City Rainbow’s End
RIP Rainbow Grocery on 15th. More details at CHS.
Your gay son/nephew/cousin/brother/friend and his boyfriend? Or the child-raping freaks at Child Rape Inc.?
The Vatican’s second-highest ranking doctrinal official on Monday forcefully branded homosexual marriage an evil and denounced abortion and euthanasia as forms of “terrorism with a human face.”The attack by Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was the latest in a string of speeches made by either Pope Benedict or other Vatican officials as Italy considers giving more rights to gays.
Erica’s in love with a car. I’m in love with my new pink Nintendo DS Lite.
Like Erica, my love is also wrong. Very, very wrong.
Because of my pink Nintendo DS Lite, I was up until four o’ clock in the morning playing “Yoshi’s Island.” I love the way the little baby Mario cries “Yoshi!” and I love how Princess Peach flies through the air with a pretty pink parasol. Baby Donkey Kong is my favorite; he can climb vines and do this cool power stomp thing to knock out enemies. VrooomSTOMP!
I’m up to level three, but I have a few embarrassingly low scores in the previous levels, so I’ve been replaying some stuff and trying to find all the big gold coins and stars and shit. But one thing that I can’t seem to do, is unlock the mini games. I only have one so far. ONE! One lousy mini game!
There’s gotta be more. Where are they?
I’m addicted. I will not sleep until I find them.
I want to second what Dom said—it’s great idea, the city should do it.
But if the city doesn’t act… well… what’s to stop pride parade participants going to Seattle Center anyway, permits or no permits? We can have the parade down 4th Avenue end just across the street from Seattle Center… which is open to the public, right? And the gays are a part of the public, right? (We’re a large part, as Dom mentions.) So we pass the word around the parade and up and down the route: “Meet up at the fountain after the parade.”
There wouldn’t be special tents or beer gardens or disco divas or a drag stage (not a bad thing, that last item), but there would be a Space Needle, a Center House with tons of food and some bars, the lawn, and the Fountain. How could they keep us out?
As the second-gayest city in the US, Seattle deserves an awesome Pride parade. It also deserves an affordable venue for large rallies. But, alas, it has neither. That can be changed.
Currently, three city parks can realistically accommodate sizable political events – Volunteer Park, Myrtle Edwards Park, and Gasworks – but they only hold about 30-40 thousand people at one time. And the city’s multi-department Special Events Committee, currently being audited for delaying permits, has historically placed onerous restrictions on rallies in those parks to appease the NIMBYs. What’s a growing event to do?
Pride escaped from Volunteer Park to Seattle Center, which is actually designed for large events. But they experienced the fate organizers of other events feared could happen there: owing tens of thousands of dollars and losing their permit. It’s not Seattle Center’s fault – they’re simply charging the mandated union labor and usage fees. It’s also not Pride’s fault – as a controversial political event, they can’t raise corporate sponsorship on par with Bite of Seattle or Folklife to pay those costs.
But, clearly, Pride is an asset to the city’s culture and should be allowed to flourish. Furthermore, the city shouldn’t risk getting sued every time the Special Event Committee places unconstitutional restrictions on permits in order to squeeze big rallies into small parks.
Here’s the solution:
The Council should pass a bill that requires Seattle Center to provide the lawn and fountain areas at greatly reduced rates for free-speech events that have outgrown city parks. Sure, Seattle Center will kick and scream and bitch about the cost of repairing their precious lawns and maintaining the grounds. So change the terms of the Center’s operating contract with the city. Subsidize the events with money saved from lawsuits. Do what you must, council. But make it work.
All-star reporter David Halberstam—who cut his teeth as a reporter during the Vietnam War, eventually writing the landmark The Making of a Quagmire and winning a Pulitzer for his NYT reporting on the war— died in a car crash today.
