That eruption at Mount St. Helens two years ago? It never stopped.

Earlier this week, I pointed out that Geov Parrish’s list of “underreported stories” for 2005 was way off base.

In the comments thread to that post someone asked me what I thought about Parrish’s statement that if the Weekly’s new corporate owner (New Times) fires Parrish, it will spell the end of Seattle’s only “consistently progressive local political voice” at the four main papers in town.

Here’s the exchange:

Josh,
At Eat The State, Geov claimed he’s “the only consistently progressive columnist in Seattle.”
You aren’t consistently progressive, Josh? Do you have views on the estate tax you’d like to share with everybody? :)
Posted by Belltowner - December 28, 2005 03:51 PM

“Consistently Progressive” ? Yuck. I’m lucky if I’m consistent.
Posted by Josh Feit - December 28, 2005 04:12 PM

I should add that, to me, “consistently progressive” means predictably orthodox, which is the last thing I want to be as a columnist. But I also wanted to address the larger misconception that I think is going on with Parrish’s spin on the New Times takeover.

The real point I think Parrish is trying to make is that New Times is an evil, out-of-town, corporate chain that is going to come in and quash the Weekly’s local voice. This is misleading. The Weekly is already owned by a NY-based media chain. In fact, one of the Weekly’s main corporate parents—Goldman Sachs— is George W. Bush’s 6th all-time top financial contributor. So, if Parrish’s point is that the corporate super state banishes lefty columnists, he’s flat out wrong. If he loses his job, it’s not because New Times is an evil corporation. As a financial model, New Times is not much different from the Weekly’s current out-of-town, chain parent VVM. Spinning this takeover/merger as some dramatic changeover/sell out is a misconception.

Second, contrary to the scripted story about this corporate takeover (cookie cutter, out-of-towners etc), I think New Times will actually make the Weekly a better paper. Take it for what it’s worth coming from me, but the Weekly seems like a pretty irrelevant paper these days. Some change—any change—is likely to give them a much-needed jolt. I actually look forward to a little actual competition from the New Times clones.

Finally, I want to dispel the idea that indie-owned media (the Stranger, for example, is super-majority locally-owned) de facto equals “progressiveâ€� columnists. I would never subscribe to that kind of label. I’m pro WTO. I think the war in Iraq has some merit. And I support mayor Nickels’s development agenda. (Although, it’s gonna flop unless he deals with the choke that single-family zoning has on this town and unless he does something about our lack of mass transit.)

Anyway, I just wanted to counter the scripted knee-jerk sense that the upcoming change at the Weekly is robbing our city. I think, most people will find that the Weekly will be better after the takeover. Especially, if they stop being “consistently progressive.â€�

From the King County Journal:

A new group of bar and tavern owners has found a potential sponsor for a bill that would exempt an establishment from the new public-smoking ban if it has taken at least a 10 percent hit on its revenue.

The exemption or waiver wouldn’t apply to places where minors frequent, such as bowling alleys and skating rinks, or to restaurants.

The group, Hospitality Partners, an offshoot of the foes of Initiative 901, which voters approved overwhelmingly in November, has found an Eastern Washington legislator who may sponsor the bill.

So Shirley Jones, AKA Mrs. Partridge, is in a new movie! You can read all about it in an AP story headlined “Mrs. Partridge in Sex Romp in New Movieâ€�.

What’s this — the matriarch of the Partridge family in bed with a 24-year-old stud? It happens in “Grandma’s Boy,” a boisterous comedy produced by Adam Sandler’s company. “It’s a different role for me,” laughs Jones, the star of “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” “Music Man” and other squeaky-clean movies… The fun starts, she related, when three housemates — played by herself, Shirley Knight and Doris Roberts — find a jar left in the kitchen by a previous tenant. The contents look like tea, so they heat up a brew. What they’re actually sipping is hashish. That’s when things get wild with a group of fun-loving young men.

Sounds like fun—and the commercials I’ve seen for it are pretty entertaining. And I love hash and fun-loving young men. But I can’t help but wonder what a certain TV mom who appeared in a series of newspaper ads decrying Hollywood’s love affair with sex and drugs would have to say about Shirley Jones appearing in a film that glamorized drug use and intergenerational sex.

The ads were taken out by a conservative group known as the Parents Television Council, and they complained about the “filth, vulgarity, sex and violenceâ€� promoted by Hollywood, which “is undermining the morals of children, encouraging them to have premarital sex, encouraging lack of respect for authority and crime, and shaping our country down to the lowest standards of decency.â€� The Parents Television Council still exists and claims to be “reaching millions of potential supporters with the message that we are here to help families take back the airwaves and stop Hollywood’s corrupting influence,â€� and pitching fits about Desperate Housewives and Paris Hilton eating a burger in a Carl’s Jr. commercial. (The PTC’s Wikipedia listing walks you through the groups founding and their involvement in the Janet Jackson’s Boob War.)

So who was that TV mom who appeared on the PTC ads? Why it was Shirley Jones, Mrs. Partridge. She not only appeared in the ads, she was the PTC’s co-chair at the time. (Steve Allen was the other co-chair.) You could argue that there’s nothing hypocritical about Jones portraying a character who uses drugs and bangs 24 year-olds in “Grandma’s Boy”—it’s a movie, not a television program. (And not, praise God, a documentary.) Since “Grandma’s Boy” is rated R—”for drug use and language throughout, strong crude and sexual humor, and nudityâ€�—kids under 17 can’t get in to see it. But like all R-rated movies, “Grandma’s Boy” is going to wind up on cable—first, HBO or Showtime, then on basic cable—where it will, without a doubt, be seen by children who will, without a doubt, demand sex from their grandparents immediately after the credits roll.

And that’s why the Parents Television Council is calling on the Feds to regulate cable—to protect impressionable children from the kind of smut that their former co-chair is starring in:

Over-the-air broadcast networks have to abide by decency standards. There is, however, no such jurisdiction over cable television, which is far more offensive. Cable companies enjoy a virtual monopoly forcing consumers not just to take offensive programs, but to pay for them. This is unconscionable.

The PTC kicked-off its campaign to call attention to grossly indecent content on basic cable at a national press conference on Capitol Hill. Less than a month later, lawmakers in both the House and Senate are echoing our sentiments by calling for a crack-down on cable indecency and urging the cable industry to give consumers better options.

I have nothing against Jones appearing in a movie about a hash-using, young-stud-banging grandma—the woman has to make a living. (And it’s not as if this is her first intergenerational sex romp: She played Drew Carey’s much, much older girlfriend for a couple of years on “The Drew Carey Show.”) But it seems to me that someone—like, say, the AP reporter who interviewed Jones in her home—should ask about the contradiction between her past work with the PTC and her current willingness to appear in a movie like “Grandma’s Boy.”

I posted an item about this last week: Brad Renfro, mid-90s teen idol, was arrested during a police sting of an open-air heroin market in LA. I posted these pics of Renfro:

That’s the “before” picture, i.e. Brad during his teen idol days. The next pic is Brad on the day of his big heroin bust:

Tonight the AP is reporting that Renfro is entering a rehab program—hey, not a moment too soon. And look for Renfro on the celeb remorse circuit once he’s out of rehab. The View, 20/20, maybe even Oprah. He’ll be remorseful and thank God that he got arrested, because that was when he hit bottom, got help, blah blah blah. This bust is going to be the best thing that’s happened to Renfro’s career in a decade.

But what blew my mind when I read tonight’s AP report, however, was Brad’s age. It wasn’t mentioned in the original reports about his arrest. The kid is 23 years-old—23! Look at that “after heroin” picture again. That guys is 23? Jesus, why does anyone touch heroin?

A chronic gripe of mine has been KEXP’s aversion to playing techno. Sure, the popular Seattle station will dabble with downtempo electronic music (almost always tracks with vocals), but when it comes to anything in 4/4 time above 120 bpm, KEXP mostly ignores it. In its Variety Chart, only Nortec Collective (at #79) can even vaguely be considered a techno act. KEXP’s Electronic Chart consists of one other artist who can be construed as techno (Apparat).

This is unfortunate, especially because in Seattle alone there reside several techno and house producers who are internationally acclaimed, but might as well not exist in the ears of KEXP’s decision-makers.

Continue reading "Clap Your Hands Say Techno" »

So for, like, YEARS, the Europeans have been all: “You stupid Yankee twerps. You don’t know about painting. You don’t know about literature. You don’t know about classical music. Nyah, nyah, nyah.”

Well guess the fuck what? As usual, we were just waaaaaay ahead of the pack. From the Guardian:

“More than half of Britons polled do not realise that Elgar was English or that Beethoven was born in Germany, according to a survey for the digital arts and culture channel Artsworld.

In a poll of nearly 1,200 people, Artsworld discovered that more than 85% of those surveyed described their knowledge of classical music as ‘average’ or ‘worse than average’.

