New Icon!

Around the (sorta long) corner from where I work is Uncle Lou's Fried Chicken, where they serve what would be called delicious honey fried chicken, if I liked honey. Also, the "monster burger," which caters to competitive eaters--although their normal cheeseburger is of reasonable size and is pretty tasty as well.

Cleaning out the garage this weekend, I found a box of old engineering texts that I'd packed up two jobs ago when I quit, and the drink cup from Uncle Lou's, featuring this chicken logo. Is the chicken flashing a Blood gang sign? Or is his eminent demise "okay?"

In any case, sometimes you need an icon for chicken, or to say that things are okay, or for your gang-related posts, so here it is.

A question.

Does the housing crisis strike anyone else as largely fictitious?

I mean, obviously people are losing their homes, and one major lending corporation seems to have suffered a collapse, but aren't the numbers driving the interest-rate increases arbitrary, designed to screw homeowners over based on the inability to refinance as their interest rates grew beyond their ability to pay?

Did Bear Stearns fail because it couldn't walk the fine line of screwing their customers just enough to get them to keep paying mortgages, but still enough to keep the investors from pulling their money out of Bear Stearns and investing it in a company who could screw its customers even better than Bear Stearns could?

After all the COFI hasn't really changed THAT much over the past few years--it certainly hasn't hit percentages I saw (7.5%) when I bought my own house seven years ago.

Are we, as a nation, going to wind up paying a lot of money to bail out real-estate speculators, instead of letting them suffer the consequences of their folly?