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I must confess to a blatant bias against manufactured homes. I have my reasons. Rather, I have one certain 12-by-60 foot reason. When I was 9 years old, our family of eight squished inside one of those long, narrow, aluminum tubes like human toothpaste. It was a temporary thing. Builders were busily clearing out the matchstick walls and smoky rubble of our house.  My 5-year-old brother had discovered the power of fire the hard way.

One the plus side, I enjoyed near star status during show-and-tell when I presented three plastic statues of saints melted into practically miraculous configurations from the sheer intensity of the heat of the house fire. One geeky science girl inquired if the popcorn in our kitchen had popped. Excellent question. Alas, we'd had no kernels in our cupboards at that time, and were unwilling to set ablaze the house a second time to test her hypothesis.

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