JayB

In 95% percent of all markets, I'd agree. After the recent, unprecedented credit-fueled run-up, I'm not so sure - but if you factor in the non-financial benefits of home ownership, then things become a bit fuzzier. I've briefly looked at what half-a-mil gets you in Ballard, and I can't fathom any scenario in which that would make plunking down that kind of money, or paying three times that over the life of a conventional loan, or at least 2X as much in mortgage payments as the same property would rent for - for the kind of property that you get for that price. However - forced savings of some sort are just about always better than no savings at all, which is the situation that an awful lot of people in this country are in from one month to the next, so that's another benefit for folks that would spend the rent vs mortgage differential instead of investing it.

and I disagree profoundly... owning a home is a great long-term investment, and a great way to ease your tax burden, enabling you to put more money into retirement, and have the ability to fund those expensive college educations down the road (HELOC, or down-size home, etc) This is the common perception, but it's not one I've heard offered forth by many folks who know what they're talking about that don't have their livelihood tied to the construction, sale, financing, etc of homes in one way or another. Money in a diversified portfolio constructed by someone that knows what they're doing produces better real returns with lower risk than residential housing in every long-term scenario that accurately measures total costs and total returns. Most people will buy a home for a multitude of reasons, some financial, some non-financial. For those who buy, buying a smaller home than you can afford and putting the difference in a diversified portfolio - ideally in a tax advantaged retirement account of some sort - will be a better choice than maxing out your mortgage payment on a primary residence or a combination of a primary residence and a second home in just about every conceivable long term scenario. http://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate/article/102603/why-your-home-is-not-the-investment-you-think-it-is

Speaking of veneers, I was driving on a logging road a few years ago on what seemed like compact snow and ice - which it was on the main road. On the spur-road I turned onto, the firm surface hadn't been created by traffic, but by a fairly significant freeze-thaw event covered by 1/2" of old compact snow. Things went pretty well for the first couple of hundred yards, at which point I drove over a slight depression, heard a creaking sound, and suddenly found myself sunk up to my headlights in granular sugar-snow capped off by the aformentioned ice crust. "No problem. I've got the chains, the shovel, the rope, the chains, the come-alongs, etc in the back. This will suck but I'll get out for sure." Long story short, due to some un-anounced borrowing on my buddy's part, and no small measure of stupidity on my own, I found that all I had to extract myself with were a leatherman, a can of coke, a plastic milk-jug, and an aluminum baseball bat. I was about 20 miles from the nearest paved road, I was on a sick-day and would have to account for my presence in the mountains a long way from home while sick, had told no one of my plans, was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and about 1/2 hour after I got stuck a storm hit and it stated snowing about an inch per hour. After 8 or so hours of making water by melting snow by filling the coke can with snow and placing it in the engine compartment when I had the engine running, breaking the ice with a baseball bat, then digging out the sugar snow with the milk-jug scoop I made, and cutting down every tree and branch I could get my hands on and making a branch-and-frond traction path back to the main logging road, I did some chainless rally/momentum-preservation style driving through 8-14 inches of snow while peering through a 6-inch gap in the fog on the windshield, and made it back to the main road with only minor body damage and an overworked clutch. From the time I realized that I was in the middle of something like the real-life equivalent of a rejected McGyver script until I saw the gate marking the start of the pavement, I wasn't sure I'd make it back to the road. My main concern was never survival, but I was plagued by alternating visions having to leave my truck behind for legions of heavily armed ATV or snow-mobile mounted mega-tweakers to use for target-practice/parts/outhouse-duty and/or losing my job. Get home, chain and shovel etc borrowing buddy rolls in and says, "Hey - anything interesting happen today?" I had been about 5-minutes away from abandoning my truck and jogging out before I got stuck, and left a note outlining my plan taped to the steering wheel. I kept the note on the fridge for about a year in the hopes that viewing it daily might help insure that such episodes were somewhat less common in the future.

That's great. Houses are great for the long term, and if you find something you like in a place where you want to live, and you can afford the fully-indexed payments while still funding your retirement, emergency savings, etc, etc, etc, etc - then buying a home is rarely a bad choice - but their status as a long-term investment vehicle has been vastly exagerated, especially after accounting for interest, taxes, maintenance, transaction fees, inflation, etc. For the next 3-5 years, they will be less ideal as a means to fulfill a highly-leveraged get-rich-quick scheme. Anyhow - How about that bet? I choose a number-two link-cam if you're game...

