Mukilteo inventors have designed a sturdy, spherical refuge for humans in case of tsunami. Further subjects today include a really wide waterfront highway plan and its discontents; Paul Allen’s settlement over his mega-yacht’s coral-reef trashing; Amazon’s real-life bookstore quietly raising its prices (to non-“Prime” people); and an opera with only one man and one woman playing one role.

Bill AND Melinda Gates as potential Vice Presidents? Ridiculous. Among our other topics today: our pal Kelly Lyles and her art-van; HALA changes; a high school requesting “pledges” of attendance only from Af-Am students; a game company responding to allegations of “enabling” gambling; and an International District institution threatened.

In our daily e-missive this day: Our state’s ex-first lady speaks out on sexual harassment and its apologists; the Ace Hotel founder’s kids demand their fair share; an architect suggests we put affordable housing on top of I-5 (instead of just a bigger Freeway Park); the landlord lobby successfully delays the move-in-fee cap; and a Pierce County institution comes to Seattle (spoiler: it’s a burger joint).

A black woman claims she was subjected to uncalled-for “scrutiny” when she tried to open a bank account in Seattle; the bank says in response that it’s that mean to everybody. Further subjects this day include lawyers vs. closed “public” hearings; women in video games struggling for respect; Belltown’s most fiscally troubled tower project is “on” again; another Oso legal settlement; and yet more backlash against brutal sexist talk and its excusers.

Washington’s new high-school football powerhouse is a Catholic school named for an Irish-American bishop, and known for recruiting the state’s biggest, bulkiest teens. Elsewhere today:  J.J. Abrams (heart)s the Wash. election-funding initiative; the Seattle Times dislikes lobbyist-written legislation (but only if those lobbyists champion the needs of poor people); one of Belltown’s last “artsy” apartments gets sold; the “Uber-ization of health care”; and how NOT to save the whales.

As WSU prepares a Hanford museum, local activists propose a unilateral nuclear-weapons scrap. Additional topics this Thursday include a clever local response to a traditional-gender-roles “action fashion” shoot; hydro power’s eco side effects; a drive to “democratize” artificial intelligence; the ascendant Sounders; and a soap-opera master’s final fadeout.

We note a quarter century of a pioneering pan-genre, pan-gender performance/dance space (and the site of a memorable Cobain hissyfit). Also of note today: a famous 9/11 flag found in Everett (probably); a specialty clinic for trans teens; a drop in local greenhouse gases (that still isn’t enough); a call for a lot more bus service; and the loss of a legendary Capitol Hill pizza hawker.

Global speculators, having been made less than welcome in Vancouver, are already driving Seattle real estate even higher. In other Tuesday topix: wildfires are back; airlines (and Sea-Tac) boom while Boeing struggles; Councilmember Herbold wants a replacement for the despised old business “head tax”; and Town Hall’s selling off its parking lots for two towers.

We’ve got a graphic example of how to avoid looking grotesquely “fake hip,” by visually celebrating your geek. Plus: how not to headline a story about a white supremacist’s violent crime; Seattle’s “most dangerous street” gets a little less so; a trans singer-songwriter tries to find his voice again (literally); and the heat’s gonna be brutal.

Paul Allen’s next big local spectacular will be a music festival and industry confab, coming to Pioneer Square in May. And we also look at another Black Lives Matter march; a fish-processing plant proposed for the soon-to-be-ex Weyerhaeuser campus; feudin’ whales; and an ex-governor’s questionable real-estate sale.

What activists in the ’70s couldn’t stop is still with us, a nuclear-sub base on the Sound. Also with us: gentrification in the CD marches on; a river’s being moved away from a highway; YouTube’s trans stars; and a (different) retro video game inspires a new micro-park.

Once again, the Fremont Solstice parade has arrived and left.

This year, the threat of rain may have kept the audience smaller than previously.

Not in short supply were the body-paint bicyclists (and more-or-less clothed bicyclists, and just plain nude bicyclists, and walkers, and skateboarders).

Much as the Seafair hydro races have become, to many fans, the sideshow to their own intermission act (the Blue Angels), the Solstice Parade has become, to many, merely the footnote to its unofficial and unorganized prelude.

As the annual corps of paint people and their pals has grown, the parade itself has shrank. This year’s edition barely ran 45 minutes.

There were the usual ethnic and pseudo-ethnic dance troupes.

There were the usual floats and dancers celebrating summer, environmentalism, nature, and wholesome “quirkiness.”

There was a tribute to Prince with a purple-boat float.

The main “political” statement at the parade was made by homeless advocates. They depicted Mayor Ed Murray with a broom, trying to literally “sweep” away a bunch of street people and car-dwellers; while marchers carried signs (conforming to the parade’s traditional rule against written words) exhorting people to call Murray to support housing and denounce sweeps of encampments.

I’d hoped to, but didn’t, see anything in the parade expressing solidarity with the Orlando victims and families, and forthrightly expressing LGBTQ solidarity. Apparently that happened too soon for parade volunteers to build moving artwork and costumes.

The bike brigade did include several folk proudly sporting rainbow-flag paint. These two held barbells labeled LOVE.

While other “alt” gatherings around town, such as Pride and Hempfest, remain big, Solstice this year seemed to be in decline.

Is it that Seattle’s finally getting done, after all these decades, with the cultural aesthetic of baby-boomer mellow? Or is it that Solstice has no specific, single “cause” behind it?

Parade organizers do plan to do something about it, starting next year.

They want the bicyclists to register as official participants, subject to official event rules.  They don’t specifically say they’ll order the bikers to cover up, but they’ll assert the right to make such decrees.

If Solstice does have a “cause,” it’s celebrating an extended family, a virtual “tribe,” built around creativity, joy, and personal freedom.

If its leaders try to rein in the event’s most basic (and most popular) expression of such freedom, its decline could get worse.

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POSTSCRIPT: The Fremont Solstice Fair is much larger than the parade itself. There’s the big street fair. There’s the HONK! Fest West, a festival of alternative “street bands.” There’s the display of art cars. And there’s the live music, which this year was even more impressive than in past years. Even if the parade declines in interest, the rest of the fair still goes strong.

Making sense of the senseless: I can’t even try. But I try anyway. I also look at the paucity of women on local corporate boards; more trouble for Western State Hospital; a worker walkout at a strawberry farm; and an attack of “Diarrhetic Shellfish Poison.”

In your Monday missive: The Mariners lose at home again; Central Washington’s wildfire season’s underway already, as seen by Sasquatch! festival-goers; Seattle’s black community’s increasingly a diaspora; a local high-school shooting becomes a streaming-TV-drama subplot; and who really sends the most anti-woman Tweets® and does it matter?

We’re all still Mariners fans after this past weekend, right? Also under review: High-school students take charge of trans-bathroom activism; oil protesters arrested on train tracks; how the KPLU/KUOW deal really went down; a new site for the Punk Rock Flea Market (replacing the previous new site); and Amazon’s threat to every mall and clothing store.