9 p.m.

• Well that's nice. Don't pay your mortgage, get a reduction in principal.

Mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Citigroup Inc. plan to cut home-loan payments for hundreds of thousands of borrowers facing foreclosures, following similar moves by the nation's biggest banks.

 

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will reduce principal or interest rates on some loans and extend the terms of others, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which seized control of Fannie and Freddie in September.

Shit, this is even better.

The Bush administration on Tuesday announced another plan to modify what it thinks will be hundreds of thousands of distressed mortgages held or backed by mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac...

 

...The new plan is far short of the moratorium on foreclosures sought by President-elect Osama and the Democrats who next year will have stronger control Congress. The move follows announcements by private lenders such as Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and most recently Citigroup that they would voluntarily rework troubled mortgages.

 

However, the plan announced Tuesday reaches only a small number of homeowners whose loans were pooled with others and sold to investors by Fannie and Freddie as bonds called mortgage-backed securities. The effort also would help an even smaller number of loans that Fannie and Freddie haven't packaged and pooled but retain on their books...

 

...To qualify for the new program, homeowners whose loans are owned or packaged by Fannie and Freddie must be 90 days or more past due on their payments for single-family dwellings in which they live. They must prove hardship, can't be in bankruptcy and their outstanding loan values must be at least 90 percent of their homes' current values.

If you haven't paid off even 10 percent of your home's current value YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE BOUGHT A FUCKING HOUSE TO BEGIN WITH! Go live in a dumpster.

• Every October the better half has an annual ritual that she does. She buys a pumpkin for each cat we have and takes a picture with them. Is this nuts? Yes. Whatever. We could be sacrificing goats or something. Other people do much worse. However, there is one bright spot to this story -- JJ is terrified of pumpkins. Yes, he runs away from these orange ovals whenever one is within viewing distance. You can set these things up along the floor and you could make JJ go in any direction you desire. Don't believe me? Here you go.