orwell irony

Baby kangaroos at the beach aww….

Sure it’s milk. Sure.

You can’t be cynical about this.

It’s all your fault

The Batman on Chatroulette

Things that look like other things

Check out the caption on the photo

A great baseball play: baserunner jumps completely over the catcher

Where your tax dollars go

The implosion of Texas stadium, from the inside

Fan Fiction

“Look”: an entrancing video

Say chee— hey, who are they?

Writing under the influence

Beating Obesity

Propaganda: Inside the North Korean information machine

After the end of the Civil War, Col. Anderson of Tennessee, wrote to his former slave, Jourdon Anderson, asking him to return to work for him. Here is his reply.

Good security questions are not as easy to make as you might think. Many of them are terrible. Asking for your mother’s maiden name or the last 4 digits of your social security number doesn’t help at all. If someone else is impersonating you it is easy for them to find this information.

A good security question should be something that

1) Bad guys don’t know (and can’t easily find out)
2) I know

The second issue sounds obvious, but it’s a very real issue. “What is your mother’s maiden name?” can be stymied by the complexities of modern life. I have at least 3 maiden names to pick from, due to the divorces and re-marriages of my parents. Some days I can’t remember which one I picked originally.

Emigrant Direct went above and beyond the call for failing on the second issue. Look at the security questions they have.

How many of these could you answer unambiguously, and be confident that the next time you went to log in, you would give the same answer? The only one I know for sure is my Grandmother’s first name. And that’s only because one grandmother wasn’t really part of my life and the other one is awesome. (By the way, happy 101st birthday Grandma!)

• What is my favorite sports team? It’s the Celtics! No, wait, it’s the Patriots. I honestly don’t have just one answer. And do I write it as “Celtics”, “Boston Celtics”, or “The Boston Celtics”? It’s a good thing I hate baseball!
• How about a childhood friend. Um.. .which one? A couple of you are reading this blog right now. Let’s see, I probably meant Chris W. No… maybe Andrew B? No? Michael W? I hope it’s not Michael, I’ve been spelling his name wrong for forty years. Did I use both names, or just a first name? This one is impossible!
• Who’s my favorite president? I don’t know. Clinton? Lincoln? LBJ? I read Theodore Roosevelt’s biography lately, he’s awfully incredible. Would I have used first names?
• Obviously I attended more than one school as a child.

They have five mandatory questions, and not one of them is a good question! All five of them allow for ambiguity. Going zero for five is something special. That takes effort!

Emigrant does redeem themselves a little. Besides the five mandatory questions shown, you can also make a set of questions yourself. (They then ask you any two of the combined set.) These are great. For example I used, “What’s my nickname for my college roommate?” I will never forget that as long as I live, and hardly anyone else on the planet knows it. I can ask a trivia question about The Who, one that’s hard to get even via Google. Or, how old was I when I _____? Or, what did I want to name my first child? Or, what was the first name of the kid who almost drowned me at camp in the 70s? All these questions are ones that I know the answer to instantly and anyone else would have a very hard time guessing. That makes for an ideal security question. (For most people you can also use the name of their first pet. That doesn’t work for me. “Muttrox” is kind of public…)

So Emigrant Direct, I award a D. You allow free-form questions, which is excellent. But your mandatory questions are so awful that I’ve had to get my password reset both times I needed to answer these questions.

The 2009 data is out. If you’ve followed any of my previous posts, you’ll understand that this is the key figure, the long-term projections:

Due to the economic crash of the last couple years, we are turning into the bad parts of the curve. We are no longer adding to the SS surplus, we are starting to draw on it. How long can that last for? Using their scenario II (in another post I’ve shown why this is overly conservative), it lasts until 2037 or so. The Congressional Budget Office has their own calculations, and they show the fund lasting until 2043. After the fund runs out, we pay out more than we are taking in. We come up with a way to balance the books then, or make minor changes to balance the books now.

The last time we checked in, the fund was depleted in 2041. So in one year, it’s gone down four years. That is not good. However, this is nothing like bankruptcy. This is like saying your expenses have gone up and you are spending more than you make, but fortunately you have an enormous nest egg that you’ve diligently saved up. I can’t show the image here, but check out Figure 3 of the CBO report. You’ll see why there isn’t much to worry about.

So sleep well. Even with the economic disaster of the last couple years, social security is in good shape.

What makes a fart: Hands down the most edifying interview I’ve ever read.

3 invisible….

Jim Henson’s characters breakdown

The untold story of the world’s biggest diamond heist

The underseas internet map

Bubbles Perv

An interview with history’s youngest chess champion

Drew Brees vs Olympic Archer. Guess who’s more accurate?

Dew in the morning: Wonderful pictures

Worth it

Rock on cloud

Willie Wonka reenacted by Christopher Walken and Jack Nicholson

Drought

The still face experiment

It’s the end of an era. Audience lets crowd diving Iggy Pop fall

Reincarnation

A helpful lesson on resource locking

Gods Soldiers

The life of a letter to the President

Another cover of Don’t Stop Believing. Don’t these kids know enough to know how uncool they are? No they don’t, that’s what makes it so nice to watch.

Japanese experimentation in WW II. “He is a cheerful old farmer who jokes as he serves rice cakes made by his wife and then he switches easily to explaining what it is like to cut open a 30-year-old man who is tied naked to a bed and dissect him alive, without anesthetic.”