Year: 2006

Michael Monahan: ‘Remember that Marx brothers’ routine? Groucho is the shady real estate salesman (in Florida, of course), speaking to a crowd of would-be ‘investors’ . . . ‘Folks, we got it all. You can get brick. You can get wood. You can get stucco. Ohhhh, how you can get stuck-o.’ Well, here are some painfully precise anecdotes, ’06 versions, from Sacramento.’

☞ Michael links us to a blog, ‘Flippers in Trouble,’ which shows the previous sales prices and current asking prices of 188 properties. For example, a nice 6 bedroom house someone paid $858,500 for on March 16, 2005, and now has on the market asking $804,900. The blog shows that as a 6.2% LOSS, but that only begins to state the pain. That’s the asking price.

Let’s say someone offers $725,000 and they reach a deal at $775,000. Less 6% brokerage and $5,000 in additional closing costs = $723,500. So now the owner is down $135,000 (15.7% LOSS). Except he may have spent some money fixing it up, which would widen the loss.

Not to mention the costs he may be incurring ‘carrying’ the house while it’s on the market. Sure, maybe he lives in it himself and has not already bought or rented a second place in the city he’s been transferred to . . . or maybe he has a wonderful tenant who is happy to pay full rent as prospective buyers come traipsing through – and to keep paying that rent right up to the day of ‘closing.’ But it would not be at all unusual for the seller to lose two or three months’ rent in this process, but still be on the hook for his mortgage payments, property tax, insurance, lawn care and all the rest – widening the loss further.

And what if he doesn’t get $775,000?

• Faced with the prospect of monthly carrying costs for an empty house, and fears of a weakening real estate market, he’ll settle for $750,000 instead (say) – giving him a loss of at least $160,000 for his year and a half of effort on this project.

• Or, unwilling to take less, he’ll watch as the market weakens further . . . and then, when he finally is ready to accept $750,000, find that the new low ball offer he’s faced with is $650,000.

At some point, and despite the cost to his credit rating, he might just hand the keys to the bank. Foreclosures will not do much to strengthen the market for others on the Flippers in Trouble list.

And if none of this happens? Terrific.

JET LAG ADVISOR

Alan Caroe: ‘This very useful site was described in yesterday’s LA Times.

If they made a movie about YOUR HOUSE, would you go see it?
Well, they have.

REAL ESTATE

So is the air going out of the balloon? And if so, how much is left to go – and how fast? And everywhere?

I dunno, I dunno, I dunno.

But I shorted a housing-related stock (symbol NVR) at $273 a share on October 10, 2002 – at least I did you the courtesy of not telling you – only to see it rise to $747 a share a couple of years later, where, wincing, I doubled down (doubled up?), and then to $938 last July – where I should have told you about it, because it closed last night at $426.

Which is a long way of saying that investors seem to think the future is not as bright for housing stocks as they did a year ago.

Or take WCI Communities, whose stock closed last night at $15.48, down from $35.20 less than a year ago.

If the stock market is a barometer, predicting storms ahead – well, there may be some.

(Then again, investors don’t always get it right. And when they do, they often over-react. So maybe these stocks are ‘oversold’ and maybe the worst of the slump in residential housing is actually behind us. I don’t think so, but what do I know?)

Thanks to Michael (below) for pulling together some interesting tea leaves for us to read.

But first:

Pieter: ‘Living in an overpriced house in LA, it would be great to be able to lock in current profits, without having to sell – and also be protected against the coming downturn. What do you think of these options and futures, tied to specific real estate markets (Los Angeles, Miami, New York, etc.)?’

☞ I haven’t used them and will be interested in the thoughts of others. A few basics though: (a) futures are a lot riskier than options, so if you do this, use options; (b) any profits you do make will likely be taxed at short-term rates (from what I could see on the CME site, these options don’t go out past next May, not long enough to take a long-term gain); but mainly (c) you and I are not the only ones thinking prices could drop – so that expectation will be built into the price of the options. (If it’s not, they could be a bargain – or the market could simply be smarter than we are, foretelling a further rise in home prices we don’t see.) You could do okay hedging against a sharp drop in home prices; but these are not easy games to play and win.

And now:

Michael Monahan: ‘Looks like the days of reckoning have finally arrived. Are the stars in alignment for this to be the perfect storm? Teasers gleaned from Housing Tracker:’

Greater Miami area:

Greater Phoenix area:

☞ Aha. Triple the inventory overhanging the market. That can’t be good. And Michael has more. (I won’t translate all the terms . . . I think you’ll get a sense of what they mean from the context. Just picture chickens coming home to roost.)

