Realtorese

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After being listed back in August at $3.495 million, 89 Indian Field Road finally took a price cut today and its builder will now gladly accept just $2.995 million.

I’m sure it’s a very nice house, but while wading through the (many, many) paragraphs of the listing’s description* I came across a term I haven’t encountered before: “Curated designer details”. That’s a new one on me, so I put it to ChatGTP, and even the computer wasn’t impressed:

Q: I've been in the residential real estate racket for quite a few years, but haven't seen the phrase "curated designer details" before. What, if anything, is this listing agent trying to say?

A: “Curated designer details” is mostly listing-agent dialect for “we chose some finishes we think look nice.”

Breaking down the euphemisms:

  • Curated = selected, rather than accumulated accidentally. It suggests somebody exercised taste and restraint.

  • Designer = intended to imply elevated, fashionable, or professionally selected. It does not necessarily mean an interior designer was involved, much less a notable one.

  • Details = deliberately vague. Could mean anything from custom millwork and unusual hardware to trendy light fixtures, faucets, wallpaper, or cabinet pulls.

Put together, I'd translate it as:

“The house contains decorative finishes and fixtures that were deliberately chosen to give it an upscale/design-conscious appearance.”

What's conspicuously absent is anything objectively meaningful: custom, bespoke, architect-designed, designer-specified, imported, original, handcrafted, or even the name of an actual designer or manufacturer.

So if I encountered “curated designer details” in a listing, I wouldn't infer anything about quality or cost. I'd expect the photos or subsequent copy to tell me whether we're talking about Waterworks plumbing and custom cabinetry—or somebody had a productive afternoon at West Elm.

It is, however, an impressively efficient concentration of real-estate-adjective energy.

*LIke so:

“Beautifully designed and thoughtfully finished, this exceptional New home blends sophisticated style with modern comfort and effortless everyday living. From the moment you enter, wide-plank French oak floors, 9-foot ceilings, Andersen windows, and curated designer details create a warm yet elevated atmosphere. The dining room and office make a statement with rich color-drenched finishes, while custom lighting, polished chrome hardware, and refined millwork carry a cohesive aesthetic throughout. At the heart of the home, the kitchen is both striking and functional, featuring quartz countertops and backsplash, soft-close cabinetry, under-cabinet lighting, and high-end Thermador appliances with separate refrigerator and freezer towers. Antique brass accents add warmth to the space ….”

Blah, blah blah — at least she didn’t mention its “coveted neighborhood”, “professional chef’s kitchen”, or it’s “traditional design reinvented for today’s modern lifestyle”.

Prices at Old Greenwich Gables have certainly gone up

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51 Forest Avenue, listed at $1.995 million, sold in six days for $2,507,000. The buyers came from Garden City so it’s no wonder they’d pay a premium to escape, but I showed, even sold a number of these units back when they traded in the $350-$475,000 range, so this number is impressive.

But this one is a three-bedroom unit, relatively rare, and all traces of the cheap Arthur Collins finishes and hardware have been erased. I always thought it a shame that Collins built such a shoddy project on a great location: one can literally stroll down a walkway to the Old Greenwich railroad station, Binney Park, Old Greenwich Civic Center, Perot Library and the Village itself are all just a short distance by foot. Gradually, however, the units have been improved, the crumbling brick facade repaired, and things look pretty good here now.

Speaking of predictions, some are better than others

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InstaPundit:

OLD AND BUSTED: Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.

—The London Independent, March 20th, 2000.

The New Hotness? Elon Now Facing the Possibility That SpaceX Will Never Get Starship Working.

—Futurism, July 22nd, 2025.

A Shining Welfare City Under the Arch; what could go wrong?

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Saint Louis NGO: Let's Become 'Little Kabul'

David Strom:

Saint Louis has been losing population for decades, and the City "Birthing Persons" have been rightly worried that they need to find a way to reverse the hollowing out. 

The solution they have latched onto is to become 'Little Kabul' by luring in Afghan migrants and other "diverse" populations to replace the native-born Americans who have been leaving. 

It's an interesting plan for many reasons, not just the most obvious one: it is insane. Common sense tells you that making massive, abrupt demographic changes, even if the cultures involved are largely compatible, is a recipe for trouble. 

And common sense should tell you that importing more people who, by your own plan, will be clients for welfare and other services will not strengthen your city but will financially strain or bankrupt it. 

And common sense says that importing large numbers of people from a wildly different culture that rejects Western values is a recipe for disaster. 

Yes, but if you run an NGO that gets tens of millions of dollars from the government to serve "clients," connect them to welfare, and "welcome" refugees, this sounds like a gold mine. 

The International Institute of Saint Louis has produced a plan that proposes to implement a massive demographic shift to the City of Saint Louis. The stated goal is to boost the population and make it more diverse because, after all, "diversity is our strength," and the mechanism is to throw tons of government and NGO benefits at newcomers to make Saint Louis a magnet for foreigners. 

….

The goal is obvious: replace a recalcitrant population that already dislikes the direction the city is taking with a population that will be client-dependent on the city government and the NGOs that will serve them. 

It's a bold strategy. Replace the population with a more malleable one, and call it success. 

The International Institute is doing what institutions always do: view every problem through the lens of their own institutional interest. It is almost an iron law that no matter what the stated goal or original intent of a structure is/was, its true purpose over time is to grow and perpetuate itself, and what better way for the Institute to do so than import a new population to Saint Louis that is utterly dependent on government and NGO benefits?