Christine Wenc, a former editor of The Stranger, sent in a link to this piece at Mother Jones and asked me to Slog it. Here are the money graphs:
The first person killed by Cho Seung-Ho, a freshman named Emily Hilscher, was initially rumored to be Cho’s current or former girlfriend – the subject of his obsession or jealous rage. It now appears that she never had a relationship with Cho, but the rumors were spread quickly, especially by blogs and by the international tabloid press. The UK’s Daily Mail headlined the “Massacre Gunman’s Deadly Infatuation with Emily,” while Australia’s Daily Telegraph published a photo of a smiling Hilscher with the line “THIS is the face of the girl who may have sparked the worst school shooting in US history.” (The page is still up.) Some accounts stooped to suggesting, with zero evidence, that the victim had jilted Cho, cheated on him, or led him on.More significantly, local police and university administrators appear to have initially bought this motive, and acted accordingly. In the two hours between the murders of Hilscher and her dorm neighbor Ryan Clark, and Cho’s mass killings at another university building, they chose not to cancel classes or lock down the campus. (They did choose to do so, however, in August 2006, when a man shot a security guard and a sheriff’s deputy and escaped from a hospital two miles away.) Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said authorities believed the first shooting was a “domestic dispute” and thought the gunman had fled the campus, so “We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur.” The assumption, apparently, is that men who kill their cheating girlfriends are criminals, but they are not crazy, not psychopaths, and not a danger to anyone other than the woman in question. (Or, as one reader commented at Feministe sarcastically, “Like killing your girlfriend is no big deal.”)
Says Christine:
From the very start of this coverage most reporters blithely went along with the “just a domestic dispute” idea, and implied that the young woman in the dorm—the first one killed—was somehow romantically connected with Cho and this is what set him off. I admit that I thought this was probably the case myself at first, since this sort of thing is so common. When I used to read the news on public radio there would be something on the wire about a man murdering the woman he was involved with about once a week. It’s not a feminist harangue—it’s just true. It has become part of our social wallpaper, kind of like car accidents.Even so, from the start of the Cho coverage I was angered by the idea that somehow it wasn’t a big deal because it was “only” a domestic dispute. (As well as the implication that she somehow brought this upon herself, if only for being a pretty young woman).
So I’ve been waiting to see if someone would write something about how disturbing it is that we seem to find shooting your girlfriend so ordinary. I was very happy to see this Mother Jones article. As it turned out, she was not involved with him at all.
Earlier this month, the local chapter of the Sierra Club sent a letter to Pierce County Executive John Ladenburg explaining why the Puget Sound-area environmental community was going to come out against RTID.
High on the club’s list of complaints was Pierce County’s SR 704 (the Cross Base Highway), which the Sierra Club included on its list of “Bad Projects: Viewed as ‘Poison Pills.’” The group said the project violated all the Sierra Club’s criteria: consider multimodal uses; reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and preserve dollars for transit and pedestrian projects.
Ladenburg, a big RTID and SR 704 supporter, responded.
I’ve linked Ladenburg’s response—in which he misspells the word environmentally—after the jump.
For starters, though, he hauls out a road-expansion argument that’s getting really tiresome: Expanding roads will allow cars to move faster, and so, without cars idling in gridlock, there will be less CO2 emissions.
He writes:
The highway will reduce greenhouse gases by shortening thousands of trips that currently are forced to travel north to HY 512 before they can go south on I-5. Taking that traffic off of 512 will also speed up traffic on that route and reduce emmission there also.
Stop it already. Adding more lanes ultimately adds more cars. More cars = more C02. Furthermore, cars don’t emit less emissions at 65 mph. Going about 45 mph is actually best to reduce emissions.
Anyway, read his letter yourself.
From my inbox—unedited—in response to this week’s Nightstand.
after reading neighboring piece nichols line “whose work is best appreciated at home, alone, book in hand, silently”, [ ever the faithfull cynic, [ i spell all those with 2 l’s,]
[and yet by definition, part hopefull,]
it connected me to the perpetuation of the “problem” by you
with headers like “kaminsky beats beckman”
and the meritorious negative connotation of “competition”
to a realm where it should not enter,
leaving me all but convinced the natural gulf between word percussionists,
[ rap, stage poets et cetera,] and deliberate meaningfull poets should widen,
allowing at least a whit chance of retarding the extinction of this art
that deserves to be thought about, considered,
and the only path that distuinguishes it from candy,
however infectious its beat or dramatic its reading…
yes, i revel in the essence of the “right voice” for the right work,
[ eliot, pound, lowell speaking theirs with their unique vocal stamp,]
but that’s not what the gravamen of this is about…
i’ll leave in between the lines for you…
peace,
transcenderarts…
Hmm.