Nearly two-thirds were unable to identify Mozart as composer of The Marriage of Figaro. The poll found that only 46.7% identified Sir Edward Elgar as English, with the remainder plumping for German or Austrian.”

In your face, Europe!

First off, hello to our regular readers at Seattle Weekly. Be sure to stock up on paperclips and notebooks while you can—oh, and keep taking your meds. Then dash off an e-mail to John Longenbaugh, letting him know that he made SLOG again.

I was at SCCC’s gym. I had just finished playing racquetball with Eli Sanders—despite the fact that I am considerably older, gayer, asthmatic, and recently broke a toe on my left foot, I beat Eli three straight games—when John Longenbaugh walked up. We briefly made eye contact, then John looked away.

Now, when Frizzelle spotted John recently, John posted a comment on the SLOG in which he claimed that he didn’t know what Frizzelle looked like. This is odd, considering that these men of letters were introduced when they both worked for the Weekly (Frizzelle was a staffer at the time, John a freelancer), and they currently live in the same building on Broadway. According to John, if he had recognized Frizzelle, he certainly would have said hello. Well, I know that John recognizes me because he said so in his comment on SLOG:

I DO recognize Dan. I saw him on Oprah.

But John didn’t say hello to me. For the record: I’ve never been on Oprah. I’ve been on HBO (Bill Maher), CNN a few times (Anderson Cooper, Paula Zahn), MSNBC bunches (always on Scarborough), ABC (20/20), C-SPAN (book stuff), and more shows on VH1 than I care to admit to. But never, ever Oprah. I’m not sure why John would say that. But it’s not like John would need to see me on TV to know who I am. John interviewed me once for a piece in the Weekly, and we used to nod to each other when we passed on the street. But not today. John looked away—and, in all honesty, so did I. John and I are, I think, equally awkward around each other. He unnerves me, I unnerve him. So I’m content to look away and leave John at peace.

But I did call out to him, after he strolled away, that I was never on Oprah. I wanted to correct the record because it’s a big deal for a writer to be on Oprah, and I don’t want people to think I run around claiming to have been on Oprah when I haven’t. Just coming clean.

The PI’s current series about “misconduct and breakdowns in [internal] discipline and accountability” at the King County Sheriff’s Office (a follow-up to their excellent Dan Ring expose last August), is a fat piece of investigative journalism, and it’s causing a stir at the County.

I was talking to some county officials last night who were just shaking their heads. And, in a first, the Sheriff’s office called me today—I always call them—pitching me a story about Sheriff Rahr’s vision for 2006.

Anyway, props to PI reporters Eric Nalder, Lewis Kamb, Phuong Cat Le and Paul Shukovsky for exposing this questionable business at the sheriff’s dept.—a stark contrast to the Seattle Times’s endless recycling of that “story” about SPD corruption in local night clubs and/or strip clubs and/or something.

Baruch Hashem!

Who knew so many people would try to rescue me from my latke crisis? Thanks for your recipes (Vitamin C tablets keep latkes from turning green? Really?), thanks for your orders to toughen up and tolerate the greasy smell, and most of all, thanks for your suggestions of places that will sell me latkes so that I won’t have to tolerate that greasy smell.

Per several suggestions, Amy Kate and I just drove out to Goldberg’s Deli in the Factoria Mall, which apparently — and rather embarrassingly for this city, I would say — is the Jewish deli nearest to Seattle. Godlberg’s has good macaroons, I’ll give them that. And the place makes a serious roast beef sandwich. But I’m sorry, this is not a latke:

A couple of people warned me that a Goldberg’s latke would be disappointing, and they were right. I mean, it’s as big as a potato, and it’s shaped like a potato too. And it seems to be breaded or something. If I’m going to trek all the way out to Factoria for a latke, I want it to be a flat, shredded-potato latke — just the way I would make it if I weren’t too lazy, and too scared of greasing up my apartment, to do it myself.

Thanks for being there for me Goldberg’s, but I’m sticking with Madison Market.

This just in: COMCAST CABLE SUCKS RANCID DONKEY BALLS.

Seriously. They’re over-priced, their service is shoddy, and when they fuck up—like they’re doing right now, which is why only four of the 400-or-so channels (of mostly crap) I’m being over-charged for are working at the moment—they tell us they can’t send a technician out to fix said fuck up until Monday.

Monday.

So I have no cable this weekend, and no internet access, because Comcast could give a shit about their customers. If this were an isolated incident that would be one thing, but since moving to a new apartment at the beginning of this month Seattle’s only cable company has needed to send technicians out twice just to complete the simple transfer. And now they’re sending out a third—presumably in a Comcast bus that’s short and yellow.

Deep breaths, deep breaths…

Valerie Plame has again been outed as a spy—this time by her five year-old son.

An article in today’s Seattle PI tells of a nonfatal attack on a police officer by a pack of Chihuahuas.

A few years ago I was at an antiwar rally downtown with my Chihuahua puppy when I was approached by a man who seemed to know a lot about the breed. We were talking for a little while when he asked me if I knew that in olden times in Mexico, Chihuahuas used to hunt in packs. He said, “they could take down a buffalo.” I didn’t believe him at the time, but now I have my doubts…

Remember when The Stranger was Seattle’s smuttiest paper? Well, no more. The top story at The Seattle Times this year—as measured by Internet traffic—was the sad tale of a man, a horse, and a perforated colon.

Note to Mike and Glenda Carmichael of Alexandria, Indiana: If you’re going to spend 28 years painting a baseball until it weights more than 1,700 pounds, you could at least spend 5 or 10 minutes on the website and description. This is for the ages, right?

Imagine an ordinary baseball…Now imagine that same baseball with over 19,100 coats of paint on it. Getting the picture? Good, because that’s exactly what my wife, Glenda and I have done for the past 28 1/2 years.

…

This ball is truly remarkable with over 19,100 coats of paint on it!

You can say that again.

UPDATE :: In case you’re curious, I did the math. 19,100 coats of paint in 28.5 years is an average of nearly 13 coats of paint per week, or 1.8 coats per day. For almost 30 years. I don’t know what to say.

Fundamentalist Christians want two things: They want to get creationism into public schools by demanding that schools “teach the controversyâ€� that, uh, they’ve created. And they want public schools to refrain from even mentioning homosexuality at all. John Aravosis at Americablog makes a great point: Shouldn’t students be taught the controversy over homosexuality too?

America’s Taliban thinks that any effort to stop teachers from talking about creationism in science class is “educational censorship.” Okay, great. Then I assume they don’t mind every grade school and high school teacher in the country telling their students that many people, including all the top scientific organizations and a number of mainstream religions like Reform Judaism, think being gay is 100% a-okay.

Anything less would be educational censorship. Don’t you agree?

I’m serious. If the intelligent design debate is going on in your school district, then put forward a proposal that all the health classes, social studies classes, science classes, and any other class that even vaguely touches on marriage, human relationships, sex ed, or sexual reproduction in humans or animals teaches that the preponderance of scientific research says that being gay is genetic, normal and healthy, but that some people disagree.

John’s got a great list of quotes from fundies talking about teaching Intelligent Design/Creationism that make the case for teaching homosexuality—the controversy!—in America’s classrooms. You can read the whole thing here.

This is what happened last night: I’m sitting with Christopher Frizzelle on a leather sectional in a new Belltown nightclub called Venom (formerly Medusa—apparently the woman has gone but her snakes are still around). The Viper, I mean Venom is big and there are lots of okay-looking people hanging around, drinking, and listening to rap. A group of young, slatternly women are sitting on the sectional across from us. One of them, who has big breasts, gives me the eyes. Embarrassed, I turn and look at people buying drinks at the bar. Nature calls Christopher, and he stands and leaves to go to the restroom. Suddenly I feel the heat of a hot body behind me. I look up, and it’s the woman with the breasts. She sits down next to me and there is no doubt in my mind that sex is on her mind. Her eyes say nothing but sex. She says, “Sorry to ask you this. But is your friend single?” “My friend Christopher,” I say with the coldness of a fish freshly pulled out of the Bering Sea, “is gay.”

“Damn, I always pick the gay ones,” she says, and leaves me just like that. More upsetting still, when I tell Christopher about the woman with the breasts, he says with great satisfaction, “Yes! I still got it!” Christopher, are you really gay? Did I lie to that horny woman with the big breasts? Why did her desire for you please you so?

I’ve enjoyed a few goofy plunges into “immersion journalism,” but never have I come close to doing anything as brazenly stupid as the 16-year-old Florida boy who spent his Christmas vacation traipsing around war-torn Iraq to “experience during my Christmas the same hardships ordinary Iraqis experience everyday, so that I may better empathize with their distress.”

Full (and miraculously non-fatal) story here.

For the week of December 29, 2005 - January 4, 2006:

Seattle Weekly: 84 pages.
The Stranger: 96 pages.