‘Data collected from the Mortgage Brokers Association for Responsible Lending:’

As of September 2005, Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) accounted for roughly 70% of the prime mortgage products originated and securitized and 80% of the sub-prime sector.

49.3% of ARMs with interest-only features originated in 2004 lacked full documentation.

In 2006 97.5% of borrowers are likely to face a payment shock of at least 25% and 75% of borrowers could face a shock of 50% or more. [This strikes me as impossibly high, unless it refers specifically to adjustable-rate mortgages taken out recently, with teaser rates. – A.T.]

These changes do not include additional shocks that would result when monthly principal repayments kick in on loans that began as ‘interest-only.’

Payments will increase on 41% of the outstanding subprime loans in 2006 alone.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, almost 75% of mortgage loans taken out last year (2005) allowed borrowers to delay the payment of principle. Negatively amortized loans jumped to 29% of the Bay Area mortgage market from less than 10% in 2004.

70% of borrowers with ARMs that allow negative amortization are currently making minimum payments. [I.e., their mortgages are actually growing slightly, not shrinking slightly, each month.]

[And speaking of increasing indebtedness:] In 2004 $600 BILLION of consumers’ spending power was from borrowing against home values – double that year’s tax cuts, as estimated by Brooking Institution scholar Peter Orzag.

2nd homes accounted for 14% of new mortgages in 2004; in 2000 it was only 7%. Mr. Greenspan said that the fact that someone can sell a 2nd home without moving, “suggests that speculative activity may have had a greater role in generating the recent increases than it customarily has had in the past.”

‘For more, check out thehousingbubbleblog.com.’

☞ More? You think we can take more and still breathe? Well, perhaps we can if we’re renters flush with cash waiting for the possible bargains.

And yet Michael presses on:

‘Some other links that might help your readers: piggington.com has two articles at page top that strike me as really good: Evidence of a California Housing Bubble and Risks of a Serious Home Price Decline.’

☞ Those are about Southern California. Fortunately, you live in New Jersey.

Oops. Michael points us to this ‘beautiful historical document‘ – from the Northern New Jersey Real Estate Bubble Blog (motto: keeping a watchful eye on our small part of the largest asset bubble in history.)

And then there’s this (do not click if you are offended but thinly-veiled four-letter words): housingbubblecasualty.com.

Finally, Michael clipped this July 13, 2006, post from piggington:

I am a Realtor here in San Diego and I am continually amazed at the depth of misconceptions in our industry. I have usually abstained from postings on-line but in the past few months, usually after listing appointments [i.e., where he meets with a prospective seller about listing his home], I have felt more and more compelled to do so. …

First let’s look at the source of data which is Dataquick, who in turn gathers numbers from the sold entries that realtors like me enter into the MLS.

Rule 1, when you enter a sold price, you DO NOT subtract credits. Now, in today’s sales, I would estimate that, due to declining conditions, credits and rebates, are present in 30-50% of home sales. So right off the bat, the Dataquick numbers are not even accurate [because they don’t reflect those credits].

Second, online housing comparison and estimators like Zillow, Home Insight, even Realtor.com continue to propagate INCOMPLETE information.

Consumers go to ALL of these sites to value their home. Well do any of you readers know how these sites make their valuations? They simply use the MLS information. However how far back to they go? Listen guys, most of my listing appointments consist of trying to demonstrate what the market is doing. That entails reversing peoples opinions that they are entitled to a certain price of their home because that is what the house down the street sold for in 2004 or that is what Zillow told them.

When I ask them how Zillow came up with the valuation they do not know. When I ask them how many expired, cancelled and withdrawn listings are in their mapcode, they do not know. Having a degree in electrical engineering has made me totally anal about data. If you do not use accurate data, your analysis is flawed and soon becomes pointless.

As for the run up in prices and who is to blame… That is EASY…The buyers are to blame. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BUY A HOME.

As far as I know nobody has ever held a gun to a buyer’s head and forced him to sign a contract. Don’t blame appraisers, realtors, mortgage brokers, or even Uncle Sam.

In the past 3 days I have gone to 3 listing appointments … all speculators who bought a few months ago and want to spin the properties. In each case I simply showed them the stats of their neighborhoods. In each case they were all severely disappointed.