When I interviewed Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Peter Boal for this column about the inaugural spring dance festival (this year’s theme: Northwest choreographers) he seemed, in his gently subdued way, excited and nervous about everything: Will our subscribers come see modern dance? Will non-PNB regulars buy tickets? Will people notice? Will people care?
“There might even be press in from New York,” he said. “Or, I think there will be. I hope there will be.”
Judging from today’s New York Times story on Northwest choreographers and PNB, Mr. Boal got his wish.
And judging from reports by attendees (including Annie Wagner and an Unpaid Intern), lots of people, both PNB regulars and newbies, noticed, cared, and showed up.
Now please enjoy this surprisingly dirty etymology of the word “tutu”:
tutu
ballet skirt, 1910, from Fr. tutu, alteration of cucu, infantile reduplication of cul “bottom, backside.”
That entry is too polite. Cul is less bottom and more “ass.”
When I got my most recent Seattle City Light bill, I received an invitation to join the Green Up program, through which I can pay a bit extra for my electricity in order to assure that some (or all) of the energy I consume at home is coming from clean, renewable wind power.
This sounded nice. It would only cost $12 extra a month for me to power my place using blowing air.
What’s $12 a month if it means zeroing out my home emissions? Also, I think wind turbines are pretty:
But then I remembered this New York Times Magazine piece by Thomas Friedman. In it, he writes about how the biggest problem facing the planet right now is figuring out how to produce clean energy “at scale” — that is, at a cost that is cheap enough for the average person to afford. When the average person experiences no adverse economic consequences from switching to clean energy, the thinking goes, everyone will switch. Until then, it’s unreasonable to expect anyone but the most wealthy humans to switch.
And here begins my quandary: Obviously, wind power is not currently cheap enough to be sold to City Light customers at the same cost as normal power. Otherwise, City Light wouldn’t be asking its customers to pay a surcharge for wind power. But if the goal is to get wind power to become cheaper as quickly as possibly, am I actually working against that goal by signaling that I am willing to pay more for wind power now? Doesn’t this offer something of a disincentive to wind power producers who might otherwise be moved to innovate more quickly in order to bring the cost of their product down?
Or am I thinking too hard about my measly twelve dollars?
Bursting With Enthusiasm: Kurt B Reighley on Rufus Wainright.
Way Hotter Than Bette Davis: Ari Spool on Betty Davis.
More on The Scene: Donte Parks on A Number of Names.
Switch-Craft: Eats Tapes and Lucky Dragons’ Wonderful Toys.
Pop Bubble: The EMP Pop Conference.
And now, the very definition of monkey cuteness (thanks, Amy Kate):
The P-I gave the Democrats a dreamy front-page headline this morning— “Health, environment and education win big”—with a list, in splashy color just below the headline, of what the Dems passed: Domestic partnerships, family leave, a budget including big chunks of money for education, health, and the environment.
It’s true that the Democrats did some heavy lifting this session. Lining up the funding to ensure health-care for low-income children is huge. (Weird, though, as labor activists have pointed out to me, that the super majority Democrats couldn’t get adults on that list. But still, applause is in order.) They also got off some culture war victories: a Domestic partnership bill and a bill mandating accurate sex ed.
However, one bill, the family leave bill, actually threw the spotlight on some “pent-up” anger, according to Senator Erik Poulsen (D-34, West Seattle).
Indeed, the Senate had passed a more sweeping family leave bill, and one that was actually funded—as opposed to the bill that eventually passed in the House. The original bill would have included leave to care for family members who were suffering a serious illness, as well as for new children. The current bill only includes leave for new children. And it isn’t funded.
“I was just appalled at the way family leave was watered down,” Poulsen told me. “We had a much broader bill. And we found a way to pay for it. We faced the same pressure from big business that the House did, but we sucked it up and took the tough vote.” Lobbyists from the the Association of Washington Businesses didn’t like the bill because they thought it would cost them money. “The House refused to take that tough vote,” Poulsen says, “and they passed a study [for how to fund it.]”
Poulsen says it was a big mistake to put off defining the funding source until next year because “next year is an election year. It’s always hard to impose a tax in an election year. Especially when you have someone like Speaker Chopp. History shows that in an election year, he puts the races in front of everything else.”
Poulsen’s anger is related to another bill (his own), which he says the House “torpedoed,” that would prevent mining company Glacier NW from expanding its gravel-mining operation on Maury Island. “Coming on the heels of what the House did to the Maury Island bill, that was the last straw.”
