I believe Vancouver BC was the first or second City where a Starbucks opened on a downtown intersection, diagonally across from a Starbucks.

Caffeine is a drug.

It was April the forty-first
Being a quadruple leap year
I was driving in downtown Atlantis
My barracuda was in the shop
So I was in a rented stingray
And it was overheating

So I pulled into a Shell Station
They said I'd blown a seal
I said, "Fix the damn thing
And leave my private life out of it
Okay pal?"

While they were doing that
I walked over to a place called the Oyster Bar, a real dive
But I knew the owner
He used to play for the Dolphins
I said "Hi Gil"
You have to yell, he's hard of herring

Think I had a wet dream
Cruisin' thru the Gulf Stream
Ooh Ooh Ooh Ooh
Wet dream

Gil was also down on his luck
Fact is he was barely keeping his head below water
I bellied up to the sandbar
He poured me the usual

Rusty snail, hold the grunion
Shaken not stirred
With a peanut butter and jellyfish sandwich on the side
Heavy on the mako

I slipped him a fin
On porpoise
I was feeling good
I even dropped a sand dollar in the box for Jerry's squids
For the halibut

Well the place was crowded
We were packed in like sardines They were all there to listen to the big band sounds of Tommy Dorsal
What sole

Tommy was rockin' the place with a very popular tuna
Salmon Chanted Evening
And the stage was surrounded by screaming groupers
Probably there to see the bass player

One of them was this cute little yellowtail
And she's giving me the eye
So I figured this is my chance for a little fun
You know, piece of Pisces

But she said things I just couldn't fathom
She was too deep, seemed to be under a lot of pressure
Boy, could she drink
She drank like a . . .
She drank a lot

I said "What's your sign"
She said "Aquarium"
I said "Great, let's get tanked"

Think I had a wet dream
Cruisin' thru the Gulf Stream
Ooh Ooh Ooh Ooh
Wet dream

I invited her to my place for a midnight bait
I said "Come on baby, it'll only take a few minnows"
She threw me that same old line
"Not tonight, I gotta haddock"

And she wasn't kidding either
Cause in came the biggest, meanest looking haddock
I'd ever seen come down the pike
He was covered with mussels

He came over to me and said
"Listen, shrimp, don't you come trollin' around here"
What a crab
This guy was steamed
I could see the anchor in his eyes

I turned to him, I said
"A-balone, you're just being shellfish"
Well, I knew it was going to be trouble and so did Gil
'Cause he was already on the phone to the cods

The haddock hits me with a sucker punch
I catch him with a left hook
He eels over
It was a fluke but there he was
Lying on the deck, flat as a mackerel
Kelpless

I said "Forget the cods Gil
This guy's gonna need a sturgeon"
Well, the yellowtail was impressed with the way I landed her boyfriend
She came over to me, she said
"Hey, big boy, you're really a game fish
What's your name"
I said "Marlin"

Think I had a wet dream
Cruisin' thru the Gulf Stream
Ooh Ooh Ooh Ooh
Wet dream

Well, from then on we had a whale of a time
I took her to dinner, I took her to dance
I bought her a bouquet of flounders
And then I went home with her
And what did I get for my trouble
A case of the clams

Think I had a wet dream
Cruisin' thru the Gulf Stream
Ooh Ooh Ooh Ooh

Wet dream
Cruisin' thru the Gulf Stream
Ooh Ooh Ooh Ooh

Wet dream
Cruisin' thru the Gulf Stream
Ooh Ooh Ooh Ooh

Salt Lake City Mormons could have just let all the homeless stay in their huge church... would have saved the city even more money.

On a serious note, I was in Salt Lake City in 2012, and I didn't notice many homeless people downtown.

Ah yes, beautiful downtown Russia again . . .

pfft, the rich have welfare, they just call it tax breaks, and they have the lobbyists to keep them.

No one wants those on foodstamps to use them for alcohol and other frivolous items. name me one non-foodstamp-using person who does? It's a strawman that the right obsessively cling to.

