‘TWAS A PERFECT DAY for the low-key recreation of the Alki Landing that served as Seattle’s official 150th birthday rite. That is to say, there was heavy rain, wind, cold temperatures, high tide, moderately heavy waves, and a near-total greyout (no visible horizon).
Some 1,000 people and 800 umbrellas braved the elements to witness volunteers playing the Denny Party showing up on a restored clipper ship playing the schooler Exact, then taking a small rowboat to the beach (where the real pioneers had been met by nearly-nude natives, not Gore-Texed honky families enjoying freebie chicken wings and Starbucks coffee).
The scene then moved down the shore to the 1905 landing-memorial obelisk, for a ceremony dedicating two plaques just added to it honoring the landing-party’s women and the local natives.
Lame-duck mayor Paul Schell gave a short speech, comparing his appearance to that of Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the far-better-attended 1951 100th birthday: “We do have one thing in common. We were both asked to leave.”
ELECTION ’01 UPDATE: The absentee-vote counting resumed today after the Veteran’s Day holiday weekend. Our boy Greg Nickels still leads, but by fewer than 1,600 votes. Today’s count, however, still included a number of early absentees, who trend more conservative. It’ll be the makeup of the late absentees, some of which were counted today and more of which will be counted in the next two or three days, that will decide it all.
ELECTION ’00 UPDATE: The news-media recount of the Florida ballots has finally been announced. Most headlines about the unofficial recount claimed Bush won it. But buried in the stories (or played up in ‘alternative media’ analyses of the results), you find that Gore would’ve won under six of the nine possible recount scenarios, other than the one the Republican-dominated Supreme Court threw out.
In other words, one can still plausibly say the election may have been stolen by the GOP sleaze machine, now hard at work attempting to recreate the social conditions of the Cold War.
