Clear and warm this early Thursday on California’s northern coast, with the near-full moon hanging like a white doorknob out over the Pacific Ocean.
As we approach the weekend, the speed of life tends to really pick up — today and tomorrow will flow like swift-moving and polluted river water.

A surf through the foul scent of the news this morning reveals a machete can be gruesome and the fabled sequester will allow some federal agencies, like the fabled IRS, to be closed tomorrow — a furlough holiday.

And the second-tiered news level sucks even worse.

(Illustration found here).

A short-list of dumb-ass, and/or mean shit.

A most-depressing aspect of living is suicide, now ability appears to be growing. A touch of too much in some odd-ball direction seems a reality of the nowadays:

We know, thanks to a growing body of research on suicide and the conditions that accompany it, that more and more of us are living through a time of seamless black: a period of mounting clinical depression, blossoming thoughts of oblivion and an abiding wish to get there by the nonscenic route.
Every year since 1999, more Americans have killed themselves than the year before, making suicide the nation’s greatest untamed cause of death.
In much of the world, it’s among the only major threats to get significantly worse in this century than in the last.
…
This year, America is likely to reach a grim milestone: the 40,000th death by suicide, the highest annual total on record, and one reached years ahead of what would be expected by population growth alone.
We blew past an even bigger milestone revealed in November, when a study lead by Ian Rockett, an epidemiologist at West Virginia University, showed that suicide had become the leading cause of “injury death” in America.
As the CDC noted again this spring, suicide outpaces the rate of death on the road—and for that matter anywhere else people accidentally harm themselves.
Somewhere Ralph Nader is smiling, but the takeaway is darkly profound: we’ve become our own greatest danger.

A way-sad situation.

And the apparent ‘problem‘ with females in the US military continues to spawn bullshit. Here’s another totally different asshole:

A sergeant first class and officer in charge of the “health, welfare and discipline” of cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point has been accused of videotaping female cadets without their consent, including when the women were showering or otherwise unclothed.
According to the New York Times, Sgt. First Class Michael McClendon is being charged under four articles of the Uniform Code for Military Justice, including indecent acts, dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, and actions prejudicial to good order and discipline.

Women in combat ain’t no problem — it’s the shitheads males back in the barracks.

And for climate change, the “canary in the coal mine,” is a frog:

Federal wildlife scientists report Wednesday that frogs, salamanders and toads are dying off at alarming rates nationwide, with the declines most dire among threatened species.
…
“This analysis suggests that amphibian declines may be more widespread and severe than previously realized,” concludes the study.
It finds that overall numbers of frogs and their kin drop 3.7 percent every year, meaning they could disappear in half of the habitats they now occupy nationwide in 26 years.
For 12 threatened species, things are even worse, with their numbers dropping 11.6 percent every year.

And this from ScienceDaily last week:

Amphibians, which are declining throughout the world, play an important role in ecological systems.
They eat small creatures, including mosquitos, and they are food themselves for larger creatures, such as birds and snakes.
Because amphibians are the middle of the food chain — and sensitive to environmental disruption because of their aquatic or semi-aquatic lives — their existence is often used as an indication of ecosystem health.

History can be just that — too far back to remember.
Kids are moving with the times and into the big cities:

Census Bureau data released Thursday show that 48 of the 50 most populous U.S. cities have grown since 2010, compared with only 40 of the top 50 in the first two years after the 2000 Census.
Of the top 100, 93 have grown since 2010, compared with just 72 a decade ago.
Many of the biggest — New York, Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego and Dallas, among others — are outpacing the nation’s 1.7 percent growth rate since 2010.
“Urban America is recovering faster than more remote, more rural places,” said Robert Lang, a professor of urban affairs at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
Lang said urban areas appeal to Millennials (those born from about 1982 to 2001) “in part because they haven’t seen cities in crisis. They missed the riots of the 1960s, the urban decline of the 1970s and the crack epidemic of the 1980s. “If you’re a kid born in 1993 or 1992 and you’re in college now, you’re looking around the country thinking about where you want to move … you’ve seen fairly … tranquil cities, in relative terms to what their history was.”

Government overreach?
And can this be real?
If filmed, yes, indeed — New York City switched parking signs way-too fast:

Cars parked along one side of the street shown in the video are parked legally when the video begins.
But this stretch of road will soon be home to one of NYC’s new bike-share program, meaning there can be no parking in front of the large bike rack to be installed.
And so, as you can see on the video, a city employee comes in and installs a new No Standing Anytime sign.
And within 25 minutes of that sign going up, a parking enforcement officer is swooping in to issue tickets — $115 each — to cars that had been legally parked before the sign was changed.
When contacted by CBS 2, a rep for the Department of Transportation simply said that “any motorist who believes they received a ticket in error can contest it through the Department of Finance, which adjudicates violations.”

The IRS feels the say way.

This I can fully understand — my laptop was stolen in January, and I ended up buying a HP with Windows 8, which really, really, really sucks:

According a report by Examiner, Microsoft’s American customer satisfaction index (ACSI) declined to 74 after the launch of Windows 8, even though everybody expected to see the tech giant improving its overall score in this ranking.
What’s more interesting is that Windows 8 caused a drop almost similar to the one brought to Microsoft by Vista in 2006 after it was launched.
At that time, Microsoft’s index fell to 73, but it was then improved by Windows 7, still the number one operating system in the world.
…
Of course, all eyes are now on the Windows 8.1 update due to this summer that’s expected to focus a bit more on consumer feedback.
As a result, the next Windows release is very likely to fix some of the issues reported in Windows 8, including the lack of a Start button.
What’s more, Microsoft could even include an option to skip the Start Screen and thus let users boot directly to desktop instead of getting the Start Screen every time they turn on their computers.

Windows 8 is ludicrous, overcomplicated and just plain dumb-ass. Wonder if Windows 8.1 will be free for those who think the original really, really, really sucks.

And this weekend is Memorial Day — more depression, more fun ways to hurt yourself.
This is Thursday, though, and a busy-busy one at the liquor store I manage, with a big liquor order due in and a beer delivery.
Plus it’s payday!
Yeah for WTF!