The lily in our pond is happy this year.
The shade structure that collapsed in the big March blizzard let the sun in, and the lily responded with a lovelier than usual bloom. The fish, which have always been a bit of a mystery, seem more so. The cattails (the “weeds” of the title – I didn’t plant them) seem more exuberant as well.
Autumn Gray, in this morning’s Journal, picks up on a remarkable trend in the Albuquerque real estate market: out-of-market buyers using their bubble money to buy investment properties here:
Such sales are part of a trend that home builders and real estate agents say is driving up prices in the Albuquerque metro area and making it more difficult for local buyers to find homes.
“I’ve seen properties that shouldn’t sell for more than $150,000 go for $200,000,” said John Sheffer, a real estate agent with the Vaughan Company Realtors.
Local real estate offices first saw the increased interest here about seven months ago, and activity has escalated since.
Now it’s not uncommon to spot groupings of California license plates at local home building sites.
One wonders what happens here, then, if my bubble-obsessed friend Aaron is right. I’d been thinking of this as a coastal phenomenon from which we were (at least relatively) insulated. I was imagining the housing market to be a series of relatively isolated islands. Autumn’s story suggests the bubble moves with more fluidity than I had understood.
Today, birthday money burning a hole in my pocket, I bought my own copies of Freakonomics and The Tipping Point. I’ve read borrowed copies of both, but wanted to own them: Freakonomics so I could spend some time chasing down the footnotes and thinking through the implications, and The Tipping Point because – well – because when I grow up I want to be Malcolm Gladwell.
It was Todd at work who loaned me his copy of Freakonomics, after a conversation that started when he dumped The Tipping Point on another colleagues desk with the explanation that he really must read it. So I was amused when Gladwell sent this email to Dubner:
thought you would enjoy this. a man in the security line at toronto airport today recognized me, pulled out a copy of freakonomics, and made me sign it. we are totally co-branded! cheers, m.
It’s especially noteworthy because Levitt’s work totally undercuts one of Gladwell’s primary “tipping point” examples: the reasons for New York’s precipitous drop in crime. According to Levitt, it was abortion, not the city’s decision to go after turnstyle-jumpers. It’s a credit to Gladwell that he’s willing to admit he was wrong and happily flack Freakonomics. So today I bought both. They’re so totally co-branded.
Newly enthusiastic about baseball statistics, I followed a link chain that started on Levitt and Dubner’s blog and ended up at Hardball Times. When I was talking at the ballgame a few weeks back with my friend Dan about the most underrated baseball statistics, I mentioned “runs scored” and “runs allowed.” Hardball Times has a nice graph that succinctly explains the Yankees’ improving but still quite modest record: they’re giving up a lot of runs.
I met the knee repairman Tuesday (“orthopedic surgeon” sounds so frightening). After looking at the MRI and taking a set of fresh x-rays, he tried to soften his explanation: “I wish I had better news for you.” The lateral meniscus in my right knee – the sort of wedge-shaped pancake of cartilage that cushions the outer half of the femur-tibia junction – is completely trashed. It’s pretty much what my cycling buddy Sage predicted in a moment of candor: “bone on bone.” I’ll need surgery to clean out the crap.
So why isn’t this more traumatic news? Well, first and foremost, it’s fixable. There’s going to be some unpleasantness over the next couple of months, but it’s not a huge deal. It’s not like I was just diagnosed with cancer.
But there’s a second explanation, I think, for the satisfaction I take from the news. What happened to my knee was inevitable, the doc explained. Nearly 20 years ago, I suffered a freak basketball accident that fractured the top of the tibia. The knee repairman I had that time did his best to reshape the tibial surface – where the top of the tibia and the lateral meniscus meet. But it wasn’t perfect, and over the years the surface of the tibial plateau has been slowly chewing away at the meniscus.
In other words, what I had been thinking of as a freak accident was in fact an event with a clear cause and a certain inevitability. Freak accidents are scary. Clear causes and inevitability are far more manageable. Risk perception is a funny thing.
“Now, I have to go play on line Pictionary, if you’ll excuse me.”
Matthew Bohnsack has a lovely illustration of what happens when it gets wet in the desert.
OK, so the whole tendonitis thing was a bunch of crap. It’s torn cartilage in my right knee (lateral meniscus, for those of you in the baby boom generation uncomfortably familiar with the anatomical details). Surgery seems likely. Bike racing seems unlikely, at least for a bit.
In which Nora does Mandelbrot with a randomly sweet color sensibility.
An amusing grand convergence: two books I brought with me on my trip to Phoenix, both recommended by colleagues: Freakonomics and Moneyball.
Here’s a blog entry in which the author of one trashes the other.