The dynamic in Seattle - rising inventories, slowing sales, and increasing median closed-sale price doesn't surprise me too much, and I imagine this reflects a shift in the distribution of sales activity towards the higher end of the price range. Having said that, I would have put YOY price growth in the low single digits even in "median closed price" metric. IMO, and in the opinion of most institutions that need accurate info to base their decisions on, the Case-Shiller-Weiss index is way more accurate, but even those figures will show positive YOY numbers for July when they come out in a couple of months. However, given the massive and near unprecedented changes in the secondary market for mortgage-based securities that have transpired in the past couple of weeks - especially the large and/or exotic types that can't be resold to FNMA or GNMA - I feel pretty confident that the data will show an inflection point for Sept-Aug of 07, when the changes in the mortgage market start to register in the closed-sale stats. Look for increasing inventory, a fairly substantial decline in sales, and higher DOM through next spring as sellers refuse to capitulate on price and a lack of buyer participation brought on by either failure to qualify for loans big enough to get them into a home that suits their taste, or flat-out balking at the asking price. By late next summer, folks who are either foreclosed on or are in must-sell mode due to divorce, job-related relocation, etc will start to capitulate and begin the process of selling below comps and move the market lower. So - just to make this more interesting, I am willing to bet a cam or ice-screw of your choosing - that the Case-Shiller-Weiss stats for every county within commuting range to Seattle will be negative between October of '07 and October 08 will be negative. Summary of what's transpired in the past couple of weeks posted below: " Worse than LTCM: Not Just a Liquidity Crisis; Rather a Credit Crisis and Crunch Nouriel Roubini | Aug 09, 2007 The global market turmoil got ugly today forcing the ECB and the Fed to inject liquidity in the financial system as the concerns about subprime, credit and debt turned into a full blown liquidity run and crisis. As in 1998 at the time of the LTCM crisis, Fed and global central banks decided to ease monetary policy in between meeting and injected a large amount of liquidity into the system. Coming two days after the Fed tried to prevent perceptions of a Bernanke put by signaling in its FOMC no Fed easing and no bail out of the financial system, the Fed actions today are certainly ironic if necessary given the massive liquidity seizure in the financial markets. But the current market turmoil is much worse than the liquidity crisis experienced by the US and the global economy in the 1998 LTCM episode. Let me explain why. Economists distinguish between liquidity crises and insolvency/debt crises. An agent (household, firm, financial corporation, country) can experience distress either because it is illiquid or because it is insolvent; of course insolvent agents are – in most case also illiquid, i.e. they cannot roll over their debts. Illiquidity occurs when the agent is solvent – i.e. it could pay its debts over time as long as such debts can be refinanced or rolled over but he/she experiences a sudden liquidity crisis, i.e. its creditors are unwilling to roll over or refinance its claims. An insolvent debtor does not only face a liquidity problem (large amounts of debts coming to maturity, little stock of liquid reserves and no ability to refinance). It is also insolvent as it could not pay its claim over time even if there was no liquidity problem; thus, debt crises are more severe than illiquidity crises as they imply that the debtor is insolvent, i.e. bankrupt, and its debt claims will be defaulted and reduced. In emerging market crises of the last decade, we had liquidity crises (i.e. a solvent but illiquid sovereign) in Mexico, Korea, Brazil, Turkey; we had debt/insolvency crises (a sovereign that was both illiquid and insolvent) in Russia, Ecuador, Argentina. The 1998 LTCM crisis was mostly a liquidity crisis: the US was growing then at 4% plus, the internet bubble had not burst yet, we were in the middle of the New Economy productivity boom, households were