I wish that I could have had more time with this book, but is still a reasonably new volume and someone else in Fairfax County wanted to read it! So, I had to rush thru the last 80-ish pages on Tuesday morning before taking it back (can’t really complain because I use holds to get most of the books that I want to read from the library … it is a habit developed in Oxford working with the strange stack request system).

So, a book about a life with cheese … well, not exactly.  This is an autobiography about a cheesemonger, Gordon Edgar, that never set out to become a food professional.  Instead, he was a punk and fixture in the 80′s San Francisco counter-culture that, on a fluke, got a job at the Rainbow Co-op.  From this slightly random move from a job cleaning buses used by hippies to working at the Rainbow’s cheese section, Gordon explains how his life as a punk and his extracurriculars at university helped to shape his career as the Cheese Man. Read more »

Would you pay $103,000 for this shack?

The more that I read about the housing crisis, it seems that it has two very clear sides.  First, are the sub-prime mortgages that were given to people like Marvene Halterman living in that little blue shack.  On the other side of the equation are people like Francine Hardaway, who despite being in a position to made a reasonable purchase were swayed (for some reason or another) into a purchase that they should not have made on terms which should have been avoided.  But, what do these two types of people have in common? Read more »