Don't fool yourself into thinking that these stats mean it's cheap to build right now. Sure, you can get contractors to return your phone call and there's skilled labor available. But raw materials are at record highs and subcontractors are going to pad their bids in order to protect themselves from the price hikes that are going to take place in the months before they actually arrive on the job.

I've been working with an architect for about nine months on a major home remodel project here in LA: adding a 2nd story and pushing out a couple walls at the back of the house to add about 845 sq. feet (to a 1285 sq. foot house), adding an additional bathroom, all new doors and windows, reconfiguring the space on the first floor, etc. Target budget? $380K. Bid from contractors delivered in February? $550K to $575K.

The architect is as dumbfounded as I am. All of the trade journals he reads have been saying that 2008 construction prices would be at 2007 or even 2006 levels. No one seems to have anticipated that raw materials would be so costly. But then again, construction materials face a global marketplace, so voracious demands for copper, steel and lumber in Shanghai and Dubai drive up the cost for modest construction projects in Los Angeles...

Interesting. There was a play mounted here in the LA area last fall called Canned Peaches in Syrup that took place in post-apocalyptic landscape where the surviving humans were either vegetarians or cannibals. Wonder if Carol saw it. Seems like it might have inspired this strip.

http://www.laweekly.com/stage/theater/canned-peaches-in-syrup-eat-me/17489/

Isn't that "net" in the illustration attached to a computer mouse? Perhaps it's meant to convey something more like "harnessing the power of the web"?

I think another interesting statistic is what's going on at DonorsChoose.org:

http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/leadershipboard.html?category=25

Stephen Colbert has been encouraging supporters of Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton to donate there to help out a Pennsylvania school in honor of their preferred candidate. Right now, Obama supporters are outspending Clinton supporters 5 to 1. This isn't purely an online measure as it's also a measure of who watches The Colbert Report, but I find the difference striking nonetheless.

Secondly, there's ACSH.

Secondly? That's the first time ACSH appears in the item. I reread the item a second time and I'm guessing that the scientist that "Stier then quotes" is from ACSH. But as written, the appearance of ACSH three quarters of the way in is confusing. And I had to use Google to find out that ACSH stands for American Council on Science and Health...

What is this current obsession with highlighting reader supplied content? I go to Dilbert.com because I want to read Dilbert strips. You know? Those things that Scott Adams draws and writes? I don't care which strips are most popular. I don't care how many stars other readers might give a particular strip. I have no interest in wading through a bunch of alternate punchlines supplied by readers.

What I would like to be able to do, and used to be able to do relatively easily until the site was redesigned, is read the strips in published order. There tends to be something of a storyline that develops each week and I often visit on Fridays in order to read that week's strips. It used to be that you could click on "Read Past Strips", click on a date in the calendar and then read through the strips in order. Now it's: click on "Strips" (and hope that the date on which you want to start reading is listed on that page or you're forced to do a date based search), click on a particular strip, wait for it to load, enjoy said strip, click the back button to get to the list of strips, click on the next one, wait for it to load, etc.

Lately it seems to me that every web redesign I come across makes it harder to do the thing that I visit that page to do and/or buries the unique asset that the site provides (e.g., the writing of Scott Adams) and spotlights the contribution and comments of the site's readers. Comment sections and blogs (and, yes, letter pages where I'm typing this rant) abound. Why do publishers think that providing more of what's already abundant is going to attract more readers?

(Note to the LA Times: there are approximately 4,397,214 places on the web I can go to read other diner's reviews of local restaurants. There is only one place I can go to read the the opinion of your professional critics. Why do you make it so hard to find the latter and so easy to find the former? Why bury your unique assets? Why should I bother to visit?)

The picture captioned, The colossal squid's eyes, is actually a picture of the two-part lens of the eye. It is not the entire eye.

Not every taxpayer is getting a stimulus check. The payments start to phase out at $75K and end at $87K. If your AGI is above $87K, you don't get a thing. Oh, and at the other end of the spectrum, if you earned less than $3K you're in the same boat as Bill Gates: you get nothing.

Note what you're agreeing to when you open an acccount:

After each purchase you make, the Store you purchase from will send us your purchase information which we will use to process your cashback. In the future, we may also use your purchase information to help personalize your experience which may include displaying customized advertising and content.

If I decide I'm not comfortable with Microsoft keeping tabs on everything I purchase on-line, I may stick with my tried and true method of checking Pricegrabber and Amazon before making an on-line purchase.