Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Idiot of the month award

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Man uses gun for backscratcher, shoots himself

01:43 PM CDT on Tuesday, May 13, 2008

By KIMBERLY DURNAN / The Dallas Morning News
kdurnan@dallasnews.com

A Fort Worth man trying to scratch an itch on his back used a revolver and accidentally shot himself.

Jorge Espinal, 44, was drinking beer and playing poker around 3 a.m. Sunday in his home in the 3500 block of Montague Street, when he got up from the table and walked into another room, said Fort Worth police Lt. Kenneth Dean.

“He told officers he had an itch on his back and grabbed the first thing he could get a hold of, which was a revolver,” Lt. Dean said. “The gun went off."

Mr. Espinal went back and told his buddies that he shot himself. “They didn’t believe him until they saw the blood coming down his back,” Lt. Dean said.

Mr. Espinal was taken to an area hospital, where he was treated and released with non-life-threatening injuries.

No Marx Cafe tonight.

No spinning all the amazing new music I have, makes me one sad panda, phooey..... I'm going to be working late tonight preparing a presentation for a day long round table style meeting that kicks off at 6am. So staying out till all hours at some dodgy bar playing music for unappreciative hipsters isn't compatible with my career goals. Next week, next week it's on for sure!

-peace

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Travis Twiggs RIP

Wow, reading about this has left me in tears.

Marine who died after cross-state chase wrote of war stress

By ARTHUR H. ROTSTEIN – 9 hours ago

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Last month, Marine Staff Sgt. Travis N. "T-Bo" Twiggs went to the White House with a group of Iraq war veterans called the Wounded Warriors Regiment and met the president.

Twiggs had been through four tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan and months of therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder in which he said he was on up to 12 different medications.

"He said, `Sir, I've served over there many times, and I would serve for you any time,' and he grabbed the president and gave him a big hug," said Kellee Twiggs, his widow.

About two weeks later, Travis Twiggs went absent without leave from his job in Quantico, Va.

He and his brother drove to the Grand Canyon, where their car was found hanging in a tree in what appeared to be a failed attempt to drive into the chasm.

The brothers carjacked a vehicle at the park Monday. Two days later they were at a southwestern Arizona border checkpoint, and took off when they were asked to pull into a secondary inspection area, Border Patrol spokesman Michael Bernacke said.

Eighty miles later, the car was on the Tohono O'odham reservation, its tires wrecked by spike strips.

As tribal police and Border Patrol agents closed in, Twiggs, 36, apparently fatally shot his 38-year-old brother, Willard J. "Will" Twiggs, then killed himself.

Pinal County Sheriff's spokesman Mike Minter said no motive has been established. But Kellee Twiggs said the decorated Marine would still be alive if the military had given him enough help.

"All this violent behavior, him killing his brother, that was not my husband. If the PTSD would have been handled in a correct manner, none of this would have happened," she said in a telephone interview from Stafford, Va.

Travis Twiggs, who enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1993 and held the combat action ribbon, wrote about his efforts to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder in the January issue of the Marine Corps Gazette.

The symptoms would disappear when he began each tour, he said, but came back stronger than ever when he came home.

He wrote that his life began to "spiral downward" after the tour in which two Marines from his platoon died.

"I cannot describe what a leader feels when he does not bring everyone home," he wrote. "To make matters even worse, I arrived at the welcome home site only to find that those two Marines' families were waiting to greet me as well. I remember thinking, 'Why are they here?'"

Weeks later, Twiggs "saw a physician's assistant who said that was the severest case of PTSD she'd seen in her life," his widow said.

He began receiving treatment, but the Marine wrote that he mixed his medications with alcohol and that his symptoms didn't go away until he started his final tour in Iraq.

When he came home, "All of my symptoms were back, and now I was in the process of destroying my family," he wrote. "My only regrets are how I let my command down after they had put so much trust in me and how I let my family down by pushing them away."

Kellee Twiggs said her husband was "very, very different, angry, agitated, isolated and so forth," upon his return. "He was just doing crazy things."