It’s a regular issue for both papers.

Stranger music writer Megan Seling has written a big deal story about a gang called FSU that’s been hovering below the radar screen in Seattle’s hardcore scene. As Megan reports, after 10 plus members of the gang were able to shut down a performance in West Seattle last week with threats of violence, the gang—once considered just a nuisance—is emerging as a central and troubling flash point for bookers, club owners, and hardcore fans.

The story isn’t in this week’s hard copy of the paper, so I wanted to alert people that it’s over on our homepage.

As Megan writes: “If a dozen young black men showed up to a local hiphop show threatening fans, performers, and promoters with violence, it’d easily make front-page news.” Props to Megan for filing this important story.

Lynndie England has been burned in a prison accident.

Terrie England [Lynndie’s mother], who is caring for England’s infant during her incarceration, faulted prison officials for not giving better treatment during a visit to the emergency room.

Read the rest here.

That’s it! I’m moving to Sweden.

My top ten films of the year, rendered in the ancient art of haiku. (Hey, it was a long flight)

Continue reading "Something, Something, Cherry Blossoms" »

I know, I know… I’m Jewish, I’m supposed to be able to make my own latkes. But here’s the problem: I live in a one-bedroom apartment, I need to be in possession of several dozen latkes by this evening, and the idea of frying them up myself only sounds good until I start to consider the greasy smell. Everywhere. Lingering. For days on end. Long after the latkes are gone.

So I wandered around downtown on Wednesday holding this lovely article by Min Liao, The Stranger’s former food critic, who in 2002 trod the streets of Seattle in search of matzo ball soup and other Jewish comfort food. It turned out that Min could find only one place, Roxy’s Diner, that had fresh latkes for sale, and this was Min’s verdict on them: “I cannot recommend the latkes with good conscience (they tasted more of frying oil than potatoes).”

Still, I was desperate. I went to First and Union, where Roxy’s Diner was supposed to be, but Roxy’s is not there anymore. I called its number and was told that wherever Roxy’s now is, it doesn’t sell latkes these days. I sighed and walked toward the address for Kosher Delight, supposedly near the Pike Place Market and, according to Min, a place of “PERFECT” matzo ball soup. I figured Kosher Delight might have decided to sell some latkes for the holidays this year. But when I arrived I quickly realized that Kosher Delight does not exist anymore. It seems to have become a crumpet shop.

So what’s a Jew to do? After much brain straining and calling around, I found one place that would sell me a mess of hand-made latkes: Madison Market on Capitol Hill. Hurray. Sort of. I know beggers can’t be choosers, but I have to say, buying latkes from a nouveau-hippie health food store is not the same thing as buying latkes from a placed named, say, Kosher Delight.

Can anyone out there answer my desperate cry for a real Jewish deli that sells latkes? Does such a thing exist in Seattle? Or is Madison Market really my last, best hope? (And don’t waste my time with directions to the nearest frozen food section, where, I know, companies that no one’s ever heard of are now offering frozen “potato pancakes” to desperate Jews like me. Been there. Done that. Looking for better.)

Anyone who wants to go to the (recommended) Heaven & Hell Ball on Saturday but doesn’t want to fork over $35 for a ticket should call Andy Fife (206-381-3218)—he’s looking for volunteers to help out in exchange for admission.

Heaven & Hell Ball at ConWorks
Featuring Circus Contraption, FCS North, The Atomic Bombshells, Tipper, Jerry Abstract, Nordic Soul and very special guest John Tejada.
New Year’s Eve, 8:30 pm - 2 am
Advance tickets at www.ticketwindowonline.com
This event is 21+

Precalculus for Christian Schools, from Bob Jones University Press, looks like a gas. Some excerpts:

A line can be described either by its slope (a ratio) or by its inclination (an angle). These terms describe the deviation from the horizontal, but the word inclination also has a non-mathematical meaning. Without Christ, man is inclined to sin. The Word of God should shape our attitudes (inclinations).

A person is eccentric if his behavior deviates from normal. Jesus Christ expects His disciples to be eccentric, since living a Christlike life is not normal in this world (Titus 2:14). Likewise, in mathematics, conic sections are eccentric if they deviate from a circle. Eccentricity is a measure of this deviation. The eccentricity of an ellipse (e) is the ratio of focal distance (c) to the length of the sentimajor axis (a): e = c/a. Since c and a are distances and c < a, the eccentricity of any ellipse is 0 < e < 1.

Talk about a one-track mind; Which, I suppose, is the Bob Jones way.

that’s certainly a good case for it. “emotional undercurrent for ballads”? you know what that means…
Trapped In The Roadhouse 1-12.

Hiphop is officially dead.

There’s an 18-year-old college student named Andrew Villeneuve who’s made it his mission to take down Tim Eyman. Villeneuve, chair of Permanent Defense, is an impressive young man. He came in to the Stranger’s ed board this fall to debate Eyman on I-900, Eyman’s audits initiative. Our ed board has had Eyman in to scrap with some of the best debaters in town (Mark Sidran, Dwight Pelz), and I must say, Villeneuve was the first person I’ve seen get under Eyman’s skin.

My favorite exchange during the meeting was when Eyman kept trying to start his closing statement saying, “Given that I don’t have any oppostion…” and Villeneuve would interrupt Eyman and say dramatically: “I’m your oppositon…” Eyman would roll his eyes, take a breath, and start again, “Given that I don’t have any opposition…” and Villeneuve would jump right back in: “I’m your opposition.” This happened four or five times, before we had to jump in and referee a little.

Anyway, Villeneuve just sent out this “memo” (he’s titled it: “Focus! #16”) about Eyman’s uncanny ability to land on op/ed pages. Villeneuve’s memo is more emotional than it is eloquent, but he also attaches a related write up from the Northwest Progressive Institute that’s pretty compelling regarding Eyman’s overrated status.

I’ve posted both.

Continue reading "Challenging Eyman" »

Today’s talk-radio show The Conversation (KUOW), on the decline of functional literacy in American adults, is a good listen, especially for grammar nerds. Thanks to Hannah for the tip.

I lived in Botswana in the late 80s (my mother was lecturing at the University of Botswana at the time), and it was a very happy experience. The desert dusks, the beautiful Tswana woman (Stella, where are you now?), the beautiful Swedish ex-pats (Asa, where are you now?), the heat, the cold, the rapid growth of the village—I simply loved the democratic country. Loved the name (pula) and color (blue) of its money, and loved drinking at the Sun Hotel, eating lunch at the President Hotel, debating politics at the Bull. Anyway, that is all in the past; what is in the present is the encouraging news that Botswana is making progress in the war against AIDS. If any African country is going to beat (or tame) the terrible disease, it’s going to be Botswana.

If that subject line is too cryptic for you, here’s the full story, courtesy of Local 6 News.

Nutshell version: A Honolulu mom bought her 14-year-old daughter an iPod from Wal-Mart for Christmas. When the girl opened the sealed box, she found not an iPod, but a wad of raw meat.

The culprit: A former Wal-Mart employee, who is now facing tampering charges.

There are no details on the cut, color, or even animal-of-origin for the meat.

In Tuesday’s Seattle Times, City Council member David Della made the case for rebuilding the Alaskan Way Viaduct rather than holding out for the city and state’s “preferred” tunnel option. “[B]uilding a new, stronger viaduct is estimated to cost between $2.7 billion and $3.1 billion and is projected to take between six and eight years to build,” Della writes. “Do we really want to risk people’s lives betting on an aesthetic point of view?”

Della’s op-ed is both metaphorically tortured (“Our safety is at risk each day that we hold out false hope that there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow”; “I can’t stand by in good conscience and let safety, jobs and transportation take a back seat to a gold-plated alternative”) and logically unsound. If the viaduct can be shut down for six to eight years during reconstruction (not much less than the estimated seven-to-nine-year shutdown tunnel construction would require), why can’t it be shut down permanently?

The state Department of Transportation estimates that a $4.1 billion, six-lane viaduct tunnel would reach its full capacity in nine years - after that, it would be just as congested as the current highway. That’s a big investment for less than a decade of traffic relief. Tearing down the viaduct and rebuilding the traffic connections through downtown instead would cost far less - and accomplish far more in the long term - than spending billions on a tunnel that will do almost nothing for the city’s long-term transportation needs.

So far, 11 people have put in applications for city council position 9 (nee Jim Compton’s seat), and speculation continues about who else will apply by the January 6 deadline. Those who have made it official include:

Businessman and Muni League volunteer Norman Z. Sigler;
Activist Juan Jose Bocanegra;
Office of Police Accountability Review Board chairman Peter Holmes;
Two-time council candidate Angel Bolanos;
Onetime council candidate Douglas A. Mays;
Former City Council member Dolores Sibonga;
Seattle Film Institute employee Chris Blanchett;
Antiwar activist Aaron Shuman;
Software developer and Poet Ramon Arjona;
Rosebud restaurant owner Robert Sondheim; and
Former city council member and 2003 Compton opponent John Manning.

