I mean, I do not.  EVER.  Do this.  But I found myself laughing so hard at this that I am posting it for you.

All kudos to topcultured.com.  Those people are geniuses.

Markets: Flat.  No change.  Rates hover at 5% and a bit below.  15-year loans are at 4.25% and thereabouts, 5/1 ARMS are 4% or a shade lower.

Analysis: A piac nem tud melyik iranyba menni, ugyhogy semmisem tortenik.  If I write the same thing I’ve been writing for the past month, it gets old, even for me, so I wrote it in Hungarian this time.  Prizes for the first person to email me the sentence above in English.

There’s nothing going on, people.  Or, at least, nothing that is big enough to make the markets move.  Breathlessly we wait for the Fed to stop buying mortgage-backed securities, and loud are the forecasts of rate-based doom, and yet…nothing.  Still, nothing.

Clarification: There is a lot of confusion about the homebuyer tax credits, so let me herewith set the record straight.  YOU DO NOT HAVE TO CLOSE ON YOUR PURCHASE BY APRIL 30.  The house merely has to be under contract by April 30.  It can then close any time before JUNE 30.  “Under contract” means there is an agreement, signed by both the seller and the buyer, outlining the sale price and the terms of the sale.  As long as you have that in place by April 30, you still qualify for the tax credit, and that is either the first-time homebuyer credit or the long-time homeowner credit, either one.

Cj

This is my Mother’s house.  The one she grew up in, the one she shared with her brother and sisters, the one her parents lived in for 50 years.

As of today, it’s not theirs any more.

Mom has been gone from that place for 45 years, and her parents essentially died there a few years back, but her brother was still there, and more importantly, the soul of the home was there - Grandpa’s records.

Yesterday, we took them out.

Our estimation is that there were over 10,000 records - that is vinyl and shellac, people - in the house in all sorts of places, though the overwhelming majority were in the custom record shelves constructed just inside the front door.  Almost all of them were in pristine condition, played maybe once, definitely not more than a few times.  No one could possibly listen to them all, not in a lifetime.

We tracked across all sorts of gems while we (my brother, father and me) were boxing them all up.  We found the recording of Peter and the Wolf (A side) and Carnival of the Animals (B side) that I remember listening to in that very house as young boy.  We found the complete Beethoven’s symphonies recording, identical to the one that started me loving classical music myself.  We found Bongos from the South’s version of My Old Kentucky Home (look, it’s not all classics, folks).  We found a recording of Enrico Caruso, the first recording he ever made, from 1903, and then we found the last recording he ever made (can’t wait to hear those).  And we found a Benny Goodman 4-record collection - signed by Goodman himself.

All this stuff weighed close to two tons.  It was never meant to be moved.  As long as it was there, the house still belonged to my Mother’s family, even though the glass wall around the fireplace was gone, the teardrop-shaped planter peninsula that jutted out from the living-room wall was gone, the apricot tree in the backyard (still the best apricots the world has ever known) was gone, the marble game in the downstairs cupboard, the long rug in the hallway in the basement, the innumerable jars of peaches, the trinkets in the kitchen drawers, all gone, and yet when I close my eyes I can see them still.  I know those things better than I know any of the nooks and crannies of any house I lived in save one.

The bathroom is still there in pink, the same as it ever was.  And there are still rosebushes outside, likely the same ones my father and I used to catch nightcrawlers under, the night before we all went fishing.  But the people are gone, and now the records are gone.  That was what that house was for.  It’s not our house any more.

But tonight, my Grandpa and I are going to get back together, with Enrico Caruso and friends, for a little reunion.

Adieu, Dallin Street, my port in many a storm.  Fare thee well.  Thou shalt not hear Herald any more.

Markets: We’re off 12bps, which is a bit less than what we gained yesterday.  Rates hang out right at 5% (fractionally more on some programs, fractionally less on others).  SOmething interesting to note: the 15-year loans are operating at their biggest spread in a decade - the 15 year fixed loan is currently selling at 4.25% and better, depending on your credit and equity position.

