The Hainan Island Incident of 2001 is overshadowed by events that happened later that year, but when it transpired, it set the then-still-nascent Internet abuzz. An American spy plane, which had been flying over a disputed section of the South China Sea, collided with a Chinese fighter jet and was forced to make an emergency …
I was going to research how manufactured homes are tied down, but realized before I typed the query into Google that I don’t have to think any more. Instead, I typed, How are manufactured homes anchored into Chat GPT, and this came out: Manufactured homes are anchored to the ground using a variety of methods, …
Moral Hazard, by Kate Jennings, is a book that was published to great reviews and moderate sales in 2002 and then sunk like a stone. You can pick it up for under five bucks now on Thriftbooks, but for a while you could buy it on Amazon for a penny plus shipping. It is the …
Brendan Behan made much of growing up in a tenement, but he did not say that his grandmother owned the building. Brendan’s mother’s mother, Christine English, was referred to as the Empress of Russell Street, because she owned several tenement houses there, each of which could hold up to a hundred people. Residents would come …
–Assume a water molecule. –Where am I? -Some AirBNB in central New York. -What time is it? –3:45 AM. –Can I take a piss, O Socrates? -Of course. -Can I get a drink? -What can you do with a quart of water molecules? -Drink, wash, flush the toilet, put out fires. -Where does a water …
Here’s a text a resident of my park in northern New York who I will call Maria Gutierrez recently sent to Mike, the manager of that park: Hi Mike, I really need your help. What do I have to do to take Casey off of this lease? I don’t want him here anymore. I have …
I have written previously about the people in the title division of the New York State DMV. It is no longer cool to make jokes about Polish people, Italians, people with physical disabilities, people with learning differences, Black people, Asians, Hispanics, gay and transgender people, Jews or Irish people. It is still OK, but not …
Imagine a Twilight Zone episode that occurs in a mobile home park. There is the usual cast of characters. The evil park owner who cares about nothing but money (think oil executives in The Wages of Fear); The busybody who is in everyone’s business; the town drunk; the conspiracy theorist who get his news from …
Here’s a recent conversation between me and an IT rep from Rent Manager: It’s a system-wide problem. We are working to correct it. Can you give me an ETA? We are working to fix the problem. Can you give me a ballpark estimate? It will be fixed quickly. Could you give me your best estimate …
Here’s a text conversation I recently had with a guy who scraps homes in my park in central New York. A very good tenant just moved out of a park-owned home and bought another home in the same park. The home they moved out of is a crappy 1978 single-wide with a leak nobody can …