A regular roundup of stuff that wouldn’t necessarily make it on the blog, but is worth noting.
• Dallas-Fort Worth home foreclosures set a record in 2008 — some 50,000, 17 percent more than in 2007. This should give us an idea of how bad the foreclosure problem is in the rest of the country, since everyone keeps telling us that we’ve been sheltered from the housing crisis. Or, as foreclosure expert George Roddy noted, the market these days is twice as big as it was in the late 1980s, when the old record was set.
• How do you get on national TV? Advocate sex for married couples. That’s the publicity path that Grapevine pastor Ed Young chose this week. " "I think our culture, sadly, has taken sex out of context, and we want to put it back in context," says Young. There’s some great stuff on the church’s web site, too.
• American Airlines is testing cell phone-based boarding passes at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. If you have a cell phone that can download something called a 2-D bar code, you don’t have to print a paper pass. The airline’s equipment will can the bar code displayed on the phone’s screen.
• And, just in time for the recession, an article about the return of the interview suit. Said one expert: "We are back to a time when every company expected both women and men to wear suits and we didn’t have a Casual Friday. They are looking for a sharper style. I recommend a strong suit that says you are collected and ready to work."