Online ad alert

Seems like everywhere on the interwebs these days are ads about a mom's tooth whitening discovery.

Click through, and you'll get a page telling you that for a mere four bucks, you'll receive two products that will whiten your teeth.

Read the fine print for Dazzle White:

When you order today you'll be signed up as a member of our exclusive preferred customer club. You will be billed $4.95 for the shipping of your 14-day day trial, then once you choose to continue whitening with the DazzleWhite Pro System the low member price of only $58.76 per month for every month.

And for Smile Brite:

After ten days we will charge you at a discounted price with a 18% savings of $19.95 off the regular price, for the low price of $85.37.

I think I'll pass, and I recommend you do the same.

Gas

Can't live with the price, but can't live without it. And there are no easy answers.

Unfortunately, the time to economize on gas was before the price rose. Nowadays, you can't give away that nice big pickup truck or other guzzler you've been cruising in. So unless you've got an income or resources that will enable you to buy an economical car without trading in your dually, you're outta luck.

How many weeks will pass before you can organize a carpool to work? Maybe you should've done that sooner, huh?

My daddy used to say, "Do the math." In this case, it shows a no-brainer. Most of us don't need to carry seven passengers or a roomful of furniture every day. Therefore, we can drive a little Honda, and rent a truck for the occasions when we need one.

The math:

30 mpg, 1200 miles per month = 40 gallons, at $3.89 = $155.60

15 mpg, 1200 miles per month = 80 gallons, at double the cost.

You can rent a pickup truck for a day for the difference. Every single month.

Note to looney lefty liberals: We didn't invade Iraq to steal their oil, or it'd be cheaper.

Mortgage lender implosion

144 lenders down the tubes since late 2006.

Fifty lenders have gone bust.

That's right. Fifty. Read it and weep.

The heat is on!

Suffocating temps are on the way, and we get a sneak previous of that in April.

Check your air conditioning filter. Change it or wash it.

For the window units, best thing is if you can remove them, take off the outer housing, spray with water and brush the dirt off the coils. Let dry in the sun, reassemble and slide back into place. Dirty coils can be one reason they'll "freeze up" with ice and/or leak water into your room.

The cost of electricity only goes up, so it makes sense to keep your a/c operating as efficiently as it can, by cleaning it yearly, and changing/washing the filter monthly.*
---------------

* Clean/change filter more often if your equipment is exposed to a lot of dust.

Mortgage lender implosion

The number of defunct mortgage lenders has risen to forty-four.

Mortgage lender implosion, again

The number gone kerplunkt is now THIRTY-SIX.

Mortgage lender implosion

THIRTY-FOUR mortgage lenders have gone bust.

Previous:

If I had any extra money... -- posted Sunday, March 4, 2007. Three more MLs down the tubes since this post.

If I had any extra money...

... I'd probably buy silver coins and bury them in Mason jars in the backyard.

Stock market shenanigans. Subprime lenders going bust. Housing prices and the bubble. It's all there at Housing Panic, and it ain't goin' away.

Read the posts, the links and the comments, and plan accordingly.

UPDATE: Thirty-one mortgage lenders have gone bust since late 2006.

Free credit report online

Read all about it at the Federal Trade Commission.

Helps protect against identity theft :-).

Beware of copycat sites; some of 'em are phishing.

"Fraudera Ranch"

You've got to read this post at Bubble Markets Inventory Tracking [excerpt]:

12 Quartz Ln., Ladera Ranch, CA 92694
--05/2004: purchased for $421,500.
--06/2005: purchased for $530,000 by Angelica, associate of "The Family."
--06/2005: Angelica immediately deed the title to Janneth.
--01/2006: sold to Saul the truck driver for $630,000.
--07/2006: NOD filed, Saul just committed a first payment default.
--11/2006: REO
--Total Profit: $100,000 for "The Family."

There's more. Much more. To the tune of a profit for this family of around half a million dollars.

Tons of it at Mortgage Fraud Blog.

Casey Serin blogged his shenanigans.

Check out the Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter. Twenty mortgage lenders gone bust in the past couple-three months.

Hang onto your hats. We haven't seen the bottom yet.

UPDATE: I fixed the nonworking link. Sorry 'bout that.

Don't do business with Discount Mats.

Via Gulf Coast Pundit:

Wisconsin Mat Company Gives US Troops the Finger

The link leads to Gateway Pundit, and this:

Sgt. Hess, who is from the 1st Cavalry Division stationed in Iraq, emailed a company called discount-mats.com, an online retailer in West Allis, Wisconsin to inquire about ordering some mats but wanted to verify that they would ship to a APO.

From: SGT Jason Hess
Sent: Tue Jan 16 3:25

Do you ship to APO address? I’m in the 1st Cavalry Division stationed in Iraq and we are trying to order some mats but we are looking for who ships to APO first.

Well, you wouldn’t believe the disgusting reply he received back from the company:

From: contact@discount-mats.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 9:44 PM
Subject: Re: Feedback: from discount-mats.com

SGT Hess,
We do not ship to APO addresses, and even if we did, we would NEVER ship to Iraq. If you were sensible, you and your troops would pull out of Iraq.

Bargain Suppliers
Discount-Mats.com

As Gateway Pundit notes, it's been verified as true by Snopes.

Send an email, phone, write 'em a snail mail. They deserve it [big evil grin].