There's all the usual blather about the importance of diversity, how new immigrants will lead to blossoming prosperity, and of course about how this will make Missouri the envy of every other NGO-heavy Blue region, but once you dig into the details, it's clear that the only prosperity resulting from this plan will be for the Immigrant industrial complex.

After all, you don't build prosperity by luring people in with free rent and free food, plus help hooking them up with government benefits. That's a recipe for draining the public purse, not refilling it. 

The focus is on attracting Afghans, not because Afghans are especially known as a high-skill workforce, but because the Institute has a program focused on them. It's something they already do well, so let's put more money into an existing program and call it "revitalization."

The plan is to betray the population of the region, shut them out of the planning by "insulating" the decision-makers from backlash, and ultimately replace the current citizenry with a class of clients who depend on the elite. 

It's a technocrat's dream. 

Okay, these clips all look ancient, but they're still fun

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Hello, World!

The Irish seem to hate the Jews as much as our own leftists

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Scott Johnson, PowerLine:

Ireland’s national soccer team bowed their heads as Israel’s anthem was played ahead of their UEFA Nations League match on Monday, and players refused to shake hands or exchange pennants. Unfortunately, Ireland beat Israel 3-0 at the near-empty Debrecen stadium in Hungary.

In their defense, the bog trotters are merely upholding a long-established tradition of the proud isle:

Johnson:

In the first paragraph above I borrowed from The Times of Israel story here. The ToI story adds: “Israel’s delegation explained earlier in the day that the Irish team had informed UEFA authorities that its members would not shake hands with their Israeli opponents, and that UEFA accepted this.” The ToI story also includes the X posts I have lifted. The New York Times has more here.

What’s it all about? This past June Brendan O’Neill devoted his Spiked column to the question. He answered: “Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul.” The verb should probably be revised to the past tense. “Has rotted” might be more like it. Anticipating last night’s match, O’Neill wrote:

* * * * *

Israelophobia is rife in Europe. It stalks the academy. It travels at lightning speed through the digital highways. It is a mandatory belief in literary circles. But here in Ireland it is especially bad. It is everywhere. The nightly news still leads with lurid tales of Israel’s ‘murder’ in Gaza and Lebanon, as even the BBC has discovered that other things are happening in the world. You won’t walk two blocks in Dublin without encountering someone wearing a keffiyeh and a punchable smug smirk. Even way out West, on the Atlantic coast, there it was, flying from the roof of the first pub I ever got drunk in: the Palestine flag. Why?

That flag is so omnipresent that it feels like Ireland has been colonised again – not by the Brits this time but by that Euro-fervour of anti-Zionism. All of the most Guardian-approved, Shoreditch-thrilling Irish artists – Sally Rooney, Kneecap, the Mary Wallopers – bow obsequiously at the altar of Israelophobia.

It stinks up the political class, too. Indeed, just last week, Margaret Connolly, the sister of the Irish president, Catherine Connolly, returned from one of those thwarted flotilla jollies to Gaza that the hyper-smug love to engage in. She said Israel behaves like a “Nazi state.” She described her brief detention in Israel as being akin to a “concentration camp.” She said she and her fellow seafaring narcissists “got a feeling of what the Jews felt like during the Second World War.” Comparing the two-day detainment of posh, well-fed mugs with the incarceration and burning to death of millions of Jews? There’s repugnant, then there’s that. Stay classy, Israel-haters.

Israelophobia is rotting Ireland’s soul. The Irish establishment’s frothing animus for the Jewish state is an embarrassment to us Irish who refuse to convert to the cult of Israel-hate. It is disproportionate, hysterical, and so obviously driven by bigotry, meaning these people will go mental over a sports fixture against the Jewish nation but say nada about a sports fixture against an Islamist nation ruled by violent men who treat women like cattle. Let Ireland be a lesson – when you drink too heartily from the Kool-Aid of Israelophobia, you lose your reason and decency. You become so consumed by hatred for a tiny foreign state that you let your own state go to moral rack and ruin.

(FWIW): Just like our own Democrats and socialists, if the Irish didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all:

And over here, Cornell students sing a joyful song calling for the elimination of Israel and its Jews while the Democrat’s former presidential candidate cheers them on:

Crowd sings ‘from the river to the sea’ at AOC’s college student event promoting Dems ahead of midterms

Connecticut needs a "stand your ground" rule applicable to all marauders, naked or dressed in furs alike.

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Connecticut man charged with shooting black bear that killed chickens in Granby

GRANBY — A town man has been charged with allegedly shooting and killing a black bear on Friday, an official says.

Will Healey, a spokesperson for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said a homeowner in Granby called the DEEP Emergency Dispatch on Friday reporting that he had killed a bear that was attacking his livestock.

Healey said DEEP Environmental Conservation Police investigated and determined that the man, identified as 39-year-old Michael Gero, shot the bear after it broke into an enclosure and killed some of his chickens. Gero reported that he observed the bear eating a chicken in his yard before shooting the bear, Healey said.

Gero also reported that he believed the bear killed his goats last month, Healey said. Gero was charged with illegal taking of black bear and was scheduled to appear in state Superior Court in Torrington on Oct. 9.

If I were defending the man, I’d assert the common law “Castle Doctrine” that gives homeowners the right to defend their home, but an explicit, broader statute would be better.

Friggin’ Smokey’s growing awfully bold these days.