High Tides and Green Grass

Does your proofreader have a sense of humor? Ours does. Here's something from the very awesome Jack Grimshaw:

There’s always a bright spot - you just gotta look hard enough.

Amid real estate gloom and doom – sub-prime-mortgage backlash, new and used home inventories stacked deeper than the abysmal all-you-can-eat buffet at Circus Circus, rocketing monthly payments, huge-and-growing numbers of defaults – there’s a truly encouraging light in the darkness from your good ol’ Irvine Company.

Offered at Crystal Cove, Newport Coast, by builders Standard Pacific Homes – and bordering the state park with its funky 1920s and ‘30s rental cottages – comes The Tides, “an estate collection” of swell abodes.

From yesterday’s (1.15) ad in the Los Angeles Times: “Residences, encompassing approximately 6,675 to 7,532 square feet, are sited to provide a breathtaking experience from their hilltop setting.”

Hop online at thetides-crystalcove.com and you can take a tour of different architectural styles. (For me, there’s a constant whiff of Rococo Bordello Meets Playboy Mansion. One man’s meat definitely being another’s gag-me-with-a-spoon.)

So where, you ask, do the warm and fuzzies enter the picture? And, uh, what staggering sum do such palatial joints go for?

Well, again, the Times ad: “Priced from the low $6,700,000s.” Got that, Bunky, the LOW? Not the mid-, or, forfend, the high, but the LOW.

Feeling better now? We thought so.