Because it grates. OK,

Why does it grate? I do not share your experience.

The French chateau-style construction boasts some features sure to attract the discerning buyer. There is the silver storage room, the china room, the wine tasting room, the screening room, the bowling alley, the wine cellar, the 17,000 sq ft attic that includes a barbers and a beauty salon and, most importantly, the gift-wrapping room.

But here's the money quote for me:

But ask how many rooms there are, and the buyer will be met with puzzlement. Is it 100, or the 123 mentioned in some reports?

"You're really asking the wrong person," Candy Spelling, the home's owner and widow of TV producer Aaron Spelling, said. "There's a lot. [The house] has evolved and I actually haven't gone around and counted."

thing I always ask is, "Where's all their 'stuff'?"  No magazines, no books other than the arty, coffee-table variety, no mail and bills on the kitchen counter, no keys in the dish next to the phone - no phone! - no shoes at the bottom of the stairs, no briefcase on the floor, no purse hanging off a chair or the random sweater draped over the sofa.  No dish in the sink, no bowl left out on the counter

You don't need keys to your home when your butler/housekeeper is always there to open the door for you. The maids make sure everything is in its rightful place and the secretaries take care of the mail/bills.
Honestly, do I have to explain everything to you plebians! <snark>

Interesting that the article was written by a Black man.

And that is giving Crowley the benefit of the doubt.

Now, you see harassment immediately.  That then would be the request for an ID with an address.  That is not inherently harassment.  So the question is how the cop handled the request.  Again, that is where we get into two different stories -- the copy saying he was asking courteously but Gates already was angry and yelling vs. Gates saying that it was harassment, so it must mean that he saw the cop not asking courteously.

Now, the cops could have said that the guys "appeared" to be residents who must have come back early, or the neighbor had the wrong dates for their trip or something, and the cops could have decided not to knock on the door, ask for IDs, etc.

And, nice try at irony.  It is very, very unlikely that I would ever give a statement to a cop or make an accusation to the authorities.  My response to a cop who asks questions would most likely be, show me the subpoena.  And, if they have one, and I have to appear in front of a grand jury, I take the fifth until I get written immunity.  And then I exercise every privilege I can think of: attorney/client and since I am an attorney that would cover a lot, spousal, doctor- patient, clergy, tax return, etc.  I doubt the cops will have much interest in talking to me.

Being home while black

I have to say I feel for Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was arrested last week by police acting on a report of a burglary at his house.

Turns out the "burglar" was Mr. Gates himself, whom a neighbor had spotted struggling to unlock a stuck front door at his house after returning from a trip abroad. When police arrived a few minutes later, after Mr. Gates had gained entry to his place, things somehow went wacko.

Earlier this week, I reported on The Sun's editorial page blog (baltimoresun.com/secondopinion) that a similar mix-up happened to me some years ago, shortly after my family moved into a house in Baltimore's Homeland neighborhood. Someone saw me emptying the trash one evening and called the police.

I was in the kitchen finishing up the dinner dishes when they knocked on the back door; when I opened it they entered and asked if I lived there.

In the end I had to show my driver's license, then call my wife and daughter downstairs to vouch for me.

Unlike Mr. Gates, however, I didn't automatically assume the two officers were racists; one of them was white, the other African-American. I figured they were just doing their job and that they probably were as wary of me as I was of them. In any case, they both managed to be civil, while remaining professionally vigilant, until my story checked out. And I was ever the mild-mannered editorialist, though I didn't mention where I worked.

Eventually they satisfied themselves that everything was OK and left. I didn't demand an apology, and they didn't offer one.

Afterward, I wondered whether I should have been more indignant, as Mr. Gates apparently was. I had made an instant judgment that there was no point in escalating a situation with a potential to turn nasty, especially with loved ones in the house.

We all bring to such encounters our unique personal histories and agendas. The truth is, that evening I just wasn't into making a federal civil rights case out of an obvious misunderstanding, even if the mistake did hinge on the ever touchy subject of race.

Meek as it may make me sound, all I really wanted at the time was to get the dishwasher going, cut the lights and call it a night.

Reader responses to the blog, a sampling of which are printed below, ran the gamut from nods for keeping cool in a dicey situation to reproaches for wimping out on a challenge to my manhood. One reader wondered whether I would have done the same if my wife and kid hadn't been there; another observed it's never a good idea to provoke the police, even if one feels they're way out of line.

Some readers thought the real reason Mr. Gates was arrested was because police perceived him as "uppity" - a black man who didn't show proper deference to authority. But among those who considered how a white man would have been treated for mouthing off the same way, opinion seemed split pretty much down the middle - and not obviously along racial lines.

The debate over Mr. Gates grew even louder, of course, after President Barack Obama said at a press conference Wednesday that Cambridge police behaved "stupidly" by arresting Mr. Gates, whom he described as a personal friend, even after he had produced a driver's license and university ID proving he was the house's rightful occupant. Mr. Obama went on to condemn racial profiling, a tactic he suggested encourages police to view any person of color as a potential criminal suspect, no matter how upstanding or distinguished he or she may be.

Mr. Obama's comment made me reconsider my own reaction that long-ago evening. Yes, I did have a momentary impulse not to cooperate with what seemed an unfair and insulting inquiry into whether I belonged in my own house. And yes, I was angry and intimidated by two guys with guns barging into my kitchen.

But trying to treat them civilly wasn't just an act, either. I really did feel something like a moral responsibility to straighten things out in a way that left us all a little wiser. Not every situation calls for confrontation (though a few years later, in a very different context, I did put up a fight when I suspected I and others had been targets of intentional discrimination).

The great black scholar W.E.B. DuBois wrote that all African-Americans suffer from what he called "double consciousness" - an awareness not only of who we are as individuals but also of how we are perceived by a larger society that long was taught to regard us with contempt. Even in the Age of Obama, this is a reality black people still live with. The day after Mr. Obama's remarks, for example, a black co-worker at the office told me a new white colleague recently encountered her in the ladies' room and for a moment assumed she was the maid.

I imagine that, however well-intentioned, whoever called to report me taking out the trash suffered a similar social myopia. But that wasn't the police's fault, and I think by the time they left they had pretty much figured out for themselves what had transpired: Neighbor sees black guy in yard and panics. It probably happens every day, but on that occasion it was left to me and the two cops in my kitchen to sort the tangled threads of our country's absurd and tragic racial history. Treating them the way I'd like to be treated myself seemed like a good place to start.

Personally, I'd much rather be a rich, famous, AA Harvard Teevee personality and professor than a lowly, middle class cop.

Any day, any day.

But in the end it was about race. But instead of the copes being racial it was Gates who was.

Gates and Obama introduced race. The cops were just responding to a call and doing their job.

Now of course it would be too much to expect for him to take a more modest but just as relaxing of a vacation wouldn't it?

BTW genius. The AIG "LOANS", as are the other TARP loans, are paying us millions in interest until they get paid back in full. As a supposedly CPA I would think you would know that. But no. People like you like to paint it as a cash giveaway and it is not.