Analysis: We talked about this last time (and here as well, in greater depth), there just isn’t any good reason to believe that much is going to change here.  I got some push-back on my contention that politics is driving the market at the moment, but I’m sticking to my guns here.  Even if Obama is indifferent to a second term (and I’m not convinced that he is, all protestations to the contrary), the driver on this stuff is Congress, more than the President.  The retirement of Evan Bayh of Indiana is a black, black sail for the Democrats.  Having spent 25 years in the political arena, I’m quite sure that most of the sitting Congressmen want to keep their jobs, and that usually means tossing bread to the plebs as they go to the polls.  That argues against fiscal restraint and higher interest rates.  I’m just saying.

NEXT year, well, that’s a different story.  And please let me emphasize, I’m no prophet.  I’m just telling you what I think, and freely acknowledge that I’m often wrong.  But I’m never slow on the trigger, so right or wrong, you’ll have the benefit of someone watching what’s happening in the markets while you do the real work out there.

Action: The tax credit expires on April 30 if you do not have a home under contract.  Call your Realtor and get cracking.  The FOMC stops buying mortgage-backed securities in 42 days.  That’s going to have SOME impact on rates, and it isn’t likely to be good (although, as argued, I don’t think it will be very big).  Move expeditiously.  That is all.

Cj

This is one of a Series of Short Takes, an occasional series on the salient issues of the day, usually politics or religion, though this one takes on something even more dangerous.  In my family, this is a hot topic.  I’m certainly going to catch it.  But some things have to be asked.

I don’t drink.  But I do occasionally go to lunch with people that do, and one day at a relatively good restaurant one of my dinner companions ordered some wine.  He ordered the house wine, at about $25 a bottle, not the recommended wine, which was something French and about five times as much.  Figuring that I might not have a better chance than this, I asked a question I’ve always wanted to ask: can you tell the difference between the really good wine - or at least the really expensive one - and the house wine?

His answer was interesting.  “I can tell the difference,” he said, “between the very good wine and the wine in a box from the grocery store.  But I can’t tell the difference between the $25 wine and the $200 wine, and I don’t know anyone that can.”

I watched the pairs figure skating yesterday.  We watch almost everything Olympic at my house.  And while the figure skating is nothing like as exciting as the Snocross 4-man free-for-all roller derby on snowboards, it is still very entertaining in its own way.

Shen and Zhao won, and I think they should have, based on the storyline alone, if not their skating, which was good - very good - but not at the level I would have expected to see from the Olympic champions.  I watched Sale and Pelletier, and I remember clearly my hatred of Gordeeva and Grinkov, and both of those couples were better than this one.  I think.

But then, here comes my problem.  Figure skating is beautiful, and athletic, and difficult.  No one with a brain would argue otherwise.  But it is also complex.  It is so complex, in fact, that the average person cannot understand it.  More, it is so complex that the above-average fan of the sport cannot understand it.  It has reached the point where it is like wine competitions, where only a few of the anointed have the ability to distinguish between the awesome and the passable.

The Americans had two teams that I saw, Evora and Ladwig and Denney and Barrett, and they were very good.  They did not fall.  They had good artistic presence.  Their performances were, I thought, excellent.  They finished 123rd or something, so far out of it that they were never in contact with the lead group.

In the lead group, we had a couple of terrible, egregious falls.  Of the final four pairs, two of them fell twice apiece.  The other two did not fall, but bobbled badly - the champions bobbling on a very simple element (simple, that is, in championship skating - I’m not for one second suggesting that a mortal could do it) that nobody ever bobbles on at this level.

So I look at this, and I think there’s something terribly wrong with the scoring.  I LIKED the American (and especially the Canadian) performances, but more than that, I thought they were better.  They weren’t, clearly.  They must not have been as technically difficult.  Or something.  But I can’t tell.  I just can’t.  I’m not an idiot.  I can absolutely tell the difference between a good jump and a bad jump on a steal in baseball, a good seal block and a bad one in football, a good assist try and one pass too many in basketball.  But I can’t tell a triple toe loop from a triple lutz.  I’m not absolutely sure I can tell the difference between a double salcow and a triple loop.  I can’t tell which performances are technically more difficult than which others - at least, at the very highest levels.  Like my friend, I can tell a bad wine from a great wine.  But I can’t tell a good wine from a great wine.

