Ruining It For Everybody

Guy has a problem with his girlfriend so he has to burn the place down. Honestly I have not been to a topless coffee shop but it sounds pretty cool. This episode makes it that much less likely that I will have this wonderful experience. Drag.

Happy New Year. Really.

A man blamed for a fire that destroyed a coffee shop where topless waitresses worked has been found guilty of arson.

A jury convicted Raymond Bellavance Jr. on Friday after deliberating for four hours.

Prosecutors said "anger and jealousy" caused Bellavance to set fire to the coffee shop, where his ex-girlfriend worked as a waitress. Deputy District Attorney Alan Kelley told jurors Bellavance was "a volatile man" who was quick to anger because his former girlfriend was having a relationship with the shop's owner, the Bangor Daily News reported.

The Grand View Coffee Shop in Vassalboro, a town of about 4,000 residents just north of the state capital, Augusta, burned down June 3, 2009.

[Associated Press]

Like Minded People Watered Down, Thank God

This is always a problem. Where like minded people are watered down. Like plants. They should all throw in behind PALIN. I don't understand what's wrong with these people. Come on! Trump/Palin. If that isn't a LOCK to bust out Obama and his hopey changey shit I don't know what is. They ate PIZZA together. This country doesn't deserve them. Or Obama, who is doing his best and is under appreciated.

I personally would love to tell people to shut up because they are watering down my impact but I am powerless on this score. Also, religious people are easier to water down, but that is a trade secret.

Flip side, none of these people are even remotely qualified to be President in these trying and troubled times. Happy New Year.

Two politically active pastors in Iowa's robust evangelical conservative movement said Wednesday that an effort has been under way to persuade either Rick Santorum or Michele Bachmann to consider quitting the Republican presidential race and endorsing the other to avoid splintering this influential voting bloc's influence in the state's caucuses.

"Otherwise, like-minded people will be divided and water down their impact," said Rev. Cary Gordon, a Sioux City minister. He said he asked Santorum several weeks ago to consider exiting the race but has since endorsed the former Pennsylvania senator, who is rising in polls.

Rev. Albert Calloway, a retired pastor from Indianola, said he asked Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman, several days ago to consider quitting the race.

A group of voters that united behind former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's winning caucus campaign in 2008 fear that this year's caucuses could be won by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas. Neither track as closely to the religious right as Santorum, Bachmann or Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Santorum, long dismissed and short on campaign money, has diligently campaigned in Iowa for more than two years. A CNN poll of Iowa caucus-goers released Wednesday showed Santorum leaping into third place in Iowa, at 16 percentage points, behind Romney and Paul.

[Associated Press]

Goodness Outweighed By Cynicism At Every Turn

Here's a happy story about how good people are. I'm just going to present it here, almost without comment...

Except to say, why is it so shocking when something good happens? And I really think the Taiwanese Consulate or whoever needs to look into this, no matter how it turned out.

Ultimately the real downer here is carelessness? You loan this kid a nice axe and she's as spaced as Ace Frehley after a night in Detroit.

"Hey wha hey I forgot my stuff man hey. Yeah another seven and seven."

This could just as easily have triggered an entry about people grabbing whatever they could lay their hands on. It's all a roll of the dice.

Christmas came early for a Boston music student who was reunited with the $170,000 violin she forgot in the overhead compartment of a regional commuter bus she rode last week, police said.

Muchen Hsieh, a student at the New England Conservatory in Boston, had traveled to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, arriving at roughly 11 p.m. on Tuesday.

Christine O'Brien, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia police, who helped Hsieh track down the missing instrument, said then came a moment of sheer panic for the student.

O'Brien said Hsieh realized she had forgotten the instrument after she was picked up from the bus station. She blamed her absent-mindedness on travel fatigue.

Hsieh called the bus company, Megabus, roughly 30 minutes after she arrived but the bus had already left the Philadelphia station, O'Brien said. Hsieh also notified police, making a plea for the instrument's recovery, O'Brien said.

The 176-year-old instrument, on loan to Hsieh from a Taiwanese cultural foundation, was found by bus cleaners in the same compartment in which Hsieh left it. They put it in storage, and police returned it to Hsieh on Friday.

