Be It Ever So Humble, There’s No Place Like Rocks

--The median price of a home around the nation’s capital is about $130,000. But Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) probably pays a few thousand more than that every month. The average Washington-area mortgage of $151,311 is the second-highest in the nation. When Rockefeller refinanced his 15.9-acre property, including a home styled after a Southern plantation manor, he went into hock for $15.3 million. Rockefeller and a spokesman, Brian Detter, would not comment on the terms of the refinancing, but Detter said the 1920s estate, known as The Rocks, has been renovated substantially. Assuming that the senator took a 30-year mortgage at 10%, he probably pays about $134,000 a month, accountants told the Washington Post. The typical Washington homeowner pays about $1,200. The bright side is that Rockefeller could have a tidy write-off on his taxes.

--Britain’s Prince Philip, accompanied by Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, laid a wreath at the Yokohama Commonwealth War Cemetery in Japan to honor the 1,738 British, Australian and other war dead buried there. The trip was seen by many as an attempt to appease anger among World War II veterans and some British lawmakers over the attendance of Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, at the funeral of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito. Although critics had denounced Hirohito as a war criminal, many historians believe the emperor was a figurehead with little political power.

--The Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University in Ohio will preserve a collection of thousands of writings from the anti-war and hippie movements of the 1960s and 1970s. William F. Ringle, who had established a subsistence commune called the Bluff Creek Theoretical Institute in Boone, Iowa, collected the more than 3,000 books and 1,000 pamphlets on U.S. counterculture before his death in 1984. Included in the works is “A Vietnamese View of Human Nature,” a 36-page booklet by California Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), estranged husband of actress Jane Fonda. The collection covers radical social history and politics, drugs, mysticism, spiritual life, alternative and radical newspapers, underground comic books and communal living.