| Housing becoming affordable on Cape Cod
The bursting of the real estate bubble has been good news for many residents of one of the priciest U.S. resort areas, Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Cape Codders who thought they would never be able to buy a house there find that some properties have dropped to a price they can handle, the Cape Cod Times reported. In January, 26 homes in Barnstable County were listed at prices between $160,000 to $199,000, compared to one in that range in 2005. Marissa Chouinard, a single mother who receives a teaching degree in May, grew up in Falmouth. She is buying a house for $173,000, $110,000 below its original asking price. In the 20 years between 1984 and 2004, housing prices in the county, which includes the entire cape, skyrocketed from $79,099 to $457,200. In 2007, they dropped 5.5 percent.
The Salinger of Indie Rock
She was the female answer to all those mall-rat punk-pop bands—proof that a 17-year-old girl could whine and snarl just like the boys and look just as silly in a pair of pants five sizes too big. But her main innovation was sonic, forsaking traditional girly teenpop (syrupy ballads, dance beats) for huge choruses that crested over loud guitars. Almost immediately, the style became de rigueur, with everyone from Ashlee Simpson to Hilary Duff to Kelly Clarkson deploying distortion pedals and black mascara. Even Liz Phair fell under Avril's sway, ditching shaggy indie rock to work with Lavigne's producers, the Matrix. Phair got a lot of grief for "going Avril," but it actually made a kind of sense, for Avril was already meeting Phair halfway. A defining feature of post-Lavigne teenpop is its adult pretensions: The drift from pop into rock signals both attitude and "seriousness," and the songs, accordingly, are full of psychobabble such as, "You fall and you crawl and you break and you take what you get and you turn it into honesty"—a teenager's version of mature relationship talk.
Cell Phones Give College Students False Sense of Safety
College students packing cell phones feel safer than those without and are more likely to take risky walks at night, a new study finds. The research reveals that carrying a cell phone can amp up risk-taking, particularly among women. "Students seem to feel less vulnerable when they carry a cell phone, although there's not evidence that they really are," said study researcher Jack Nasar, a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State University. "If anything, they are probably less safe because they are paying less attention to their surroundings." - Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Natural Science Center. - Click here for FOXNews.com's Personal Technology Center. Nasar, Peter Hecht of Temple University in Philadelphia and Richard Wener of Brooklyn Polytechnic University in New York conducted two surveys, each of about 300 male and female college students in 2001 and 2002.
|