[Reuters]

It Will All Be Over Soon

Just a brief interruption from shopping here, which is the whole point of Christmas anyway. It's good to know that we still have a safety net, the reliable hospital emergency room, when all else fails.

Happy Holidays from all of us at Daily Downers. Right.

On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.

"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.

Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."

Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.

This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.

"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

[Reuters]

God Gives North Korea Most Favored Nation Status

Talk about a downer, this is just the clearest evidence that we are not the supreme beings on Earth. You never hear of anything like this happening when a President dies, right? So if this goes on when Kim Jong Il dies, that means God is clearly closer to North Korea than North America, and all of our ideas about ourselves as Americans being the center of the universe are upside down. God loves North Korea, and connects with THEM.

Snowstorms, volcanos, Manchurian cranes. We ain't got nothing like that. Shit.

North Korea says a fierce snowstorm paused and the sky began glowing red above sacred Mount Paektu just minutes before leader Kim Jong Il's death.

State media say the ice on volcanic Lake Chon at the mountain in the far north cracked with a load roar.

And in the city of Hamhung, a Manchurian crane circled a statue of Kim's father, late President Kim Il Sung, before alighting on a tree, its head drooping before it took off toward Pyongyang.

State media say Kim died Saturday morning at age 69. His death was announced two days later.

Similar myths and legends also surround Kim Jong Il's birth on Mount Paektu. Official biographies say he was born on Paektu and that a double rainbow filled the skies when he was born.

[Associated Press]

Cheer Up Jerks

If it makes them feel good why not? I wonder if pissing into this thing would cheer me up. It looks nice. I don't know if I could go? Maybe they should have a program to loan people money to buy these things in America as well. Can you get toilet financing?

I was going to try to link this to the decline of civilization but that may be incorrect. This could be real progress and I just can't see it. There's a lot of craftmanship involved? I don't have to be cynical about everything. Just because a guy is rich enough to have a crystal toilet doesn't make him a bad person. You'd have to look good sitting on one of these.

I had no idea about this whole toilet God thing either. You can write that in a sentence and some people will know what that means as a REAL God. Come on. Really worth reading this one through. I promise.

Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but crystals are clearly for asses. That's what Japanese interior-fixtures maker Lixil believes, and it's proving it with this awesomely blinged-out toilet under its Inax brand.

The Satis loo is decked out in 72,000 Swarovski crystals and is valued at $130,000, according to Lixil. It's on display at the company's showroom just outside Tokyo's tony Ginza district.

"2011 was a really tough year for Japan, with the earthquake and tsunami disasters," says Lixil's Shintaro Kaai. "We wanted to do this to cheer everybody up just before Christmas."

Japan's toilets are renowned for high-tech functions such as automatic lid opening, adjustable sprays, and remote controls. Satis models come with standard spray functions and can operate on as little as 1 gallon per flush.

Some toilets have more exotic features such as MP3 playback and urine analysis. Talking, rolling gag toilets have also been unleashed on the population.

Toilet engineering, however, reflects traditional beliefs in a "toilet god," a Shinto deity who lives around loos. Keeping the bathroom clean would not only please the god. It was said to promise beauty and easy childbirth for women.

[cnet.com]

Another Day, Another Disaster In The Making

I wonder how the arch right wing anti-global warming folks will spin this one? Maybe all that methane is going to be good? Will help us lower taxes on rich people? With any luck it won't matter or perhaps it will only have local impact on the Russians. This scientist here says it's "amazing." That sounds kind of optimistic. What's under all that ice? Well, I hope we'll come through this one okay.

I've got my fingers crossed.

Russian scientists have discovered hundreds of plumes of methane gas, some 1,000 meters in diameter, bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean. Scientists are concerned that as the Arctic Shelf recedes, the unprecedented levels of gas released could greatly accelerate global climate change.

Igor Semiletov of the Russian Academy of Sciences tells the UK's Independent that the plumes of methane, a gas 20 times as harmful as carbon dioxide, have shocked scientists who have been studying the region for decades. "Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of meters in diameter," he said. "This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing."

Semiletov said that while his research team has discovered more than 100 plumes, they estimate there to be "thousands" over the wider area, extending from the Russian mainland to the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.

"In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed," Semiletov said. "We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale — I think on a scale not seen before. Some plumes were a kilometer or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere — the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal."

