It’s a lazy Sunday here. Local time is half eleven in the morning. Back home it’s half four. The sky is blue and the temperature outside is… warm.

Have adjusted to life without a kettle and taken up filter coffee as my main beverage. See, in the local supermarket there’s only a small selection of instant coffee – no freeze dried instant coffee at all – and just two types of tea. Pretty obvious why, in hindsight, if boiling water takes a minimum of four minutes in the Microwave.

So here’s an example of how something as simple as the Mains electrical system – 110 volts AC instead of 240 volts AC (apparently this stops there being enough juice for British style kettles) has caused an entirely different beverage culture out here. Here filter coffee is the easiest and quickest thing there is, creating a huge market for filters, coffee beans and ground coffee and destroying the market for tea and instant coffee. No kettles, no tea.

Cause and effect, you see.

With that in mind I notice this curious story about the Governor of Massachusetts, one Deval Patrick. He’s a Democrat, if that sort of thing matters to you, and he’s just signed an anti-foreclosure bill (or anti-repossession for Brits!) which will mean, in effect, a delay of around a year between someone stopping paying and someone losing their house. It’s called “An Act To Stabilise Neighborhoods“, and it is intended that it will help individuals and communities stay together. It’s the only bill like it in America, apparently.

Critics and cynics, and I have to say this includes me, suspect that the knock on effect of this particular Act will be to make getting a mortgage in Massachusetts more difficult than it currently is. People already in their homes, whether they can afford them or not, will get to stay – at least for another year – and those who are stuck on the sidelines waiting to get their own home? Well, they’re going to stay stuck.

Says a lot that the rights of people in a house that they’re not actually paying for count for more than the rights of a company that lent them the money to live in that house in the first place, but hey, I’m a ruthless evil Capitalist so perhaps I’m missing something here, but isn’t this the sort of thing you expect from old Communistic Europe, not the brave new world of the United States?

Ho hum. Your strangely baffled and bemused correspondent, signing off…