September Summer

Summer lingers. There might be touches of yellow here and there on the trees, plus shorter days and cool nights, but the days have been very warm and dry lately. The bees are active in every available flower bed near my back door, as well as the strip of land I call my "prairie restoration" (Yuriko does not call it that) on the hard-to-see side of the garage. Wasps come to visit me for lunch, if I sit on the deck. Mosquitoes come for an evening snack, if I sit there after dinner and read, and I counter with blows.

So it's summer. But any time now, summer will vanish like a swimmer pulled under by a rip tide.

Embarrassment travels fast in our time and gets translated into a number of languages, breathlessly. Since real estate is a beat of mine, I've taken some interest in the case of the Wells Fargo exec -- make that former exec, now -- who evidently wasn't satisfied with the digs possible on a banker's salary. At some point she decided to use a foreclosed, bank-owned mansion in conspicuous ways, such as for parties for (presumably) her friends. Put her name into Google news and headlines from around the world appear, such as Un bancher american a ocupat ilegal o locuinţă confiscată din Malibu.