She said her husband was treated in the psychiatric ward of Bethesda Naval Medical Center and then sent to a Veterans Administration facility for four months.

Most recently, Travis Twiggs was assigned to the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory at Quantico, a job he said helped him "get my life back on track."

"Every day is a better day now," he wrote in the Marine Corps Gazette. "...Looking back, I don't believe anyone is to blame for my craziness, but I do think we can do better."

Twiggs urged others suffering from similar problems to seek help. "PTSD is not a weakness. It is a normal reaction to a very violent situation," he wrote.

Kellee Twiggs said she can't understand why her husband was not sent to a specialized PTSD clinic in New Jersey.

"They let him out. He was OK for a while and then it all started over again," she said.

A spokesman at Quantico, 1st Lt. Brian Donnelly, said the Corps is committed to providing full medical, psychological and social support to anyone with a combat-related injury, including PTSD.

"Our leaders are trained to be alert for signs of PTSD in their Marines and to provide a supportive climate in which Marines can feel comfortable seeking help," Donnelly said.

One lingering mystery in Twiggs' case is his older brother. Kellee Twiggs said she thinks the Louisiana man joined her husband in driving west "because T-Bo was hurting so bad and for so long that Will's life was a little in chaos."

"For them to both drive off into the Grand Canyon, they both apparently wanted to end their lives," she said.

Kellee Twiggs said "something needs to be fixed" in treating soldiers coming home from combat with PTSD.

"These boys and girls coming back, they need help, things need to be changed, and they don't need to be made to feel weak for asking for help," she said.


Travis writes about his fight with PTSD.
http://riograndevalleyvamc.com/Agenda.aspx

Article with many details. For updates to this story check out the rest of the blog hosting this article.
http://www.healingcombattrauma.com/2008/05/travis-twiggs-.html

Interview with Kellee Twiggs.
http://cfc.wjla.com/videoondemand.cfm?id=14926

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Marx cafe tonight!


Hey all, were back for another installment of beats and eats, I'll be playing at the Marx from 10-11pm tonight, bringing UKG/bassline to the DC masses once more. Here's to hoping this music is able at some point to break out here across the pond. It keeps getting bigger and bigger over in the UK, at some point it'll break out here. Here's to hoping! Seeya tonight.

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW

Old gas pumps maxed out at $3.99!

Flipping hilarious! I hadn't even thought of this until now. What a gas.

Old gas pumps can't handle ever-rising prices

By JOHN K. WILEY – 16 hours ago

REARDAN, Wash. (AP) — Mom-and-pop service stations are running into a problem as gasoline marches toward $4 a gallon: Thousands of old-fashioned pumps can't register more than $3.99 on their spinning mechanical dials.

The pumps, throwbacks to a bygone era on the American road, are difficult and expensive to upgrade, and replacing them is often out of the question for station owners who are still just scraping by.

Many of the same pumps can only count up to $99.99 for the total sale, preventing owners of some SUVs, vans, trucks and tractor-trailers to fill their tanks all the way.

As many as 8,500 of the nation's 170,000 service stations have old-style meters that need to be fixed — about 17,000 individual pumps, said Bob Renkes, executive vice president of the Petroleum Equipment Institute of Tulsa, Okla.

At Chip Colville's Chevron station in this eastern Washington town, where men in the family have pumped gas since 1919, three stubby, gray pumps were installed when gas was less than $1 a gallon. They top out at $3.999, only 30 cents above the price of regular gas at Colville's station.

"In small towns, where you don't have the volume, there's no way you can afford to pay for the replacements for these old pumps," Colville said. "It's just not economically feasible."

The problem is worse in extremely rural areas, where "this might be the only pump in town that people can access," said Mike Rud, director of the North Dakota Petroleum Marketers Association.

Demand for replacements has caused a months-long backlog for companies that make or rebuild the mechanical meters — and that's just for stations that can afford the upgrade.

