Starbucks has announced it will close at least 600 stores across the U.S., almost 20% of the stores that have opened in the past two years.

You know the economy's in bad shape when companies peddling an addictive beverage are struggling.

Still, it's kind of amazing how much hand-wringing this is causing. It was the siren-screaming lead item on Drudge yesterday, and much of the coverage has been borderline hysterical: WE STILL DON'T KNOW WHICH STORES ARE AFFECTED! DEAR GOD, LET IT NOT BE MINE!

You'd think that Bottle Rockets song about people substituting gasoline for kerosene in heaters would have educated the public about gas safety, but that band never got as famous as they should have.

So, here's a less melodic PSA: don't keep gas in your home!

According to SouthCoastToday.com, a Massachusetts couple trying to avoid paying $4/gallon kept 45 gallons of gasoline in jugs at their apartment. But their thriftiness had a high cost: the fumes caused a fire that could have burned down their whole apartment complex if it hadn't been for the quick work of the fire department.

Nan Mooney wrote a piece for Babble this week about moving back home with her parents when she got pregnant. Only she's not a member of the Spears family. She's in her late thirties and a published author.

But she didn't have a partner or a child-friendly job, so she decided to give herself time to not have to worry about rent and her parents time with their new grandson.

The only problem: she started to feel like a teenager again, and not in the good way.

Woo-hoo, it's Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day! This year's theme: Making Choices for a Better World.

There are no kids in our office today. We're thinking the holiday may have jumped the shark. Here are a few theories why:

1. They made the already too-long name Take Our Daughters to Work Day even longer when they added Sons in 2003. More importantly, this move diluted its original mission, which was to get more women in the workplace and to make sure young women knew that they could make their own money.

2. Back in the day, the holiday was very rah-rah, yes-you-can, little girl! But now when you tell the official site's Dream Calculator you want to run the country, it's all, "Are you sure?"

Isn't myth-debunking site Snopes the greatest?

Especially useful: their recent post on the misinformation floating around about when stimulus checks are going out.

Apparently, a popular email going around has some truth to it: the IRS will in fact be distributing checks based on the last two digits of taxpayers' social security numbers. But the email also has a flaw: the dates circulating are from 2001.

The reality is that the money will be coming much sooner, between May 16th and July 11th for most. So you know, start yacht-shopping now.

Speaking of which, what are you spending your stimulus check on, if you're getting one? Most people we know are throwing it in the gaping student-loan maw of Sallie Mae rather than doing anything especially stimulating.

To make sense of how the faltering economy is affecting parents, we sent a smart reporter, Melissa Rayworth, to write a piece for Babble about what today's American families are spending and saving. What she discovered in the course of writing "The New Economics of Parenthood" is not good news: we're spending more than ever and saving next to nothing.

She writes: Anyone who isn't overspending knows plenty of people who are. Credit card debt grew nationally by $184 billion between 2000 and 2006, according to the research firm Demos. Meanwhile, the national savings rate for 2006 was negative one percent. Not since the Depression have Americans saved nothing at all.

Read the rest of the article here.

Does what Melissa says about spending too much and not saving enough sound familiar? Or are you one of the happy few who have more than enough money for your family's day-to-day expenses and plenty socked away for retirement?

This article in the Atlantic predicts that McMansions are destined for the blight that affected inner cities in the '70s. The writer, Christopher B. Leinberger, even suggests it's going to be worse, because the buildings in question are nowhere near as tough as urban tenements. That means those complexes are going to get very messed up very fast.

And thanks to the boom in foreclosure, It's already started, he says:

There's a story up on Salon right now by our colleague Sarah Hepola called "My big, fat, unpaid credit card debt," about how, without making any major purchases, she came to owe $10,000. Sarah is refreshingly upfront about the taboo subject of personal debt:

I was so broke, in fact, that I actually had no idea how broke I was. The exact number had become a mystery, something hidden (or, rather, stuffed) in the closet: I didn't know how much I owed on those credit cards, or how much was in my bank account, or whether that balance -- were I to check it online, which I did not do that month -- would be positive or negative. I knew I owed several thousand. Five freaking digits.

The title is the idea of Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison. After doing some math Keith found out that right now Americans are spending about 2.5 Billion a week to occupy Iraq. The amount Minnesota alone has paid is over $11 Million, they could have paid for 1.2 Million scholarships with that money. Meh, no need for eduction when there are evil dictators in the world.

With that said our video today is from Nobel Peace Prize winning AFSC.org and their video message of what can be done with the daily amount Americans are currently paying for the ongoing war. They ask you share the video with friends and sign their petition.

- For Comedy watch Jon Stewart explain your Tax Dollars at war.

Even before we turned on the news this morning and saw brokers looking suicidal, we knew things were getting pretty bad.

How? Oh, something about all those Europeans skipping through the shopping district where we work, carrying zillions of shopping bags and flinging dollars into the air as if they were confetti. It's enough to crush the spirit. As are reports like this: