today the part of ms. cranky will be played by...

Hitting the "random" button on the ol' rant-o-matic.

I'd be perfectly happy to never hear the name Chandra Levy again. "Nothing happened again today in the Chandra Levy case." Then it doesn't need to be on the evening news, now does it?

I wish I could afford to donate my tax rebate to the Nature Conservancy or the WWF, but instead I have to use it to pay my rent.

The job market for people with my skill sets is crap; unfortunately when it was not crappy, I didn't need to look for a new job. Of course every time I think I'll never get hired, someone shows up on one of my professional lists and asks a question that makes me think "If that person is employed, then I'm sure I will be too."

I'm envisioning an Arafat-Sharon Celebrity Deathmatch, and if we're lucky Marilyn Manson will show up and drop the lighting rig on both of their heads.

I can be a callous bitch, but not nearly as often as people seem to think I am.

I am finally getting completely sick of sitting in front of a computer all the time. I desperately need to get myself some different hobbies that are not related to computers.

I'm becoming more and more misanthropic by the day. I want to just pull myself into a little cocoon and let the rest of the world go hang. I'm starting to remember the good parts of being mostly alone.

(no subject)

Cool. I just got two free tickets in the mail for the advance screening of "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" on Monday. Nothing cheers up the underemployed like free tickets to a movie you were planning on seeing anyway.

today the part of ms. cranky is still being played by...

The stigma of living next to affordable housing

You know, I don't even know what to say in response to this. My disgust with large segments of humanity is growing by leaps and bounds.

The details vary, but in Fairfax a home is defined as affordable if households making 70 percent or less of the region's median income can handle the payment.
Know what the median income in Fairfax is? $82,000. Yeah, you're going to have a whole lot of white trash rednecks come crash your snotty little subdivision if you let in people making $57,000 a year. We'll all move in and put our BMWs up on blocks in the front yard just so we can drag down your property values.

County planners permitted 105 new homes on the 61-acre site, eight of which had to be affordable units. The town houses quickly became a point of contention with some residents of the nearby Wolf Trap Woods neighborhood.

"None of them wanted the affordable dwelling units," said Supervisor Stuart Mendelsohn (R-Dranesville), who represented the neighbors in the negotiations. "They were worried about homes with 16 people in them. It changes the overall neighborhood. It affects property values."

Stereotype much? Those poor people sure do pack them in. Let one move in, they bring in their entire extended family. Soon you've got a still in the back yard and chickens running around out front. It's obviously much better to crowd one or two people into your 4500 square feet of ostentatious display of your net worth and value as a human being. (Those two things are closely related, you know.)

Partly as a result of the discussions, the Carrington town houses are located as far as possible from the Wolf Trap Woods neighbors who objected, said Mark Trostle, senior land development manager for Edgemoore Homes. "They didn't even want to drive past the affordable units," he said.

God forbid you be forced to face reality, you f*cking morons. If you substituted "not wanting to drive past the units owned by [insert minority group here]", how many of these residents do you think would be appalled? Actually, probably not that many. They want to keep out the "low-income working poor" (at least as neighbors, it's fine as long as they're just coming in to clean their homes and mow their lawns), and guess who that tends to be around here? Feh. Feh, I say.

[...] But, he added, the county should not require affordable town houses on property zoned for single-family homes.

"I think the county is better off not trying to solve sociological problems by breaking the zoning," he said. "I don't want to make it sound like I am against the people who will live there. I'm a flaming liberal person myself."

Yep. Right up until it's your house next to which they build the $125,000 town homes disguised to look like the rest of your 3/4-million dollar houses. They're building townhomes because you raise holy hell if someone tries to build a $125k single-family house next to your McMansion on your palatial half-acre "estate".