[yahoo! news]

New Budget Solution - Freeze The Poor

Raise taxes on the very wealthiest Americans? No. Cut funding for poor people to heat their homes, or trailers? Yes. Any more questions America?

I love where Senator Snowe (she's from Maine and talking about cold weather so OF COURSE her name is Snowe!) said this underscores how badly the nation needs a comprehensive energy policy. You mean driving Escalades until the sky turns black is not an energy policy? You're kidding? How about fracking to release natural gas and destroy the remaining supply of clean water? That doesn't count? Building more nuclear plants? What would she call a comprehensive energy policy if this isn't it? She must be talking about a policy to SAVE energy. Our policies to WASTE energy are the envy of the rest of the free world.

Ultimately this may be part of a "comprehensive" plan of another type. First we freeze the poor. Then we can them and serve them as food. This is more "out of the can" thinking rather than "out of the box" thinking, but either way we here at Daily Downers are doing a better job of coming up with plans and ideas than the mugs that pass for our leaders today.

Mary Power is 92 and worried about surviving another frigid Massachusetts winter because deep cuts in federal home heating assistance benefits mean she probably can't afford enough heating oil to stay warm.

She lives in a drafty trailer in Boston's West Roxbury neighborhood and gets by on $11,148 a year in pension and Social Security benefits. Her heating aid help this year will drop from $1,035 to $685. With rising heating oil prices, it probably will cost her more than $3,000 for enough oil to keep warm unless she turns her thermostat down to 60 degrees Fahrenheit (16 degrees Celsius), as she plans.

"I will just have to crawl into bed with the covers over me and stay there," said Power, a widow who worked as a cashier and waitress until she was 80. "I will do what I have to do."

Thousands of poor people across the U.S. Northeast are bracing for a difficult winter with substantially less home heating aid coming from the federal government.

"They're playing Russian roulette with people's lives," said John Drew, who heads Action for Boston Community Development, Inc., which provides aid to low-income residents in Massachusetts.

The issue could flare just as New Hampshire votes in the Republican presidential primary.

U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, said she hopes the candidates will take up the region's heating aid crunch because it underscores how badly the country needs a comprehensive energy policy.

Several Northeast states already have reduced heating aid benefits to families as Congress considers cutting more than $1 billion from last year's $4.7 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program that served nearly 9 million households.

[Associated Press]

I Have A Dream

Trump is not the kingmaker he thinks he is but there is a real gem in here. It says he may do a third party run. He has said that if he couldn't find a decent GOP candidate to support he might have to run on his own and he also said he has the money to do it. Sounds like a real threat.

I don't know why having only two candidates would stop Trump from hosting the debate. He could do it without any candidates. I would tune in to watch him debate HIMSELF. Maybe he could do one of those exercises where you have to take both sides of the question.

But seriously, if he runs, my dream could still become reality. For first time readers, the dream is...Trump runs, picks Palin as VP, they win, divorce their respective spouses, get married and live in the White House. IT COULD STILL HAPPEN. As I'm waiting for this website to become my cash cow.

Business mogul Donald Trump said Friday he might scrub a presidential debate that so far has drawn only Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

Trump, the reality television star who has not ruled out an independent White House bid, had hoped for all of the Republican candidates to join in a debate he would moderate Dec. 27 in Iowa. Most have decided not to, leaving only Gingrich, a former House speaker, and Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator.

"I have to look into it," Trump told Fox Business Network when asked whether he would host a two-candidate debate.

Trump was most indignant about Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann skipping out.

"She came up to see me four times. She would call me and ask me for advice," Trump said. "She said if she wins, she would like to think about me for the vice presidency. Most importantly, I did a two-hour phone call for her with her people. ... And after all that, she announced she was not going to do the debate. It's called loyalty. How do you do that? It's amazing to me."

Trump has said he might endorse a Republican but could make a third-party run himself.

Some conservatives grouse his involvement is tarnishing the GOP's image and nominating process.

"This is exactly what is wrong with politics. It's show business over substance," said former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who is skipping the debate.

"I didn't know he had the ability to lay on hands and anoint people," said Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who is also skipping it.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry also plan to skip it.