I have long wondered whether ANYONE can.  I expect, like everyone, that the judges can tell, and probably they can.  But there isn’t any way to know, not for sure.  I’d like to see a double-blind judging performance, where we have two panels of judges judge the same skating competition, one of the panels being composed of judges that have no connection whatever to the competitors and do not even know their names.  This would tell us how consistent and objective the judging actually is.  And this is also, unfortunately, impossible.  The list of top judges is so short, and the list of top competitors even shorter, and they all know each other very, very well.  In ANY OTHER SPORT, you might be able to get a group of judges together that could judge well enough to give you this comparison, so that you could tell, for sure, that the judging was based on objective criteria.  But you can’t.  So we’ll never know.

I like to assume, as the majority of skating fans do, that the judging is fair and unbiased.  But the fact is that it isn’t, not entirely, nor could it possibly be.  I’m an umpire and a referee.  I don’t play favorites.  No, that’s not true.  I try not to play favorites.  But my judgment is colored by emotion, because I am a human.  Skating judges are also humans, and in their sport, their judgment is absolute and final.  It not only affects the score, it IS the score.  In basketball, I can potentially influence the game by blowing a call, but only in rare circumstances.  Most of the time, the game isn’t close enough for my refereeing to change the outcome.  In skating, my call IS the outcome.

Perhaps nothing would have changed last night, or any night, because the judges were coloring their impressions of the skating based on previous performances and personal experiences.  Perhaps.  But I wonder.

For this reason, I am only a reluctant fan of sports where the judging and the scoring are the same thing.  I’d like to really get into skating, but I can’t, because it is just way too arcane for me.  Gymnastics is similar.  I can’t see any possible difference between ice dancing and ballroom dancing, from a sport standpoint.  They’re both very difficult, require great athletic ability, and are so impossible to understand from a scoring standpoint that an average panel of regular people would be totally unable to accurately rank the contestants.  I don’t like games where I can’t tell who is winning - or worse, games where obvious errors like falling down on the ice are of negligible importance or altogether irrelevant, so that I can’t even trust what seems perfectly clear.  At that point, we’re not talking about a game or a sport any more, we’re talking about art, which is almost always so arcane that regular guys like me can’t tell good from bad.  But then, oil painting is not called a sport, and nobody awards medals to Monet instead of Manet based on brush technique.

Defenders of skating will tell you that it doesn’t need my fandom, and that is surely true.  The art form survives quite without my support, as do many other things.  But I believe that there are a large number of people out there that are like me, that would love to be real fans of skating, because it is beautiful and looks like great fun, but who cannot, because our palates are simply too unrefined.  So we do Disney on Ice instead of Katarina Witt.  Or worse, we make Katarina skate in Disney on Ice, so that what she does is approachable enough for the unwashed to get it.

Cj

P.S. This caveat is only for those interested in solutions.  Purists will hate what I am about to say.

Music is an art form that I understand well enough to be able to tell the best from the rest.  When we have music competitions in the academic sense, we have judging just like skating or dancing, and I daresay the judging criteria are just as arcane.  In music, though, we have managed to capture a really BIG amount of interest by doing one simple thing - moving the judging out of the hands of the experts and into the hands of the audience.  It’s called American Idol - maybe you’ve heard of it.  Now, say what you will about the show itself (I’m not a watcher), the one thing you can say is that no skating competition, in fact, no artistic competition EVER has enjoyed the kids of ratings that this show has.  The judges do have criteria to judge from, and they do that, but most of the judging is done by the people that watch, the consumers of the product.  The audience.  I cannot believe that this would hurt the popularity of skating; contrariwise, I believe it would usher in an explosion for the sport.

But to adopt anything like this, skating (and gymnastics) would have to do what singing (and now dancing) has done, and that is abandon the pretense that it is a sport.  It isn’t.  It is athletic, and complicated, and difficult, and requires skill and training far beyond anything we can imagine as mere mortals.  I grant this freely.  But so does industrial sculpture.  So does dancing.  In order to demonstrate the magic of the art form, dancers have embraced the public and attempted to give them something that they can understand, and get excited about, and absolutely LOVE, without pretending that there is some sort of objective scale on which more than a handful of people can agree, on which they can be judged.  There is no such thing, or at least, dancers and singers have come to the understanding that that scale cannot be weighed as any more important than what people like.

Perhaps skaters wouldn’t like to have a show twice a year where some of the best of their kind perform for millions and win large prizes, instead of doing it once every four years as a warmup for hockey.  But I wonder about that, too.