As with so many things, it's not about laws or bureaucracy, it's about enforcement. laws mean nothing without enforcement. I'm getting sick of seeing more and more panhandlers downtown where I live and I completely agree that handouts are not an efficient solution.

but you know what isn't a good solution either? negative reinforcement. We've been living under the conservative idea that if we just keep punishing the poor and making their lives more miserable, then obviously that will be motivation to not be poor.

IT DOESN'T WORK. maybe it works for a small percentage of people, but those people aren't poor then. so you have a group of people that are continually being punished and devalued for no good fucking reason because if they aren't motivated to not be poor under these kinds of conditions, then they never will be.

so again, we have this situation where there are two solutions that aren't really effective, but one is slightly less bad than the other. sure some people may use their foodstamps for alcohol and other shit...but many people do actually use their foodstamps for...food. shock.

Even if you had a much more equal distribution of wealth, we're still going to have poor people and people in poverty.

I think the issue is largely mired in health, physical and mental. Even with all our technology...mental health is still unreliable and some people are so physically impaired that they can't work or work well.

Despite largely claiming to be pro-life, the right would either secretly want them to die alone in an alley or make them indentured servants to some corporation if they aren't already. That, I submit, is no life, at least not a good and healthy one.

I don't have the answer, all we can really do is point out that many of the things we've tried aren't working and will never work, and even if there are some successes, it's still largely inefficient, but what's the alternative? if you are "pro-life" then an inefficient solution is still preferable to a solution that simply doesn't work. So I call bullshit on people who like to claim they have the solution. If someone out there has the solution, they certainly haven't demonstrated it yet.

Funny. I live in the bay area, and walk my son to soccer in the park all the time with no worries. We can take easy, peaceful strolls outside in the summer and winter. Looking around, it's no Norman Rockwell, but all I see are american families. We are surrounded by the best schools and universities in the country.

As far as Oakland goes, it's a great city to visit and to live. It's not just me that feels this way, demand for housing there has only increased in the past decade. It's expensive to buy there because people want to live there. Alot more than St. Paul, by the way. Last time I checked, St. Paul also had its crime ridden parts; or can you walk anywhere at night in your town?

So these dystopian pictures being painted on this thread exist in this thread only. In real life, Oakland is a thriving city with alot going for it, and the people with means who actually drive the economy agree, and are voting with their feet and wallets, and corporate headquarters.

I visit Oakland often. The last trip, I took my son on a tour of the USS Hornet, where he got to see the first footsteps of the Apollo astronauts after they returned to Earth. Before that, we visited the world class planetarium and took in great views of the valley. I love going to the great restaurants and live music venues downtown.

Shite like this is the reason I moved out of California, living in good old Saint Paul, Minnesota now. Oxnard California is like a mini-Oakland. Here I have a 3000sf home built in 1901, 1 mile from downtown and no worries. My daughter is 10mos, one due in July, and we so enjoy walks in the neighborhood in the summer. My stepson walks to baseball 1 mile away, we meet him there pushing baby and walking dog, walk home as an American Family. It makes it all worth while. My wife is a CPA but I am a blue collar truck driver.

I think there are ALL KINDS of problems that lead to places like this in Cali... Fresno is almost as bad. Parts of the low desert are very bad, etc. If you want to write 2 page posts defending your view of WHY, maybe that's one of the reasons why as well, and you should define it, man up, and put it in there at number 12 or whatever. Sure "democratic stronghold" is part of the problem. American counter-culture has also been rewarding consumerism above all else for decades. Asians, Latinos, and Blacks cash in today and sell out tomorrow. The west coast is also way too expensive, real estate is too high, and money is the only incentive.

Obviously there is a problem. The left wants to look at answers that sound might or will help but accountability cant be ignored. The right wants to go to war and justify a police state when we are all Americans defining our on future together.

As a side note I might have had 10-15 encounters with these types over the years in and around Oxnard and if their skin was white and I was armed, maybe they would have died...or me. Who knows, there are always more than one way to deal with a problem. In the end the minorities pay the price and it isn't fair. They get worse jobs, their property isnt worth ShXXt, their children receive a poor education. Cookie-cutter whites, in the end, benefit on the left. The drive their Volvo SUVs on highways to schools or doctors or what have you paid for by the masses.

