The Bush Depression

It's weird to walk around and see brand new unsold houses just sitting and deteriorating. No one can buy them. I wanted to take a closer look at a small subdivision near where we currently live. It was to have been an upscale development with about a dozen home sites. All of the houses were slated to be well over 4,000 square feet with relatively large lots. The city of Mint Hill put in underground power and installed sewer and water. Three houses were completed, two as models, and a fourth was under construction when the W. Moron Bush Depression hit full steam in 2008.

One of the houses was sold at bargain-basement price so it's off the market legitimately. One now has a new church building built right behind it (I'm talking within feet), so I doubt anyone would want it now. The uncompleted house is just sitting there getting overgrown with weeds and filling slowly up with leaves and wind-blown trash. The other completed house is at the far end of the street on a cul-de-sac and is still technically for sale, although at an asking price of $571,000 it appears to be someone's idea of a bad broker's joke.

I just felt like taking a closer look at the stillborn neighborhood to remind myself once again why I don't want to reinstall the greedy, monstrous idiots who already wrecked this nation. What's left for them to steal? I'm sure they'll find what remains and pry it out of our grasp.

The house abandoned about 70% complete. No one's touched it since late 2008.

Carole and I inspect the upstairs (third floor). It would have been one Hell of a nice place. Classic McMansion design but a cut or two above that in quality. It had what appeared to be four bedrooms on the third floor.

Inside the three-car garage. They never got around to installing the garage doors so the place is filling up with leaves and dirt.

This is the completed house at the end of the street that technically is still up for sale. Listed at almost $600K, no one is going to pay anywhere close to that. The weeds are overtaking it and mud is building up at this low end of the avenue.

Standing in front of that last house and looking back up the street where there were to have been many more luxury homes. And the scum who caused all of this claim this nation still needs the same policies that put us in this state in the first place.

The Linville Fools

Morons!

Some years ago on a day-trip to Linville Falls and the Blue Ridge Parkway a friend and I hiked down to the base of the falls with the idea of going for a swim. Back in the day there wasn't much of a big deal made about swimming in the plunge pool beneath the falls. These days, there are signs up claiming that it's not allowed, but I suppose folk still go there to swim.

On the day we went we did indeed go swimming. It's a great place for it. The water's good and deep there and
it's just a perfect place to cool off on a hot summer day.

However, when we got there we discovered that a family of insane people had preceded us to the falls. The family consisted of a father, and children of various ages and their friends. The dad was standing at points around the plunge pool using a bulky old-style video camera to record the antics of his various kids and their pals. What they were doing was climbing as high as they could up the walls of the gorge and leaping into the river far, far below.

His oldest kids, teenage boys, were jumping from heights varying between 75 and 100 feet. The younger kids, girls, were leaping from about twenty to thirty feet.

The worst aspect of what was going on was that the target one had to hit from the highest parts of the jumps was a circle of water about ten or twelve feet on a side. If you varied beyond this target you were likely to hit a boulder or shallow water and be killed. I had never witnessed such insanity. This went on for the entire time we were down there swimming, and they were still making the incredible leaps when we climbed out of the pool to hike back to the top.

No one was killed while we were there, but one of the older boys finally did manage to hurt himself by hitting the water at a bad angle. He then dragged himself to shore where he was obviously in a great deal of pain. However, after some time he seemed to recover and was once again scaling the cliffs around the falls and leaping back into that small target.

I've always referred to these folk as "The Linville Fools". It seems appropriate.