Speaking of house and home, I was driving south on Echo Park Avenue just past noon today and saw the fences peeled away from the debacle we call Durbin, a failed condo development in the heart of Echo Park -- at Chicken Corner in fact. It has been about 14 months since construction on the project was halted. There is still a porta potty on the premises, and fire clearance has killed the wild tobacco plants and grasses, but no building, no tearing down, nothing. The several acres where the condos were supposed to go have been surrounded by regulation-issue green-tarp chain-link fence for all that time until today. At first I thought that maybe the fence rental folks hadn't been paid and they had come to reclaim their property. But it turns out they were only maintaining it. Doing repairs, a worker explained -- to the fence, the only active element in the whole moribund eyesore. Curtain goes back up shortly.