Also preparing applications are 2003 council candidate Darryl Smith (who confirmed last week that he’s definitely running) and Sally Clark, a Southeast Seattle activist and former aide to Tina Podlodowski.

You can listen to the Seattle Shakespeare’s premiere “audio jumpstartâ€� podcast here.

Why would you ever want to? Well, the first five seconds are inadvertently funny (every Ibiza dance hit should have some stiffly read Shakespeare!), followed by a mildly interesting summary of the Wars of the Roses. Then the podcast devolves into an interview with the artistic director, a lackluster reading of the Richard/Anne scene (wherein she tells the “diffused infection of a manâ€� to fuck the fuck off), and other dull jaw flapping.

The podcast idea ins’t bad, even if this initial attempt is lame. Some advice for SSC: tighten up each segment, ask more pointed, colorful questions (the audience doesn’t care if the director is “really positiveâ€�), and stick the actors with pins while they’re reading.

Tonight and tomorrow night my friends in Circus Contraption and the Aerialistas are performing in the Seattle Center House as part of Winterfest (and it’s free). At 7:00 p.m. both nights, a dozen wood nymphs, snow sprites, and frost fairies will spin, dance, and drop from the heights of the Center House ceiling in a full-length aerial ballet, accompanied by live music from the Circus Contraption Band. Also, the holiday ice rink in the Fisher Pavillion is open until 8 p.m. tonight and 11 p.m. on Friday ($7).

According to a new Harris poll:

— Forty-one percent (41%) of U.S. adults believe that Saddam Hussein had “strong links to Al Qaeda.” — Twenty-two percent (22%) of adults believe that Saddam Hussein “helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11.” — Twenty-six percent (26%) of adults believe that Iraq “had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded.” — Twenty-four percent (24%) of all adults believe that “several of the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11 were Iraqis.”

(Via Atrios.)

I went to the Queen tribute at Chop Suey last night, a fund raiser for kids affected by AIDs/HIV.

It was packed. They were expecting to raise about $1500 to $2000. At $5-a-head, I imagine they came pretty close to raising the $2K. I’ll report back on that tomorrow or this afternoon when the numbers come in. [THIS JUST IN: $1900. Nicely done. Congrats to event sponsor Rise n’ Shine.]

A note on the show: Queen brings it out. The lead singer in each band showed up obviously having practiced their scales for hours. For example, Sean Bates (“as in masturbates” he told me), brought the house down with a prancing roaring rendition of “We are the Champions,” dressed in a tight white Flash tee shirt. And the guitarists showed up with brand new, glowing electric strings and expensive polished tuned Gibsons 1970s style.

They were all there to bend the club out. And they all did. Highlight songs included “Fat Bottomed Girls” (two different bands on that one), “Somebody to Love,” “Pressure” (a breath taking garage arrangement), “Death on Two Legs,” and a great great work out on “Sheer Heart Attack,” the absolute best Queen song.

Queen, obviously, is the 2nd best rock band of all time. Which, of course, means they’re the best rock band of all time.

Guess who is in Dargis’ The Best Films of the Year list; guess who is not.

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 25, 2005
“BATMAN BEGINS,” “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” “Capote,” “Darwin’s Nightmare,” “Duma,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Funny Ha Ha,” “George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Grizzly Man,” “Head-On,” “The Holy Girl,” “Howl’s Moving Castle,” “In Her Shoes,” “Keane,” “Match Point,” “Millions,” “Mondovino,” “Mysterious Skin,” “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan,” “Police Beat,” “Pulse,” “Red Eye,” “Rize,” “The Squid and the Whale,” “The Sun,” “Syriana,” “The Talent Given Us,” “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” “Three Times,” “Tony Takitani,” “Tropical Malady,” “Waiting for the Clouds,” “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” “Who’s Camus Anyway?” and “The World.”

In this week’s Letters (print version), The Stranger ran this header over a reader’s missive: JOHN IN THE MORNING IS OVERPAYED. The sentiment is debatable (and boy are people debating it on Slog and in The Forums). What isn’t debatable is the mortifying misspelling of overpaid. Let this mention of it be either the last regret of 2005 or the first of 2006.

This week’s Regrets Issue is particularly shameful for the copy department.
In Police Beat, we printed “end of the ear” rather than “end of the year,” plus “axe” should have been the American Heritage-preferred “ax.” Control Tower has a glaring error in the subhead: “Misstress.” We said “KRAKT” is a band name when it is in fact an awesome monthly techno night at Re-bar (and we knew this). And in the letters section, “overpaid” is spelled “overpayed.”
We, The Stranger’s proofreader, copyeditors, and copy chief, regret we were ever born.
We also recommend that you read this week’s Stranger online where these mistakes have been corrected.

Last night, the Mudede/Drakes gave our 10-year-old nephew, Munyaradzi, an excellent (if not the best) book on the art of graffiti, Graffiti World : Street Art from Five Continents. The boy was pleased with the gift; and I was pleased to inform the boy that the book was published in Singapore, of all places. He didn’t get it. I didn’t bother to explain to him how strange it was for a book on graffiti art to be published in a city that physically punishes those who dare to write or draw on walls that are owned by people other then themselves. Munyaradzi doesn’t need to worry about such things; he is happy enough to look at street art from around the world.

Bad news for those who are in a tight situation, the rainbow has disappeared. It was there a minute ago, but now it’s gone. Sorry if I raised your hopes. My intentions were noble to the bone.

Good news for those who are in a tight situation, a rainbow has just appeared behind Cal Anderson park. If you go to the end of that rainbow you will find a pot with gold in it. The amount won’t solve all of your problems, but it will make life a little easier, a little brighter.

…I’ve got a few, the most recent of which is being forwarded this local message board posting found by Hot Tipper Jake:

I am looking for a select few highly motivated individuals with a strong desire to explore new horizons in the wonderous world of ART!!! Ask yourself this: AM I WILLING TO STRETCH THE LIMITS OF CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE ART? Well are you? AM I READY TO EXPERIENCE BEING LOOKED AT AS DIFFERENT AND OR AN OUTCAST OF SOCIETY? Well, ARE YOU? AM I READY, TO BE NOT PAID TO DO STUFF SO UNAPPEALING AND DISGUSTING THAT ALOT OF PEOPLE DONT WANNA DO IT AND WOULDNT EVEN FOR LOTSA MONEY ? ARE YOU REALLY ? WELL ARE YOU? REALLY?? OK, I beleive you. Last but not least I need you to look yourself in the soul and ask: SOUL, AM I WILLING, TO MAKE DOG POOP STATUES, MOLDS AND OTHER FREE FORM POO-ART, STRIP NAKED AND SLATHER MY NAKED SELF IN FECES AND MARCH INTO THE CITY CENTER TOWING BEHIND A DUNG FLOAT DECORATED WITH MY NEW ART WORKS ?

If have the courage to do the “doo doo walk” you will be showing all these earthlings that you can take a stand against poluters and jesus freaks and still save the world and help all these poor disabled kids. Do not delay contact me right away.

The “time to make the donuts” guy from the Dunkin’ Donuts commercials dies—of diabetes. Okay, he was 87 and was going to die of something sooner or later, but the cause of his death seems oddly appropriate.

Next up: Spain. Their proposed smoking ban, however, exempts bars that are less than 1000 square feet—and that’s a lot of the bars in Spain—and it allows bars to open smoking rooms if they’re sealed off from the bar’s main room.

A 52 year-old man on Camano Island blew his brains out after a tree fell on his trailer early on Christmas day, trapping his legs. His legs weren’t broken, but he couldn’t free himself. Authorities believe that he figured that no one would come along and find him, and he would eventually die anyway, so he blew his brains out.

But a friend dropped by to say hi that afternoon and found his body. The Seattle Times has the story.

So—you just luurve all the local rap being played on KEXP…You bought your be-throwbacked nephew a copy of the Blue Scholars’ new EP for Xmas and you copped the Common Market for yourself. Well, do yourself a favor and peep the other side of this 206 hiphop shit—the “street-orienfested” game of the man known as Framework.
His awesome debut Hello World probably won’t have drive-time KEXP DJs on gush—its coke-and-thugs charm is more likely the domain of Street Sounds.

Frame, having been locked up the majority of the year, is home and celebrating both his and his album’s release tonight at the War Room. Come party and peep one of Seattle’s best rap acts enjoying his damn self.

Former King County Democratic Chairman Greg Rodriguez told me today that he’s dropping out of the race to succeed outgoing state chair Paul Berendt.

I think Rodriguez—who made a run at Berendt’s seat last year—was the only real competition for front-runner Dwight Pelz.

