Just a quick comment on the remark below about the story of the fellow in the New York apartment who was avalanched upon by the contents of his magazine collection or "hoard" (see Thu Jan 01, 01:50:04 PM ). In one of the stories it was described as a 10 foot by 10 foot apartment he paid $250 per month for. I must compare that to current Sydney rents. Does sound a touch expensive, since it didn't sound like a very flash place. Like, was this entire place a single 10-foot-square room? With toilet & bathroom facilities down the hall? Or was that size just the 'bed-sitting room', and he had his own amenities which didn't count in the description?

These are just a grabbed handful of the links from a search engine.
www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-junk31.html

There is a wonderful difference in tone between these next two reports of the incident. Interesting that, except for the ones which are pretty much just a copy of one of the others (e.g. from a wire service/news agency/whatever they're called these days), that different little bits of facts (?) come out in different stories.
www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/14782.htm
BOOK WORM SQUISHED
By MARK BULLIET and TATIANA DELIGIANNAKIS
New York Post; Dec 30, 2003; pg. 007

www.iht.com/articles/123315.html
Recluse buried by paper avalanche
Robert D. McFadden NYT
Neighbors save New Yorker who never threw anything out

www.orlandosentinel.com/features/lifestyle/ orl-livhoard04010404jan04,0,5635066.story?coll=orl-living-headlines
Chairmen of the hoards
The case of a Bronx man trapped for two days under a huge pile of magazines and catalogs is the latest example of a most curious behavior.
By Nina Bernstein | New York Times
Posted January 4, 2004
"I had to squeeze inside my apartment," Patrice Moore, 43, said of his 10-by-10-foot room, which rents for $250 a month.

Let me just drop the name Sir Thomas Phillipps — yes, that's the spelling — here. Most of the New York and many US stories about the incident mentioned the Collyer (Collier?) brothers, a famous hoarding story from the area.

Extracted from an exchange of email:
Paul,
... your collective refrigerator door, your collective bathroom mirror ...
When the fridge died at midsummer just before Christmas, I did contemplate getting one of the groovy new ones they were advertising that had a mirror-finish door, since we don't have anywhere else to put a large mirror ...

... but I didn't think it worth the extra $1000, and it was too big for the space anyway. But it would have been both together. And if it was one of those internet-connected models (another $3000) that's the whole catastrophe!