Yikes, the economy

Yesterday I was at Panera trying to get a little work done, and was sitting next to these four women in their forties and fifties that I just instantly disliked. They had a very aging-Valley-Girl way of talking, they laughed at jokes that weren't funny, they all looked like they'd been in their church clothes for the past ten hours because they just preferred to dress that way -- it's hard to explain, they just got on my nerves. One of them started talking about how she had put her house on the market, and she needed to make $400,000 from it -- it really sounded like she was talking about net, not gross, but who knows -- and how she just couldn't believe it, but not one single person had come to see it this weekend! The women first blamed the beautiful weather -- who would want to go outside? Then the woman talking theorized that it was because her neighborhood was full of Obama signs. She just thought that was turning buyers off. She talked about how she wanted to get a McCain sign but all they had were in Spanish (can you believe there wasn't a run on Spanish McCain yard signs?), "so they all said 'Blah blah blah McCain.'" At no point in this entire conversation did the economy, credit crisis, mortgage crunch, buyer fears, or anything else remotely plausible enter this conversation.

It's as if these people were airlifted in directly from crazytown, but I'm proud to say that I disliked them well before they started talking politics.

So anyway, on that, I just wanted to recommend This American Life for a quick and relatively easy layman's explanation of the economy. Back in May they had one on the mortgage problems that was top-notch. Better than anything else out there for explaining the situation. Now you have to pay $.95 to get it, but I think it's worth it. (If you subscribe, you'll get them free. I had it, but listened to it, so iTunes deleted it and now Josh can't listen to it. That's how they getcha.) Recently, as in the last day or two, they had another good one about the immediate causes leading up to Paulson's dramatic announcement. Just start subscribing to This American Life podcasts, is what I'm saying.

And oh yes: Just look at that gorgeous shade of Carolina blue.