10.31.2010

Correction

My swimming calculations were off. I swam 600 yards last time. Today I swam 800 yards. Tiring.

10.28.2010

Swimming

Back to exercising today, after quite a long layoff. About three weeks since I've been regularly going. I've switched to swimming for the season. I'm starting easily, and did three sets of 150 yards. Still, that was tiring.

10.26.2010

Surprises

I guess I like them, sort of. If I don't have to wait for them.

10.24.2010

Grown Up

One of the ways I know that I've become an adult is that I have yet to attempt to make myself a bow-and-arrow out of the dowels I have in the closet (it would be awesome).

10.21.2010

More Advice

The introductions "I'm not a bigot, but..." and "It may sound petty, but..." leave very little room for error on the dismount. Consider avoiding them.

10.20.2010

The Girl With the Stolen Laptop

Wow. Honor amongfrom thieves?

10.19.2010

Dental Update!

Had another one in my endless series of appointments. A few fillings, pretty quick. One close to the root, so we'll see if it is okay. The next one (I guess by implication, two) should be more exciting, what with a for sure crown and probable root canal. But after that, my chompers should be back into decent repair.

10.15.2010

Pac-12 Alignments

It sure looks like the Pac-12 may go to a North-South split. It seems clear to me that a zipper schedule would actually be, you know, fair. Arranged correctly it could even preserve the Cali games. But, no, apparently the commissioner thinks that anything other than geo-based divisions would be "too confusing" to people outside the conference.

Here's an idea, commish: cultivate the best option within the conference. Jerkface.

Check out the "Pac-12 cooler" if you are interested in a conference alignment that makes sense.

10.13.2010

Terrifying

Thanks so much, Masters of the Universe. From here:

Adam Levitin, a Georgetown University Law professor who specializes in, among many other financial regulatory issues, mortgage finance. Levitin says the documentation problems involved in the mortgage mess have the potential "to cloud title on not just foreclosed mortgages but on performing mortgages."

The article continues...

Real estate law requires real paper transfer of documents and titles, and a lot of the system went electronic without much regard to that persnickety rule. Mortgages and property titles are transferred several times in the process of a home purchase from originators to securitization sponsors to depositors to trusts. Trustees hold the note (which is the IOU on the mortgage), the mortgage (the security that says the house is collateral) and the assignment of the note and security instrument.

The issue is in that final stage getting to the trust. The law demands that when the papers get moved around they are "wet ink," that is, real signatures on real paper. But Prof. Levin tells me that's not the worst of it. Affidavits assigned to the notes and security instruments are supposed to be endorsed over to the trust at the time of sale, but in many foreclosure scenarios the affidavits have been backdated illegally.

Further...

So with the chain of documentation now in question, and trustee ownership in question, here is one legal scenario, according to Prof. Levitin:

"The mortgage is still owed, but there's going to be a problem figuring out who actually holds the mortgage, and they would be the ones bringing the foreclosure. You have a trust that has been getting payments from borrowers for years that it has no right to receive. So you might see borrowers suing the trusts saying give me my money back, you're stealing my money. You're going to then have trusts that don't have any assets that have been issuing securities that say they're backed by a whole bunch of assets, and you're going to have investors suing the trustees for failing to inspect the collateral files, which the trustees say they're going to do, and you're going to have trustees suing the securitization sponsors for violating their representations and warrantees about what they were transferring."

But I thought that financial innovation was supposed to benefit both the producers and the consumers!