[Associated Press]

The One Percenters Of The Music World

Hubert Sumlin died Sunday. If you ask 10 people if they've ever heard of this guy, I'd say maybe TWO would know him. If you ask 10 people if they've ever heard of Eric Clapton, of course they have. All of them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a sucker for hard rocking Brit bands. I've been reading some interviews with Jim Dickinson, a Memphis music legend, and he has to defy political correctness to say that black people play the blues, and white people CAN'T play the blues, they play ROCK. And ROCK is cool. For one thing, the Brits made it LOUD, and they just hit everything HARDER. Good stuff in there.

Cream put out an album "Wheels of Fire." If you add up the tracks on this album, it should've had a disclaimer on it, "30% Hubert Sumlin," because about a side and a half had Sumlin as the foundation, and Clapton just blasted out over it and that was that. Extra downer here in that Sumlin was a sideman, and did not get any songwriting royalties when these songs were covered. Led Zeppelin tried to go even further and get around the songwriting royalties, they just STOLE songs from Willie Dixon and retitled them, until they had to go to court. This is part of why my favorites were The Who. They were not quite as derivative. It was really "ROCK" and not just "ROCK (that we made from blues)."

I don't begrudge these Brits their success. I love those records. Plus the Brits jammed with Hubert on his records to help him out. Can't help noticing though...Eric Clapton can roll out of bed tomorrow and phone his booking agent and get 30 gigs across the U.S. with about 25,000 people in each hall, charge $200 and up for tickets and make millions of dollars. Just like THAT.

I saw Hubert Sumlin once, at a place called Abilene Cafe in NYC. He was unbelievable, and he walked out in the street with a long guitar cable to jam with the passing traffic. The taxis honked at him, standing on the corner. Abilene Cafe held maybe 200 people. If he made $3,000 that night it would've been a lot.

So if you apply the "Occupy Wall Street" logic, my Brit guitar heroes are actually the One Percenters of music. Isn't every business ultimately like this? The richest of the rich rock hedge fund managers, living in castles, chauffered in limos, and no doubt able to boff models whenever they like despite their advanced age. And then there's Hubert Sumlin, working man.

RIP to an all-timer.

Hubert Sumlin, the guitarist whose slashing solos and innovative ideas galvanized the blues of Howlin’ Wolf and inspired rock guitar players like Jimmy Page, Robbie Robertson and Eric Clapton, died on Sunday in Wayne, N.J. He was 80.

His death was announced on his official Web site, hubertsumlinblues.com. No cause was specified.

Mr. Sumlin began appearing on Howlin’ Wolf’s recordings in 1953, first as a rhythm guitarist and then, beginning in 1955, on lead guitar. Mr. Sumlin’s eerie guitar counterpart to Howlin’ Wolf’s unearthly moaning on the 1956 hit “Smokestack Lightnin’ ” has lately been featured in a television commercial for Viagra. He also played lead on “Back Door Man,” “Spoonful” and “The Red Rooster,” all written and arranged by the Chicago blues trailblazer Willie Dixon.

“Dixon’s often astute novelty lyrics and shrewd arrangements were topped off by Sumlin’s imaginative, angular, taut attack, frequent glisses, maniacally wide vibrato and percussive chords, all drawn with an exaggerated brush,” the producer Dick Shurman observed of Mr. Sumlin’s relentlessly inventive playing in his liner notes to a 1991 boxed set of Howlin’ Wolf’s work for Chess Records.

“Back Door Man,” “Spoonful” and “The Red Rooster” were later made even more famous in versions released, respectively, by the Doors, Cream and the Rolling Stones. All three originally appeared on Howlin’ Wolf’s 1962 LP “Howlin’ Wolf,” which the critic Greil Marcus called “the finest of all Chicago blues albums,” largely because of Mr. Sumlin’s contribution.

[NY Times]

With A Whimper, Not A Bang

Changed dramatically for the worse. MUCH worse. Yawn. More yahoos arguing that global warming is bunk. There will not be a collective uprising on this until it is WAY too late with the water coming in through the windows.

Makes me wonder. Would you rather dissect each impending disaster, the way we do it here at Daily Downers, and mull it over each day, and then finally wake up to the zombies and realize how cool and RIGHT you were...or would you rather IGNORE everything and then wake up and see the zombies and be really surprised?

