Pleasant Rowland Lists Homes in Aurora, NY

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Sara Lin:

Pleasant Rowland, the founder of doll company American Girl who spent six years and millions of dollars restoring much of Aurora, N.Y., has put both of her houses there on the market.
From 2001 to 2006, Ms. Rowland renovated town buildings owned by Wells College, her alma mater. Some townspeople criticized the renovations as too extensive. “I just simply saved a town that was crumbling,” Ms. Rowland says now. “My work there is completed.” She says the dispute isn’t her reason for leaving town.
One of the houses in Aurora, which is 46 miles southwest of Syracuse, is a 10,000-square-foot Queen Anne lakefront mansion built about 1902 with six bedrooms. It could use some interior renovation, Ms. Rowland says, and comes with 200 feet of frontage on Cayuga Lake, a dock and a boathouse. The two-acre property is listed for $2.2 million. The other house, an 1830 Federal-style home of 4,000 square feet with three bedrooms, is restored, Ms. Rowland says. The four-acre property is listed for $2 million.
In 1985, Ms. Rowland founded American Girl, which Mattel bought for $700 million in 1998. These homes represent the last of Ms. Rowland’s recent ties to Aurora. Last week, she sold Aurora-based MacKenzie-Childs, a decorative-tableware and home-furnishings company. She’s based in Madison, Wis. Paddington Zwigard of Brown Harris Stevens has both home listings.

It must be noted that former Mattel CEO Jill Barad signed the $700M check.

First Quarter 2008 Real Estate Market Source

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Dave Stark:

In our last issue of the Real Estate Market Source, we predicted a slow ? rst quarter for residential closings, followed by an uptick in the second quarter (see www.starkhomes.com for back issues of the Real Estate Market Source). Well, we were certainly correct about the soft ? rst quarter. However, an increase in customer inquiry and showing activity after spring break gives us reason to hope that the second quarter might also meet our projections.
It appears closings will be off roughly 25% from the ?rst quarter of 2007 in the combined Dane, Sauk, and Columbia markets. We admit that this is an even bigger drop than we anticipated. However, we also didn’t anticipate a record snowfall year, when many weekends in January and February were virtually wiped out as far as showings go. The earliest possible Easter didn’t help either, as activity is always reduced in the weeks before and after the holiday for academic spring breaks. Excuses aside, this was a rough quarter.
On the brighter side, since late March, we’ve seen a noticeable increase in activity on our web site, in open houses, and in our showing volumes.
Showings on our listings were off 18% in January and February, but were even with last year in March, and are on pace to be over 20% ahead of last year in April. Offer activity is picking up as well. Pending sale data in the MLS is notoriously unreliable and always late in being reported, so we won’t really know until May or June if the market overall is taking a real turn. But the traf?c signals are certainly positive.

The mother of all on-board ideas, or Why Southwest Airlines Should Fly to Madison

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Terry Maxon:

Southwest Airlines, saving passengers’ necks since 1971.
Colleague Karen Robinson-Jacobs, who flew to Chicago on Saturday, said the airline had an interesting on-board amenity: free Mother’s Day cards for anybody on the airplane who needed one.
Flight attendants announced during the flights that anyone who needed a Mother’s Day card should hit their flight attendant call button. On both her flights, Dallas-Little Rock and Little Rock-Chicago, Karen reported the airplane immediately sounded like slot machines hitting the jackpot as numerous forgetful passengers hit their call buttons.
The idea reportedly came from Southwest president Colleen Barrett, who had each originating flight Saturday provisioned with about three dozen cards. But that was not enough to fill the last-minute demand on the Little Rock-Chicago leg, as Dallas-based flight attendant June Zapata ran out mid-plane.

“Crisis of Confidence in Dane County and Madison Leadership”

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Jason Shepard, speaking on UW-Madison graduate Greta Van Susteren’s program mentioned that a “crisis of confidence exists in Dane County and Madison Leadership”. Jason discussed the growing controversy over murder victim Brittanny Zimmerman’s botched 911 call.

Fox News link (will disappear at some point)

40MB MPEG4 download for ipod/iphone/playstion and others. CTRL Click here.

Albuquerque’s Enlightened Airport

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Albuquerque’s Sunport has long offered free WiFi for the masses. Passing through recently I noticed that they have greatly expanded the quantity of power outlets available. It is a kind of sport to watch folks vie for any (often rare) open outlets in most air terminals.

Recent Books

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Cultural Amnesia by Clive James. A large, interesting book. Slate posted a selection of the book’s essays here.
The Bin Ladens by Steve Coll. In many ways, this book repeats the mantra that “those who fail to understand history are condemned to repeat it”. Quite a work and a nice complement to his Ghost Wars.
Comrade J by Pete Earley (fascinating read):

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War officially ended, and a new world order began. We thought everything had changed. But one thing never did: the spies. From 1995 until 2000, a man known as “Comrade J” directed all Russian spy action in New York and oversaw all covert operations against the U.S. and its allies. He recruited spies, planted Russian agents, penetrated U.N. and U.S. security, and manipulated events that influenced American policy, under the direct leadership of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. He was a legend, the man who guarded Russia’s secrets – secrets that he never revealed…..until now. Based on exclusive interviews with Russian spymaster and double agent, Sergei Tretyakov, Comrade J exposes how the “new” Russia continues to spy and undermine the U.S.

A Tip of the Hat to Jason Shepard

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Grad student and former NYC teacher Jason Shepard has set the standard for investigative reporting over the past few years. His Isthmus expose of the 911 problems in Zimmerman’s recent murder is just the latest in a string of substantive works on the local scene.
Shepard has done an exemplary job diving deep into a number of subjects, particularly our $367,806,712 school district.
A link to many of Jason’s articles.

Last Breakfast in Cambodia

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Sichan Siv:

CAMBODIANS and other Theravada Buddhists celebrate their New Year in mid-April. They were not always able to do so. Under Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese rule, those ancient traditions were forbidden, impossible. But now Cambodia is free again and the festivities are in the open. As I wander the country of my youth, I see people spending the long holiday praying at temples and visiting relatives.
And I remember. My family used to hold a reunion on April 13 to mark both the New Year and my mother’s birthday. In 1975, we had no idea that it would be our last. We were all apprehensive about the future, and my mother was distraught because I had missed the American evacuation.
The day before, an officer of the United States Agency for International Development had told me that I had to be at the embassy within an hour if I wanted to be airlifted out of Cambodia. (I was a manager for the American relief agency CARE and had been selected for the evacuation.) Instead, I went to a meeting to find a way to help 3,000 families stranded in an isolated province.