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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?
A legendary storehouse of fabulous cheap wonders, the Boeing Surplus store in glorious Kent, is closing in December.
Boeing will still sell off stuff it no longer wants (hardware, upholstery, office furnishings, computers, power tools, obscure measuring instruments), but it’ll sell it all online. Where’s the adventure in that?
As you might expect for a place with so many engineering nerds among its regular customers, a “Save Boeing Surplus” web site is already up n’ running.
UW scientists say they can alter poplar trees with rabbit DNA to create pollution-sucking trees. According to a P-I piece, these Frankentrees can “naturally render a list of cancer-causing pollutants–benzene, trichloroethylene (TCE), vinyl chloride, chloroform–non-toxic.”
Now, let’s have these PoMo tree surgeons create plants that could do something really useful, like ridding the indoor air of cheap perfume stink, or even patchouli.
…Seattle Times “expose” piece on Sunday? The one blasting certain local Democratic politicians for approving costly budget earmarks benefitting a big campaign contributor?
Well, prog-blog star Matt Stoller has his own take on the topic.
Stoller’s opinion on these favors ties into his opinion about Rep. Brian Baird, one of the three lawmakers cited in the Times story. (The others are Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Norm Dicks.)
Stoller lists Baird as a “Bush Dog Democrat,” one of several Congresspeople who regularly vote with the right wing on key issues at key moments. Stoller would like more progressive Dems to run against these Congresspeople at the next primary season.
Stoller looks at Baird’s work to force the Navy to buy an unneeded $4 million boat from a local builder as part of a larger “nexus between Bush Dogs and corrupt practices.”
A Seattle Times Sunday editorial rejected the Roads and Transit ballot measure, following its Friday “expose” of Sound Transit light-rail construction costs.
Both pieces were built upon faulty reasoning.
About the supposed revelation of cost overruns, those “wasted” $5 million or so were out of a budget approximately a thousand times that high. Of course construction projects that drag on a decade or more are going to rise in price, especially during Seattle’s condo-mania when everything from concrete to cranes has been in overheated demand. The article failed to mention that if the original Sound Transit scheme had been approved in 1995, let alone the Forward Thrust transit scheme in 1968, we’d have gotten many more miles of light rail at a lower total cost.
And about the editorial’s assertion that we don’t need no new-fangled pubic transportation, that all we need to get around better is more and bigger highways?
The next day, the Monday Times’s big headline gave the startling news that people in Puget Sound country are driving less these days and taking public transportation more. The region’s vehicle population is still growing, but at a third its ’80s rate. And Sound Transit’s ridership has trebled since 2000. And that’s without light rail. Might the Times editorial board be persuaded to change its mind and acknowledge the value of adding more transit? Naaah…
AWAKENING FROM THE DREAM(LINER): Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner will now be at least six months late to its maiden flight.
Boeing says it’s due to multiple snags in the plane’s global outsourced production system.
So much for author Thomas Friedman’s claims about the world (of global commerce) being flat, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat concludes.
Still, don’t expect Boeing to go back to making more pieces of its products itself. Global deals, political tradeoffs to get state-owned foreign airlines to buy the finished planes, you know…
FALLING DOWN: Shortly after the start of Sunday night’s Seattle Seahawks-New Orleans Saints football game at Qwest Field, NBC’s skycam mechanism fell from its high wires onto the field below.
The mishap occurred during a called time out. Nobody was on the playing field when the skycam suddenly became a groundcam.
Once play resumed, about ten minutes later, the Seahawks did all the crashing. The unsung Saints, in their first victory of the season, trammeled the hapless Hawks in a game that wasn’t nearly as close as its 28-17 final score. It was the Hawks’ second nationally-televised collapse in as many weeks.
THINKING GLOBALLY, PICKETING LOCALLY: The P-I Monday headline: “Stripped-down student protesters rush Macy’s aisles.”
The reality: Less flamboyant, more serious, more global.
Six female college students simply walked into the ladies’ room at the downtown Seattle store formerly known as The Bon Marche. They emerged clad in odd, but street-legal, garments assembled from black plastic trash bags. After 15 minutes on the premises, the six left to join 12 other female and male picketers outside.
The protesters’ slogan: “I’d rather wear trash bags than Macy’s sweatshop clothing.”
The protesters’ message: A statement of solidarity with unionized textile workers in Guatemala, who have been locked out by factory management. The factories in question, Cimatextiles and Choishin, make clothes for such U.S. brands as Talbot’s and Liz Claiborne.
DISSED FOR LISTENING TO DISSERS: Gov. Christine Gregoire’s been traveling the state, patiently listening to citizen gripes at town meetings. Republican Party operatives blast the meetings as a big political stunt.
Let’s figure this one out: When the gov, as part of her regular governing duty, hears the voice of the people, that’s “political.” But when, say, undeclared un-candidate Dino Rossi travels the byways to make himself heard, that’s just public service?
…Nobel Peace Prize, here’s a lucid and elequent congratulatory essay by local-boy-made-good (and done good) Alex Steffen.
I first knew Steffen when he ran Steelhead, one of the most intelligent and handsome local zines this burg has ever produced.
Since then, he’s traveled much of the world, written a lot of important things, and in 2003 guest-edited the last, never-printed, issue of Whole Earth magazine, the last descendant of Stewart Brand’s old Whole Earth Catalog.
You’ll find vast acreage of smart prose by Steffen and compatriots at WorldChanging.com, his site dedicated to “bright green” eco-solutions.
I’m currently halfway through the huge (600-plus pages) WorldChanging book, edited by Steffen and written by himself and several dozen appropriate-tech experts. (Gore contributed a short introduction.)
