When I was a kid Meat Puppets were a band. When I was an adolescent a meat puppet was a cool concept in a cool science fiction book. Now that I am an adult I have no idea what this is: Pete The Meat Puppet (maybe NSFW). [more inside]
posted by cjorgensen on Dec 1, 2008 - 31 comments

The sub-prime mortgage crisis is giving way in some places to crime ridden McMansion ghettos, perhaps the beginning of a larger long term trend in demographics: "many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay."
posted by stbalbach on Feb 29, 2008 - 81 comments

Mansions fit for a commoner "... moving into a bigger house was not something to be questioned, but something to be accepted, an axiom of American life."
posted by knave on Nov 28, 2005 - 86 comments

Do you want fries with that house? Not content with a normal McMansion, the Banner family of Potomac, Md. upgraded four years ago from a 4,500 square foot house to a 8,500 square foot house. Its six bedrooms and nine bathrooms now comfortably accomodate the house's two adults and two children. The unusually ironic NYTimes (reg req.) article does not spare us the absurdities of this arrangement, a growing trend in wealthy suburban enclaves. Interior decorators must now "supersize" furniture to fill up a cavernous "media room". Entire wings of the house sit unused for months, because the suburban rich entertain others at home no more often than their middle-class counterparts.

Suppose you had a $500k income and a completely empty 2 acre zoned lot in Potomac in which to live. What might you build there?
posted by PrinceValium on Jun 20, 2002 - 52 comments