For many station owners — who, because of relatively small profit margin on gas, aren't raking in money even though gas prices are marching higher — replacing the pumps altogether with electronic ones is just not an option.

"The new ones run between $10,000 and $15,000 apiece," Colville said. "It's an expense that's not worth it."

Mechanical meters can be retrofitted with higher numbers when pump prices climb another dollar. The last time that happened was in late 2005, when gas went over $3 a gallon, and owners of the older pumps installed kits that went to $3.999.

This time around, owners of the old pumps will need to install another kit that can handle prices up to $4.999, and possibly higher. Industry experts say those changes could cost as much as $650 per pump.

It costs less to change the meter to raise the maximum price from $2.99 to $3.99 a gallon, but that option raises the risk of a breakdown, said said Pete Turner, chief operating officer for APS Petroleum Equipment Inc. of Anniston, Ala.

"The computer that they're upgrading was not designed to go any more than what it's going now, and if you do it, they don't last long enough," Turner said. "They run so fast that the gears are wearing out."

The price of fixing the meters jumped in the past three years because old pumps are being phased out for new electronic pumps and demand for refurbished meters is down, Al Eichorn, vice president of PMP Corp., which makes the mechanical meters.

The Avon, Conn., company has hired extra employees who are working overtime but still has a 14-week backlog of orders, Eichorn said.

To deal with the problem, some state regulators are allowing half-pricing — displaying the price for a half-gallon of gas, then doubling the price shown on the meter.

In North Dakota, regulators recently told service stations their mechanical pumps could use half-pricing, provided they use signs to alert costumers and find a permanent solution by April 2009.

South Dakota is preparing similar rules, officials say. And in Minnesota, rural service station owners whose pumps cannot display the right price are being told to cover up the incorrect numbers.

"The consumer can only see the gallons turning," said Bill Walsh, a spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Commerce. "Then they just have to settle up with a calculator, basically." Colville and about a dozen other service station owners in Washington have received temporary variances from the state to allow them to half-price fuel.

Stations granted variances are required to post signs telling customers that the final price they will pay is twice what the pump meter indicates.

"No, that don't bother me. The price does," said Jim Puls, a third-generation rancher who pulled up to Colville's diesel pump to fill up his flatbed truck at $4.41 a gallon. "I can understand what they have to do."

Nationally, the average price for a gallon of gasoline rose past $3.70 Sunday, while diesel was selling for an average of $4.33 a gallon, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service.

Small stations are struggling to make a profit on gas, even as the price rises. Its small profit margin makes it less lucrative that snacks and other products the stores sell inside.

"If gas is the profit driver and you are one of those guys with the old pumps, you're either evolving or getting out," said Jeff Lenard, spokesman for the National Association of Convenience Stores, a trade group that represents about 115,000 stores that sell gasoline.

"If you're just that kind of image of the '50s gas station where you have a conversation, fill up and have a cup of coffee, that's in the movies."

Associated Press Writer Dale Wetzel in Bismarck, N.D., contributed to this report.

Half of Cleveland’s sub-prime loans resulted in foreclosure

Wow, the other half are sure to follow.

Report: About Half Of Cleveland's Subprime Loans Ended In Foreclosure

POSTED: 11:33 am EDT May 11, 2008

CLEVELAND -- The Cleveland Plain Dealer is reporting that about half of the city's subprime mortgage loans written by top lenders in 2005 ended in foreclosure filings.

Subprime mortgage loans are generally given to people with poor credit and come with higher fees and interest rates.

Now Cleveland is dealing with one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation.

The Plain Dealer said all five of the city's top lenders in 2005 have since been absorbed by other companies or have gone out of business, and there is no accurate way to determine what percentage of subprime mortgage loans may have been based on fraudulent or unscrupulous lending practices.

Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Marx cafe tonight!

Hey all, I'm going to be at the Marx tonight, playing from 10-12, bringing the best UKG to the DC masses, and 4/4 bassline niche pressure, ya heard! Belgian beers are on special all night. Seeya there!

3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW