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Bar In Washington Opens Vapor Club To Get Around State Smoking Ban
Joe | Mar 28, 2013 | Comments 0
A bar in Washington state is testing the limits of the new recreational marijuana legalization law, as well as testing the limits of the state’s smoking ban when it comes to bars and other public places.
The key, at least for Stonegate Pizza and Rum Bar in Tacoma, is vaporizing. The owner charges a cover charge for those who wants to go upstairs and vaporize, privatizing the “vapor club.” And because patrons are vaporizing and not smoking, there should be no problem with the state’s smoking ban.
Of course, much remains to be seen in terms of law enforcement reaction, on a local level and on a federal level. But barring legal troubles, these bars and clubs are the future of folks gathering to enjoy some legal recreational marijuana. Where people go out for a beer or 2 or 6 nowadays, someday friends will be going out to enjoy some tokes at their favorite club.
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Filed Under: Exclusive Web Content • Politics • Recreational Cannabis • The War On Drugs
PS4′s Encouraging Start Centers Around Sharing and Developer Friendliness
It’s true, the games are ultimately what we are most concerned with when we talk about a games console. But when they are first announced, it’s the systems themselves that are often the most fascinating topics. This is perhaps truer than ever before in the case of the PlayStation 4, what with the industry changing so dramatically and the current generation of systems having lasted for as long as it has. Going into today’s event, I was of the belief that Sony needed to present a convincing reason for why it chose to make the decisions it would unveil and, more importantly, why it is that gamers should care about investing hundreds of dollars in a new system. At least part of Sony’s answer to the latter question revolved around making the PS4 a much more social platform than other consoles, though whether that’s a satisfactory justification remains to be seen.
The picture of the system’s new controller that has been circulating around the web for the past week did prove to be real. The DualShock 4 uses Bluetooth and is largely the same as its predecessor, save for some tweaks (like merging the Start and Select buttons into one, and the introduction of new, concave analog sticks, which are unfortunately not offset, Xbox-style) and a few new features: a headphone jack, a Share button, a touchpad, and a light bar. The touchpad, which I figured would have received some attention during the event, was all but ignored; I had hoped to see some reason for its inclusion. Perhaps it’s better that the games we saw didn’t include it, as it’s the sort of input that should only be used when it makes sense to do so, not simply because it’s there.
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Olympics, elections and horsing around in odd 2012
LONDON |
LONDON (Reuters) – Presidential preening, golden Olympic gaffes, a royal windfall for a skydiving British queen on her diamond jubilee and the endless end of days marked the odd stories in 2012 which pranced across the news in Gangnam Style.
The year opened with a tale that flocks of magpies and bears had been spotted in mourning for North Korea’s “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong-il who died in December 2011 and was succeeded by his 20-something son Kim Jong-un.
Winter weather was so cold in Brussels that the Manneken-Pis, a bronze statue of a young boy urinating had to stop peeing because of sub-zero temperatures.
There was slightly warming news about Mondays in Germany, where crematoriums are struggling to adapt to an increasingly obese population and a boom in extra-large coffins.
“We burn particularly large coffins on Monday mornings when the ovens are cold,” one crematorium said.
In March Polish media reported that kite surfer Jan Lisewski fought off repeated shark attacks and overcame thirst and exhaustion in a two-day battle of survival on the Red Sea with just his trusty knife as protection.
“I was stabbing them in the eyes, the nose and gills.”
In other animal news, dairy cows across the world mourned the loss of “Jocko”, the world’s third most-potent breeding bull and Yvonne the German cow who evaded helicopter searches and dodged hunters landed a film deal: “Cow on the Run”.
A Nepali man who was bitten by a cobra snake bit it back and killed the reptile after it attacked him in his rice paddy.
“I could have killed it with a stick but bit it with my teeth instead because I was angry,” Mohamed Salmo Miya said.
A scathing resignation letter of a Goldman Sachs executive published in the New York Times inspired a sheaf of online spoofs, including Star Wars villain Darth Vader.
“The Empire today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about remote strangulation. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore,” Vader wrote in a published letter.
Austerity in Europe saw a once-thriving Greek sex industry become the latest victim of the country’s debt crisis with Greeks spending less on erotic toys, pornography and lingerie.
But lust appeared to be in the rudest of health elsewhere.
Turkish emergency workers rescued an inflatable sex doll floating in the Black Sea and a German disc jockey vowed to press charges against a woman who locked him in her apartment and ravaged him for hours until he rang the police.
“She was sex mad and there was no way out of the flat,” Dieter S. told police.
@ROYALFETUS
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth celebrated her 60th year on the throne with Diamond Jubilee celebrations that saw a 1,000-ship rain-sodden flotilla sail down the River Thames, a massive party in front of Buckingham Palace, street parties across the country and a spoof incarnation of her majesty on Twitter.
“OK, fire up the Bentley. Let’s rock,” tweeted “Elizabeth Windsor”, the comic online alter ego of the British monarch in a typical tweet from the spoof Twitter account @Queen_UK, a virtual monarch with a razor-sharp wit and a penchant for gin.
And Twitter positively exploded with spoof royal accounts later in the year when Elizabeth’s grandson William and his wife Kate announced she was pregnant with a future monarch.
“I may not have bones yet, but I’m already more important than everyone reading this,” was the tweet from @RoyalFetus.
Leadership and change was a theme which ran through a year in which socialist Francois Hollande defeated incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and Mimi the clown to become French president, Vladimir Putin was elected Russian president again and U.S. President Barack Obama won re-election over Republican Mitt Romney.
