As promised, here are the pix of my Sunday Amtrak-trek to the not so naughty border town of Bellingham.

The journey is beautiful. You should take it early and often. WiFi, a snack car, legroom, scenery galore, and all with no driving.

The trestle over Chuckanut Bay just might be one of the great rail experiences of this continent. It really looks like as if train is running straight across the water’s surface.

The Bellingham Amtrak/Greyhound station is just a brief stroll from Fairhaven, the famous town-within-a-town of stately old commercial buildings, and a few new buildings made to sort of look like the old ones.

My destination was in one of the pseudo-vintage buildings. It’s Village Books, a three-story repository of all things bookish.

Why I was there: to give a slide presentation about my book Walking Seattle.

Why people 80 miles away wanted to hear somebody talk about the street views down here? I did not ask. I simply gave ’em what they wanted.

Some two dozen Bellinghamsters braved the sunbreaks punctuated with snow showers to attend.

Afterwards, some kind audience members showed me some of B’ham’s best walking routes. Among these is the Taylor Dock, a historic pedestrian trestle along the waterfront.

Yes, there had been an Occupy Bellingham protest. Some of the protesters made and donated this statue on a rock near Taylor Dock.

Apparently there had been windy weather the previous day.

After that I took a shuttle bus downtown, where I was promptly greeted by a feed and seed store with this lovely signage.

The Horseshoe Cafe comes as close as any place I’ve been to my platonic ideal of a restaurant. Good honest grub at honest prices. Great signage. Great well-kept original interior decor.

(Of course, I had to take advantage of sitting in a cafe in Bellingham to trot out the ol’ iPod and play the Young Fresh Fellows’ “Searchin’ USA.”)

Used the remaining daylight to wander the downtown of the ex-mill town. (Its local economy is now heavily reliant on Western Washington U., another victim of year after year of state higher-ed cuts.)

But I stopped at one place that was so perfect, inside and out. It proudly shouted its all-American American-ness.

Alas, 20th Century Bowling/Cafe/Pub will not last long into the 21st century.

A scene from the 2008 Japanese film Love Exposure (dir. Sion Sono).

• My book Walking Seattle (you do all have your own copy by now, right?) just happens to take readers past five historic Christian Science church buildings in different parts of town. All are now occupied by others; two as other churches and three re-purposed to new uses. The last of these, a townhome redevelopment on 15th Avenue East on Capitol Hill, is finally done. Lawrence Cheek explores both the architectural and usage ironies in turning a house of worship into homes for the upscale.
• (By the way, Walking Seattle has its own online companion now, as an add-on virtual tour guide within the iOS/Android app ViewRanger!)
• (By the other way, North Sound readers who want to learn more about traipsing through the Jet City can attend a Walking Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Sunday Feb. 26 at Village Books in Bellingham.)
• Damn: J.C. Penney won’t be coming back to downtown Seattle after all. So let’s get Kohl’s in the old Borders space, and a full branch of the University Book Store upstairs in the Kress building (where Penney’s was supposed to have gone).
• In today’s wacky city survey of the day, Seattle ranks last in average pay raises last year. (Note to bosses, particularly in the tech biz: People can’t eat break-room foosball tables. Wanna hold on to those people you insist are so vital to your continued growth n’ success n’ stuff? Treat ’em better.)
• In a related story, the labor union UNITE/HERE is fighting to get a better deal for workers at the Space Needle, who’ve been offered the usual raw deal of takebacks and job insecurity.
• Megan Seling asks the musical question, if Seattle does get NHL hockey, what local standard should be the team’s “goal song“? I’m more interested in the team name. If we do get the currently league-owned Phoenix Coyotes, we wouldn’t really need to change that moniker. After all, this state is the birthplace of the creator of Wile E. Coyote.
• Somebody who claims to have done his research has come up with an online, annotated Seattle gang map.
• How to end police brutality? Studies? Consultants? “Process”? No?
• Sadly, there are still some pathetic, deluded dudes who want to turn the inland Northwest into a white supremacist “homeland.”
• You want to know how completely unpopular the far right’s social agenda is? Consumer marketing and advertising have completely ignored/rejected it. (Yes, many of you reject marketing and advertising. But advertisers want to sell by appealing to common contemporary values. And those are not the values either held, or paid lip-service to, by today’s rabid right.)
• I didn’t notice this when it came out, but New York magazine noted a couple months ago that e-books have become “a whole new literary form.” Specifically, the mag cited the fact that e-books can be any length, thus creating a market for long “short nonfiction” and short “long nonfiction.”
• Rampant, pathetic homophobia can pop up anywhere, even among the people you’d think were least likely to absorb it. Such as female tennis stars.
• The LA Times thinks it’s tracked down the world’s most unromantic tourist destinations. I dunno. I can certainly imagine the erotic symbolism of Australia’s giant earthworm museum.
• Our ol’ pal Jim Romenesko’s got a growing list of “words journalists use that people never say.” My own favorites include pontiff, solon, stumping, embattled, succumb, cohort, loggerheads, cagers, and, of course, moniker.

