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…Tabella is selling its space to Ballard’s Mars Hill Church. So, instead of drunken gay-bashers on Saturday nights, Western Avenue will have sober gay-denouncers on Sunday mornings. Yes, that’s an improvement.
IF ANYONE WAS AT the big and costly Hillary Clinton to-do in town Monday night, I’d love to hear about it. I do know the rightist protest scene outside Benaroya Hall wasn’t so big as it had been at her prior visits.
PARKING-LOT CZAR Joe Diamond may be dead, but he’s still a stern taskmaster. Diamond company officials earlier this month said they’d forbid tailgating parties before Seahawks football games on Diamond-owned lots. Now comes a revised edict: Go ahead and party, but don’t be seen with any booze.
SEATTLE’S MOST FAMOUS “We Never Close” restaurant is closed today. A chimney fire has shut down 13 Coins since about 4:30 a.m. Tuesday; it may reopen for tonight’s dinner shift.
IN VANISHING SEATTLE NEWS, the famous Wonder Bread neon sign will rise again, on the apartment building that’s replacing the former Central Area bakery site. Once again, the mark of wholesome blandness will draw motorists to what has traditionally been Seattle’s least whitebread neighborhood.
KUDOS TO 13-year-old Aaron Furrer of Monroe and his Guernsey heifer Dot for winning a big juniors-division prize at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, WI. Buried deep in the hereby-linked article: Furrer’s family can no longer turn a profit on their 46-acre dairy farm; his dad now works as an electrical contractor just to hold on to the land.
OVERHYPED TRAGEDY OF THE DAY: “A jury Monday convicted a former stripper turned Olympia, Wash. soccer mom in the decade-old murder of her fiance. Mechele Linehan, 35, was convicted of first-degree murder for conspiring with another fiance to kill Kent Leppink, who was shot three times in 1996 near Hope, AK. Prosecutors say Linehan wanted Leppink’s $1 million insurance policy.”
IF YOU BELIEVE what you read in the papers (or on the papers’ web sites), Shirley McLaine says Dennis Kucinich once saw a UFO outside Graham, WA. Make up your own comment here.
…so I guess we can talk about it now: Downtown Seattle just might, might mind you, be about to face a luxury-condo glut. Of the umpteen projects currently announced, some may not get built. Developers, natch, say all’s still well n’ fine, not to worry, bubble-what-bubble?.
IT’S NOT JUST A FEW BAD APPLES, it’s dozens of bad apples and alleged bad apples: Over the past five years, 125 schoolteachers in our state have been “punished for sexual misconduct,” including unwanted groping and rude remarks toward students. The usual question: Are teachers getting ruder to students, or are students/parents/administrators getting more nerve to press charges?
IN OTHER SCHOOLHOUSE RUDENESS, vandals over the weekend disabled the Snoqualmie School District’s entire fleet of school buses.
JOHN S. MURRAY, 1925-2007: The former state legislator owned the Queen Anne News and Magnolia News from 1953 until sometime in the 1980s. (They’re now the prime properties of Pacific Publishing, which also owns the Capitol Hill Times and has a sales contract with the Belltown Messenger.) Murray also acquired, and ran into the ground, the downtown-insiders’ tabloid Argus and the pioneering local slick monthly View Northwest. In all these, he ran editorials advocating a square, pre-extreme Republicanism, and in which his prose repeatedly revealed he was a businessman and not a scribe. Murray also owned the old News Publishing printing plant on Third Avenue north of Bell Street, recently demolished for the Moda condo project.
AND REMEMBER, tread lightly in the woods if you’re scavanging for wild mushrooms. Of course, with some of those fungi among-I, you can just float out of the wilderness…
A P-I editorial claims we might just as well forget about preserving industrial lands in Seattle, and let the “free” market determine the highest-‘n-best use for the city’s commercial real estate. High-rise, high-price housing, big-box retail, office parks–bring ’em on. Manufacturing, shipping, distribution–quaint, but “so last century.”
Our comment on their comment: Trade is never really unencumbered. There’s always governments, cartels, and other movers-‘n-shakers setting directions.
