Last week, the New York Times' House & Home section ran a story on John Bowe, author of the book Us: Americans Talk about Love. The story ran under the "At Home With" rubric, a series of articles the House & Home section does frequently -and well- that documenst everything from Pentagram designer Paula Scher's incredibly designed Manhattan apartment to hoaxster Margaret B. Jones, the supposed author of Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival whose true identity as well-to-do Californian Margaret Seltzer was discovered after the Home section ran a story on her Eugene, Oregon house.

The point of the Bowe story was not that here is this man who is lonely and perhaps has fears of intimacy and sometimes has a hard time finding a woman who isn't so implausibly unavailable -she lives in Saipan! The point is that we find it utterly bizarre when single men decorate their own homes.

During lean economic times, many of us start looking to trim extraneous expenses from our household budgets. But even if you've recently downsized your home and belongings, getting renter's insurance still makes a lot of sense. After all, how many of us could afford to replace all of our worldly posessions in the event of a fire or theft?

Replacement Insurance

When you start thinking about renter's insurance, the first question is whether you should get replacement insurance or just insure the value of your belongings. Well, we all know that things drop in value the minute you buy them, right? So, if you insured the contents of your closet for its value would you be able to get even one decent outfit with the cash?

Replacement insurance costs more than insuring your property at its actual value, but it also means that the insurance company will pay you something close to what it costs to replace it. That means paying you to replace your three-year-old Xbox 360 instead of paying you the yard sale value of it. Your flat-screen television, video game systems and appliances are just one reason to get replacement insurance. The other is that closet full of clothes. You didn't accumulate it all at once, so chances are you never thought about how much it would cost if you had to go out and buy new jeans, sweaters, shirts, and shoes all at once.

This truly is a sweet rental. Imagine living right in Midtown Manhattan and having this 1-bedroom to call home. It's 780 square feet of pure, Big Apple heaven. Look at this place; it's crazy-good with its sleek design, hardwood floors, and large windows to provide plenty of light, not to mention an awesome view of the city that never sleeps.

Read on to find out more the skinny on this Sweet New York Rental:

The box office success of "Avatar" is pushing Samsung to begin mass production of 3-D televisions, but even if the $2,000 to $4,000 initial price tag is lowered a bit, don't go buy one yet.

There are many reasons, one of the top being that any new technology always costs a lot when it first comes out and then drops in price as more people buy it. But that could take years. Just ask the early adopters of HDTVs and standard DVD players. Prices are now about as far down as they'll get, and even Blu-Ray DVD players are inexpensive.

But there are other reasons to stay away from the fun allure of being the first on your block to have a 3-D TV.

With federal regulations on how much phone companies can charge expected to end next year, there's a chance your home phone bill could go up.

AT&T's California customers recently saw the monthly rate for basic home phone service jump 20% to $16.45, up from the 23% increase last year.

And even if you're not ready to give up your landline home phone yet, it's smart to be prepared in case your home phone rates rise and you want to find something better.

Here are a few options for cutting your home phone bill:

The "Dualstar" production company may have made Ashely Olson and her sister Mary-Kate rich child stars, but, the stars are not lining up for the sale of Ashley's home. Ashley bought her surprisingly modest Spanish-style home in Los Angeles for $1,595,000 back in 2007. She's just placed it on the market for $1,399,000.

(For anyone still unable to tell the twins apart, Ashley is described as the one who does "not dress like a very rich and homeless senior citizen." )

Ashley's corner-lot home sports three bedrooms and two-and-a-half bathrooms, a pool, beamed-ceiling living room, and herringbone-wood-pattern floors. It even has a second-floor balcony overlooking the tony Hancock Park area. For privacy's sake the property is surrounded by tall hedges.

But, two mysteries surround the house....

In a recent search for news in the world of apartment living, I stumbled across a contest in Manchester, England that awarded some lucky bloke a furnished, rent-free, luxury apartment for a year - James Gilhooly, I envy you. But it made me wonder about another apartment giveaway contest that took place last year a lot closer to home here in New York.

Local clothing retailer Daffy's (think T.J. Maxx with an especially eclectic European label fetish) had a competition to find the most worthy shopper to be a tenant in an apartment building where the $7,000 per month rent would be decreased to a much more affordable $700 for a year. And this wasn't a nondescript apartment building for which people were baring their souls on in a 30-second video submission- this was for a building designed by Rogers Marvel in the West Village. Passersby know this building for its extremely triangular and highly voyeuristic glass façade.

So after a little Googling, I found the winner - Kimberly Dawn Neumann. Out of sheer curiosity and seething jealousy (yes, I entered the contest), I called her up to see how things are in her glass tower. And it's no surprise to find that the Broadway performer-fitness instructor-writer is living it up in style while she has ownership of the furnished two-bedroom, two-bath apartment.

Raised in Pasadena, biologist Thomas Juhasz tells us his favorite spots in town, plus how to get landscaping you love to help balance the natural ecosystem.

Name, Age, Occupation: Thomas Juhasz, 27, Endangered Species Biologist

Abode: 2-bedroom duplex

How long have you lived in Pasadena? I grew up in Pasadena, so about 24 years.

Mayor Bloomberg held a competition for Android and iPhone mobile apps to help New Yorker become, in the words of the contest, "more transparent, more accessible, and more accountable." The winner won a cool $20,000 and lunch with the mayor.

Check out these winning apps and download one or more of them ...

In 2005, New York design trickster Rob Price-working under the collective name Thwart Design-released a series of designs called Design Without Reach. The idea was to mock the then-excruciatingly popular Design Within Reach line of mid-century modernist furniture (the store has since fallen into financial trouble along with, oh, the rest of the universe).

Design Without Reach was playful without being snotty: George Nelson's iconic ball lamp was reimagined as a series of Tootsie Roll pops; Marcel Breuer's famous chair was redone out of tape and paper clips. The point was simple - Design Within Reach wasn't all that in reach, and neither was mid-century design. The closest counterfeit we could have, then had to be somehow funny, witty, a riff.

Cut to five long and recession-heavy years later, and Bruno Bornsztein, the publisher behind Curbly.com, an online DIY community that posts everything from "Top 10 Uses For Coffee Grounds" to "Clean Like a Maid!", has just released a book-available online for a $9.99 download or in print for $18.00-called Make It! Mid-Century Modern (or MCM, for short.) In it are instructions for creating your very own Mid-Century Modern (sorry, MCM) standbys like a Charles and Ray Eames coathook, a Calder mobile, and that very same Nelson lamp that Price made out of lollipops. Here, though, it's a little more serious, a little less tounge-in-cheek.