Zen and the art of management - Los Angeles Times
Life increasingly begins to resemble a Dave Barry column:

The Los Angeles Housing Department has paid thousands of dollars to a Zen Buddhist priest from Hawaii for management training that includes teaching breathing with sphincter control, learning "how to stand" and playing with wooden sticks. Norma Wong, a former Hawaii state legislator and leadership consultant, has been paid $18,819 since 2005 to conduct at least four training sessions for executives and other staff. The most recent one was last week. Mercedes Marquez, the general manager of the department, said the training was designed to help "center" Housing Department managers and teach them to react nimbly to problems such as the city's housing shortage

Allstate to stop insuring Calif. homes - Yahoo! News
More good news for California homeowners, to go with the falling prices, bad schools, high taxes, HOA assessments, and loss of the traditional perks of ownership.

Pasco: Homeowner groups and county clash over lawns
There's a drought on. Watering is allowed just once a week. So the homeowners are being told they'd better water their lawns - and they'd better not. "It's a Catch-22," Dick Ortiz, the county's code enforcement director, said on Friday. "Either we write them a ticket for watering or the association writes them a ticket for not watering. So what do they do?"