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From the WSJ: how to find a rich Canadian buyer for your rapidly deflating American real-estate investment.

Apologies for the long absence from the site (and from my usual space in the National Post): I spent the first half of the missing fortnight traveling to and from the UK, and the second half recovering from a premier selection of the world's finest respiratory viruses. I can report that London is the same as ever, only with better food. To make up for lost time, I have a mortifyingly inadequate column on the late David Foster Wallace in today's Post.

In 1995, the Montreal Expos' first overall draft pick was Michael Barrett, who has caught 878 games in the major leagues and was an NL Silver Slugger in 2005. Later they took Brian Schneider, currently the starting catcher for the division-leading New York Mets. The third catcher they drafted that year only suited up for the team once.

The Expos had 18th-round draft pick Tom Brady take BP yesterday. Brady, a left-handed-hitting C, is from nearby Serra High School, the same school that produced Barry Bonds and Gregg Jefferies. Jefferies's father coaches there. There's some work to be done getting Brady signed, however. He's signed a letter of intent for a football scholarship at Michigan as a QB. -The Montreal Gazette, June 12, 1995

Wonder whatever happened to that kid?

I think the trophy surely has to go to the return to prominence of "solid-state" as a signifier of trendiness. When I was a kid, any piece of consumer electronics with anything even resembling a semiconductor in it had these magic marketing words stamped on it. If the quadrophonic eight-track stereo in your boogie van didn't have them somewhere on the face, your heterosexuality was thrown into profound question. Suddenly, in the 21st century, I find myself demonstrating the amazing boot time of a solid-state hard disk to total strangers. I just have to hope those terrible lapels don't come back.

Michael Bliss's September 23 Financial Post column about the American credit crisis contained a reference to "the personally ascetic prime minister, Pierre Trudeau". The phrase should have read "the personally ascetic prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, who was a jet-setting nightclub and discotheque fixture throughout his career, favoured expensively tailored clothing, married a 22-year-old woman (one he had met in Tahiti) at the age of 51, dated Barbra Streisand and Liona Boyd on the cusp of turning 60, and fathered a child out of wedlock at 71". The Post regrets the error.

An awful lot of Albertans under the age of 40 grew up shaking their heads and pursing their lips about having to live under the rule of Ralph Klein, the insensitive dastard who had once blamed street crime in Calgary on "Eastern creeps and bums" who had come to the province looking for work.

Funny thing: now that the boom is back, you can catch a lot of the people experiencing the social conditions for the first time saying to themselves "Ohhh, shit, so these are the Eastern creeps and bums he meant." Ralph may have used colourful language appropriate to his persona and educational level, but I'll be damned if "[these] young men... are not doing much that is positive for our communities" doesn't amount to the same thing.

I've finally been able to ectomize an editing error out of my Friday column on mortgage fraudster Casey Serin, so if you haven't read it yet, now is a suitable time. I've been getting some interesting feedback from Casey's army of detractors, some of whom feel I was too easy on the young webceleb fuckup. I also got a polite and friendly note from Casey himself, who told me I made some "good points" and gave him some "things to think about". This is the sort of response he typically makes to critics: for all his dubious behaviour, the man has an admirably thick skin and an indestructibly positive attitude.

Somewhat renewed by my quiet, deliberately uneventful London holiday, I've been busy with new material on Full Comment. I wrote a post on the Chinese milk scandal and the ethics of celebrity endorsement, spotted an amusing mistake by a minor-league baseball GM, and was horrified today by some inappropriate comments in the Globe & Mail.

Played hookey and treated myself to a lower-bowl seat tonight. Some random game notes for the Oilogosphere punters:

What's this? I can't change my Bookmarks toolbar to a sidebar? And my back/forward mouse buttons no longer work for some reason? And audio controls in embedded players are effectively frozen? And the whole thing is generally about as customizable as a cinder block? Hey, why do I find myself suddenly wishing that the icon for my Recycle Bin was a picture of a toilet?

As if fate were trying to suggest that I actually surf through the entire internet every few days, I spent a little while this past week looking for a good page on Lee Miller, the great dual-threat model/photographer who was a dame in every sense of the word, and couldn't find one—but then ran across this interesting Russian-language one quite accidentally.

20th century in a nutshell: Miller was both the first real woman to appear in a print advertisement for a menstrual hygiene product and the first person to photograph the use of napalm in warfare.