• All right, fans of glass buildings and obscure dangerous plants, you all have one year to figure out how to save the Volunteer Park Conservatory.
• Update: That 83 year old activist Tacoma priest, who was on a hunger strike while in federal detention? He’s still detained, but off the hunger strike.
• Another of those silly surveys claims Washington DC has surpassed Seattle as the nation’s “most literate” city.
• A Republican state legislator introduced a bill to scuttle any enforcement of the feds’ prescribed remedies concerning excessive force by Seattle police, and shunt the matter over to “a bipartisan taskforce.” Where, presumably, Republican politicians would hold veto power on any policy changes.
• In other legislative news, farmers and farm workers both back a bill to slow the local spread of “E-Verify,” the federal background-check program for immigrant workers.
• The new Businessweek’s cover story discusses Amazon’s latest move into publishing its own e-books—the opening of an NYC office intended to issue bigtime books by bigtime authors. The headline (“Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business”) and the cover image (yes, a burning book, straight outta Fahrenheit 451) depict the viewpoint of an NY publishing cartel both scared to pieces and smugly defensive of their old time business-as-usual, now threatened by this dot-com upstart. And just as you’d expect, the piece quotes the industry’s Big Six conglomerate-owned mega-publishers defending their wasteful, slow traditional practices by hyping their “role as nurturers of literary culture.” As if the commercial book biz had ever been about that.

I know some of you have had your fill of this.

After all, even the most delicious meal can become unappetizing if you have to eat it every day.

But I still love it. And I’ll love it until it goes away in Friday’s postponed Big Melt.

One Day Only! Mass melt promised for Thursday! Hope you got out and enjoyed it while you could.

Longtime readers of this space know I absolutely love snow in Seattle. Especially when it sticks around, as a rare and always-welcome guest.

And it looks like we may get more over the next two days!

So have fun. Be safe. Most of you don’t really have to drive anywhere, especially on the Monday holiday.

Use the snow day to take a good look out at your own surroundings, your own neighbors. Imagine what a more walkable, less car-dependent nation might be like.

second avenue north from yesler way, 1903; uw special collections

I could not have produced my best known work, Vanishing Seattle, without the kind and knowledgable help of the University of Washington Libraries’ Special Collections department.

Special Collections’ photographic cache is a literal treasure trove of valuable images. Among many other subjects, these photos depict Seattle and Washington state at almost all time frames. They depict ordinary street views and everyday scenes as well as the major monuments and scenic attractions.

Prints and scans of these images were available, at reasonable cost, to anyone.

The pictures aren’t going anywhere.

But our ability to access and use them is.

Due to budget cuts in other parts of the UW, the on-campus photo lab that makes these prints is closing.

Until further notice, Special Collections’ photos are available for viewing, but nothing more.

Let them know you want this to change.

Here’s one way to get a large audience for a literary reading. Invite so many readers that they, and their individual dates and/or entourages, will fill the room by themselves.

That’s what happened at Town Hall last Saturday night with “60 Readers.”

The event’s organizers scheduled it to tie in with the Modern Language Association’s convention in town that week. But the reading was not officially connected with the MLA. This meant the general public could get in.

Town Hall’s 300-capacity lower room was nearly filled for the free event. Readers were limited to three minutes max. The whole thing came in on time, at just under three hours.

The readers picked included both locals and MLA attendees. They ranged from the wild and the experimental down to that squarest of all literary sub-genres ever created, ’70s style nature poetry.