Either way the zombies are coming. If you read this all the time maybe you're getting upset about things that don't matter, because the zombies are coming anyway. And if you don't read it, maybe you had more fun, or maybe you DIDN'T have more fun because you weren't that smart or cool and couldn't find anything better than Daily Downers and you would've have had a few laughs over here on your way to the bitter end.

Two points. One - we'll never know. Two - it doesn't matter. I could go on through point three (you can't win), but you get the picture.

Federal officials say the Arctic region has changed dramatically in the past five years — for the worse.

It's melting at a near record pace, and it's darkening and absorbing too much of the sun's heat.

A new report card from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration rates the polar region with blazing red stop lights on three of five categories and yellow cautions for the other two. Overall, these are not good grades, but it doesn't mean the Arctic is doomed and it still will freeze in the winter, said report co-editor Jackie Richter-Menge.

The Arctic acts as Earth's refrigerator, cooling the planet. What's happening, scientists said, is like someone pushing the fridge's thermostat much too high.

"It's not cooling as well as it used to," Richter-Menge said.

The dramatic changes are from both man-made global warming and recent localized weather shifts, which were on top of the longer term warming trend, scientists said.

The report, written by 121 scientists from around the world, said statistics point to a shift in the Arctic health in 2006. That was right before 2007, when a mix of weather conditions and changing climate led to a record loss of sea ice, from which the region has never recovered. This summer's sea ice melt was the second worst on record, a tad behind 2007.

"We've got a new normal," said co-author Don Perovich, a geophysicist at the Army Corps of Engineers Cold Research and Engineering Lab. "Whether it's a tipping point and we'll never recover, who's to say?"

[Associated Press]

Man's Best Friend Is An Enemy Preparing For Global Conquest

Months ago, maybe even a year ago, I came across a story on Nazis and talking dogs and posted here about it. Once again, Daily Downers is ahead of the curve in predicting the evolving apocalyptic disaster that will soon engulf us all.

This is a story I haven't seen in the mainstream press. What's fascinating is that the author feels compelled to offer an explanation, even though he has NO IDEA what this DOG was thinking. How could he? Says, the dog "was apparently excited to join his owner in the marsh" and jumped up and stepped on the gun, causing it to discharge.

How the hell does this guy know the dog was EXCITED? This happens all the time, where writers assume they know what PEOPLE are thinking. Now it's DOG telepathy. Come on.

I'm reading this and I have a different interpetation. The dog was PISSED. He's out in a CANOE in a SHALLOW MARSH. My dog likes to sleep in, preferably next to a heater or on top of a blanket. So I think THIS dog said to himself "you know what, fuck this guy, I've had it with his bullshit." The dog has probably seen the guy shoot this gun before and knew exactly what he was doing. The dog can't pick up the gun and AIM it, but it was laying there, pointed at his owner's ass, and the dog figured, "this is the best shot I can get, so I'm going for it." Ka-boom!

Trust me, all these mutts are slowly gathering skills and intelligence and soon we'll be faced with an army of armed, talking dogs who know how to use weapons and then we are SCREWED. If you want to buy into this "man's best friend" line of crap you're welcome to it. But don't say I didn't warn you. AGAIN!

Dogs are man's best friend. Except, you know, when they're shooting a gun at you.

And strangely enough, that's what really happened to a hapless dog owner in Brigham City, Utah. The man in question--a 46-year-old hunting enthusiast who is not named in local news reports on the incident--got a behind-full of birdshot courtesy of his loyal canine companion when he was out duck hunting over the weekend.

KSL.com reports the man and his dog were traveling in a canoe-like boat when the man stepped out into a shallow marsh to set up some decoys. His left his 12-gauge shotgun resting across the bow of the boat, according to Box Elder County Sheriff's Deputy Kevin Potter.

That's when the dog "did something to make the gun discharge," Potter said. "I don't know if the safety device was on. It's not impossible the dog could have taken it off safety."

Apparently excited to join his owner in the marsh, the dog jumped up on the boat's bow and stepped on the gun. The gun was fired, hitting the man in the buttocks with 27 pellets of birdshot.

The man promptly called 9-1-1, and is now reportedly recovering. Potter said that thanks to a well-positioned pair of waders--the hip-length rubber boots he was wearing at the time--the dog owner was able to avoid a more serious gunshot wound.

[yahoo! news]