Lester & Charlie lend their expertise to solving the financial crisis.

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 [...]

From the blog PR and Unemployment, a list of dozens of questions you are likely to encounter on a job interview. Here are some of them: Who was your favorite manager and why? What kind of personality do you work best with and why? Why do you want this job? Where would you like to [...]

Time for another animated episode of Odd Todd’s “Laid-Off.”

Click on an image to see it full size. More photos here

“Come Thursday, February 24, I will be making my way on the streets of Orange County as best I can, and I will be considered that most stigmatized of people – a homeless woman.” “Whereas it used to take me a matter of days to find employment, it is now rare for me to even [...]

From a recent post titled “What Are These Three Numbers” on the economics blog Econbrowser comes this chart:

These numbers, represented in billions of 2010 dollars, were taken from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

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.

I was in my credit union to do some banking recently and I asked the guy helping me if he’d seen an uptick in new customers lately. “Definitely,” he said. “A lot of people are coming in from the big banks, because they said they read about doing it on the Web.” Two months ago [...]

Others may be cutting back, but the EconomyBeat Podcast is growing! On this episode we have a full hour of economy stories from independent and station based producers compiled, curated and constructed by the fine folks at Michigan Radio. From a story about a family living on a beach, to a former GM employee looking [...]