"I loved this story. In a precise, concise exercise the question exposed the empty verbiage of people who dare to think they can govern or worse, think they can lead."

"The truth exposes their credentials vs knowledge. Political candidacy has become formulaic even shallow. This simple query sifted the chaff from the wheat. It works as short hand test for cities across the US."

Top-rated comment at the NYT for a story titled "It’s a Home in Brooklyn. What Could It Cost? $100,000? Shaun Donovan and Raymond J. McGuire, candidates for mayor of New York, were way, way off when asked to estimate the median home price in the borough."

Shaun Donovan was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama Administration and housing commissioner in the Bloomberg Administration. His answer was "In Brooklyn, huh? I would guess it is around $100,000." How could he be so out of touch?

Only Andrew Yang got the answer right: $900,000. 

How did Donovan get his high positions when he's that clueless? I looked at Wikipedia: 

He holds three degrees from Harvard University: an A.B. in engineering sciences from Harvard College in 1987, a Master of Public Administration degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1995, and a Master of Architecture degree from the Graduate School of Design in 1995.

Credentials! I know I'm impressed. Amazing when one question ruins a candidate — amazing, yet entirely justified. For the record, afterwards, he tried to explain it away as based on a belief that the question referred to the tax assessment value of the houses. Please follow up on that. Are the assessments out of whack? Are $900,000 houses assessed at $100,000?

"One of the reasons I built [my house] was to express my artistic vision through another medium, in addition to the scarless rhinoplasty and facial enhancement."

Says one of the plastic surgeons quoted in "Cosmetic Surgeons Are Building L.A. Megamansions, and the Results are Over-the-Top/Celebrity dermatologist Dr. Alex Khadavi is listing his 21,000-square-foot Bel-Air property, which includes space to show off your NFT artwork, as well as a DJ booth, an outdoor tequila bar and a car museum" (WSJ). 

Another says: "In order to be great you have to dare to be bad. You have to take risks.... There are these tech and cryptocurrency guys who are still young and who want to have fun."

I wonder if they feel that way about faces too — In order to be great you have to dare to be bad. That would explain some of the things I see in the subreddit Botched Surgeries.

When the landlord drops by to photograph your apartment for presentation on the Internet...

... and — I guess! — can't touch your stuff but wants the photographs anyway, the rest of us get to see you live like this.

It doesn't seem quite fair. Maybe you shouldn't look. I think it's funny... and real... both the way the tenant is living and the ludicrous landlord's representation that it's "Just renovated," with "new paint and carpet."

"Mr. Gates was already working on his dream home before marrying Ms. Gates in 1994.... The place was 'a bachelor’s dream and a bride’s nightmare'..."

"... with 'enough software and high-tech displays to make a newlywed feel as though she were living inside a video game.'... After six months of discussions about whether the entire project should be scrapped, Ms. Gates decided to influence further construction by incorporating her preferences — and insisted on making the place a home for a family and not a lone tech wizard.... Perhaps Mr. Gates may now recommit himself to designing and building a smart house (though that may not be a challenging project for him today, now that connected devices are everywhere). Because despite the changes she made to the couple’s home, Ms. Gates recently expressed misgivings about continuing to live there. 'We won’t have that house forever....I’m actually really looking forward to the day that Bill and I live in a 1,500-square foot house."

From "Who Gets Xanadu 2.0, the Gates Family Mansion? Melinda Gates, at least, has been open about her desire to live in a smaller house" (NYT).

A 1,500-square foot house. I guess I can give this post my "tiny house" tag. How big is the "Xanadu" mansion? 66,000 square feet. That's 44 times the size of the house she purported to dream of. In a house so big, why worry about your estrangement from the other person? So easy to avoid them. Even hard to find them. Or I guess there were electronic devices to help you find them — in case you ever want them. It's beyond separate bedrooms. You're living in a place the size of a small town. Go live in another part of that town.

A NYC woman wonders where that cold wind in her apartment is coming from... the bathroom... the mirror...

 A TikTok mystery — Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

WARNING: Somewhere in the dialogue — I think it's in Part 2 — they talk about the movie "Parasite" and reveal something that is a significant spoiler.

Image there's no Trump/It isn't hard if you/Are a conservative WaPo columnist/With Biden pulling you through/Image Scranton, PA/Ooh Ooh Ooh Ooh...

Watching @HillaryClinton speak you cannot avoid imaging what might have been. Also her account of @JoeBiden pulling her through his boyhood home in Scranton, PA is priceless

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) April 28, 2020

ADDED: I didn't watch Hillary's endorsement of Joe Biden, so I was challenged not merely to "image" her as President but also to "image" what was so "priceless" about whatever she said about getting "pulled" through Scranton. I found the transcript though. It's nearly an hour long, and my time is not priceless. I would watch it for $1,000 and let you know what I think. But I will scan the transcript... perhaps only for the word "Scranton"... I'll "scran" the transcript... okay:

So for me, this is a moment that we need a leader, a president like Joe Biden.... And we share a common experience and a love of Scranton, Pennsylvania. When my great grandparents came from England and Wales, they ended up in Scranton and my grandfather and then my father grew up in a house on Diamond Avenue and while the randoms were living on Diamond Avenue, the Bidens were over on North Washington Street. And I’ve had a lot of time to visit Scranton, talk about Scranton with Joe and one memorable occasion we were there together and he said, “Hey, let’s go see the house that I lived in when I was a little boy.” And if you know Joe Biden, you know the words were out of his mouth and we were racing to get there. And of course we got there and he talked his way in.