414-736-8394 contact@discount-mats.com

Bargain Suppliers
3259 S.106th Street
West Allis, WI 53227

New blog and group

I was lurking in a Usenet group and ran into a link for this Time magazine article [excerpt]:

A little over a year ago, 10 friends got together in San Francisco over a potluck dinner. There were a few teachers, a technology marketer, an engineer, a dog handler. What would it be like, they wondered amid the Christmas shopfest, if they all pledged not to buy anything new except food, medicine and essential toiletries for a year? Thus was born a movement that they named, in a light-hearted way, after the 1621 Mayflower Compact. "We are a group of individuals committed to a 12-month flight from the consumer grid," they wrote in a chat-room manifesto that lists their aims as going "beyond recycling," reducing clutter in their homes and simplifying their lives: "Borrow, barter or buy used."

Here's the San Francisco blog.

I've begun a blog for Louisiana. Posts coming this p.m.

The Louisiana Compact Yahoo Group. Ya'll are invited to join :-).

The huge The Compact Yahoo Group.

"Home-loan house of cards ready to fall"

Excerpts [emphases mine]:

This week brings an update on the deterioration, via comments from two very knowledgeable friends. One of them, a former top executive at a subprime lender (whose chronicling of the unwind has been amazingly accurate and timely), told me that serious issues are developing, and that large companies like New Century Financial, Accredited Home Lenders and NovaStar Financial will, in his words, "hit the wall" very soon. [...]"This will, and should, take years to play out. (Federal Reserve Chairman Ben) Bernanke will yield to the Lobby and the Street, trying once again to lower rates and allow people to bail themselves out, while in turn allowing the buyout firms of the world to overpay for the companies they buy with easy money. The game is so rigged against honesty, it boggles the mind."[...]I am not as sure as he is that it will take "years" to play out. The damage will last for years, but the crackup that precedes the big damage will happen this year, I think.

Read it all, and Mr. Fleckenstein's earlier article, Voodoo Debt and the Coming Recession.

Be careful out there.

Earlier:
Mortgage lenders going bust
More on the bubble
Biggest bubble of 'em all
Advice for the New Year

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble...

Excitement at Lake Peigneur:

Lake Peigneur, which drained into a salt mine after an oil rig accident 26 years ago, was bubbling Thursday morning, area residents said.

Richard Suire, a retired oilfield worker who lives on the lakefront, said he saw it when he let the dog out Thursday morning. "It was bubbling up probably a foot and a half high, and 15 feet north and south, and about two to three feet wide," he said.

More reading on the 1980 Lake Peigneur disaster.

Numbers!

I wonder if there's any significance to having $6.66 in my checking account...

Substitutes

One problem at Bogalusa Middle seems to be lack of teachers. There are at least two out long-term, we've been told by a student, info not verified.

Yet I find no vacancies listed at the state civil service employment site, at Teach Louisiana, or at Bogalusa City Schools employment page.

In Bogalusa, a substitute teacher can be noncertified and non-degreed and will get paid $50 per day [page 15, line 66].

Is it acceptable for a high school graduate to teach your kids?

Mortgage lenders going bust

As part of our Housing Bubble readings, we've found the Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter:

I set this page up to keep track of mortgage lenders in the US going bust since approximately December 2006, when it seems the first of them started going under. Many observers (including myself) have been anticipating this for some time, as rising home prices (and other financial assets) have collided with the deteriorating consumer balance sheet and low-as-they-can-possibly-go interest rates (heavily reliant on the dole of China and the oil exporters).

It appears what had to give is now finally giving: the latest subprime loans are going delinquent the quickest, and it seems likely that their prior kin will soon follow (and many of these will likely end up in foreclosure). Further, I expect a large swathe of prime loans to go bad (the prime/subprime distinction is quite fuzzy anyway). Originators cannot handle the buybacks, and so when challenged by them are immediately folding. The phenomenon is just getting started. What will the banking industry — generally all or part owners in these enterprises — do? Stay tuned.

Nine so far. Yes, do stay tuned.

More on the bubble

Over at the Housing Panic blog, Keith has an outstanding and sobering post:

· The upswing usually starts with an opportunity - new markets, new technologies or some dramatic political change - and investors looking for good returns.

(collaterized loans, 1% interest rates, globalization)

· It proceeds through the euphoria of rising prices, particularly of assets, while an expansion of credit inflates the bubble.

(Hey, my house just went up 20%! Masses quit their jobs to get realtor licenses. Neighbors talk about prices at cocktail parties)

· In the manic phase, investors scramble to get out of money and into illiquid things such as stocks, commodities, real estate or tulip bulbs: 'a larger and larger group of people seeks to become rich without a real understanding of the processes involved'.

Read the whole thing.

Someday we'll live at the beach...

...when the land south of us slides into the Gulf of Mexico:

A new report by scientists studying Louisiana's sinking coast says the land here is not just sinking, it's sliding ever so slowly into the Gulf of Mexico.

Will the last people to leave south of Lake Pontchartrain please turn out the lights?

Uh, wait. If anybody's still alive:

About the best that could be said of New Orleans' murder rate in 2006 is that it has held relatively steady over the past six months.

The worst is that, if it continues steady for six months more, the city would have a 12-month murder rate about eight to 12 times the national average for cities its size, rather than this year's multiple of seven to 10.