So the elections were a disaster and it's getty chilly and we've lost an hour of daylight. I still feel pretty good. I'm pleased. I jazzed. I'm chuffed. I don't like to use the h-word recklessly, but I would admit to feeling jolly these days, and I have a reason:

It didn't quite fold--like the cheap camera to which Rabbi Yehua Levin likened Carl Paladino after the latter backed off his nasty remarks about homosexuals and gay marriage--but our mortgage bank, Chase Home Weasel, finally 'fessed up, in writing, to wrongdoing.

Readers of my previous posts on...

Carl Paladino has been relatively quiet lately. This interlude began after the Orthodox rabbi who claims partial authorship for the candidate's sharp indictment of homosexuality, homosexuals, the Gay Pride Parade and anyone tolerant of the aforementioned, especially if named Cuomo, withdrew his support for Paladino. The reason: Paladino's sort-of-but-not-quite apology...

Readers of my recent posts know that my wife and I are locked in combat with our mortgage bank, which persists in creating false penalties to add to our mortgage bill. Last week, the day after the receipt from our certified letter to Jamie Dimon returned to us,...

Readers of my last Chase Home Weasel Update on Huffpo know that we are four weeks past the talk with the Tax Department's dulcet JoAnne, during which she said it might take the bank as much as two weeks to undue the havoc it had wreaked upon our...

For a couple of weeks after my post about Chase Home Finance's continuing attempts to defraud my wife and me, things were all quiet on the mortgage front, almost. We mailed in our August payment early (just principle and interest, just what we owe), so it would arrive...

Our mortgage bank says we have to pay our next door neighbor's water bill.

Last month, we got a letter from Chase Home Finance stating that we were delinquent in our payments. So Chase paid our neighbor's water bill and established an escrow account into which it...

Who knew?

Who knew that the final resting place of John Brown, who earned fame and infamy in Kansas and Virginia, was the rocky soil of North Elba, New York, an Adirondack hamlet just outside Lake Placid?

I didn't. I assumed he was buried in Virginia, where he was...

Last week, I received a letter from the Friends of John Boehner containing a questionnaire entitled the 2009 Republican Leader's Survey. I am a registered Democrat living in New York City, in a neighborhood in which Republicans are probably outnumbered by, I don't know, Wiccans or Basque speakers....

"Denizens of Brownstone Brooklyn like to pad around in plastic clogs..." -- "Brooklyn, Meet Your Oligarch" by Clifford J. Levy, the New York Times, Sunday

"...W. pads around the White House in Crocs..." -- The Devil Wears Crocs by Maureen Dowd, the New York Times, Sunday

I'm mad...

Last month marked the twentieth anniversary of my family's move to our current address, so I've been thinking about my neighborhood and the whole idea of neighborhood, at no time more strongly than a couple of Saturday morning's ago, when I was walking home with George from his off-leash hour...

For the last year and half, I've been taking a weekly acting class, a renewal of an old love after twenty-something years away. It's a long story. Anyway, an unanticipated benefit of my return to The Theatre is the pleasure of shlepping all over town to see...

It's hard to find encouraging business news these days, so it was with some enthusiasm that the New York Times reported recently on a little-known segment of our brave new economy that is going strong: poop scoopers or, as they prefer to be called, animal waste specialists. For many,...

My wife says the holidays feel shorter this year because Thanksgiving came relatively late in November. To me the holidays feel longer this year because they started on November 4th, when I waited almost an hour and a half to vote. I've voted at the same polling station for nineteen...

A few weeks ago, my wife and I drove our son to college. All went smoothly after the initial disagreement about how to mount the new rooftop cargo thing so it would neither fly off within a few miles nor cause the car to hydroplane out of control on the...

In all my years of bespoke suit lust, I never contemplated getting one from anywhere other than Savile Row. My yearnings have focused particularly on Anderson and Sheppard, a venerable establishment known for the soft lines of its house style, whose clients have included Rudolph Valentino, Duke Ellington and...

The morning after my birthday, I was effervescing over breakfast about the glories of the previous day, chiefly my impending ensemble, when my wife asked if I'd noticed how much clothing had been on my mind lately. Apparently, my cutting observations of our network anchor's wardrobe had become more frequent...

Part One: Shock and Awe

For my recent Very Important Birthday, my wife gave me a bespoke suit. She could not, of course, present me with an actual, corporeal suit; it doesn't exist yet. A bespoke suit doesn't come into existence until there have been discussions, negotiations and...

It's too bad that "There are no second acts in American lives," is probably F. Scott Fitzgerald's most frequently quoted line. It's not his best. Of course, Fitzgerald was dead by the time he was 44, so you could say he didn't know much about the subject. In any case,...