Others going for the seat are former state rep and failed secretary of state candidate, Laura Ruderman & former state supreme court justice, Phil Talmadge.

Pelz, an outgoing K.C. Council Member, is a loud-mouthed partisan brawler, and I think he captures the mood of the Democratic Party right now. Democrats want to play mean and loud—just as the Republicans have been doing for years. Dwight, a Deaniac, is sure to put an emphasis on media and communications.

That may sound enticing, especially in the wake of Berendt’s lacking media presence. (Berendt’s Republican counterpart, sassy Chris Vance, has been much better at dishing the catchy sound bites and framing the debate.) But keep this in mind: Washington is the only West Coast state where both senate seats, the governor’s mansion, and the state house are controlled by the Democrats. Berendt had game when it came to campaign.

Pelz should be a welcome change in the media wars, but ultimately it’s about the ground game.

I’m at my mom’s house in McHenry, Illinois, an longish train ride from downtown Chicago. I needed to sneak off today and write Savage Love, so I headed for a Panera Bread Company a half a mile from her house. Panera is one of those supposedly high-end franchise restaurants that have taken over the `burbs. Despite the fact that this Panera faced six lanes of traffic packed with SUVs and Hummers and minivans, the place was going for an urban feel. It’s had Starbucks-esque interior (lots of browns and ambers), a couple of deep leather club chairs, a fireplace.

The only thing missing from this “third space,â€� faux-urban paradise was, naturally enough, urbanites. I walked to the café, an urbanite sort of thing to do, and I was probably the first customer to show up on foot in the three or so years it’s been open. Everyone else in the café was either under 18 or over 35. Moms, dads, kids, tweens, and teenagers who were clearly itching to graduate from high school and get the hell out of McHenry. (And I don’t want to hurt my mom and step-dad’s feelings, but who can blame them? ) There was no one I could see in who was in their 20s or 30s. The presence of these young-ish adults—20s/30s, single, childless—pretty much defines modern urban spaces. Cities are increasingly the province of single adults (who live in apartments) and the retired (who live in condos). People are writing about it, cities are stressing about it.

After dashing off some of my famously unhelpful advice—I’m particularly unhelpful next week; I fail to answer two questions, and then lash out at someone who had the nerve to challenge me on a point of Catholic doctrine—I had to take a leak before I walked back to mom’s.

Here’s the urinal in the bathroom:

When I stepped up to the plate, I noticed that this urinal had something to say to me. I looked a little closer…

A little closer and I got the urine-slicked message…

Just say no to drugs. Another moment of urban/exurban disconnect: In, say, Linda’s or the Cha Cha, this would be a highly ironic statement for a urinal to make. If they bothered to put a red plastic urinal thingy—what is that thing anyway? a filter?—in the urinal, there wouldn’t be a trace of it left by the end of the night. It would dissolve under the combined toxicity of one night’s worth of hipster urine.

Anyway, I peed, returning the hot water I had purchased when I arrived at Panera back to ecosphere in the form of slightly-less-hot water. And thus is the circle of life completed. Then I walked back to mom’s place. And ultimately I took the urinal’s anti-drug message to heart. Instead of sharing a traditional post-Christmas speedball with mom, we split a bottle of wine. Cheers!

In this week’s Dategirl advice column, Judy McGuire writes:

It’s been my experience that there is usually a lot of liquor involved with the one-night stand. As the owner of a penis, I think you probably realize the penile pitfalls that can result.

This is why knowledge of grammar is crucial. The boldfaced sentence implies Judy is the owner of a penis. Unless McGuire’s a hermaphrodite, the statement is hilariously inaccurate.

I don’t know what’s more embarrassing—her grammatical blunder or the fact that you now know I read Dategirl.

From the back of “Bitter Harvest,â€� an exposé on the real Cesar Chavez published by Orange Tree Press in July of 1970:

JOHN STEINBACHER, according to an editor of the Christian Science Monitor, is a “National Phenomenon.â€�

After five well received books, he suddenly emerged from his role as an everyday reporter to become nationally famous for his sensational “Charter Houseâ€� expose. His investigative report of a secret session for subverting America’s youth by leading educators and professional sexologists was subsequently reprinted all over the nation in the millions of copies.

Since then, his School and Family column in the Anaheim Bulletin has resulted in nationwide fame for that newspaper.

A school teacher for 10 years, he spent seven years as a social worker in Los Angeles. In 1968 he worked with Walter Winchell on the Sirhan case, and from that came the book, “The Man, the Mysticism, the Murder.â€�

Steinbacher has written scripts for motion pictures, including “Pavlov’s Children,â€� and is the author of numerous LP recordings, including The Child Seducers narrated by the famous screen star, John Carradine.

His Charter House series should have won him the Pulitzer Prize for exceptional investigative reporting, and probably would have — if he had written a story favorable to the participating conspirators.

BITTER HARVEST has been acclaimed by professional editors and publishers as his finest achievement. Simple and direct in style, it manages to carry in its pages all the moving eloquence of a masterpiece.

With BITTER HARVEST, Steinbacher has written his own introduction to literary immortality.

Dear ol’ uncle John—who knew you were such a Renaissance Man?

Thanks to some help from Slog readers, I have another salary to compare against the $90,000/yr that’s being given to KEXP DJ John Richards.

Nic Harcourt, the big morning DJ at LA’s non-commercial indie music station, KCRW, made “a little over $100,000 last year,” according to the blog laist.

So, for those keeping score at home, here’s how it stands:

KCRW’s Nic Harcourt: Over $100,000 in 2004

KEXP’s John Richards: $90,000/yr (and $120,000 in 2004, thanks to bonuses and retroactive pay)

KUOW’s talk show hosts: From $35,000 to $60,000/yr

Don’t know what I’m talking about? See here, here, here, and here.

Want to suggest another salary for comparison? Put it in the comments…

As if the Virginia man who fatally gunned down four people (including his mother) before killing himself on Christmas or the Spanaway man arrested on suspicion of killing his parents on Christmas weren’t Christmas horror enough, today brought a far less deadly but still relentlessly upsetting Christmas horror from an I, Anonymous writer, whose holiday was ruined by some, uh, figgy pudding.

Ew.

Less filling, tastes….?

CLIVE, Iowa - A Nebraska man has been arrested in central Iowa for allegedly delivering some unwanted Christmas gifts. Reno Tobler, 54, was arrested Thursday in Clive after police caught him lobbing urine bottles into backyards. “We’ve got a Grinch that has been lobbing urine,” said Clive Police Chief Robert Cox. “Since this fall, we’ve had eight to 10 incidents reported where people have found containers full of urine thrown into their backyards.” Tobler is a truck driver whose route regularly takes him to the Clive area. He was charged with littering and harassment for allegedly tossing detergent-sized bottles of his urine over fences. Tobler told police that it was a longtime hobby of his to deliver the bottles. Police searched his vehicle and found several other urine-filled bottles ready for delivery. Tobler was taken to the Polk County Jail and was released on a $500 bond.

Seattle Weekly’s Geov Parrish published a list of 2005’s most “underreported” stories. As usual, his annual list reads like the fantasies of a leftist who believes the mainstream media is ignoring critical stories.

From Parrish’s list: Republican corruption scandals, the failure of I-912, and Samuel Alito’s right-wing views.

I’d provide links to the hundreds of stories that have been written about Abramoff and Scanlon and DeLay and Frist and Cunningham and that weird penny story out of Ohio, but it’d take up this entire blog. As for the “Failure of I-912,” not only did papers like the Olympian, the Tacoma News Tribune, and even the NYT editorialize about the significance of its defeat, but it was, in part, defeated in the first place because all the local mainstream media came out against the stupid thing. Alito? Parrish himself says that’s Alito’s right-wing radicalism is “no secret.” He’s right. And the reason: It’s been covered in the mainstream media. Just last week, Alito’s memos on spying and overturning Roe V. Wade were front-page news.

Here’s my favorite, though. Parrish claims that follow-up to Hurricane Katrina and “the abandonment of New Orleans” has “received virtually no attention.”

The Seattle City Council’s annual retreat will be in Bremerton this year - an hour-long ferry ride from downtown Seattle. Technically, council “retreats” (which have been as far from council chambers as La Conner and as close as the Bertha Knight Landes Room on the first floor of city hall) are open to the public; as a practical matter, though, the farther away a meeting is, the harder it is for the public to attend. Most retreats are more comical than nefarious (last year, the council spent two days identifying its “core values” and participating in a mysterious exercise called “gracious space”), but that’s not the point, citizen activists say. Public meetings should be accessible to the public - and a conference center an hour and a half away doesn’t pass the test.

Incidentally, when asked by the Kitsap Sun why the council had chosen Bremerton, council spokeswoman Jackie O’Ryan had this this to say: “We get to take a ferry. Wouldn’t it be nice to go to a meeting on a boat?”

