Sorrow for the lost Lennar
We all know that the housing industry has been served up a heaping plateful of fundamental crumb cake. Now some of the players are coming back for seconds. Lennar (NYSE:LEN) disappointed investors with its second guidance hosing in the same month.

I'm fully aware that we will come to a point where real estate developers are screaming bargains. The stocks have already given back good chunks of the gains they achieved when the going was good. However, when you have a bellwether warn twice in the same month, I think it's pretty fair to say that we have yet to hit rock bottom in this slide.

Feel free to start scouring for bargains now, but you'll probably be better off buying in cheaper in a few quarters.

Been there, Dunn that in searching for the headline of the year
That Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) scandal keeps getting uglier with every passing admission. However, you've got to hand it to the journalists for finding snappy headlines. Then again, when your CEO is a homophone with "herd" and "heard" and your chairwoman -- now, former chairwoman -- is the phonetic twin of "done," it's almost too easy to get CEO Mark Hurd or Patricia Dunn into an original headline without treading on the obvious.

So, I'd like to give props to the folks at Red Herring for coming up with the Dunn-related headline that everyone is probably now kicking themselves over. With a nod to old-school AC/DC, the business weekly's headline was Dirty Deeds Dunn Dirt Cheap. Game over.

I'll offer up the silver medal to the first publication to write about the resignation of Ann Baskins, HP's general counsel, just hours before she was set to testify before Congress and label it Baskins Robbing. What's that? No robbery was involved here? She pleaded the fifth instead of testifying? Bummer. I was ready to scoop up ice cream metaphors to make this work.

Let's take the whole week off
So, Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) got into the holiday spirit and announced that it would be giving its employees the final week of the year off. Alyce Lomax was correct to point out that this isn't a matter of the online juggernaut getting into the holiday spirit. Rather, this is just the company's way of saving money at its employees' expense by forcing them to take vacation time or else go unpaid for those days.

The company didn't really need to do this. It's got billions in the bank. This isn't the same as when nervous technology companies did the same thing when the dot-com bubble was bursting. In fact, Yahoo! probably shouldn't be doing this, from a business perspective, much less from a PR perspective. If Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) was eating my lunch, I'd find a way to squeeze 53 weeks out of the calendar instead of whittling it down to just 51 weeks.

Until next week, I remain,

Rick Munarriz

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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz recommends windshield wiper fluid when trying to look back. He's also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early. He does not own shares in any of the companies in this story. The Fool has a disclosure policy.