Sorry, can I geeze for a moment? Looking through my Post this weekend, I was struck by how many merchants were offering very generous terms to finance the acquisition of HDTVs. Circuit City, for instance, offers 36 months interest free to anyone who spends more than $999 on a TV—the only catch is you have to sign up for Circuit City’s credit card. Best Buy is offering a similar deal as long as you let something called the Geek Squad into your home to install your purchase (buy online and install the TV yourself, and you can get a free massage chair instead).

Clearly, our economy is doomed. Anyone who takes out a three-year loan to buy a freaking TELEVISION needs to reexamine his or her priorities, stat, and any country whose economic well-being hinges on people having their priorities so screwed up is Rome just before the Vandals hit. Let’s say you buy the Sharp 52-inch AQUOS™ 1080p 120 Hz LCD HDTV for $3499.99 before instant savings of $350 at Best Buy. That’s only $87 a month for the next three years, plus you get a “free” Sharp Blu-Ray Disc™ player. Of course, in three years, that 1080p 120 Hz LCD HDTV will be worth a tenth of what you paid for it, technology will have marched grimly on, and you’ll be out the $600 you could have earned in a no-load mutual fund that tracks the market, even in a recession. Good thing you’ve got a massage chair.

The Washington Business Journal has an interesting piece in this week’s issue about the development potential of school properties on the closure list. “At the top of the list might be Hine Junior High School, a 131,300 square-foot Capital Hill building at the corner of Eighth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue SE that is set snuggly among Eastern Market, the Metro station of the same name and the Barracks Row retail corridor,” writes reporter Jonathan O’Connell. The article also mentions three sites in the prime-for-development Brookland area. (And O’Connell did track down one developer, Jim Abdo of Abdo Development, willing to go on record saying he was “very interested in looking at what’s available.”) At least four buildings look safe from bulldozers, according to the article, the Ward 8 schools: Wilkinson Elementary, Douglass Transition Center, Green Elementary, P.R. Harris Educational Center.

Photo credit: Darrow Montgomery

So it turns out merchants are not allowed to enforce minimums for credit card purchases — at least under the agreements they sign with MasterCard and Visa. Extra charges for using plastic are usually a no-no too, although stores may offer discounts for buying with cash. This information came as something of a revelation for someone who almost always forgets cash. But I’m not sure how little old me would enforce it. Threaten the barista?

I know the credit card companies bleed stores with fees for each transaction. But I’m a lazy consumer. I want my $1.50 coffee now.

British writer Tom Hodgkinson has a recommendation for attacking stress: fuck it. More precisely, according to the chapter titles of his new book, The Freedom Manifesto, you can just opt out of it all–give up on work, say no to government, abandon the rat race, and somehow enjoy life without alienating the friends and family members I imagine you’d soon be mooching off of. (Flipping through the book, I gather a ukulele is involved.) Still, I was willing to give the book a chance, lured in by the subtitle: How to Free Yourself From Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste. Hey, I have a mortgage and go to supermarkets! Let’s find my Zen!

It took only three paragraphs before I crashed into this brick wall:

In the Middle Ages, despite the hierarchies, we used to organize things for ourselves. The vast majority of the manacles discussed in this book had not been invented. Life was self-determined and full of variety.

As this guy would say: What up the fuck? When Hodgkinson writes, “full of variety,” he doesn’t mean “full of death, pain, and abuses under feudalism.” He means: “full of amazing, freewheeling joy.” In a perverse way, I’m sort of in love with how Hodgkinson dismisses countless examples of war, oppression, enslavement, disease, and all-around soul- and body-crushing horribleness that was life for most people during medieval times, just by inserting a qualifier between appositive commas. Oh, there were a few “heirarchies,” sure, but otherwise the 14th century was awesome.

Skipping ahead, desperate for something that might justify this silliness, or identify the book as a prank, or at least make a lick of sense, I came across this: “Yes, I would have been happy to be a peasant, a cleric or a noble.” Clearly the British are different than we Americans, but Hodgkinson has apparently enjoyed some success with his magazine, the Idler. I’m not familiar with it–if you are, could you please point me to something of Hodgkinson’s that isn’t brain-shatteringly idiotic?

Chore and time spent on it:

Grocery shopping: 1.5 hours

Making bread: 1 hour

Turkey-related prep: 45 mins.

Make Jell-O salad: 25 mins.

Make mashed potatoes: 20 mins.

Stuffing prep: 1 hour

Gravy prep: 35 mins

Pie prep: 1.5 hours

Cleanup: 1 hour

Total labor: 8 hours

Time spent eating dinner: 45 mins.

Strategy for next year: sponge off of family/friends/neighbors. We’ll bring the wine.

Yesterday, Forbes came out with its annual list of the 400 richest Americans. A few of them hail from the D.C. metropolitan area. I’m guessing none of these people are actually your neighbors; City Desk probably doesn’t reach the over-the-hill billionaire demographic. But somewhere out there behind a fence that costs more than your annual salary, the billionaires lie.

In D.C., there are two: the Rales brothers, Mitchell and Steven, number 117 and 135 respectively. The source of their income is Danaher Corporation, whose various businesses manufacture everything from hand tools to electronic voting systems for elections. According to the blurb in Forbes, “Danaher” is the name of a Montana stream where the two brothers once fished.

Also in the area are Ted Lerner (owner of the Washington Nationals ), who lives in Chevy Chase; David Rubenstein (founder of the Carlyle Group), of Bethesda; two Marriott family-members, both of Potomac; Virginia-based John Mars and Forrest Mars Jr. (of Mars candy fame); and a few others. Bill Gates tops the list, followed by Warren Buffett.

The youngest guy on there is Houston-based John Arnold, 33, who made his money in hedge funds. He’s just a year younger than the Google guys, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Also, this year every member of elite 400 is a billionaire.