not financially stretched and corporations were not financially stretched with debt either. In spite of those sound and solvent fundamentals the collapse of Russia – a country then with the GDP of a country such as the Netherlands – caused a global liquidity seizure and crisis of the type experienced by credit markets in the last few weeks: sudden demand for cash liquidity, sharp increase in the 10 year swap spread, sharp increase in the VIX gauge of investors’ risk aversion, liquidity drought in the interbank and euro-dollar market, deleveraging of highly leveraged positions, reversal of the yen carry trades. With the exception of the credit event in Russia, this was not a credit/insolvency crisis. And since it was a liquidity crisis the Fed easing – 75bps – was successful in restoring in a matter of weeks calm and liquidity in financial markets. Even that liquidity episode had painful credit fallout: it is not remembered by most but the entire subprime mortgage industry went bankrupt in 1999 following the LTCM liquidity crisis. So a liquidity shock even triggered credit events. Today we do not have only a liquidity crisis like in 1998; we also have a insolvency/debt crisis among a variety of borrowers that overborrowed excessively during the boom phase of the latest Minsky credit bubble. You have hundreds of thousands of US households who are insolvents on their mortgages. And this is not just a subprime problem: the same reckless lending practices used in subprime – no downpayment, no verification of income and assets, interest rate only loans, negative amortization, teaser rates – were used for near prime, Alt-A loans, hybrid prime ARMs, home equity loans, piggyback loans. More than 50% of all mortgage originations in 2005 and 2006 had this toxic waste characteristics. That is why you will have hundreds of thousands – perhaps over a million - of subprime, near prime and prime borrowers who will end up in delinquency, default and foreclosure. Lots of insolvent borrowers. You also have lots of insolvent mortgage lenders – not just the 60 plus subprime ones who have already gone out of business – but also plenty of near prime and prime ones. AHM – who went bankrupt last week – was not exposed mostly to subprime; it was exposed to near prime and prime. Countrywide has reported sharp losses not only on subprime lending but also on prime ones. So on top of insolvent households/mortgage borrowers you have plenty of insolvent mortgage lenders, subprime and - soon enough - near prime and prime. You will also have – soon enough – plenty of insolvent home builders. Many small ones have gone out of business; it is likely that some of the larger ones will follow in the next few months. Beazer Homes – a major home builder - last week had to refute rumors of its impending insolvency; but so did AHM a few weeks its insolvency. With orders for home builders falling 30-40% and cancellation rates above 30% a few will become insolvent over the next year or so. We also have insolvent hedge funds and other funds exposed to subprime and other mortgages. A few – at Bear Stearns, in Australia, in Germany, in France – have already gone bankrupt or are near bankrupt. You can be sure that with at least of $100 billion of subprime alone losses – and most losses are still hidden given the reckless practice of mark-to-model rather than mark-to-market - many more will. In the meanwhile the CDO, CLO and LBO market have completed closed down - a “constipated owl” where “absolutely nothing moves” the way Bill Gross of Pimco put it. This is for now a liquidity crisis in these credit markets; but credit events will occur given that the underlying problem was not of of liquidity but rather one of insolvency: if you take a bunch of to be defaulted subprime and near prime mortgages and you repackage them into RMBS and then these RMBS are repackaged into various tranches of CDO, the rating agencies may be using magic voodoo to turn those junk BBB- mortgages into AAA tranches of CDO; but this is only voodoo as the underlying assets are going to be defaulted on. And the recent sharp widening in corporate credit spreads is not just a sign of a liquidity crunch; it is a sign that investors are realizing that there are serious credit/solvency problems in parts of the corporate system...."

