Sunday Funnies 7-30-06

Sunday Funnies 7-30-06
A Case Of Flip This House...or Just A Bad Day?

A case of, “Flip This House”, or just a “Bad Day”?

I’ll preface today’s funnies with an brief explanation of “Flip This House”: For those of you who can’t/won’t watch Home and Garden Channel’s series, it is about people who go into the housing market with an eye to buying a house cheaply, and spending X amount of money and time to fix it up, before placing it back on the market to reap a quick and often lucrative price.

That is where one of today’s funnies finds me. As you know by now, I spend my Sunday morning perusing the LA Times, in search of stories which strike me as odd, or funny (in my perfect little world anyway) to regale you with. I have certain sections I look in, but today, Hubby alerted me to this item he saw in the Real Estate, Hot Property column.

Apparently this past April the glam actress/celebrity, Sharon Stone, bought a Beverly Hills-area home for 11 million dollars. Usually that is a yawner, you know, the usual five bedroom, 9,000 square foot home situated on nearly five acres.

Today, however, it is now back on the market, only this time for $12,500,00. GULP! That is, by my own calculations a mere….$12,397.00 (rounded to the nearest dollar) per day, that she has owned it, for ????

That is not nearly enough, it would appear, for her to have renovated and flipped a perfectly decent home, to anyone I know at least. The gated estate, of course, was built in 1991. But (get this), said house was completely redone in 2004. Coincidently that is the same year that Ms. Stone divorced the son of an Ojai couple, San Francisco Chronical editor, Phil Bronstein.

What is up with that? Apparently a call to the listing agent let it slip that it was just an impulse purchase. You have to be kidding me. Nope, it seems like Ms. Stone, who already owns a house in the same area fell in love with it on first sight. Oh my, and I thought an impulse purchase was a pair of shoes or two.

I read where this home has a screening room (is that instead of a screened in porch?), gym (Gawd, wouldn’t want to see her lifting weights at the local “Curves” now, would we?), guesthouse and meditation garden (ahem….well, I can’t get too huffy about that feature ), tennis court (again …far be it from me to deny her that ),and surrounded by fruit trees. WHAT? She got fruit trees too..oh yeah, I got some of those too.

Once she got back to her longtime home, the movie star then turned into an ordinary person and got…dare I say it….second thoughts (better known to the rest of us as “buyer’s remorse”).

Okay, so even if she did, what took her so long to re-list it? Could it have been a case of….having to wait for a 90 day escrow to close? Inquiring minds really don’t want to know!

Or, should we play the song, “Bad Day”, by Daniel Powter? You all know that song, the one they play on “American Idol” each time a contestant was voted off the show last season? Well, here a few stanzas of the lyrics, to help you to relate:

Lyrics by Daniel Powter

Where is the moment we needed the most ?
You kick up the leaves and the magic is lost ?
They tell me your blue skies fade to grey ?
They tell me your passion's gone away ?
And I don't need no carryin' on

You stand in the line just to hit a new low ?
You're faking a smile with the coffee to go ?
You tell me your life's been way off line ?
You're falling to pieces everytime ?
And I don't need no carryin' on…
??
Cause you had a bad day
You're taking one down?
You sing a sad song just to turn it around?
You say you don't know?
You tell me don't lie?
You work at a smile and you go for a ride?
You had a bad day?
The camera don't lie?
You're coming back down and you really don't mind?
You had a bad day?
You had a bad day?


Didn’t relate? Yeah, me either. But that brings me to another story I saw today about Mr. Powter hmmmmm, is it just coincidence that his name rhymes with “pouter”?. It seems this guy became the best-selling digital song in the brief history of downloadable music earlier this month with nearly 1.7 million copies.

His debut album sold nearly two million copies. But, as so often goes, Mr. Powter was became disheartened by its popularity. I guess he was having a bad day. “I had a backlash against the song. I felt there were songs on the record (excuse me….record? I thought everything was now CDs…Nada scratches her head in confusion) that were more important to me. So I became very reluctant toward it. insert a whine here I’m so tired of talking about this.”

He didn’t even want to come back and perform the song on “American Idol”, the venue which, undoubtedly, made him successful in the USA. He explains, “I was in Thailand on a tour…when they asked me to do the show and I said, ‘I can’t really come back for that’. “But with careful guns (whatever those are..) to my head, pointing at my brain, I made the best decision. I made everybody happy. I came back.”

Oh gag me! I saw the finale, saw him doing his song, and if I would have known then, what I know now, I would have let him know we could have just listened to the recording like we always did.

Well, he now says he has made peace with the song, ever since someone told him their relative used it as inspiration while going through chemotherapy. In his words, “….hearing the song meant something to them, I gotta get over myself.”

I think so….and you might want to ring up Ms. Stone, I hear she has a fixer-upper for sale.