In honor of our 2005 Regrets Issue, which hits streets this afternoon and is mused upon expansively by Josh Feit here, I’d like to share one of my all-time favorite regrets.

Actually, it’s a regret-by-proxy, although I’m sure if the subject of my second-hand regret allowed herself to feel anything as negative as retroactive remorse, she would burn in shame recalling this brave, well-intentioned fiasco.

Anyway: Every year the Oprah Winfrey Show changes its theme song. Please enjoy this tuneless treasure from the season Winfrey decided to self-actualize by singing the theme song herself.

Drunk of the Week’s got NOTHIN on this collection of photos on chillout.

…kept me up last night. I am a slow reader, and usually I am happy to put something I’ve been reading down after half an hour or so, make some food, look out the window, pick it up again, switch couches, play some music, call someone, pick it up again, etc, but last night I started reading the new McSweeney’s and I almost literally couldn’t stop. A friend who lives in a different neighborhood thought he left something valuable at a restaurant where we’d had drinks after work and asked me to go look and I said I would but it was raining and I kind of resenting having to put the magazine down — I was in the middle of Edmund White’s essay “My Hustlers” — and finally I went down and looked and it wasn’t there and I came back and I kept reading…

He saw me looking at him. My eyes must have been shockingly hungry — the sort of eyes that have lost all self-awareness and glint with pure emptiness. If someone had whispered, “Ed,” in my ear, I’d have had to dial my way painfully back from the boy’s handsome face toward earth, toward me, like a diver rapturous with oxygen deprivation who is drawn against his will up out of a storm-dark sea.

At the beginning White writes about wanting to lay next to a hustler and be held tightly “while down there our genitals would do something ecstatic and nonspecific,” and later there’s also a great part where he talks about kneeling under some tough guy while long strings of drool drip into White’s mouth. (The essay is an excerpt from White’s memoir due out in April.) And now I’m in the middle of an excellent Roddy Doyle short story.

Last June, NPR broadcast an excerpt from Julia Sweeney’s (Spokane native, SNL’s androgynous “Pat”) one-woman play Letting Go of God about how her Catholic faith started to slip when she joined a bible study group and started actually reading the Bible. The audio held me captive in my garage for the better part of an hour when it aired. If you have 30 minutes to spare this week, you should give it a listen (courtesy of OneGoodMove.com).

There’s a new fundamentalist church aimed at 20- and 30-somethings meeting at the Capitol Hill Arts Center.

Since there’s been so much Slog and Forums discussion about the annual income of KEXP morning DJ John Richards (see comments here, here, and here), I thought it might be helpful to offer a point of comparison.

The debate over Richards’ $90,000/yr salary is, on one level, about whether his salary is excessive. And, as you’ll see from reading the comments linked above, one school of thought holds that it’s not excessive at all, given the salaries pulled down by other prominent radio personalities. Well, what exactly do other prominent radio personalities make?

I just got off the phone with Cheryl Kitchin, director of finance for the local NPR affiliate KUOW, who tells me that salaries for KUOW’s hosts—people like Steve Scher (Weekday), Ross Reynolds (The Conversation), and Megan Sukys and Dave Beck (The Beat)—range from $35,000/yr to $60,000/yr, with the average being about $41,500/yr.

That’s a lot less than John Richards makes. But the next question is whether this is a fair comparison. John Richards isn’t a talk show host like the people listed above. He’s a DJ. And while KEXP is like KUOW in that it asks listeners to pledge money to keep the station running, its finances are ultimately very different than those of an NPR affiliate.

To be honest, I’ve been struggling with the question of who to compare John Richards to, and I wonder if the Slog readers who have been commenting on this story have any suggestions. (I have a call in to Nic Harcourt at KCRW in Los Angeles, who hosts the morning music show “Morning Becomes Ecclectic.” It seems to me that he might be a better comparison, since KEXP is a lot more like KCRW than it is like KUOW, and John Richards is a lot more like Nic Harcourt than he is like Steve Scher. When I figure out what Nic Harcourt makes, I’ll let you know.)

But in the meantime, got any other suggestions for comparisons? Please post them in the comments…

If you write it as Alfred Lord Tennyson, then you must place a comma after Alfred.

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/300

I like him, too, but I think I might be partial to his cousin: Alfred Lord Tennyson.

All Things will Die Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing Under my eye; Warmly and broadly the south winds are blowing Over the sky. One after another the white clouds are fleeting; Every heart this May morning in joyance is beating Full merrily; Yet all things must die. The stream will cease to flow; The wind will cease to blow; The clouds will cease to fleet; The heart will cease to beat; For all things must die. All things must die. Spring will come never more. O, vanity! Death waits at the door. See! our friends are all forsaking The wine and the merrymaking. We are call’d—we must go. Laid low, very low, In the dark we must lie. The merry glees are still; The voice of the bird Shall no more be heard, Nor the wind on the hill. O, misery! Hark! death is calling While I speak to ye, The jaw is falling, The red cheek paling, The strong limbs failing; Ice with the warm blood mixing; The eyeballs fixing. Nine times goes the passing bell: Ye merry souls, farewell. The old earth Had a birth, As all men know, Long ago. And the old earth must die. So let the warm winds range, And the blue wave beat the shore; For even and morn Ye will never see Thro’ eternity. All things were born. Ye will come never more, For all things must die.

Nuff said Lord Alfred Tennyson, my favorite poet in the whole world.

This is wretched. Sample paragraph:

A proposal prohibiting defense contractor involvement in human trafficking for forced prostitution and labor was drafted by the Pentagon last summer, but five defense lobbying groups oppose key provisions and a final policy still appears to be months away, according to those involved and Defense Department records.

After a too-warm holiday weekend, it looks like it’s snowing again at the passes. The Summit has 12 inches of fresh snow and it’s still accumulating. Baker’s report says “Mountain forecasts are calling for large amounts of snowfall today on into tomorrow.” (Yes, I realize no one else here cares save maybe Dan, who’s new to snowboarding and relies on the soft stuff to break his falls.)

Courtesy of USA Today:

Scientists at a Georgia laboratory have developed what could be a low-tech, low-cost weapon in the war on terrorism: trained wasps.

The tiny, non-stinging wasps can check for hidden explosives at airports and monitor for toxins in subway tunnels.

“You can rear them by the thousands, and you can train them within a matter of minutes,” says Joe Lewis, a U.S. Agriculture Department entomologist. “This is just the very tip of the iceberg of a very new resource.”

Lewis and others at the University of Georgia-Tifton Campus developed a handheld “Wasp Hound” to contain the wasps while they sniff out chemicals and other substances.

Lewis and his partner, University of Georgia biological engineer Glen Rains, say their device is ready for pilot tests and could be available for commercial use in five to 10 years.

According to The Independent, vitamin D is the new cancer cure-all.

Better late than never.

The guy just can’t keep his mouth shut about anything.

I regret not getting on the podcast bandwagon until a few days ago, because podcasts are (with apologies for being so late to this realization) fucking cool. One of the podcasts I’m now signed up for comes from NPR, which sends me a daily podcast of whatever the NPR editors decide was the best story from the previous day—the one that I didn’t know I couldn’t live without.

Today it’s Susan Orlean talking about being crafty. And yesterday, it was a story that will surely inspire regret on the part of many thirsty Stranger readers:

A researcher at Cornell University has found that even when bartenders are told to be very careful, they pour about 30 percent more alcohol into a tumbler-sized glass than a highball-sized glass. The result can mean people have more to drink than they think they’re getting.

I regret, on behalf of all of you, the you didn’t ask for more drinks in tumblers this year.

Our Year-end Regrets issue hits this afternoon. It’s one of my favorite issues of the year.

For starters, I love New Year’s. I dig time and history and lists and staying up late and regrets and making new goals and alcohol. On New Year’s Eve, everyone’s on my wavelength for one night.

For me, the annual Regrets issue has become another satisfying element of New Year’s. I think an account of miscues and failures is an optimistic exercise and a smart conceit for making sense of the year.

I write about most of my regrets in this afternoon’s paper: reporting mistakes about the monorail, Mayor Nickels, and the 2005 election. However, while 2005 was, for me, defined by local politics, it was also a year I’ll remember as the time I read an unusual number of excellent books. So, I want to add a regret that I didn’t put in today’s issue.

On several occasions this year, as I talked on and on (to anyone that would listen) about the latest book I’d read, the Stranger’s books editor, Christopher Frizzelle, asked me if I’d write up a book review. I could never find a news peg for the review, though. The books I fell in love with this year didn’t seem germane: two books about the infamous Depression-era outlaws, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow; two books about the 1979-80 Hostage Crisis in Iran; a book about the NBA in the 1960s, with a focus on the rivalry between Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell; and a Pulitzer-Prize-Winning book called Bearing the Cross, a mammoth month-to-month history book about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and `60s.