If you really need clearance and will be driving rough, remote roads in winter then I'd go with the Tacoma/Tundra/Cruiser and get real chains for all four wheels, a tow strap, shovel, some static rope, and a couple of come-alongs. If you'll do virtually all of your winter driving on paved or gravel roads, then a Subaru outfitted with snow tires would be a much better choice in terms of control/handling/traction/etc. I can think of a few times when having clearance was critical - like the time when a freak storm rolled in when I was way, way out there on a logging road when a freak storm rolled in...but I think there's some truth to the notion that extra 4WD capacity can get yourself in situations that you would have avoided altogether with a wagon or sedan.

Nice parody - intentional or not - of all of the precious wanks who feel compelled to venture such critiques in a spirit that suggests that they've been forcibly compelled to read the TR's submitted by others and are thus entitled to certain considerations on the author's part. I have a helpful set of commandments of my own that I will humbly submit for Moses and his ilk: 1. If you see a trip report that does not interest you, ignore it. 2. If by some accident you happen to find yourself in the midst of a TR that does not appeal to you for any reason, avail yourself of the "back" button on your browser and move onto something else. Shalom.

"News, articles, trip reports, gear reviews. Message board. (Pacific Northwest, some features require registration) [Description from dmoz] This site reaches approximately 4,390 U.S. monthly uniques. The site attracts a slightly male slanted audience. The site's audience's interests are clothing (REI), news (Fox News, New York Times) and auto info (Edmunds)." http://www.quantcast.com/cascadeclimbers.com

More: http://data.nationalmortgagenews.com/columns/hearing/ "What We're Hearing By Paul Muolo I'll put it bluntly: if you operate a non-depository mortgage firm (lender or servicer) and don't have a deep-pocketed parent or hedge fund as a sugar daddy you're likely to be out of business by year-end, probably sooner. In the 20-plus years that I've been covering residential finance I haven't seen a financial meltdown this swift since the S&L crisis of the mid-to-late 1980s. One subprime executive who closed his shop a few months ago told me, "This is a liquidity crunch the likes I have never seen...."

As of last November or thereabouts he was calling a bottom for homebuilder stocks and encouraging his audience to buy their stocks. Cramer on Housing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmt5_T2WAQc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5zAvh-iFfU Cramer is essentially an entertainer, and has no fiduciary duty to anyone in his audience, so this is a case of caveat emptor. As was the case with the tech implosion, there was no shortage of people offering counterarguments and analysis that anyone who stayed long on these stocks chose to ignore.

Seems like the adage "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" applies to most folks who could see the trainwreck coming in this sector. Kudos to you if you timed this one right - I'm sure you're making a killing if that's the case. In other news, Cramer may not be too far off the mark with his rhetoric, but I don't think that any action by the Fed is going to make the participants in the secondary market any more anxious to buy tranches of securities constructed from fraud-laden POS ARM/IO mortgages backed bynothing more than declining collateral and the ability of folks who borrowed 5-10X their incomes ability to keep their monthly payments current. Summary from elsehwere on the web.... “The market dropped particularly sharply yesterday afternoon after investors were rattled by remarks by executives at Bear Stearns, the investment bank that has been heavily involved in mortgage securities. The firm’s assurances about its own financial position were overshadowed by bleak comments by its chief financial officer about the credit markets.” “‘I have been at this for 22 years, and this is about as bad as I have seen it in the fixed-income market,’ said Samuel L. Molinaro Jr., Bear Stearns’s chief financial officer.” “Lenders say they are increasingly unable to persuade investors to buy packages of home loans made to borrowers with little or no down payment or those who cannot fully document their incomes. As a result, many companies are no longer offering such loans to potential buyers.” “‘I have never seen it happen so quickly,’ said Steve Walsh, a mortgage broker in Scottsdale, Ariz. ‘Banks always do these little cutbacks here and there. What they are doing now is a liquidity crunch. It’s a credit freeze.’” “‘It seems to me things got every bit as silly in the credit markets in the last few years as they did in tech stocks in the late 1990s,’ said Douglas M. Peta, chief market strategist at J. & W. Seligman & Company, an investment firm based in New York. ‘I still think we may have a ways to go in this.’” From Dow Jones Newswires. “The secondary market that supports a big part of the U.S. mortgage industry has ground to a halt in recent days, a development that dramatically could increase the cost of home loans in expensive regions, experts said.” “The private, secondary mortgage market ‘is not functioning,’ Mike Perry, CEO of home loan specialist IndyMac Bancorp Inc., wrote in an email to IndyMac staff.” “It’s currently difficult to trade even AAA-rated parts of private mortgage- backed securities. Only mortgages that conform to the standards of government- sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, like Fannie currently are trading, Perry said.” “That account was confirmed by Scott Valentin, a mortgage company analyst at Friedman, Billings, Ramsey. ‘We’re hearing securitizations have frozen up,’ he said in an interview. ‘No one wants to bid on these things and then find out that the loans are worthless tomorrow.’” “‘If home buyers are in loans that don’t conform with Fannie or Freddie, given present market circumstances, they will have to pay at least 100 basis points more,’ explained Andy Chow, portfolio manager at a $14 billion San Francisco investment firm. (A basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point).” “That will have a big impact on the housing market in California, Florida and other places where home prices are very high, he said.” “‘In these areas, if home buyers don’t have much money as a down payment, their loans will be too large to conform with Fannie and Freddie’s standards,’ Chow explained. ‘That means people will pay much higher interest rates.’”