One guy got a 4/2 in Escondido for 525k after it had been on the market for 70 days back in March. It was listed at 525k to 610k. (Obviously a Prudential listing) So when he tells me he wants to get 625k for it (and he did some nice work inside) and I tell him I can price it at 625k, but I don’t think it will sell, he doesn’t understand why… Well if nobody touched it at 525k for 70 days what does that tell you? When I asked him why he didn’t try to get it at 475k he said they wouldn’t do that because it would have been a short sale. So what? Let it foreclose and buy it then.

I lost A TON of money on stocks in 2001… I could have blamed my money manager, I could have blamed Wall Street, I EVEN INVESTED IN ENRON. It was simply stupidity and greed on my part. Nobody forced me to do these stupid things. Bad decisions are usually motivated by emotions such as greed or paranoia. Generally they are not motivated by hard analysis, patience, and/or data. Yes through the past 10 years most realtors told you if you don’t buy now you may never get in… but you didn’t have to buy. I have no sympathy for overextended homeowners. Is it too much to simply put a budget on paper BEFORE you buy? Most buyers I work with have already been on-line looking for homes for weeks and even months before they contact me. When I ask them if they have written up a budget for their financial future that would include a mortgage, property taxes and insurance over 90% of them say NOT AT ALL.

Yes I represent sellers but also homebuyers and yes I encourage them to finance their purchases with standard 30-year fixed rate mortgages. When they cannot afford the payment my first sentence to them is, maybe you should wait until you can afford the payment rather than buy now. Yet that statement is more than likely met with deaf ears. The response to that is, what about some of these new loan programs I hear about? So I point them to a mortgage broker and let them do their thing… In all cases I do review their loan program and sit down with them to point out the risks of what their payment will be in 3, 5 and 7 years. I tell them I don’t LIKE those vehicles but as long as THEY KNOW the possible outcomes, then I will not feel I acted improperly.

My name is Adam Rappoport and my brokerage is G & R Realty.

Finally, my read on the market is that we will continue to stay flat with single digit depreciation in low and mid range housing for the next few years. A wild card may be an impending recession that I feel should come upon us soon and we may see a cash infusion into the economy as soon as next summer. The other wild card is stagflation which may be an ugly reality as it would force the rates to stay high and that would definitely accelerate home depreciation. Just….my….guess.

☞ My Dad used to say, ‘Life is not a business.’ If you view your home as a home, not a speculation – and if you can afford to live in it – who cares what happens to real estate prices over the next few years? Otherwise, it seems to me there could be pain ahead.

WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR?

This article might pique your interest in this movie.

HURRICANES FOR DUMMIES

A nice review of our friend Bryan’s Hurricane Almanac – and a plug for his web site. Tell me this isn’t a great way to get your 12-year-old interested in science.

JUST ANOTHER FALSE ALARM?

William McLeese: ‘In the final chapter of his superb book Collapse, Jared Diamond points out that a huge percentage of fire alarms turn out to be false. If we considered false alarms an excuse for inaction, we would have abolished fire departments long ago.’

Ted Gault: ‘Thanks so much for mentioning that Y2K was AVERTED due to much effort; it wasn’t a hoax. Few beyond those of us that worked to prevent the problem, and our accountants who funded the effort, seem to remember that today.’

TREMENDOUS IMMEDIATE

Joel Margolis: ‘If, as you say, Bush, Cheney and Rice were told by the CIA at Blair House on January 7, 2001, that Osama Bin Laden posed a ‘tremendous’ and ‘immediate’ threat to the United States, could you tell me exactly what your heroes – Clinton, Gore, Cohen, Reno, et. al. – did about it? Or did the threat only occur on January 7, 2001?’

☞ You can read about it in Bob Woodward’s largely pro-Bush Bush at War. Go to Amazon and ‘Search Inside the Book’ on ‘Blair House.’ You’ll find it at page 18. You will see that ‘President Clinton had approved five separate intelligence orders authorizing covert action to attempt to destroy bin Laden and his network.’ The CIA was urging Bush to continue or step up those efforts; instead, he shut them down and (we know from Bush’s first Treasury Secretary’s book) turned his attention to Iraq.

APES

Bob Neinast: ‘Regarding the so-called ‘global cooling’ crisis in the 1970s, that was media hype. Very few scientists were pushing that. Click here. And regarding whoever got mad at you for saying we descended from apes, they are wrong, too. The common ancestor of us and the other apes would almost certainly also be called an ape, by any reasonable definition of the word. Indeed, by any reasonable scientific definition of the word, we are apes. I am an ape. My father was an ape. I am descended from my father.’