The Olympic Peninsula is a giant rock that ran into the continental US. When the white settlers first got here, they looked at all the massive trees and thought -- FERTILE LAND! Woo-hoo!

They were shocked when they clear cut, dug down, and found rock, like, really quickly.

Port Townsend was supposed to be Seattle -- the main entry point of all ocean shipping. But they could see that there wasn't enough water and the deep bay wasn't protected enough. When a storm came in and beached a bunch of sailing ships. that ended PT's hopes. The money moved to Seattle, protected by Puget Sound.

PT is also in the rainshadow of the Olympics. Over 100" of rain on the ocean side of the Olympics. PT, which is on the other side? Gets 19" a year. Seattle gets 40".

Micro-climates rule over here. Even within city limits -- once I was downtown (which is one block from the water) and struggled to get home through a snow storm. By the time I drove half a mile to a flat area to attempt to go inland, and drove four blocks away from the waterfront, it wasn't even raining.

Micro. Climates.

What you say is true of the Seattle side of Puget Sound. But once you keep going east, over the Cascades, you end up in a huge rainshadow that is most of Eastern Washington.

I couldn't tell you word one about climate in Europe. Typical American!

Those cameras are 20k plus. If someone knocked over my camera, my lively hood, my job, and my reputation I'd certainly run over to it too.

And for the record, that looks more like Parramore. Which is a neighborhood near downtown. This why we don't visit Parramore.

Can we get these to law enforcement please, one per city block downtown

...Buy a house?

Be $58,000 into your mortgage instead? Cripes, if you're willing to be on a freaking campground than you're not looking for a 2.5 million dollar house close to downtown, so get a house in a developing area for cheap.

Meh, there's two Starbucks cross-corner from eachother downtown here. And here you can walk across the street from one to the other without risking your life (well, no more than normal anyhow).

I know my enemies and my friends and allies. I also have become quite deft at disengaging a potentially hind-brained copper from his predictable, robotic license.

My general rule of thumb is polite, courteous, etc.-Keep the robot's heart-rate down, make them feel in control, cooperate.

Sometimes this does not work, especially the further out of the city you travel, constables and sheriffs necks tend to be redder...This is Texas, you must remember and while the pigs of Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Carolinas (deep south) are much worse, you still have to factor in asshole-redneck-douchebag.

In the event I get no quarter from a cop who's simply human garbage, I let rip with my assessment, this after I already know I'm going to jail. Every time this has happened incidentally, was for unpaid parking tickets, and once for possession of an oz. of weed, which the prick searched my vehicle about 30 mins. for before he found it....A total piece of shit, this assessed after an attempt at a conversation with the asshole-The cunt risked my life with his driving as well, breaking all speed limits to get me downtown to county, probably because I would not stop verbally assaulting him from the backseat...He deserved all I had and more, the buzz-killing prick who was "JUST DOING HIS JOB."

Here's to all the people who scream "TROLL" whenever someone leaves one remark on a post without returning for a "discussion" (perhaps that's all that one felt needed said to make a simple point?)


@shatterdose "Who typically freaks out? People that are guilty or crazy"-That sounds like a willing herd animal using broad generalizations in favor of a police state.

@arekin-Agreed-I am not implying that I would have handled this scenario any differently-

@bmacs27-All relevant and valid observations-Our distrust, fear and derision of cops in the U.S. comes from conditioning-The so-called, "war on drugs" has been the bane of law enforcement since prohibition, that and CORRUPTION from top to bottom-

@moopysnooze THANK YOU!!?? How much more WILL the cattle take, eh??

I like that all that craziness hasn't affected downtown Seatown that much...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_Place_Market

diablo 3 was pretty bad for launch date. I've never experienced that sort of downtown and bullshit for the first 2 days.


diablo 3 was a big let down. but I still played the shit out of it.