Depends on which side of the trade they're on, I suspect. Don't expect many of the folks on the wrong side of the leveraged MBS/CDO/ etc equation to be strolling around wall Street with "Will Arbitrage for Food" signs around their necks anytime soon, though. I suspect that not all of the folks whose homes serve as the underlying collateral for the repackaged loans of various sorts that the imploding securities in question were constructed from may not fare quite as well. Leverage gives, and leverage takes away...

Post Of The Day...

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=452808336 Not sure the Greenspan Put is going to materialize this time. Should be interesting to see what the carnage in the secondary markets is going to to do loan originations in Q3 and Q4....

Rumor mill traces the said footage to Melbourne, Australia. Might account for the absence of gunfire.

Your sorry record of Alaskan clip-ups disqualifies you from commenting here...

Yup. P.O.T.D.

There is nothing "on-going" and "the bet" was childish. Here's the story which directly relates: A few years ago, there was a discussion about hang-dogging in which I described it as "siege climbing". The old school philosophy is that you climb from the bottom up, and if you fell, you were lowered to the ground and started over, or you trained on lower grades and worked your abilities higher until you were good enough to address the climb on its own terms. Hang-dogging...hanging off your gear to rest, falling repeatedly while rehearsing the moves, was considered weak free-climbing, essentially aid, and bogus. It demonstrated that you weren't ready. So let's say the climb is 5.13, and someone thrashes their way up this thing after weeks of hang-dogging and rehearsal and than pulls the rope and "red-points" it. Is this person really a 5.13 climber versus someone who has worked their abilities to the point where they can actually lead it on-site? An analogous tradition can be seen in the expedition vs. alpine tradition in mountaineering where alpine-style climbing is considered a stylistically superior means of obtaining a summit. Reinhold Messner epitomized this by advocating and demonstrating the concept of climbing the mountain by fair means, not beating/sieging it into submission. I also made the analogy on cc.com about a piano; something to the affect of: You may not be able to play the piano today but rehearse it enough and you'll be able to play a Beethoven sonata. This, by the way, does not mean that you have the same skill level of someone who has worked up their skill level to the point where new music can be set in front of them and they can play through a sonata without falling all over themselves. I made the comment that I felt that nearly any climber with the dedication could, using the present rules of sport climbing, pull off a 5.13 if they were allowed to rehearse the moves endlessly into submission. It might take them months or a year or whatever, but put up rules like that, and it opens the door to all kinds of faux-accomplishments. I picked 5.13 because a lot of folks see that as a BIG NUMBER! and it seems to be a usual number for when the on-sight leading often ends and the sieging begins. Some folks chimed in saying 5.13 wasn't such a big deal anymore....it's what 5.12 was 20 years ago or 5.11 25 years ago. They're all over the place now...Whatever, I was making a theoretical statement apparently lost on many. Then the usual cc.com taunts began, and a few of the usual and predictable blow-hards came out with frat-boy challenges to collect a bet that Dwayner couldn't possibly climb any kind of 5.13 no longer how he tried. It was utterly childish. One major moderator on this site told me that it would be impossible for me (to which I replied that I hope he doesn't spread his crappy attitude to children). The school-yard buddies delivered their usual lame clichés: "put your money where..." and my award for the most pathetic of all time: "don't cash a check your *ss can't deliver" Believe me, if I had a convenient crag nearby, the interest and inspiration, and importantly, the time (none of which I have), it would be very satisfying to engage in such a challenge myself....it's not an excuse...it's reality...(on the other hand, I don't have an inclination to respond to juvenile bets, but if I ever do, it will be on my own time and terms). Regardless, my concept still stands. Perhaps someone with an abundance of the factors that thwart me can prove me correct. Now wasn't that fascinating? Hi Dwayner. How have you been? Long time no speak. ok enough chit-chat. It's easy to say "Oh I could do that." I know, because I do it all the time. It's a confidence I have, but the time eventually comes when I step on to that which I have almost blithely dismissed, and thank goodness occasionally get my ass kicked. This is good for me! It smacks me of my arrogance! It lets me know that I need to try if I want to do something, and that nothing is given until it is actually accomplished, and also takes me to what I love about climbing: figuring stuff out. Let me re-state that: until one has climbed something quite specific, well, they haven't climbed it. Rather self-evident, yes? No amount of rationalization, equivocation, explanation, prognostication, hubris, or ventriloquism can change this fact. You should know this: before that dinosaur bone is in your hand, it isn't in your hand, and you don't know whether or not you will find it. Perhaps you have a good idea that a specific location might contain dinosaur bones and eggs and mummies and stuff, but since you haven't climbed even a 5.12, what makes you think you will find a mummy in your closet? Until you actually step out from behind your excuses and attempt that which you so arrogantly dismiss, you will be nothing but an archaeologist lost in your closet. Did you know that Andres Segovia spent most of his time practicing scales and etudes? Very simple stuff, rehearsing and rehearsing. Many artists do this. Personally I'm more pulled by the spirit of things and not just the mastery, but I admire mastery also. You, Mister Don, need to be less arrogant and climb more, instead of always complaining about the state of climbing. Having Sexual_Chocolate back on board, even for but a single post, has redeemed this entire thread...

