When did you first notice

Ole Dave.

that our economy was going over the cliff?

Writing in The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten notes:

For many, the awakening came while they were driving through some over-built exurb in Florida or California, or watching a commercial for a subprime lender (“Mortgage consultants are standing by!”), or studying a graph depicting the ratio of total debt to the gross domestic product. In the early days, intimations of economic imbalance could come to you in a fancy restaurant, or a Home Depot, or an A.T.M. vestibule: a two-hundred-dollar dinner, a traffic jam in bathroom fixtures, fees on top of fees on top of fees. A pulse of common sense suggests, This can’t last.

For me, it was talk about raising chickens. I know it's in my future, because my pal Dave, who introduced me to argyle socks and Santana and all important things, is raising chickens. As is his custom, he's doing it in style: all sorts of weird birds his grandkids chase around his farm.

Think ole Dave's alone?

PORT ROYAL, S.C. -- A proposal the town of Port Royal is considering is literally for the birds. Mayor Sam Murray says he had no idea so many people in the community were interested in raising the birds.

LOS ANGELES -- As suburb dwellers continue to blur the line between the rural and urban divide, backyard hens are cropping up in neighbourhoods all over greater Los Angeles — and beyond. The national phenomenon of raising hens for eggs is so widespread that it’s spurred luxury hen houses, such as The Chicken Co-Op, a $3,500 solar-ventilated, loft-like coop.

FREMONT, Ohio -- Sandusky County Sheriff Kyle Overmyer has heard the laughter, shrugged off the "jail bird" jokes, and happily restocked his jail's chicken coop for a second season. For the second summer in a row, inmates at the Sandusky County jail are raising a small brood of chickens -- 60 White Mountain Broilers.

Be cool like Ole Dave -- be the first on your block!