WorldChanging’s shtick has been described as an update of the Whole Earth “Access to Tools” shtick, adapted for a generation of bloggers and a post-WTO sensibility.
Unlike a lot of the gloom-n’-doom nihilism preached by eco-leftists, Steffen and his team concentrate on solutions to the planet’s big and small problems. The book covers everything from urban planning and refugee camps to renewable energy and adequate water supplies. The emphasis throughout is on Things We Can Really Do About It.
If Barack Obama bills himself as the politician of hope, Steffen is its scribe.
As Steffen writes in his Gore piece today:
“If we do our jobs right, life will get better. The systems we currently rely on don’t just destroy the environment, they limit our happiness. We do not live in the best of all possible worlds. We know it is possible to create lives which are not only profoundly more sustainable, but more prosperous, comfortable, stylish, healthy, safe and fun. If we do our jobs right, a bright green future will be downright sexy.”
…to Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore. I believe the standard lefty-blog-O-sphere response is to ponder that, had the ’00 election not been nakedly stolen, we’d have a “peace president” instead of what we got.
King County Executive Ron Sims has no official jurisdiction over the city-owned Seattle Center. That hasn’t stopped him from expressing his citizen’s right to suggest how he’d change the place.
Like most of the big plans about the Center floated lately by Mayor Greg Nickels, David Brewster, and others, Rice’s plan would raze the Fun Forest amusement park and High School Memorial Stadium.
Like some of these plans, Rice’s would raze KeyArena and the Northwest Court buildings, including the current Vera Project space. (Perhaps Rice hopes to bring the Sonics and Storm to a new suburban home.)
Like all of these plans, it would add lots more green park space and fancy landscaping, creating yet another New Seattle monument to world-class-osity. (Or, as Sims’s staff puts it, “a destination known worldwide.”)
Unlike the previous plans, Sims’s would add artist live-work spaces and a transit center. His office issued a “slide show” .pdf depicting old-fashioned trolley cars along Mercer Street.
I like the trolley idea. I’d like it better if Sims had said where these trolleys would go from and to.
My take on this, and all the other Center schemes: We don’t need another sculpture park. We don’t need another impeccably manicured cover scene for architectural magazines.
We need a homey, informal “back yard” serving, and welcome to, all ages and classes, for the widest possible variety of public uses.
So I want to keep high school football there.
I want to keep carny rides there.
I want to keep miniature-freakin’-golf there.
But by that time, the whole company might be sold off.
I can still remember when there were five mass-production breweries in the Northwest alone, each operated by a different company.
Fortunately, we now have a wealth of microbreweries, whose broad range of tasty product has long since rendered superfluous the likes of “Colorado Kool-Aid.”
Both Kerouac and Rand are better known today for their celebrity and their ideas than for their prose stylings.
But both authors’ rambling self-indulgences actually serve their respective egotisms.
Both liked to hype themselves as daring rebels, valiantly crusading against the stifling anti-individualism of grey-flannel-suit America.
Kerouac helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-centered dropouts and anarchists to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of mainstream society.
Rand helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-cenetered tech-geeks and neocons to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of civil society and rule of law.
But at least Kerouac’s devotees don’t go around declaring that the oil companies and the drug companies somehow don’t have enough power.
(P.S.: Digby has much more lucent thoughts than mine i/r/t Randmania.)
…for aggressively expanding recycling, but it’s my ol’ neighbors in Snohomish County who actually do the dirty work.
(PS: No, I still haven’t got comments up yet. Darn.)
I’ve got tagging turned on, but not comments. This is getting more complex than I thought.
Philip Golub believes we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the US as hegemonic superpower, but that the coming decline may be really slow and really dangerous.
Every now and then one of these “gender” pundits proclaims that political conservatives have absolutely no tolerance for, or vision of, female sexuality.
Bosh.
There is a right-wing female sexuality. Several, in fact. You might not be particularly turned on by/approve of ’em, but they’re there.
This was proven back in the pre-Reagan ’70s, with Marabel Morgan’s once-popular paperback book The Total Woman. In it, Morgan extols the ultra-eager-to-please wife, who might not have a career but who works damned hard to keep energy in the marriage bed.
The current edition’s Amazon page is chock full of juicy, snarky customer comments. Most of the commentors howl at Morgan’s vision of female totality as little more than passive-aggressive bimbodom.
But is Morgan’s fantasy woman really that passe?
Perhaps she’s simply been succeeded by another set of ideals.
Morgan’s vision of the conservative feminine libido belonged to a conservatism that was already fading when her book came out.
It was a conservatism of hierarchy, of rules, of clearly defined social roles. A conservatism of modest luxury and quiet good taste, when business executives at least still talked about prosperity for all; when politicians at least still talked about civility.
Those days are long gone.
The organized thuggery and egomania that are today’s “conservative” culture are topics I’ve ranted about before, and probably will again.
But with a changed culture come changed personal roles. That includes female roles. (I’ve already written that the sole positive thing I can say about Bush is he respects strong women.)
I happen to have had acquaintances of differing degrees with a few of these modern right-wing women. I won’t get into the sordid particulars.
Let’s just say I’ve seen what a new Marabel Morgan might write about in gushing tribute.
I’m sure you can, too.
And as soon as I’ve figured out how to add them newfangled comment threads to this site, I’ll ask you to add your own suggested chapter titles for a new self-help tome, Nookie for Nubile Neocons.
‘Til then, take these as inspiration:
Ah, fuggittaboutit.
…housing prices haven’t deflated yet? Aw, you figured it out already.
