From the “Where are they now?” department… here’s a tidbit on Robert Van Winkle, better known by his nom de microphone, Vanilla Ice. I erroneously read this headline at first as “Is Vanilla Ice the next Ty Willingham” and thought he had been recruited to coach Notre Dame football, but that’s not the case. He’s getting a show on HGTV, and you can watch him attempt to flip a house:
Slated for Oct. 14, The Vanilla Ice Project follows Van Winkle and a crew of friends and home improvement professionals as they renovate a 7,000-square-foot house in the Versailles community, one that had been “trashed” by its previous owner, he says. “Everything was missing, from the floor to the ceiling. They took everything – the crown molding, the flooring – yes, even the kitchen sink!” he says. “It was depressing to see a fairly new house be ravaged But I love Palm Beach County. This is my area.”
The article goes further into the problems with the home he’s rehabbing. Not only were all the appliances yanked out, but someone DRYWALLED OVER THE HOME THEATER. Quel horreurs! So what other calamaties have befallen his “area” in the PBC?
Of course, this now- sparkling six-bedroom, five-bathroom home isn’t the only one in Versailles with a troubled history. The community, whose huge structures once sold in the multiple millions, was the subject of a very public scandal involving mortgage fraud and rampant flipping to collect money for houses the flippers should never have qualified for in the first place. Versailles needed a hero.
It needed Vanilla Ice.
Yeah, VANILLA ICE SAVES VERSAILLES was nearly the title of this post. But I was kind of afraid the ghost of Louis-Philippe would come kick my ass and/or steal my fainting couch, and I need that fainting couch.
By the way, in Florida, especially in South Florida, you could throw a rock and hit a community where huge structures sold in the multiple millions, were the subject of a very public scandal involving mortgage fraud/rampant flipping/poisoned drywall/multimillion dollar loans to people who worked the night shift at Denny’s/you name it. So if anyone is inspired by this story, come on down.
Also, I do have to say, it’s funny to hear him complaining about a house being trashed, as the only thing I remember him for other than “Ice Ice Baby” is when he trashed an MTV set with a baseball bat:
But, as always, I digress. We wish Mr. Van Winkle the best, though whether or not this will be a profit-making venture for him is questionable:
Once priced at more than $2.5 million, it was bought by Van Winkle for about $400,000 and cost about $300,000 to renovate. Van Winkle’s hoping to get somewhere in the six figures for it, selling it to a nice family that will take care of it and love Versailles as much as he and his family do.
$400K + $300K = $700K, and “somewhere in the six figures” is substantial wiggle room. But hey, they fixed the home theater, so let’s hope he can fetch the upper end of that ballpark figure.
Parliament House isn’t doing so super, but thanks for asking.
The article I’m linking to doesn’t tell much of the history, so let me fill you in as a local. Parliament House Resort, was originally built as a hotel in the 1960s, then was converted to something of a gay enclave in the 70s by a man named Bill Miller. Miller died in the early 90s and the property started going the direction of everything else on South Orange Blossom Trail in Orlando, and that direction was, not surprisingly, south. It was acquired by Donald Granastein and his wife, Susan Unger, in 1999; they then proceeded to do what everyone in Florida was doing in the early to mid 2000s, which was to take out a multimillion-dollar loan to build a bunch of condos, in this case timeshare condos. They bought a trailer park, kicked out the hookers and started building it up.
I’ll give them props for letting the place continue to fly its freak flag instead of aiming it at the Disney crowd, but unfortunately, as with a lot of real estate developments in Florida these days, the owners are getting their pink slip, no pun intended. Okay, pun intended:
Orlando’s oldest gay entertainment club, the Parliament House, faces foreclosure and is headed into receivership, according to court filings.
Houston-based Southwest Guaranty Ltd. and Compass Bank of Alabama initiated foreclosure actions against the property on North Orange Blossom Trail in July over a $7.5 million mortgage that matured at the end of 2009. Attorneys for the creditors said Monday they expect it will taken over this week by a court-appointed receiver, which would continue the club’s operations under court orders.
Lenders have taken the initial steps to foreclose on the property, which is owned and controlled by Grantastein, president of Parliament Partners Inc.; Gerald Cadesky; and the Gardens LLC.
Granastein claims the receivers are going to let Parliament House go on with shop as usual, but do you really think the boards of two banks based in Texas and Alabama aren’t going to have objections to a place that bills itself as “The Gayest Place On Earth” and has regular foam parties and events like “Bears’ Night Out?” I’m surprised they were open-minded enough to finance it in the first place.
This image of course popped into my mind when I read about the foreclosure, and I really think Barney Frank should come down here and do a P-House fundraiser, immediately:
Folks, consumer electronics shopping is gonna get a lot more painful this holiday season. The yen is rallying, the Bank of Japan is easing and the markets are shrugging:
Japan’s government offered a modest stimulus package Monday and the central bank took steps aimed at curbing the rising yen, but a tepid reaction from markets leaves policy makers under pressure to do more.
The 920 billion yen ($10.78 billion) stimulus is part of a double-barreled attempt to prevent the surging yen from undermining Japan’s fragile, export-led recovery. At an emergency meeting Monday, the BOJ’s policy board voted 8-1 to offer domestic financial institutions 10 trillion yen of six-month loans, in addition to the 20 trillion yen in three-month loans it has been offering.
The chairman of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association expressed hope the BOJ move will help weaken the yen. A strong yen makes Japanese products less competitive abroad, hurting key export sectors.
The move is largely considered to be the equivalent of throwing a bone (er…. a wonton?) to the local manufacturing industry, unlikely to have any long-term effect on the yen’s rise. If the BOJ wanted to make a significant impact, they’d need to buy bonds or get their ZIRP on. And they’re resisting that:
But he seemed to rule out one common suggestion: greater “quantitative easing” through stepped-up BOJ purchases of Japanese government bonds. “The current pace of outright government bond purchasing is the most appropriate,” Mr. Shirakawa said.
He also has resisted cutting policy interest rates, which have been at 0.1% since December 2008, to zero, fearing this would interfere with money-market functioning.
(Reports that a major car manufacturer threatened to point a number of recalled vehicles with so-called “accelerator issues” in the direction of the BOJ building if they failed to act are unsubstantiated at this time.)
In sum, get those Blu-Ray players and Lexuses while you can still afford ‘em, folks — it’s unlikely we’ll see a strong loller dollar vs. the yen any time soon. Much like the top in the euro was marked by supermodels demanding their contracts be paid in that currency, we’ll probably be able to call the top in the yen by waiting for 50 Cent to change his Twitter name over to @50¥, so I’m just going to wait for that to manifest.