They read in alphabetical order. They opened with Greg Bem, whose “piece” was a listing of all the readers’ names.

As it happened, most of my favorite bits came in hour three:

• Doug Nufer (above) telling a tall tale of a circus freak, who had been the knife thrower “before the accident.”
• Judith Roche repeating a “blessing” she’d given to a new waste treatment plant, praising the cycle of life as the cleaned up biosolids get trucked to the Palouse to fertilize the wheat fields (really!).
• Nico Vassilakis howling raw phonemes.
• Christine Wertheim enacting an orgasmic childbirth(!), then with equal passion mourning the murder victims from Mexico’s drug wars.

Once again, the Space Needle held a fireworks spectacular to ring in the new year. It almost makes me forgive ’em for their role in the Chihuly gallery fiasco.

This year’s boom-boom lasted a healthy eight minutes, with a vast array of colors and effects.

My wishes for the year to come:

• Health and financial stability for you all.
• Serious progress toward revenue reform in this state at last.
• At least one local sports team with a winning season.
• And the total repudiation of the Rabid Right this election season, nationally and in each state.

(Told you I wouldn’t necessarily be providing these headlines every day.)

• Wednesday was drum n’ bass dance nite at Occupy Seattle!
• Gavin Polone is a film/TV producer in L.A. who believes film and TV should mostly be made in L.A., not spread out across North America. Still, he makes a lucid point when he alleges state and provincial tax breaks for film producers (like the ones Wash. state just got rid of) benefit only the producers, not the states and provinces.
• The real woman behind the book and TV movie Sibyl didn’t really have multiple personalities. But (and this is buried in the linked story) she really did have serious psychological/emotional issues, and believed she could only get the attention and help she desperately needed by exaggerating her condition.
• Ex-Seattleite Emma Harris pleads for her fellow environmentalists to care about more places besides “pristine wilderness”—which she says doesn’t even exist.
• Could the recently concluded CityArts Fest grow into the big regional music festival various entities have tried to launch from time to time but without really catching on?
• Now it can be told: Steve Jobs called Fox News a “destructive force in our society” to Rupert Murdoch’s face, while he was negotiating to get Murdoch-owned entertainment content for iTunes.
• Does the boss of BankAmeriCrap really believe all he has is an “image problem“? If so, he’s even more out of touch with reality than the average big-bank CEO. If not, he’s just another cynical spinmeister.
• Even Forbes scorns the Oakland, CA police’s violent over-reaction to peaceful Occupy protesters.
• Danny Westneat notices something we’ve known all along—Tim Eyman hates transit. So do right-wingers in general. They want people stuck in traffic, as captive audiences for the talk-radio goons.

Some 50 people attended our fantabulous Walking Seattle event Saturday at the Elliott Bay Book Company.

At least half of those followed along as we took a short stroll through upper Pike/Pine during a lovely equinox early evening.

Thank you all.

The downtown Seattle Borders Books closed earlier this week after 17 years. (The Redmond store closes Sunday, among the busted chain’s final outlets to close.)

• At Friday’s Park(ing) Day display at the Seattle Art Museum, a videographer from a Chinese-language cable access show tapes an interview using a Flip-like digital video cam, a mini spotlight, and a small Steadicam-like camera stabilizer.
• Former P-I book critic John Marshall is still unemployed, and writes for the Atlantic about receiving his final unemployment check.
• The Jo-Ann Fabric store in Olympia has a Halloween crafts section. It recently had a bat in it. A real bat. With rabies.
• A survey co-sponsored by Microsoft’s MSN.com named Seattle North America’s sixth worst-dressed city. Vancouver was #3; the top spot went to Orlando.
• Seahawks fans this Sunday will not only face a formidable opponent on the field (the dreaded Steelers) but also extreme frisking.
• Another gay/lesbian event, another would-be censorious program printer.
• Pierce County: Now with 35 percent less transit.
• Netflix: Now with higher prices and 1 million fewer customers.
• The corruption investigation against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his inner circle turns out to have begun with comments to blog posts.
• Why didn’t anyone tell me there’s a Barbie Video Girl doll with “a video camera embedded in her chest”? You could use it to reenact the cult film Double Agent 73!

(Remember, my big book shindig is one week from today (Sept. 24). See the top of this page for all pertinent details.)