And so, every time Frizzelle asked me to channel my latest obsession into a review, I demurred, asking him (and myself) something like: “What do Bonnie and Clyde have to do with anything, really?â€�

Now, I regret not attempting to answer that question. Or even worse, not trying to write one of those psychedelic essays that run in the New York Review of Books where I could have connected Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini with 1934’s Bonnie Parker with Wilt Chamberlain with MLK.

I didn’t just stumble onto these topics in 2005. I have been an amateur 20th-Century American history weirdo for as long as I can remember—with the ‘79 Hostage Crisis, Bonnie & Clyde, `60s and `70s pro basketball, and the Civil Rights movement, being pivotal chapters (among several others) in my brilliant 4,000-page masterpiece explaining 1994’s Republican Revolution.

But the fact that my favorite lessons from the past were front-and-center for me at the same time that dramatic stuff like the War in Iraq, politicized Evangelicals, intelligent design, Jack Abramoff, NSA eavesdropping, Roberts, blogs, Alito, Katrina, Valerie Plame, torture, and Tom DeLay’s indictment were all making headlines, makes me regret that I didn’t take up the challenge to write and think more topically about books like My Life with Bonnie & Clyde; The Crisis: The President, The Prophet, and the Shah—1979 and the Coming of Militant Islam; Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and The Rivalry: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and the Golden Age of Basketball.

…kept me up last night. I am a slow reader, and usually I am happy to put something I’ve been reading down after half an hour or so, make some food, look out the window, pick it up again, switch couches, play some music, call someone, pick it up again, etc, but last night I started reading the new McSweeney’s and I almost literally couldn’t stop. A friend who lives in a different neighborhood thought he left something valuable at a restaurant where we’d had drinks after work and asked me to go look and I said I would but it was raining and I kind of resenting having to put the magazine down — I was in the middle of Edmund White’s essay “My Hustlers” — and finally I went down and looked and it wasn’t there and I came back and I kept reading…

He saw me looking at him. My eyes must have been shockingly hungry — the sort of eyes that have lost all self-awareness and glint with pure emptiness. If someone had whispered, “Ed,” in my ear, I’d have had to dial my way painfully back from the boy’s handsome face toward earth, toward me, like a diver rapturous with oxygen deprivation who is drawn against his will up out of a storm-dark sea.

At the beginning White writes about wanting to lay next to a hustler and be held tightly “while down there our genitals would do something ecstatic and nonspecific,” and later there’s also a great part where he talks about kneeling under some tough guy while long strings of drool drip into White’s mouth. (The essay is an excerpt from White’s memoir due out in April.) And now I’m in the middle of an excellent Roddy Doyle short story.

Professor Juan Cole lays out what he considers to be the Top Ten Myths about Iraq in 2005, neatly debunking each in that “I know a lot more about this than Anthony does” way of his.

The myths:

1. The guerrilla war is being waged only in four provinces.

2. Iraqi Sunnis voting in the December 15 election is a sign that they are being drawn into the political process and might give up the armed insurgency.

3. The guerrillas are winning the war against US forces.

4. Iraqis are grateful for the US presence and want US forces there to help them build their country.

5. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, born in Iran in 1930, is close to the Iranian regime in Tehran.

6. There is a silent majority of middle class, secular-minded Iraqis who reject religious fundamentalism.

7. The new Iraqi constitution is a victory for Western, liberal values in the Middle East.

8. Iraq is already in a civil war, so it does not matter if the US simply withdraws precipitately, since the situation is as bad as it can get.

9. The US can buy off the Iraqis now supporting guerrilla action against US troops.

10. The Bush administration wanted free elections in Iraq.

The debunking.

John Aravosis makes a good point: If the Americans George W. Bush has been spying on illegally have “a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings, and churches,â€� as he’s now claiming, then Bush could have obtained all the damn search warrants he wanted.

Here’s what I’d like to know: If the country is crawling with people who have a history of blowing up trains, weddings, and churches—a history, mind you, not just a yearning—then why was Bush content to simply spy on these evil doers? Why didn’t he have them arrested and prosecute them for the crimes they had already committed?

Here’s something that makes my head hurt everytime I pause to think about it: Is Bush as dumb as we think he is? Or are we anywhere near as dumb as he thinks we are?

James Wolcott, as always, makes a lot of sense.

I meant to post about this earlier, but work got in the way. This morning Ann Coulter appeared on the Today Show to spout forth with her standard bile, and Matt Lauer, ever the hack, challenged her on absolutely nothing. Maybe he was too entranced by her Adam’s apple.

Coulter is an extreme nutjob, and yet Today is more than happy to pluck her from the Fox News circle jerk and prop her up as a political voice of note. Pathetic.

Crooks & Liars has the video.

One more report from The Herald.

Woman stays with two husbands under one roof

Herald Reporter

A SANYATI woman is living with two men who neighbours believe are both her husbands.

And while everyone might be astounded by this marital state of affairs, the Rocklands community in Sanyati has learnt to accept the odd arrangement, which has been in existence since 1995.

The woman, who uses her first husband’s name, has somehow managed to have her “two spouses” get along very well.

This form of polygamy between one woman and several men, who are her husbands simultaneously and exclusively, is called polyandry.

Though records of it go back centuries, polyandry is taboo in most societies. Tibet is the most well-documented cultural domain within which it is practiced, but it has been outlawed.

Polyandry is also found in India, Sri Lanka, some regions of China, in some Sub-Saharan African communities, and in indigenous communities of Australia, New Zealand and America (notably among the Surui of north-western Brazil).

Polyandry stands in stark contrast to and is overwhelmingly less common than polygyny, a polygamous marriage in which a man has more than one wife.

Continue reading "Happy Polyandry" »

The really sad part about the End pulling their Morning Alternative show is that it was one of the only places the station really pushed local music. They’ve pushed bands like The Saturday Knights, Post Stardom Depression, the Blood Brothers and other local favorites, cracking the corporate code of ignoring local talent by inviting local bands and local personalities on the air. They even released a compilation CD of these studio appearances (I don’t have it on me but I think it was just called Live From the Morning Alternative, with proceeds going to the Vera Project). Hopefully they’ll keep the Sunday night Young and the Restless show, which was all about local bands. The more media that supports Seattle’s rich music scene the better…the more we get piped in programming from national syndicates (when it comes to music/entertainment) the worse it becomes for our local scene. Isn’t satellite radio the place for shows like Adam C.’s?

This report is from the main newspaper in Zimbabwe, The Herald. (A n’anga is a witchdoctor.)

N’angas turn to street vending From Midlands Bureau

SEVERAL traditional healers in Gweru are openly selling their magical potions in stre-ets in a bid to lure patients and boost sales.

The traditional healers have stationed themselves along streets in the city’s central business district and other strategic corners on the outskirts of the city.

A traditional healer who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity said he started vending after realising that business was low.

“Previously, I was doing my work at home and business was good. However, I have since realised that the number of patients has dwindled as there are many other healers and prophets operating in the city. I have decided to do my job on the streets because I want to get the attention of more patients. I am a registered n’anga but to make a living, I must have more patients,” he said.

The traditional healer said he sold his medicines on the streets but had a secret place where he attended to patients with “big problems”.

Lots of interesting comments have attached themselves to my earlier post about KEXP DJ John Richards’ salary… Including this one, from “Tyco”:

One of the most clever levers ever devised to exercise control of the arts is that silly old myth that your level of integrity is determined by your dedication to making no money…

John Richards apparently works hard, sticks to what he believes in regardless of detractors, conceivably even declines higher paying opportunities to that end and meanwhile wears numerous hats in the process of earning his well deserved salary. This guy is supposed to further shun the rewards of a job well done? He earns below industry standard for morning drive time DJ in a market this size, but he’s supposed to make nothing, right? Would that make it better?

Today 107.7 the End announced that they’re replacing DJ No Name’s Morning Alternative with Adam Carolla’s new syndicated morning show.

It’ll start Jan 3rd.

That’s bullshit.

From the Associated Press:

SHEBOYGAN, Wis. - A woman backing out of a driveway to get Christmas candy accidentally ran over her 6-year-old daughter and killed her, police said. Cordelia Quistorf, 24, did not realize the girl had gone outside, police said. Quistorf’s other daughter and two sons were in the car with her.

Today at San Quentin, alleged “Sausage King” and convicted murderer Stuart Alexander dropped dead on death row.

As the AP reports, Mr. Alexander, owner of a San Leandro, CA meat factory, was sentenced to death after he murdered three meat inspectors, whose fatal shootings were handily caught on Alexander’s factory surveillance cameras.

And now, just as handily, Alexander has been felled by natural causes (investigators found no signs of foul play or suicide), saving the state many thousands of dollars and rescuing California from one more capital punishment-related stain on its soul.

