Remember how we talked about commercial debt and default? AKA the “coming crisis

? Well here is the slow beginning:

The default rate for loans on office, retail, hotel and industrial properties surged to 3.8 percent from 1.6 percent a year earlier, the New York-based real estate research firm said yesterday in a report. The default rate for loans on apartment buildings climbed to 4.4 percent from 1.8 percent.

I think maybe it’s time we all show a little gratitude to John McCain. I know it’s popular to bemoan the Arizona Senator’s churlish behavior and obvious bitterness, particularly in the last year, but I think what he did today at the “Health Care Summit” shows just how much he loves this country. John McCain knows that, in a time of rising unemployment, economic uncertainty, and a political system which seems badly broken, the American people are nervous to the point of questioning their own judgment. So I think it’s fairly admirable that McCain went in front of the television cameras today and did his very best to reassure the majority of his fellow citizens that when they went to the polls back in November 2008 they made exactly the right choice. Thank you, John McCain.

People seem to… like? The Whitney Biennial?? Jerry Saltz is down. Everyone seems generally appreciative. And-oh wait! New Boston Globe art critic SEBASTIAN SMEE IS NOT HAVING IT: “Not only is it incoherent, it is overburdened with art about art, sloppy gestures of pseudo-revolt, dreary and repetitive video art, and arcane conceptualism.” He goes on.

Weather Update: The clumps of snow still fall to the ground. All is darkness, and the quietude of the storm’s progression is interrupted only by the occasional susurration of an automobile gliding by on moistened wheels. Your life thus far has amounted to nothing and when you are dead the snow will continue to fall on your grave, inexorably covering over any proof that you were ever here at all. The precipitation is supposed to stop for about a hour around 6 tonight, though, so you can look forward to that.

“Advertisements are capable of bringing forth feelings so unpleasant that we’re compelled to eliminate them by whatever means possible.”
-Indiana University marketing professor Adam Duhachek discusses a new study showing that PSAs using “guilt or shame to warn against alcohol abuse can actually have the reverse effect, spurring increased drinking among target audiences.” And how! Just reading about this study makes me want a drink, like NOW. [Via]

A working knowledge of the many celebrity scandals which keep the natives of Knifecrime Island too passive to do anything about the absolutely appalling conditions in which they live (if you can call it living) would certainly be helpful to your enjoyment (if you can call it enjoying) of this humorous “song” by “Chenille Steel,” but it is not completely necessary because there’s something oddly delightful about its sheer awfulness. (You can read some of the lyrics here, if you can call it reading, or those lyrics.) Internet, I just don’t know about you sometimes.

“He treats his trees and plants with the same nuanced appreciation he had of his Knicks teammates when he was the playmaker, or catalyst, for their offense. ‘I can look at the palms, for instance, and if I see a certain twist, I know they need water,’ he said, lifting a hose to some of the many trees that bear mangoes, avocados, apples, coconuts and cherries.”
-Nice piece on Walt Frazier’s bucolic home life in St. Croix in the Times Home and Garden section today. Reminiscent of the so-excellent-and-wonderful story a few years ago ago about Pedro Martinez gardening in Connecticut (“He is planting. He is pruning. He is talking to his tulips. ‘What about you, beauty?’ he will ask in language rarely, if ever, heard on a baseball field. ‘Aren’t you going to grow up to be so pretty?’”). And of Earl Weaver having tomato-growing contests in the bullpen at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium with groundskeeper Pat Santarone.

Grizzly bears in Manitoba are making incursions into polar bear territory, a previously unthinkable movement that sets the two groups on an almost certain course for confrontation. But who would win such a struggle? Let’s just say it’s probably not good news for the polar bears-as if they don’t have enough problems already. On the other hand, “the geographical proximity would make it more likely that polar and grizzly bears would produce hybrid offspring, labeled ‘pizzly,’ ‘prizzly,’ or ‘grolar’ bears,” which could be pretty awesome, provided they pick a better name than the three mentioned here.

Yeah this is pretty good, yesterday, when Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA!) went to town on Anthony Weiner (D-Broooooklyn), who was really going to town on Republicans being a “wholly-owned subsidiary of the insurance industry.” It demonstrates “a true sign of bipartisanship leading into a health care reform summit meant to bring both parties together,” wrote Glenn Thrush’s substitute blogger. (SARCASTICALLY I THINK?)

“It’s not just that the paper focuses on human passions; it also focuses on the right humans. The secret source of its staying power is its emphasis on what I’ll call MLNCBB: mid-level noncelebrity bad behavior, the kind of crime and punishment stories that fascinate precisely because they’re committed not by the gods and goddess of the red carpet but by (relatively) ordinary human beings who suddenly do extraordinarily ill-advised things, up to and including murder. Crime stories, usually with some bizarre, out-of-the-box twist, ones with often hidden but nonetheless accessible moral and philosophical implications, are the meat and potatoes of the Post’s stew.”
-Ron Rosenbaum examines the enduring appeal of the New York Post.

I pretty much agree with all of this, although it should be noted that the did not exactly cover themselves in glory with this one yesterday, particularly the headline. But we all get a little lazy sometimes!