Ugh! Ever had former owners of your house show up one day and try to talk their way in? Ever gone to a house you used to live in and try to talk your way in? On question 1, my answer is sort of. They weren't very direct about it, and they did not get in. On question 2, I have gone to look at the 3 houses I grew up in and each time I considered how hard it would be to go inside and realized that there was no way I would even go up to the homeowner and let them know I lived there when the house was new and I was a little child. As for trying to get an invitation to go inside... hell, no!

It wasn’t hard because the woman who was at home immediately recognized him and knew him.

And when you're a star, they let you do it.

And then we went through the house with Joe regaling me with these great stories about his dad, Joe Sr. And his mom Gene [sic, should be Jean] and the neighborhood. He was pointing out the window telling me who lived where when he was growing up. He told me one story that I loved. He said he was getting ready to go to a junior high school dance and he didn’t have any cufflinks. And so his very creative mother [Jean] got him a nut and bolt, and made a pair of cufflinks for him. But I think he said he was mortified by that. And he’s told her that and she just looked at him and she said, “Joey, if somebody says something to you about your cufflinks, you just say, what? You don’t have a pair like that.” It was that kind of love of family, that unconditional support that led Joe to be the extraordinary family member and father that he’s been through all the tragedy that so many of us have followed from afar, but know how deeply he connects with people who have similarly suffered a tragedy....

WAIT A MINUTE: "while the randoms were living on Diamond Avenue"?! Must be the Rodhams...

Hilarious. Hillary and her family were randos.

"Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are on lockdown at their $14 million Canadian bolthole after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau closed the country’s border amid the coronavirus pandemic."

In case you were wondering how Harry and Meghan are doing after running off to Canada into supposedly burgeoning new opportunities, Page Six has the answer.

I had to look up "bolthole." It's "a hole by which to bolt or escape; figurative a means of escape" (OED).

1877 E. Peacock Gloss. Words Manley & Corringham, Lincs. Bolt-hole, (1) the hole by which a rabbit makes its escape when the ferret pursues it. (2) Any unknown hole by which a person makes his way into or out of a house....
1924 E. Marsh tr. La Fontaine Fables 71 [The hare] heard a rustle, And took the hint to bustle Off to his bolt-hole.
1932 H. Simpson Boomerang xii. 306 A girl who had been jilted might choose any bolt-hole to hide her shame....

A very rabbit-y concept.

And while I'm here in the OED, let me look up "lockdown" (a word that we're seeing a lot this week and that I suspect will not go away for a long time). The oldest meaning is "a piece of wood used in the construction of rafts when transporting timber downriver." That goes back to the 19th century.  The next oldest meaning of "lockdown," dating only to the 1970s, is the prison meaning — keeping prisoners in their cells for a long time (notably after an outbreak of violence). Most recently, going back to 1984, the word came into use to refer to "A state of isolation, containment, or restricted access, usually instituted as a security measure; the imposition of this state." Examples:

1999 Computerworld 11 Oct. 8/1 (heading) Many users plan Y2K lockdowns.
2002 Quill (Nexis) 1 May 34 We heard the city was on lockdown and that it wasn't possible to get in.
2005 Courier-Mail (Brisbane) 3 May 3/5 Contestants go into lockdown tomorrow isolated from the outside world as they prepare to enter the Big Brother house on Sunday.

I heard NY Governor Andrew Cuomo struggling with the word on this morning's "The Daily" podcast. He said it was a scary word, and he didn't want to use it. It would mean that people are required to stay inside their own homes, and he wanted to assure New Yorkers that he would not do that, yet it was obvious that he was going to say that whether it was true or not, as he openly talked about the problem of causing a destructive stampede to the stores.

This is not a window.

A new vantage point, opened in Meadhouse just now.

UPDATE: I loved the temporary vista, but now:

"When President Vladimir V. Putin began a program four years ago to hand out plots of land in remote areas of the Russian Far East, the idea was to lure young, hardy settlers..."

"... to the vast and sparsely populated region in a Slavic replay of the 1862 Homestead Act’s promise of 160 acres in the United States. Instead, at least in this patch of territory near the Chinese border, the Kremlin’s program got [60-year-old Sergei] Lunin, a self-declared anarchist — though, he insists, 'not an idiot who supports violence' — and lifelong gadfly. Before signing up as a pioneer to develop his plot of empty land, he edited a now defunct newspaper, Dissident, spent time in a Soviet jail accused of 'parasitism,' and did freelance work as a political consultant specializing in making mischief.... Like the American West, the Russian Far East has always been a land apart.... 'Here people are not afraid to talk loudly,' [Anton Chekhov] wrote. 'There is nobody to arrest them here and nowhere to exile them to. You can be as liberal as you like.' Today, there are plenty of people on hand to make arrests. The one-room apartment in the regional capital of Blagoveshchensk that Mr. Lunin shares with his wife, four cats, three dogs, two mice and one rabbit sits across the road from a compound of the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the post-Soviet incarnation of the K.G.B.... 'This will be my own little country and I will be its Putin,' [Lunin] explained during a recent visit along with his wife to their [7.4 acres of] land.... 'I was free under Brezhnev and am free under Putin,' he said. 'I am free inside.'"

"'Here I Can Be My Own Dictator'/The Kremlin’s plan to hand out plots of land in Russia’s Far East, long a magnet for dissenters, idealists and oddballs, has attracted some unusually freethinking settlers" (NYT).

Go East, old man!