The Great News: Greatest Job Of All Time, Eco-Friendly Houses, and Good Times Return!

Chance Of Money Storms Likely! The Federal Reserve claims that the economy is still contracting, but more slowly than previously. Which can either mean the recession is easing, or it just might be more of a stroll to economic ruin, rather than a sprint. For now, focus on the positive: you won't have to pitchfork fight for canned food in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Yet! Yay! [yahoo.com]

House of Poos! It's lighter, stronger, cheaper, and more environmentally-friendly than excavating clay. You can build a house out of it, and be the alpha hippie on the block. They're bricks! Earth-saving bricks! Made out of poo, wonderful poo! [treehugger.com]

Get Paid To Drink Wine! This job seems too good to be true: ten grand a month to drink wine, and learn how to talk about it all fancy. Why would anyone be so cruel as to get a hobos hopes up? But if it's true… then this is the greatest gig out there, hands down. Truly great news to whoever scores it. Good luck! [sfgate.com]

The World Needs More Heroes! So this story is kind of gruesome, but since the news is so thick with stories of self-interested douchebags, it doesn't hurt to dwell on someone who just did the right thing. This little girl suffered a horrible injury, and this hero carried her for four days to get help. [news.com]

The Great News: The Recession Is Over, Bulletproof Bras and Jackpot!

Time To Start A Hedge Fund, The Good Times Are Back! How can the testosterone-jacked beancounters at CNBC ever be wrong about anything? Because one of their talking heads said the worst might be over… so you can stop buying shotgun shells. [cnbc.com]

Pilot Dead, But Plane Lands Safely! That the pilot died aloft is total bad news, our condolences all around. But that the peeps on the plane were able to land it safely is great news! So maybe it's melancholy news! [newstimes.com]

Woman's Life Saved By Bra! Quick quiz: Robbers shot her, but she was saved by her bra, which was stuffed with A) iron ingots, B) Kevlar Kleenex, or C) money! Take a guess, then clicky-clicky. [telegraph.co.uk]

Hey Nevada, Drinks Are On Her! Don't believe the Scrooge McDucks over at CNBC? If the recession has got you down, why not try to sweet talk this lucky lady, who won a whopping $33 million dollars at a casino! [krnv.com]

Great News:Hero Returns Cash, Beer Is Good and How To Be Happy!

See A Movie, Save The Earth! Now you can go see Fast & Furious, a movie about dinosaur g0-juice powered Mother Nature wreckers in a drive-in powered by clean, green, wonderful wind! [cleantechnica.com]

Beer: The Safe Investment! Do you know how much money beer adds to one state's economy? Why, beer should be a currency, it's so valuable! And delicious! [theadvocate.com]

The Anti-Bernie Madoff! These days, it seems there are only two types of people: those with very little money, and those who take that very little of money to add to their very big pile of money. This woman, however, gave money back. Alot of money! [boston.com]

Here Is A List That Will Make You Happy! OMG, love lists! They organize seemingly complicated ideas into an easily digestible format! Take this list: it reveals the secret formula to happiness during the Hobopocalypse! [msnbc.com]

The Bad News: Pirates, Mass Murder and Zombies!

Hackers All Up In Electricity Grid Grill!  National security experts claim that foreign spies have penetrated the American electrical infrastructure, looking for ways to sabotage it. This is bad news. [wsj.com]

Recession To Blame For Recent Massacres! Even more bad news: experts link recent mass murders and rising violent crime to the cratering economy, and that both trends could continue. [washingtonpost.com]

Non-Disney Pirates Kidnap Americans! Piracy off the coast of the anarchist paradise of Somalia is still a recession-proof boom industry — 20 Americans have just been taken hostage. [reuters.com]

Dead Man Elected Mayor! He was popular in life, and now, recently-deceased Harry Stonebraker is mayor of Winfield, Missouri. He would be Missouri's second Zombie-American elected to office. [stltoday.com]

Why Your Life Now Sucks, in One Paragraph

John Cole, at Balloon Juice, picks — out of a story in the Wall Street Journal — one paragraph that "really seems to be the best one paragraph description I have seen of what we are currently experiencing" with the economy.

That's great news for me, because one paragraph is about as much of an article on the economy as I can get through without cutting myself…

The 2001 recession might have ended the bubble, but the Federal Reserve decided to pursue an unusually expansionary monetary policy in order to counteract the downturn. When the Fed increased liquidity, money naturally flowed to the fastest expanding sector. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations aggressively pursued the goal of expanding homeownership, so credit standards eroded. Lenders and the investment banks that securitized mortgages used rising home prices to justify loans to buyers with limited assets and income. Rating agencies accepted the hypothesis of ever rising home values, gave large portions of each security issue an investment-grade rating, and investors gobbled them up.

Hey! I almost understood that!

I must be getting slightly less dumb.