This Wikipedia entry on Arizona’s anti-immigration law might answer some questions people have about what the exact language of the law mandates. Law Provisions The law makes it a state misdemeanor crime for anyone to be unable to prove lawful residence in the United States upon being asked to provide such proof pursuant to a [...]

Completed in February, Ice House Detroit is an abandoned house in Detroit sprayed with water and frozen by two artists seeking to dramatize the foreclosure crisis. The project was funded through Kickstarter, an arts-funding web site that we wrote about last September. Here is the Flickr pool of photos of the house, and below is [...]

Spotted on Facebook, two photos from Detroit, by Dan Haddad.  

In February, Google made an announcement:

In January, after Massachussetts sent Republican Scott Brown to the Senate, destroying the Democratic supermajority needed to pass the health care overhaul without resorting to the reconciliation process, the plan appeared all but dead. Now, some view the bill’s success as comparable to the Resurrection, while others liken it more to the return of Jason [...]

Of all the dysfunctional state governments, California’s may be at the top. California has a $20 billion budget deficit, but the state cannot raise taxes or pass a budget without a 2/3 majority vote in the state legislature. That law was enshrined in the state constitution in 1978 through Proposition 13, which also capped property [...]

Intrepid blogger Mary Hannington writes about the perils of living in crime-afflicted Detroit. Guns and the Weber Grill Wars (Vagabond Guru) I don’t know if it was a trend unique to my city or if it was popular everywhere, but everyone I knew in Detroit had a Weber grill and we barbequed all summer. We [...]

As you struggle to pay your mortgage or break even on the sale of your home, does it help to take a gander at Big Time Listings? This blog by a Chicago-area real estate site focuses on the sales of celebrity homes. Considering the current state of the housing market for folks who don’t appear regularly on “Entertainment Tonight”, reveling in the purchase of a $35 million mansion by Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg might or might not be just the ticket. Or try this “exclusive”:

Brad and Angelina enlarge their Los Angeles compound further; long-goateed actor quietly pays $1.1M to buy a missing link for his estate in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood — a two-bedroom, 3,232-square-foot house that his compound had bordered on three sides

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have increased the size of their compound in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood, with Pitt quietly paying $1,100,000 to buy a missing link for his property in the form of a 3,232-square-foot house that his estate largely had surrounded.

In a Big Time Listings exclusive, we can report on Pitt’s latest purchase, which like some other property of his was made through his Mondo Bongo Trust. Records show that Pitt purchased the property on August 6 from the estate of the late Anne Tyler Sherman.

Built in 1920, the two-bedroom, former Sherman house — whose property is shaped like a key — sits on a 0.25-acre (10,759-square-foot) lot in the Oaks area of Los Feliz. It helps Pitt round out his compound and means that Brad now owns close to 2 full acres in the Oaks…

Features in the house include two baths, a stone fireplace, a huge main room, a bonus room, and “a bar area and a secret cave,” according to the MLS.

If you’re wondering why it’s so hard to get anything done politically– and who isn’t these day–one reason may be found in the data provided by an analysis of 210 million public profiles on Facebook. Earlier in the week we did a post on an interactive map that resulted from that project, and which draws [...]

The search technology blog PeteSearch has a fascinating post on the geographical connections of Facebook friends. The Pete in PeteSearch gathered data on 210 million public profiles on the ‘book and created an interactive map with lines drawn between areas that share a lot of friends. As Pete explains it, “For example, a lot of people in LA have friends in San Francisco, so there’s a line between them.”

The map has three tabs at the top, one each for connections between countries, U.S. states, and U.S. cities.

Some random results:

• California users have strong connections to the East Coast states of New York and Massachussetts, and to Washington D.C. But the state also has a line drawn to Texas and the state of Washington.
• Chicago users connect mostly to those in Los Angeles, New York, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Atlanta.
• U.S. users in the aggregate connect mostly to other English speaking countries, but also to the Philippines and Indonesia.