Amid the tight election race, Obama met a gaffe-prone Romney for an exchange at a charity dinner ahead of the November poll, where America’s first black president poked fun at Hollywood actor Clint Eastwood for lecturing an empty chair as if it were Obama during the Republican convention.
“Please take your seats,” Obama told the crowd, “or else Clint Eastwood will yell at them.”
“THE MODFATHER”
Sporting news was dominated by the London Olympics during the summer, where the opening ceremony included a vignette of Queen Elizabeth being escorted by James Bond before apparently skydiving into the Olympic stadium for her arrival.
“Good evening Mr. Bond,” was her only line.
Olympic embarrassments were few, but they began early with organizers forced into apologies for displaying the South Korean flag on a video screen for North Korea’s women’s soccer team.
British cycling sensation Bradley “the Modfather” Wiggins became the first Briton to win the Tour de France, sparking a craze among fans for cutout cardboard sideburns modeled on his own and shouting “here Wiggo” as he raced to Olympic gold.
London’s eccentric and loquacious Mayor Boris Johnson fell rather awkwardly silent when he got stuck dangling from a zip wire, waving two Union flags in drizzling rain.
Olympic chiefs urged youthful athletes to drink “sensibly”.
But there was anything but restraint for Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, who declared an early night at one point only to be photographed later with three members of the Swedish women’s handball team. Early one Sunday morning Bolt also dazzled dancers at a London night club with a turn in the DJ booth.
“I am a legend,” Bolt shouted out to a packed dance floor from the decks with his arms raised in the air.
Towards the close of the year, tens of thousands of mystics, hippies and tourists celebrated in the shadow of ancient Maya pyramids in southeastern Mexico as the Earth survived a day billed by doomsday theorists as the end of the world.
“It’s pure Hollywood,” said Luis Mis Rodriguez, 45, a Maya selling obsidian figurines and souvenirs.
Finally, a chubby, rapping singer with slicked-back hair and a tacky suit became the latest musical sensation to burst upon the world from South Korea, via a YouTube music video that has been seen more than a billion times.
Decked out in a bow tie and suit jackets varying from pink to baby blue, as well as a towel for one sequence set in a sauna, Psy busts funky moves based on horse-riding in venues ranging from playgrounds to subways.
The video by Psy has been emulated by everyone from Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei to students at Britain’s elite Eton College, gurning politicians, spotty teens and embarrassing dads worldwide.
“My goal in this music video was to look uncool until the end. I achieved it,” Psy told Reuters.
(Reporting by Paul Casciato; editing by Mike Collett-White)
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Xbox 360 | The Walking Dead – Episode 4: Around Every Corner Review
Guts and gore hit new heights in the penultimate episode of The Walking Dead. Around Every Corner sees you shooting, stomping, and axing in the head more of the shambling piles of stink than in the three previous games combined, but this astounding level of carnage does not make for a very interesting escapade into the postapocalyptic zombie wasteland. While trying to flee the hungry dead is still terrifying enough to mess with your sleep, both the scripting and characterization are hit-and-miss. Where the preceding games were more notable for their moral choices than for their tight plots, this is a more formulaic drama that chugs along with the expeditious goal of setting everything up for a big finish. (Note: the following review contains information that could be considered spoilers for previous episodes.)
The drama picks up where things left off at the conclusion of the previous episode, Long Road Ahead. The gang has arrived in Savannah, Georgia, with the goal of securing a boat and sailing off to sunnier shores. As in the previous three games, the lead character is Lee Everett, a convicted murderer who is finding his redemption in serving as a surrogate father for a little girl named Clementine. Other members of the group include resident jerk Kenny, awkward high-school kid Ben, an old guy named Chuck, and two other people you met at the end of episode three. In addition to this crew, you team up with some newcomers, including a couple of survivors from a cancer support group living in a morgue, and a hoodie-clad ninja who jumps around building tops like a superhero and wields a climber’s pick the way Michonne from the comic series wields her sword.
All of these characters present a real problem. There are too many of them, and not one is given much screen time. It’s hard to care about anyone aside from the core power trio of Lee, Clem, and Kenny, who have been with the game from the beginning and are easily the most fully fleshed-out characters. Ben is a one-note imbecile. All of the promise of guitar-playing drifter Chuck (how has he survived on his own? what’s his real story?) is abandoned. The young couple is so unrelentingly beige that it’s tough to remember their names. The newcomers are here-today-chomped-tomorrow temps who have about as much impact on the plot as a red-shirt-clad nobody in an old Star Trek episode. Only the ninja makes any sort of impression, but even she exits abruptly and without explanation, leaving her to seem like nothing but a zombie-slaying plot device.
Now it’s down to rooting for Lee and Clem, waiting for Kenny to implode, and nodding at new plot points involving a miniature fascist state in a neighborhood of Savannah, and trying to find out who has been chatting with Clementine over her walkie-talkie. None of it is all that interesting, however, largely because there is a real rush to get everything resolved because the end is approaching fast. Plot lines that could have been the focus of entire episodes are wrapped up prematurely, adding to the feeling that the game is just trying to quickly cover ground.
Game design has some weaknesses, as well. Push-button action sequences have been multiplied. Combat has you blowing away zombies on such a regular basis that they don’t seem all that intimidating anymore. In the previous episodes, zombie attacks were mostly rare and startling. Here, there is a lot of combat, including a few sequences where you go Rambo. You gun down whole undead gangs with shots to the head on a couple of occasions, and you even hack and smash your way through a pack of zombies on a stairwell at one point. This episode plays out more like a game than its predecessors because of all this action. You get hemmed in on a few occasions, but it’s hard to get worked up about getting chomped after seeing how Lee can take down six or seven zombies with a pistol in mere moments.
