I couldn't believe this when I read it this morning, but how can you make this stuff up?

From the Wall Street Journal:

With the worst housing market in recent years, St. Joseph is enjoying a flurry of attention. Some vendors of religious supplies say St. Joseph statues are flying off the shelves as an increasing number of skeptics and non-Catholics look for some saintly intervention to help them sell their houses.

Demand for the statues has been growing. Ron Weissman, who sells the statues at Good Fortune Online, says about six months ago he switched to online transactions because the increase in calls -- from about two a week to 25 calls a day -- was too much to handle. Richard Weigang, owner of www.catholicstore.com, says he sells about 400 statues a month, double the amount he sold a year ago.

Ya know, there was one of those in our back yard when we moved in. Guess they didn't realize they were supposed to take it with them? Or perhaps they figured it didn't work since we refused to budge on our offer for 3 months until they gave in. Either way stupid crap like this just gets my goat.

With the housing market feeling the hangover of the latest bubble pop and credit crunch, people stupid enough to believe that burying a piece of plastic in the ground (in the shape of a catholic saint) will help deserve to be miserable. I'm not even religious, but holy cow is the idea of people gleaming onto it to sell a house offensive.

Let's not deal with the fact that any market that goes up, also will come down. Let's not deal with the problems that predatory lending cause with ARM's that were basically time bombs with double digit interest rates after 2 years, or the fact that lack of regulation in the mortgage lender field attributed to loans being given to people who could barely fog a mirror. No. Let's spend more money on purchasing a silly little statue on line and burying it in the lawn.

Want to sell you house? Drop your price to market standards you idiots....not what you thought you'd get after watching a marathon of Flip that House.