I used to work on New York Avenue in DC. From the Starbucks near my office you could see two more. If you walked a block east and looked north, you could see yet a fourth store.

But Starbucks’ glory days, at least here in Amurrica, are over:

From the WSJ: Starbucks to Cut U.S. Store Growth But Plans to Accelerate Overseas

Starbucks Corp. plans to drastically reduce the number of stores it builds in the U.S. over the next three years …

Starbucks said Wednesday that this year, it plans to open 1,020 locations in the U.S., down from the 1,175 that it had planned for as of January. But over the next three years, Starbucks plans to cut that number by more than half, opening less than 400 net new locations per year in the U.S.

As my favorite financial bloggers say: “We are all subprime now.”

Starbucks Cuts U.S. Growth Plans [Calculated Risk]

Lots of annoying things have forced themselves onto my radar.  Michael Bolton, Yanni, Kenny G, and Cher for example.  Knowledge of the existence of Sylvester Stallone (he of the third testicle) is lodged in my brain, and I know of the oeuvre of Pauly Shore.  I am also aware of lesser mediocrities like Adam Sandler, Mandy Patinkin, and the perpetually-overrated Garth Brooks.  I have been dragged,  kicking and screaming, to a Stevie Nicks concert, and I lived.

On the other hand, I’ve expended lots of effort to avoid knowing who Hannah Montana is - until the Vanity Fair kerfuffle, I didn’t know the name Miley Cyrus.  I had never heard her speak nor had I heard her sing. I was blissfully unaware that Hannah was the spawn of the bathetically awful Billy Ray Cyrus.  If pressed, I could not have picked her out of a lineup.

But no more.

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Hoovervilles:

They were shantytowns that sprang up during the Depression.  People who lost their homes or were otherwise displaced lived in them.  There were even Hoovervilles in Central Park.

Last night, the BBC had a story about a modern-day Hooverville in Ontario, California.  Watch it after the jump.

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These are undoctored photos of smog in Hong Kong that I took from the top of Victoria Peak on Thursday. We really need to start taking care of this whole pollution situation before more of the world ends up looking like this. In some of these pictures I was high up enough that you can see where blue skies end and the smog begins. Breathing this stuff is just as awful as you’d imagine. I’m glad to be back in Brooklyn where the air is only semi-fucked and any lung damage I suffer is gleefully self-imposed. Read the rest of this entry »