Kathy Flake: ‘I was also going to send you a (not-so-angry) message saying that we did not descend from apes but rather a common ancestor, but I asked my daughter, who is studying anthropology, and she informed me that although humans and apes descended from a common ancestor, that common ancestor was an ape.’

If they made a movie about YOUR HOUSE, would you go see it?
Well, they have.

Monday (which through the miracle of relativity, traveling at the speed of light, you can experience today): Real Estate

For MYM owners ONLY:

YOU CAN STILL PRINT CHECKS — MYM LIVES!

Charlie Engelke: ‘Bill Strong reported that he couldn’t print from MYM to the USB printers on his laptop. Your solution of printing to disk works, but there’s another way. MYM wants to print to LPT1:, which was always the printer connected to the parallel port (which few PCs have any more). But Windows networking will let you assign the name LPT1: to any network printer, and MYM works with such printers. Say your network printer name is MYPRINTER, on a PC named MYPC. Then run the following command (from a DOS window, or using the Start/Run menu choice):

net use LPT1: \\MYPC\MYPRINTER /persistent:yes

‘Now when you try to print from MYM, it works. I’ve been using this for years, under every version of Windows through XP (I haven’t tried Vista yet). But Bill wants to print to a local USB printer, not a network printer. The solution is emotionally dissatisfying, but it works: share the USB printer. You can do this with the Control Panel’s Printers and Faxes applet (see below). Once you share it, you can run the ‘net use’ command. I’ve done this for laptops, and it works with MYM.

‘Here’s how you do the ‘share’ thing:

‘Open the Control Panel and select Printers and Faxes. You should see a list or box of printers (or maybe only one). Right click on the printer you want to use, and select Properties from the pop-up menu that appears. The Properties window that opens has a lot of tabs, one of which is labeled ‘Sharing.’ Select that tab, and then click the radio button ‘Share this printer.’ It will fill in the blank for ‘Share name’ for you, but the name it fills in may be long and have spaces, which would make the ‘net use’ command harder to run later, so enter a short, easy to type name instead – perhaps ‘MYMPrint.’ Click the Okay button to close the Properties window. If you are running security software, it may pop up and ask if you intended to do what you just did, and you’ll have to say it’s okay.

‘Next, you need to know your PC’s name. (If you don’t know it, use the Control Panel and select System, which will open a Properties window. Click on the tab labeled ‘Computer Name.’ The ‘Full computer name:’ will be displayed (always followed by a period that is NOT part of the name). Take note of it and cancel to close the window.

‘Suppose your computer name is called mypc. Finally, use Start/Run and type the command

net use lpt1: \\mypc\MYMPrint /persistent:yes

‘And now MYM should print. I’ve been using the “net use” trick for years and years successfully, but with real network printers. The second level of the trick, of sharing a local printer and then “net use” it from the same PC, worked for me in the past but I haven’t actually had a local printer on a laptop and used it lately.’

☞ Oh, Charlie. Would you consider living in my office closet? I think everyone needs a Charlie Engelke. Thank you!

I really wasn’t trying to take today off; the heat wave melted my broadband connection (or something like that). Back tomorrow.

AH, THE PRESCIENCE

These quotes in Paul Krugman’s current column could make you cry:

Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits for the region. …Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart, and our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced.

— Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002

Peacekeeping requirements in Iraq might be much lower than historical experience in the Balkans suggests. There’s been none of the record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another that produced so much bloodshed and permanent scars in Bosnia.

— Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defense Feb. 27, 2003.

A GRAND TIME

But it was his previous New York Times column I wanted to highlight.

(What? You still don’t subscribe to the Times on-line?)

Left Behind Economics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 14, 2006

. . . Here’s what happened in 2004 [the latest year for which data is available]. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income – the purchasing power of the typical family – actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?

. . . even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.

. . . Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution – that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans – gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people who were already in the economic stratosphere.

. . . the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004.

In short, it’s a great economy if you’re a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.

LITTLE OLD LADIES

Bob: ‘You write: ‘Those clipping services employed little old ladies (one assumes).’ Just for the record, I recently finished reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Author Betty Smith was hired by a clipping service at age 14 (she told them she was 16). She says her fellow employees were relatively young because their eyes would eventually go bad from the constant reading.’

YOUR OWN CLIPPING SERVICE

In the old days, it worked like this. (Really, it did.) Your company – or, if you were an author or a movie star, your publisher or Paramount – would pay a monthly retainer to a clipping service that subscribed to virtually all the newspapers and magazines in the land. Those services employed little old ladies (one assumes) to read it all and snip any mention of you or your company or its products. To those snipped out clippings would be affixed a little label with the name of the newspaper in which it had appeared and the date . . . and each week a stack of clippings would appear in your mail and the mail of all their other clients. Now, you just click here and get it all free and instantly as it happens. (If you were on TV, a company would call you and offer to sell you an audio recording it had made. Today, you just TiVo it.)

WMT

Douglas Hutchison: ‘Shares of Wal-Mart have slid this week. Are you still bullish?’

☞ If we have an uneventful economy and markets – yes. But never forget that economic and financial hard times recur periodically, so you should never borrow to invest in the stock market, nor invest with money you might need in the next few years.

RELATIVE VALUE

Joe Cherner: ‘Once again we find Pfizer and Philip Morris with similar market caps, similar dividends, and similar P/Es. One kills hundreds of thousands of people a year and one cures hundreds of thousands of people a year. Never underestimate the power of addictive drugs.’

☞ When I consider how web boggle has taken over my life, without even altering my body chemistry (so far as I can tell), I can only begin to imagine what a curse a real addiction is like.

A POSITIVELY GRAND TIME

Don Rudolph: ‘Please read a copy of Class War in America by Charles M. Kelly. It should be required reading in every Economics classroom.’

☞ ‘The most appalling thing,’ writes Amazon reviewer Robynne Williams, ‘is that the book was published in 2000, BEFORE the installation of the most rapacious Administration since the 19th century.’ She calls it a ‘superb and succinct account of the rise and rise of the plutocracy.’

Comments another Amazon reviewer, Jack Lohman: ‘Even as a life-long Republican, I find it hard to disagree with many of the arguments in this obviously Liberal writing. I highly recommend [it].’

Meanwhile . . . while you’re at it . . . consider Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich of the New York Times. In a Publisher’s Weekly nutshell:

Determined to find out how anyone could make ends meet on $7 an hour, [Ehrenreich] left behind her middle class life as a journalist except for $1000 in start-up funds, a car and her laptop computer to try to sustain herself as a low-skilled worker for a month at a time. In 1999 and 2000, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress in Key West, Fla., as a cleaning woman and a nursing home aide in Portland, Maine, and in a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, Minn. During the application process, she faced routine drug tests and spurious “personality tests”; once on the job, she endured constant surveillance and numbing harangues over infractions like serving a second roll and butter. Beset by transportation costs and high rents, she learned the tricks of the trade from her co-workers, some of whom sleep in their cars, and many of whom work when they’re vexed by arthritis, back pain or worse, yet still manage small gestures of kindness. Despite the advantages of her race, education, good health and lack of children, Ehrenreich’s income barely covered her month’s expenses in only one instance, when she worked seven days a week at two jobs (one of which provided free meals) during the off-season in a vacation town. Delivering a fast read that’s both sobering and sassy, she gives readers pause about those caught in the economy’s undertow, even in good times.

SAVE JULY 29

Turn your angst into action? Click here to find or host an event.

I’ve been writing a lot about ‘the movie’ – An Inconvenient Truth.

I even made up my own little tag line:

If they made a movie about YOUR HOUSE, would you go see it? Well, they have.

Many of you have seen it by now and I hope that this weekend the rest of you will.

I am not alone in feeling this way. David Denby, in The New Yorker: ‘Every school, college, and church group, and everyone else beyond the sway of General Motors, ExxonMobil, and the White House should see this movie, and, with luck, they will.’

And Roger Ebert, syndicated everywhere: ‘In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.’

I know some of you see this as a liberal plot to rob you of $10. But once people see the movie, they generally feel differently. Which may be why so many people (our President, for example) don’t want to see it. How inconvenient this would be if we actually had to open our eyes to it.

The good news, of course, is that if we come to grips with this inconvenient truth, we can probably solve the problem – just as we did when chlorofluorocarbons were destroying the planet’s ozone layer. The world actually came together and solved that.

The further good news is that solving this huge threat can be a terrific business, filled with jobs and profits for those nations that take the lead.

We are already doing our best to discourage high-paying American jobs in stem cell research; we’ve already ceded most of our auto industry to other nations (what was Detroit thinking?). Do we really want the same head-in-the-sand approach to our giant environmental challenges/opportunities?

