Category: Consuming

Movoto And Reality Hitting The Boston Real Estate Market

The Boston Real Estate Blog says that Movoto has come to town. It’s another disintermediation play like Redfin and ZipRealty, although I haven’t bothered to figure out what their specific angle is, because I don’t really want to buy a house right now.

See, I spend a lot of time drooling over loft condos, because that’s the kind of shallow yuppie I am. So I looked up a few in my neighborhood and found 7 Park Ave, which is asking a million bucks and has been on the market for over a year. I used to live across the alley from that building. It’s nothing special, and it’s shadowed on one side by the tall, unattractive apartment building I used to live in. Yeah, the library garden on one side makes up for that a little, but not much. And sure, the condo residents get offstreet parking, but it’s just not a million-dollar condo. Spacious, yes – 3BR, 3500 square feet. And well-appointed, too, with granite countertops (the harvest gold appliances and shag rugs of the ’00s). Whoever owns this place must be a real admirer of Manny Ramirez, who has had his condo on the market for two years now without a nibble or a price reduction.

There are a lot of fancy loft condos in this neighborhood for a lot less money, and they’re not moving either.

If they all started cutting their prices by, say, forty or fifty percent, then I’d consider trying to get a loan. (Yes, I know, I’m going to rent forever because I am too cheap to pay all the various fees, which strike me as deliberate insults. Shut up.)

None of you care about this, but… MOTO LUST

BMW F800S: Drool.

The graceful upper fairing. The cafe-racer posture. The sheer arrogance of making a sportbike engine in a weird size (800cc, 2cyl, 83 hp — for reference I’m riding a 650 2cyl that puts out about 70) that defies apples-to-apples comparison. The out-of-reach list price, made even worse by the exchange rate. The totally insane stunting. (See also the 2008 Triumph Street Triple, which is a comparatively tiny 675 cc but a 3-cylinder, 97 hp hooligan beast).

Oh god. It comes in yellow.

Why did I not notice this bike before? This is what I want mine to look like. Only, the BMW is pretty angular. I’d rather have something more rounded.

OK, OK, I can resist this.

Obviously the solution for my bike lust is going to be expensive.

The first thing to do is a full tune-up on my SV650, possibly before putting it away for the winter. It’s been jerky when I hold the throttle steady and I don’t know if that’s due to a loose cable or a clogged line or a dirty carb or what. It’s not the “surging” other people describe because it’s totally steady at idle and is fine when accelerating or decelerating. I only notice this behavior when trying to hold to a steady, relatively slow pace. It’s as though it’s racing forward, then engine-braking back to the intended speed.

Then, I’d like to get the front suspension to be a little stiffer. Apparently you can switch out the fork oil relatively cheaply. Or of course replace the front forks, but that gets expensive, and you don’t get that back when you resell it.

I’d like to switch from the noisy boy-racer exhaust back to a stock exhaust. If I’m doing any expensive work on the carbs, that would be done at the same time (since exhaust changes usually require carb changes; no point in fixing the carbs, then replacing the exhaust and having to redo the carbs again too).

Appearance-wise, I wonder what can be done about the tail. Could it be flattened out to look more old-fashioned? Probably, but probably not easy, and not good for the resale value.

Should I switch the comfortable handlebars out for racier clip-ons? Probably not. Less comfortable: people with the racy SV650S often switch the clip-ons for my version’s handlebars.

Obviously I’m going to need some of those flash bar-end mirrors. That’s the cheapest, quickest, step.

(Does anyone out there have any good ideas?)

Bookdwarf Has A New Toy

Bookdwarf just got a new dangerous, expensive toy:
ducati-cropped

It’s a Ducati Monster 750 with about 9000 miles on it; my bike (Suzuki SV650) is essentially the same style, only made in Japan. The style was more or less invented by Ducati, though, which makes Megan’s The Original. Still, whenever anyone thinks about buying a bike in that class, they end up comparing the Ducati Monster and the Suzuki SV. They’re only slightly different in terms of engine size, handling (Ducati’s got a slight edge there), power (Suzuki wins that by about 5-10 HP), seat height, weight, and even styling … the major difference is brand loyalty: people will pay extra for that Italian machine.

Book Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

I’ve been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the latest book by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s nonfiction, in contrast to her earlier books, and it’s about her family moving to Appalachian Virginia and living on a farm. She tries to do it right: local and seasonal food, sustainable agriculture, all that jazz.

Bookdwarf read it about two months ago and kept going on about how we had to eat locally, especially this summer, since it’s easiest in summer. We already subscribe to the Parker Farm community-supported agriculture farm-share, but she wanted to make sure we got our beef from River Rock (run by the family of a college classmate of mine, who sadly died in a car crash while delivering beef), wanted to make sure we grew at least some veggies from Seed Saver’s Exchange out on the porch, and so on.

