The downtown ferry terminal will go bye-bye; pork farmers halted a big health probe; robots potentially threaten lots of jobs; a ‘hot, nasty summer election campaign’ is almost over.

A state court nixes Seattle’s wealth tax but suggests a possible fix; Prime Day protests; WSDOT touts high-speed rail’s promise; developers’ plans for the Lava Lounge site don’t look very ‘funky’.

An anarchist protester is shot (perhaps wanting to be) outside the ICE jail; a mild earthquake shakes things up; MS backs off from a new corporate-software pricing plan; would Rapinoe accept an Inslee cabinet post?

Bill Gates on US socialists; the water’s getting too loud for orcas; Durkan lauds homeless-camp ‘sweeps’; our first cute-animal pic in a long time.

(The link to a Boeing-related article in the newsletter was mis-given. Here’s the correct link.)

Local May Day events stayed on-message (sorry, news media); the yearly SIFF onslaught approaches; more hate-talk from Matt Shea; is this any way to teach science?

Howard Schultz’s local campaign kickoff and its discontents; don’t look but the non-Viadoom’s over; facing ‘casual’ racism at Roosevelt HS; can drinking red wine help you lose weight?

The Seattle Womxn’s March gets smaller but stays adamant; a Paul Allen company downsizes; a talk-radio host boasts about lawbreaking; still more shutdown fallout as the latest proposed “deal” gets dissed.

A plan would restore an estuary by killing Olympia’s Capitol Lake; Seattle teachers OK a possible strike; KingCo deputies under-report ‘acts of force’; recalling the days of ‘Reds’ in the NW.

Nestlé joins Starbucks (partly); protesting an NY bank’s Canadian oil investment in Seattle; Mike O’Brien removed from a Nordic Museum after-party.

A peaceful, pro-social May Day; Daniel Ramirez wins in court (for now); the newest threat to local salmon; the tragedy behind Rachel Dolezal’s story.

Connecting the early UK female punks to the Oly riot grrrls; counting every native plant and animal here; what’s certain to happen on May Day.

The #Enough protests show what’s right with Those Kids Today; the Amazon angle to the Toys “R” Us demise; still more Alexie reactions; how Seattle’s Capitol Hill ‘gayborhood’ grew and shrank.

To start off your week: Women’s March scenes; local comix legend dies; getting a taste of dementia; tech-biz sexism’s even worse than some imagine.

To start your week after a big-news weekend, read about MLK’s real message & its relevance; Cliff Avril defending Haiti’s honor; how Hawaii’s safe (for now); and a local/national sports legend RIP.

The Fremont Solstice Parade, even more than last year, was essentially an anticlimactic epilogue to the hundreds of body-paint bicyclists.

Even the arrival this year of “The Resistance,” a single overriding topic of protest in all its branches and aspects and sub-topics, as the right wing sleaze machine takes near complete control and rushes out an all-fronts attack against literally every good thing in our society (from government aid programs to social civility itself), failed to bring out more volunteer street-theater performers, marchers, musicians, etc.

Last year, there was talk that parade organizers would crack down on the nudes in hopes of attracting more participants in the parade itself, participants who might not want to be part of the same spectacle as all the poons and peens on public pubic display.

That didn’t happen. But the underlying issue remains.

The parade could fade out and die along with the original hippie generation out from which its aesthetic was formed.

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Oh, and the parade got “trolled” by an entrant who showed up with a seven-foot costume puppet of a stereotype black “mammy” figure in a rasta hat.

According to some social-media commenters, the (apparently white) guy who performed in the costume was asked to leave the parade’s Friday-evening prep session. He then crashed the Saturday-afternoon event after it had already started, before again being shooed away.

Still, the Solstice Parade’s organizers have managed for almost three decades to keep motor vehicles, corporations, politicians, and even written signs out of the spectacle. But this thing looked just enough like a regular Solstice giant mascot costume that the guy got to strut it down a large segment of the parade route.

(After all, hippie graphic aesthetics used to include plenty of one-dimensional “ethnic characterizations.”)

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Also troublesome for the parade’s future, it can’t store its floats and costumes in a city-owned warehouse space any more. (Slog) (PI.com)