Several of you forwarded a piece from the Wall Street Journal about a famous and brilliant Dane named Bjorn Lomborg (who hasn’t seen the movie), who thinks all these calls for action are silly.

Bob Price: ‘Even granted everything in the movie is correct and not exaggerated, Lomborg’s point still stands (and yes, he says he hasn’t seen it).’

☞ This would seem to be the key paragraph:

In 2004, [Lomborg] invited eight of the world’s top economists – including four Nobel Laureates – to Copenhagen, where they were asked to evaluate the world’s problems, think of the costs and efficiencies attached to solving each, and then produce a prioritized list of those most deserving of money. The well-publicized results (and let it be said here that Mr. Lomborg is no slouch when it comes to promoting himself and his work) were stunning. While the economists were from varying political stripes, they largely agreed. The numbers were just so compelling: $1 spent preventing HIV/AIDS would result in about $40 of social benefits, so the economists put it at the top of the list (followed by malnutrition, free trade and malaria). In contrast, $1 spent to abate global warming would result in only about two cents to 25 cents worth of good; so that project dropped to the bottom.

I don’t buy it. The ‘cost’ of our moving to 125 mpg flex-fuel plug-in hybrids (basically, Priuses that you can plug in at home) is NO cost, over the long run. Quite the contrary. The economic and environmental and national security benefits of consuming one-fifth the gasoline we now do are enormous – and would go a long way to reducing our CO2 emissions.

(The electricity and biofuels that would goose mileage from the Prius’s current 40mpg to 125 mpg do not come free. But they can come a lot cheaper, all things considered, than gasoline.)

And what is the ‘cost’ of not giving people tax incentives to drive Hummers?

The ‘cost’ of switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs?

The ‘cost’ of building energy-efficient homes and office buildings?

See the movie . . . and then see one more: Who Killed the Electric Car. You will not be bored for even one second, and you will leave the theater understanding the world far better than when you went in. At least I did. I was amazed at how much of this I didn’t know.

And as with its perfect companion, An Inconvenient Truth, I think you will find yourself doing what I am: urging everyone you know to see it.

Okay: Which do you want first? The movie or the peas?

FROZEN PEAS

Picture it: You’re playing racket ball or squash – with me, it was squash, but this is not a recipe about squash – and you lunge toward the front wall for the ball, pushing with enormous force off your right foot . . . and just as you do, your opponent angles his racket not flat on but edge on and smashes you in the middle of your stretched calf as hard as he can.

The pain is unbelievable. ‘F–k!’ you cry. ‘F–k! F–k! F–k! F–k!’ (You are hopping, trying to grab hold of the flat wall for support. You could not possibly lower your right foot back to the ground – the pain remains unbelievable.) ‘What did you do that for?’

Your partner has been watching, astonished.

‘I didn’t do anything. What happened? What are you talking about?’

‘You hit me!’

‘I didn’t hit you!’

‘You hit me!’

‘I’m over here!’

And – through the pain – you have to admit he is several yards away, in the far corner of the court. Your screams apparently brought him up short and kept him from retaking key after making his shot.

The pain remains excruciating. You are hopping and sweating and wondering what could possibly have happened.

‘You hit me!’ you say again with a little less conviction, as you start hopping toward the door to find a doctor or an ambulance or someone to just kill you, which right now would be a plus.

Your friend summons the pro who asks, ‘Did it feel as if someone shot you in the back of your calf with a rifle?’

‘Yes!’ you try not to shout. ‘Exactly!’ (How did he know?)

‘You split your plantaris. Basically, you tore your calf muscle. Put some ice on it, get crutches for the first two or three days, take an anti-inflammatory like Advil. Lie down for the first day and keep your calf elevated higher than your heart.’

So you hop to a vehicle, you are driven home – the pain remains acute and your calf, not small before the accident, is now the size of Alaska.

And here is where we get to the peas.

The way to ice your leg (or any other body part that may one day need icing) is to take a bag of frozen peas . . . smash it against the floor so they are all separated . . . put a thin towel around it, or a T-shirt or something . . . and put that under or atop the afflicted limb. The peas will conform to whatever shape is required.

Real guys don’t cook peas. But having a bag around can come in handy.*^†

*You should  be able to walk with a cane in about three days, with a limp in about a week, with an ache for about a month, and with an undying memory of the word plantariseven 34 years later.

^† You are wondering:  Why peas?  Why not frozen cherries?  That works too – until you start to eat the cherries.  Go with the peas.

Tomorrow (clickable today): One More Movie (and a word about Bjorn Lomborg)