I resisted. I resisted a lot. This dream of a pastoral America is easy to have, because people have forgotten just how damn hard farm work is. When I get my vegetables from Farmer Steve (and yes, we call him Farmer Steve) at seven this coming Wednesday, I know he’ll have been up and working since five AM, and won’t get to bed until midnight at the earliest.

Also, I think the people advocating a 100-mile diet have forgotten that healthful food is not some perfect natural state. An all-local all-the-time diet is almost certainly better than the typical American diet in many years, but when you have a bad spring and your harvest fails, you really want some petroleum-based imports from California or Chile. People don’t get scurvy and goiter and rickets much these days, because our artificial-nutrient-laced diet supplanted a local food culture that, in bad years, consisted of lard and whiskey. And while I agree that “food culture” and having dinner with the kids is important, it’s not just a lack of willpower that keeps that out of reach of Americans– it’s our entire economic structure and philosophy of work. France has dinner with its children, but France has an extra hour every day to do it, because France works thirty-five hours a week and has free health care. America works forty if America is lucky: a real salaried professional works sixty if she wants to get ahead, and an hourly worker holds down two thirty-hour ‘part-time’ gigs and doesn’t get sick days or vacation.

Still, I started reading the book, because Bookdwarf said it was important and because she read me some incredibly funny passages (the interactions between Kingsolver and her daughter Lilly are precious: a 7-year-old on a farm says the darndest things). So for the first couple chapters, I reluctantly agreed with everything she had to say: small farms are failing not just because it’s hard work that a lot of kids don’t want to do, but because massive farms and government subsidies tailored to agribusiness are squeezing them unfairly. Our national overproduction of corn and soybeans, and our love of grain-fed beef, are terrible (this I know already, from Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan and King Corn and many others). And then I really began to get into it.

Kingsolver acknowledges that it’s hard, that she’s very lucky in a lot of ways: the farm was already in the family, so they didn’t have to buy it. Her husband is an academic, meaning he gets summers to farm. While working on the farm she was able to write a book about it, which is a contribution to the farmer’s budget that most people won’t have.

She’s just trying to do what she thinks is right, and trying to live it like a normal person. The book is peppered with recipes and notes from her kids and her husband: their Friday night routine involves movies and pizza, like mine does, although they have grown the tomatoes, made the dough, and as often as not made the cheese themselves.

So now I’m halfway through the book and sitting out on the porch with the tomato sprouts and pea tendrils coming up out of pots on the porch, and daydreaming about life on the farm.

Schmaltz, the beauty cure

My grandmother is all about the fish oil and Omega-3 fatty acids, but she has never once suggested to me that schmaltz could be an ancient Yiddish beauty secret. But somehow, a similar product is populating the underworld of paid-placement beauty blogs and infotainment: Emu oil. Yes, fat rendered from the large, flightless Australian bird. Allegedly used by Demi Moore as a beauty secret. Oprah is said to have endorsed it, although I don’t see why anyone trusts her– she’s also endorsed “The Secret,” a book about how wishful thinking will make you rich. (No, being Oprah makes you rich. Wishful thinking makes you a delusional sucker).

Emu schmaltz: It’s not just for frying kangaroo steaks, it’s also get rich quick scheme!

Dangerous, expensive toys: pre-release hype

The rumors and object-lust surrounding the Triumph Street Triple remind me of an Apple product launch. The full website isn’t up and won’t be for a month. A few photos and drawings are available, but no reviewer has ridden one yet. We know that it’s an unfaired, street-oriented version of last year’s sport/race-bike hit, and that it’s going to cost about eight thousand dollars. But really, all we have is the imagination of the perfect motorcycle.

The real bike won’t live up to that, of course, but I am probably not alone in hoping it really falls flat. If it’s good, I will want one, and might even be tempted to do something as stupid as buy one. I already have a dangerous toy. I do not need to trade it in for something shinier, faster, lighter, and more expensive.

Liveblogging New Year’s Bubbly

Champagne is the typical new year’s thing, and rose is this year’s hot thing. But red champagne? Sure. I grabbed Black Chook sparkling shiraz on a whim, and only looked it up later. It’s exactly what it says on the label: a shiraz, but with bubbles. Fruity, almost sweet, not at all crisp. Overall it was OK– probably would have been better with food. I’d have liked more crispness or tartness to it.

Hope in Dope

Marijuana is our nation’s leading cash crop, and the ONDCP says that’s a bad thing. After all, Colombia’s biggest cash crop is coca, and Afghanistan’s biggest cash crop is opium poppies, and it hasn’t gone well for them.

That’s a pretty stupid comparison. Afghanistan wasn’t doing any better under the Taliban, when opium was not a leading crop. Colombia’s problem is not coca, but the criminal activities (and near-civil-war) it funds.

Honestly now, if we legalized and taxed marijuana — and stopped locking people up for nonviolent drug crimes– we’d have enough money to pay for the war in Iraq and social security. I don’t see why the entire balanced budget lobby doesn’t get on that issue right now.