I am the moderator in question. Leaving the matter of the bet aside for a moment, I'll address the matter of "passing along a crappy attitude to children" bit. Dismissing the accomplishments of others that are quite beyond your demonstrated capacity to reproduce is a far worse ethic to instill than one that requires that you must be, at the very least, far superior to whomever you are criticizing in whatever discipline it is that is under discussion (which you both participate in) before you open your mouth. To use your example of astronauts, if Buzz Aldrin wants to talk shit about other astronauts, he's earned the right to do so. The guy who never made it into the program doesn't. I'd say the kid who goes through life knowing that if he runs marathons himself, for example, he has no business making ridiculing anyone's time unless he's bested that himself. He'd do still better knowing that even if he is in a position to make disparaging comments about slower runners, he should have the class to refrain from doing so. I have a hard time imagining any circumstances in which learning these ethics and living by them would do anything but benefit a child, but I can think of plenty of circumstances in which a kid who conducts himself in a manner that's contrary to them will suffer as a result.

Someone should overdub the soundtrack from the "Black Knight" scene in Holy Grail on the footage...

Not so sure about that. Of course, the true meaning of "Jihad" is a "peaceful inner struggle to improve onself," and Kafeel and a handful of others have woefully misunderstood both the spirit and the words contained within the texts that they believe have given them a divine mandate to shred as many Infidel commuters, club-goers, pre-schoolers, shoppers, etc as possible with a cocktail of nails, ball-bearings, and explosives - so perhaps the bar is a touch lower than you think. I can only imagine how upset he'll be after doing all of the plotting and setting himself on fire and whatnot only to find out that the dude chilling next to him got the three-score and twelve babes with nothing more than the "peaceful inner struggle" thing.

"A man critically burned after allegedly crashing an explosive-laden Jeep into Glasgow Airport died of his injuries Thursday..." Maybe an expert on the relevant texts can chime and clarify whether or not setting oneself on fire and praising the appropriate diety at the top of one's lungs qualifies one for the 72 virgins, or if there's some kind of honorable mention for those that intend to slaughter as many civilians as possible by detonating themselves amongst them but don't actually succeed in doing so. If it turns out that Kafeel qualifies for the eternal shagfest in the sky for his efforts, the sincere pity that I feel for him will of course be terribly out of place.

No virgins for him... "Glasgow terror suspect dies from burns By TARIQ PANJA, Associated Press Writer Thu Aug 2, 6:57 PM ET LONDON - A man critically burned after allegedly crashing an explosive-laden Jeep into Glasgow Airport died of his injuries Thursday, Strathclyde Police said. ADVERTISEMENT Kafeel Ahmed, 27, had been in the hospital for a month with burns from the alleged attack on June 30, which followed a day after two failed car bombings in London. The other man in the car, Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdullah, has been charged with conspiring to set off explosions. "We can confirm that the man seriously injured during the course of the incident at Glasgow Airport on Saturday June 30 has died in Glasgow Royal Infirmary," said a spokesman for Strathclyde Police, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with force policy. Ahmed, an Indian national from Bangalore, was burned on 90 percent of his body and had been in a coma throughout his hospital stay. He had been kept under armed guard at a burns unit."

Just wondering if the mop being passed through the security glass was intended for clean up or to continue the beating.....

I think that there should be a separate prize for longevity. Seems like a sub-category for sporadic-but-longtime posters like AlpineDave, Philfort, Robertm, etc should be in order. We've had quite a few flash-in-the-pan types that rack-up a couple thousand posts in 0-6 months and then dissappear. I've always kind of wondered about folks like that.