Earthquake's Toll

It didn’t matter which picture in the New York Times’ earthquake portfolio you clicked on yesterday, she was always there, slightly down and to the right, luxuriating in her tub from Kohler in her new Toll Brothers Home.

I don’t quite get why a home builder, especially one named Toll, would want to advertise anywhere near the rubble of an earthquake …

or promote luxury bath fixtures “free with purchase” next to victims desperate for water.

As a reader, I cringed.
I wouldn’t say Atlantis was exactly the best adjacency either.

Man Bites Shark

I was grabbed by the ominous starkness of Chris Schedel’s photo, White Homes: Near Elgin, Illinois, when I saw it on the New York Times’ homepage yesterday. It accompanies a terrific piece by Roger Lowenstein in this weekend’s magazine about homeowners who default on their mortgages by choice.

I was heartened to learn that for once the intelligence of the American public has been underestimated. When lenders chummed the real estate waters with subprime mortgages, the desired feeding frenzy ensued. After taking the bait, however, homebuyers are not taking as kindly to the switch. Instead of repaying their loans out of some sense of moral obligation (as the players banked on--literally), they are doing what the Big Boys do. When an investment is unprofitable, cut your losses, learn your lessons, and move on. That's one for the free market, right?

Check out Chris Schedel's website for more images of Midwestern suburban housing subdivisions.

Pillowcase Talk

Is it just me, or was anyone else loving those fabulous pillowcases covering the heads of Taliban terrorists on the front page of today's New York Times? I clicked and moused-over the image, but alas, no hyperlink to a retail venue.

Don't they read their own paper? In a November 8th story on the the "dismal ad climate" for magazine ad pages, they report that "InStyle’s pages were up 4.7 percent for the December issue versus a year ago."

Let's just say that there's more than one way to monetize all those freeloading readers ...