In Seattle, and in the U.S., the realm of stuff-making has been out of favor among these direction-setters. (Exceptions: the sub-realms of making prescription drugs, weapons systems, and fossil fuel products.)
We have an opportunity to set ourselves some different priorities.
We can say that stuff-making is worth preserving.
We can work to keep living-wage jobs in the city.
Or we can just let the developers and their wholly-owned politicians do any darned thing they want.
You know those yuk-yuk news items this past Thursday and Friday, about Seattle-based FBI agents staging a raid on magician David Copperfield’s Las Vegas prop warehouse? It’s not so funny now. Turns out to involve a rape accusation.
Comcast has been caught blocking some broadband subscribers’ file uploads and downloads. Is it an attempt to ration out bandwidth, or to cripple file sharing services? If it’s the latter, now we know why Comcast’s logo looks so much like the copyright symbol.
…of the non-denominational “winter” decorations being designed for display at Sea-Tac Airport this December, they seem to be preparing to celebrate Festivus.
Third party magazine-subscription sales plans can be fraudulant.
Did Raymond Carver really write Raymond Carver’s short stories? Or should they more properly be considered editor Gordon Lish’s prose based on Carver’s storylines? Carver’s widow would like us all to see his real stuff, un-Lish-ized.
What, you aren’t afraid, very afaid, of the staph ‘superbug’? Why the hell not? Aren’t you a good obedient American?
The rich just keep getting richer. As of the most recent available statistics, the top 1 percent of taxpayers control one fifth of the nation’s wealth.
CBS’s Dick Meyer calls this the deliberate result of “Trickle Up” economics. And, he asserts, Republicans, Democrats, and baby boomers all support the policies that keep so few getting so much.
Greg Nickels’s big plans for south Lake Union originally didn’t include the Wawona, the 110-year-old Pacific Schooner that’s been docked since the ’70s at what’s now South Lake Union Park.
This week, the Wawona’s fate was apparently decided at a meeting of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Board. Northwest Seaport, the nonprofit that now owns the ship, would have it drydocked, disassembled, many pieces replaced, and reassembled on land near its current pier. The whole operation would take $2 million. Northwest Seaport has only raised $400,000 thus far toward the ship’s long-term restoration. But they’re hoping the SLU area’s higher visibility will translate into higher visibility for their cause.
At the same meeting, representatives of developer David Sabey discussed their plans for the old Georgetown brewery site. Sabey’s people said they won’t even try to preserve the facade of the site’s southernmost building (the former Rainier Cold Storage), which they said was too far gone to restore into anything. They might, however, consider carefully dismantling the building’s front wall so it can be rebuilt in front of some new structure.
Oh, and did you hear Sabey wants to buy, and save, the Sonics and Storm? He’d put up a new arena for the basketball teams on the old Associated Grocers land he now owns near Boeing Field.
Sabey’s current record at preserving threatened Seattle institutions is now 0-1. (He was the last owner of the Frederick & Nelson department store, which had greatly fiscally deteriorated before he came in.) Saving the Sonics would make him a true Comeback Kid.
Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla digitally recorded his first solo album in Vancouver. A recording-studio employee was bringing the finished tracks to Seattle when U.S. border agents seized the hard drive. The hereby-linked AP story says “some music publications hinted” the dispute might have been due to the “politically charged” content on the album. Walla discounts this conspiracy theorizing, noting the agents let tape copies of the songs go through. Barsuk Records says Walla’s album, Field Manual, will be out in January. The feds still haven’t returned the hard drive.
The media biz is finding less money to pay for content, says an unpaid “reader blogger” on the P-I site.
Apparently, during the ’90s microwbrewery craze, a lot of hop farms emerged in Eastern Washington. When that nascent industry experienced a shakeout, many of those farms went under, sold out, or switched to other crops. Now, suds-biz experts warn we may have a serious hop shortage. When combined with a tight barley market, the result could be skyrocketing prices for the Northwest’s better brews. Will we have to turn to wine, or gin, or (Heaven forbid!) low-hopped swill from the mega-beer factories?