We’re all getting tired of New Orleans headlines like The Big Easy Hasn’t Lost its Entrepreneurial Spirit and Laissez Les Bon Temps Rebuild, but today’s Wall Street Journal (sorry, can’t link to it) has a heartening story about the latest Big Easy craze: disaster tourism.

Selected paragraphs:

At disaster sites elsewhere, frank attempts to cash in on tragedy so soon would prompt outrage. After the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, the city welcomed tourists to the Twin Towers site but not the vendors who followed them. In those early weeks, it wasn’t uncommon to see hucksters being run off by bellowing police and firefighters. Four years later, things are more relaxed in New York.

But New Orleans is almost completely reliant on feting visitors and only a few weeks went by before operators began to exploit the storm. Now, Katrina is viewed by many as another big event with commercial possibilities, like Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest. Along Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, shops bristle with clever and bawdy T-shirts that make light of the disaster that killed more than 1,000 people, and the ensuing looting. “I stayed in New Orleans for Katrina and all I got was this lousy T-shirt, a new Cadillac and a plasma TV,” says one.

One must-see landmark on [Isabelle Coassart’s] disaster tour is the sprawling, ruined white brick home of famous rhythm-and-blues pianist Fats Domino. Rolling past the manse on a block littered with moldy church pews and a ruined upright piano, Ms. Cossart pointed out the red graffiti a fan had painted on the side of the structure, stating, “RIP Fats.”

But it’s mistaken. Mr. Domino, 77, got away by boat. “It’s a happy story,” says Ms. Cossart, whose own West Bank property suffered some damage when two trees fell in her yard, crushing her canary-yellow Corvette. She has worked the fate of her car into the spiel on the $49-a-head tour.

I know I’m courting cliché, but New Orleans was famous for that peculiar blend of humor, self-interest and self-deprecation—and that’s what will keep the gawkers (and their wallets) coming back for more.

The Army.

The Army National Guard is combating its lackluster recruitment numbers with new incentives to join, such as iTunes downloads and pizza boxes decorated with sexy lady covers. Not only are the new pizza boxes sexy, they are conversational and flattering:

“Join the Army, and get your college tuition covered.â€�

“Hey fella, pizza box thinks you would look so sexy in camo.â€�

Perhaps I am exaggerating, BUT Lt. Col. Mike Jones, the Guard’s deputy division chief for recruiting and retention says, “You can’t just be NASCAR and rodeo… You have to have a very rounded approach.” Enter snazzy new pizza boxes.

The campaign appears to be working. Accroding to the Philadelphia Inquirer, in January, the Army will celebrate its first quarter in 13 years where recruiting goals were achieved all three months.

I was at a Christmas party over the weekend and, perhaps confirming Seattlest’s worst fears about Slog writers, ended up in a long, drunken debate about this new gay health phenomenon.

It’s a free e-card service that allows a person to anonymously inform his or her sex partners that they’ve been exposed to an STD.

There’s no reason this should be an exclusively gay thing (so calm down, Seattlest), but given the gay community’s love of technology and its high rates of STD transmission, it’s not surprising this service has taken hold among the gays first.

The debate at the holiday party was not whether these e-cards would be abused by pranksters. Reuters reports that in San Francisco, “only half of 1 percent” of the cards sent through that city’s site have been pranks. The controversy was whether this new technology was giving people a pass on being grownups—allowing them to dodge normal human communication, rather than encouraging them to talk openly with each other about STDs and their feelings about passing them around.

As my friend Brad put it in an email:

Is this how we want to disseminate that information? Just because the program works, should we encourage more cities to adopt it and more poor communicators to continue communicating poorly? Do we run the risk of further alienating our community members from these community outreach organizations that are already effectively providing health services, with less psychological toil and better communication?

Short of one-on-one counseling for all gay men, safe sex counselors should be promoting good communication with our sex partners, and these eCards are antithetical to that process.

I agree with Brad that using these cards is a copout on adult communication. But I also am a bit cynical about the ability of people—gay or straight—to always act like grownups when it comes to sex. And I think that if the greater good of increased testing and reduced STD transmission is accomplished through this program, then it’s worth allowing cowardly communicators to remain cowardly communicators.

But what do you think, Slog readers? (Not about Seattlest calling you gay, although feel free to weigh in on that too. I mean about the e-cards.)

The Sunset hosts a special Richard Pryor movie screening on Monday, January 2. Check out Wattstax, Live and Smokin, and Live On The Sunset Strip. Movies are free and the screenings start at 7pm.

Seattle’s seeming unanimity on the $4 billion “tunnel optionâ€� for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct continues to crumble. The latest defector: the local Sierra Club, whose political committee chair, Kevin Fullerton, editorialized in favor of the People’s Waterfront Coalition’s “no-highwayâ€� alternative in Sunday’s P-I. The PWC option, which would improve traffic connections throughout downtown and leave just four lanes of traffic on the waterfront, would cost hundreds of millions less than the city’s “preferredâ€� six-lane tunnel. City and state officials oppose it because they want to maintain the viaduct’s freeway-level traffic capacity on the waterfront.

“The local Sierra Club supports the [PWC’s] work and calls on the mayor and City Council to shelve the freeway options until the city has had a real debate about alternatives,â€� the op-ed says. “A progressive city will realize that the real threat to its long-term health isn’t the failure of the [viaduct] —it’s the car dependency that such infrastructure fees. Let’s start solving that problem rather than waste resources on another highway our children will regret.â€�

“Plainly put: Noise music causes ear and brain damage!!â€� summarizes the organization Mothers Against Noise.

As internet hoaxes go, this one’s pretty damned clever.

Everyone’s making their lists of 2005’s top bands, shows, records, etc.…including in our forums. Add your top music to the list here.

The Hideout is one of my favorite Seattle bars…tucked into First Hill, fairly quiet on the nights I’ve been there, good bartenders, great decor. Now they’re adding live jazz to their list of attractions.

Vital 5 Productions and The Hideout present an evening of live jazz with The John Alton Trio, featuring Wally Shoup on alto sax. They will be playing Sunday, January 1st, 2006 from 9:00 - 12:00. This is a free event, twenty one and older with proper id.

Okay, this is funny. But I don’t think it’s funny enough to save Saturday Night Live.

Here’s an early 2006 xmas gift idea for the radical right-winger in your life. Or perhaps these T-shirts could be used to gag Ann Coulter. (Her latest nugget of wisdom, which makes Michael Savage seem nuanced: “I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East, and sending liberals to Guantanamo.â€�)

This angry email, complete with malapropisms and misspellings, arrived in my in-box this morning. It concerns an interview I did recently with KEXP DJ John Richards about his controversial salary (a topic that is also generating some ranting in this KEXP thread in The Stranger forums).

Anyway, enjoy the bitterness…

From: britta sumy

Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2005 09:48:04 -0800 (PST)

To: eli@thestranger.com

Subject: Re:ON THE RECORD

So are you suggesting the sum of $120.000 was wrong? U fucking scab! you have lied your ass of to many times to count, you start this story like the SEATTLE WEEKLY messed up! WRONG! you are just a two bit hag! change your profession, try cock sucking!! like you did for DJ John….fuckin loser!!

The strip club referendum—which, if approved, would repeal Greg Nickels absurd four foot rule for lap dances, among other dumbass regulations crafted to put Seattle’s strip clubs out of business—is headed for the ballot in 2006…

On Thursday, December 22, the Office of the City Clerk of Seattle received a Certificate of Sufficiency from King County Records and Elections regarding signatures on the Referendum No. 1 petitions. This certification ensures that Referendum 1, the Adult Entertainment Referendum, will appear on the ballot during 2006.

“This Referendum represents more than 35,000 signatures from Seattle Citizens who, by signing our petitions, felt that this issue was important enough to merit consideration by the entire City,” states Campaign Manager Tim Killian.

According to the Seattle City Charter, the referendum will now return to the City Council, who will decide the specific election date for Referendum 1. “Our preference is that the Council chooses to place Referendum 1 onto the General Election ballot next November so as to give the Citizens of Seattle the widest possible chance to be heard on this issue,” says Killian.

“Seattle is a modern, progressive urban center and should allow for a diversity of nightlife options including adult entertainment. These regulations are prudish and out of step with the progressive values of this city,” states Killian.

The backers want their referendum on the general election ballot in November—and not a March special election or the primary election ballot in September—because more young people and more liberals and progressives vote in general elections. Primary votes and special elections tend to attract mostly older and more conservative folks—in other words, voters who would be more likely to approve of Seattle’s puckerbutted anti-strip club regulations.

Got a problem with the great white sharks now prowling the northern coast of Oregon? Punch them in the nose.

Everybody. Cienna Madrid has a fan club, it seems, and it’s currently meeting in the Stranger Forums.

This is the sort of story that the SLOG would be all over if it weren’t Christmas.

And we would, of course, pointedly ignore this.

Merry Christmas.