“And on this house I shall build my Spaceship Jesus”*

I admit to being surprised by this;

The Hagars built their 2,700-square-foot house by stacking tire bales—five-foot-wide blocks of compressed tires—to form the exterior walls. They plugged gaps between the bales with cans, bottles, plastic plates, and other junk and moved in toward the end of 2008.
“We lovingly call it the trash house,” Ms. Hagar says. The Hagars covered up all that trash with concrete, clay and stucco and installed south-facing windows to capture light, heat and views of the snowy slopes.
To pay for it, the Hagars in 2007 took out a $240,000 line of credit from Red Rocks Credit Union in suburban Denver. In the old days of easier credit, appraiser Lori Slota couldn’t find another tire-bale home that had recently sold but said the house would be valued at $500,000 when complete, citing the listing of a straw-bale home as well as other houses in the area.
Last year, with the home finally finished and interest rates at record lows, the Hagars started trying to refinance into a long-term, fixed-rate mortgage. But in February 2009, they got the bad news from loan officer Bill Schimel, who wrote in an email, “I think we have really hit a brick wall here.”

I’d always assumed such projects were self-financed.

Your tax dollars at work;

Before penalizing the city $12,500 this week, inspectors with the Canadian Transportation Agency counted five instances when bus drivers didn’t call out stops.
Marc Comeau, senior communications advisor for the transportation agency, said there were three times that inspectors, posing as regular riders, asked OC Transpo bus drivers to say when a certain destination was reached, but the drivers didn’t call the stops.
“It was actually cases where the stops were requested,” Comeau said.

Oh, the humanity.
h/t Jamie