• Football
• Suzuki
• Pressure
• Don't fail it, Zip it.
• Moods

Everything's a mess.

Sicily also produces lemons.

highlights and lowlights.

Housing Push for Hispanics Spawns Wave of Foreclosures:

California Rep. Joe Baca has long pushed legislation he said would "open the doors to the American Dream" for first-time home buyers in his largely Hispanic district. For many of them, those doors have slammed shut, quickly and painfully.

Mortgage lenders flooded Mr. Baca's San Bernardino, Calif., district with loans that often didn't require down payments, solid credit ratings or documentation of employment. Now, many of the Hispanics who became homeowners find themselves mired in the national housing mess.

...

An examination of that borrowing spree by The Wall Street Journal reveals that it wasn't simply the mortgage market at work. It was fueled by a campaign by low-income housing groups, Hispanic lawmakers, a congressional Hispanic housing initiative, mortgage lenders and brokers, who all were pushing to increase homeownership among Latinos.

The network included Mr. Baca, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, whose district is 58% Hispanic and ranks No. 5 among all congressional districts in percentage of home loans not tailored for prime borrowers. The caucus launched a housing initiative called Hogar -- Spanish for home -- to work with industry and community groups to increase mortgage lending to Latinos.

It's only four days into the new year and things are already going pear shaped.

Lunch, sometime soon?

Me. Istanbul. Web.

The Jets and the Patriots aren't in the NFL playoffs, so I'm watching Baltimore play Miami.  The Miami QB has thrown two interceptions this quarter.  If I had liked him when he played for the Jets I would feel bad for him now. I didn't, so I don't. 

Anyway this is a diary, not running comentary on an American football game.

ana's going to be doing the weekly Sunday brunch prompted writing chat thing (a toasted-cheese.com feature), so I thought I'd write a diary in three 10-minute chunks, with minimal editing. I'll pay about as much attention to the prompts as I do when I'm writing fiction.

Oh, and is anyone else on twitter? I'm just figuring out how to use it, but I'm finding that I like the one-sentence method of diarizing.

Inside: Mostly, a holiday round up.

Okay, go!