By CHRIS PACKHAM
Unhappy ending: A title loan office was robbed!
But — as I explained this weekend to a little kid whose albuterol inhaler I wouldn't give back — this is a sad old unfair world, and the suspect was caught later, wandering the streets with a handgun and a little plastic trash bag full of money. The handgun industry reminds you to rob title loan offices responsibly. The title loan industry reminds you that if you outlaw high-interest subprime loans, only outlaws will make high-interest sub prime loans. Who's right? The truth is somewhere in the middle, as measured by the distance between Midwest Voices bloggers Yael T. Abouhalkah and Ross Balano, a writer legitimized by his proximity to Yael T. Abouhalkah.After the jump, five reasons not to drink anything Bill Cosby hands you — and five reasons you should! Click here, or for our Spanish-speaking readers, aquí.
The Pitch Inaccu-Weather Forecast: Area storms over the weekend had the Missouri River spilling over its banks, which we all know leads to raw sewage in city waterways. I don't know about you, but the poop smell in Brush Creek is like the first robin of spring for me — that's when I know I should start stealing TV shows via Bit Torrent, because Katie Horner loves interrupting anything that's interesting. But what would it take to interrupt Katie Horner? Probably some kind of intercontinental nuclear exchange that occurred during a light-to-moderate rain, I'm guessing.
Burning unleaded: Gas prices spiked $4 in the metro this weekend — thanks a lot, Democrats — so I spent the weekend teaching my church youth group some important new life skills. While an honor-roll student named Caitlin was transferring the gasoline from sculptor Stretch's Hummer to my 1989 Grand Am, I got distracted and wandered inside Grinders for a while. I picked up what I thought was a Skymall catalog someone had left on the counter, which actually turned out to be an issue of corporatist egghead magazine The Economist. According to this article, the spike in oil prices can't be explained by commodity speculation, under-supply or overconsumption. What's left? Maybe it eventually reached some kind of conclusion about that whole thing, but I have no idea because the doctor says I lack the autism-level hyperfocus necessary to finish articles in The Economist.
This looks like a job for Superfund: The nuclear weapons plant at the Bannister Federal Complex is surprisingly filthy! Although the federal government has already spent $65 million Americos cleaning up petroleum products, beryllium, PCBs and radiation waste, there are no plans to actually make the property safe or habitable. Really, the most surprising thing about the whole story is that nobody's even arguing about it. Everyone — from Sierra Club director of something-something Scott Dye, whom the article quotes as saying both "poppycock" and "hunky dory," to "the Government," as seen in paranoid conspiracy thrillers and Libertarian bumper stickers — openly admits that it's a festering, toxic menace to the environment and human life, without even being legally compelled by Erin Brockovich's Erin Brockovich filing some kind of sassy, post-feminist class-action suit. Two years from now, when we're breathing radioactive beryllium dust while shopping at a new Bed, Bath and Beyond constructed on the site, we can look back on this as a day when nobody denied the glaringly obvious.
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