For my coverage of the Maury Island bill, click here.
Oh, and click here to check out a top-dollar contribution from Glacier NW to Chopp.
Poulsen concluded:
“Traditionally, the Senate is more conservative… more hesitant to be bold. And historically, the House has been the body that pushes the envelope. This session has been a complete role reversal. The Senate was pushing out progressive legislation like comprehensive, funded family leave, and the House was shutting us down.”
Florida and James:
In the ’70s TV show Good Times Florida was played by Esther Rolle and James by John Amos; both were talented actors, and both loathed Jimmie Walker, the man who played J.J., Florida and Amos’s eldest son. J.J. became the star of the show because he was a buffoon. The youngest child, Micheal, was a genius and progressive; the sister, Thelma, was practical and beautiful; the eldest son was an illiterate idiot. But the J.J. matter is for another post (I will one day post about meeting Jimmie Walker in a bar in Harare, Zimbabwe. He was in the country filming Going Bananas, and it was instantly evident to me and all the rest who were there that no line existed between the personality of Jimmie Walker and his stupid TV character J.J.)
What I want to point out for now is that in the picture John Amos ( James) is 34 and Esther Rolle (Florida) is 53. Meaning Esther is old enough to be John’s mother, yet on Good Times they are husband and wife, not mother and son. Now, what does this mean? Here is my answer: The role Esther actually played had its essence in the eternal mammy; as for John, it was the “buck nigger”—remember the role John played in Roots, a recalcitrant African, Kunta Kinte, who was emasculated by an axe and broken by a whip.
When the producers of the show were presented with a script that imaged a married black couple, instead of drawing the characters directly from life, they drew them from myth. The myth of Uncle Tom married to the myth of mammy was not possible because Uncle Tom is asexual (how could they have kids?), and so the producers gave up and picked a buck as the one who fucked mammy and made all of these kids happen. The marriage, however, did not last long. The buck was out of the show after two seasons. The buck could not be domesticated (in real life and in the show) and so it was left to mammy to bring up the two smart kids and the one dumb kid.
I wanted to go to the EMP Pop Conference this weekend, but I didn’t get a chance. I ran into Eric Grandy on the way to work this morning, and when I asked him if I had missed anything, he went on excitedly for the rest of our stroll, beaming and pondering over the stuff he saw.
In particular, he had a lot to say about a presentation by an editor of Pitchfork, who trashed navel-gazing old-school music critics.
Grandy promises he’ll have a Line Out write up later in the day.
(Beauty) What we get lots of in this IRA movie by British director Ken Loach is not 1920s politics or guerrilla warfare, but beauty. There are lots and lots of beautiful Irish men, women, villages, huts, valleys, mountains, trees, shrubs, pubs, towns, streets, courthouses, animals, voices, hands, hair, hats, horses, hay, air, sky, clouds, shoes, earth, rocks, vests, milk, jails, maids, nights, mists, deaths, ruins, and music. Loach has finally surrendered everything, even his dependable socialist realism, to the power of beauty. (Varsity, 4329 University Way NE, 781-5755. See Movie Times, for more information, $6.25—$9.25.) Charles Mudede
I mentioned it in this week’s Last Days and now I want to gush some more: Central Cinema, the movie-house-with-beer-and-wine-and-food in Seattle’s Central District, is just wonderful.
I’m a big fan of Austin’s Alamo Drafthouses (cited by the Central as a key inspiration) but I’d never actually gotten myself to a Central Cinema screening until A Fistful of Dollars the weekend before last. The movie was great (duh) and the venue was aggressively charming.
Like the Grand Illusion, the house is entered by a middle aisle. Down the slope to the right, viewer/diners are seated at banquettes and slender tables. Up the rake to the left, viewer/diners get individual seats tricked out with swing-arm dining surfaces, like school desks you wouldn’t be afraid to eat from.
As for the food: Central Cinema specializes stone-oven baked pizza, but on my first visit I stuck to an odd starter and a standard classic. The veggie Pig in a Blanket came with a fierce aoli sauce and was exactly as strange and humble and yummy as they menu had led me to hope. The popcorn came in a thin wooden bowl and was better than normal.
As for the entertainment: Tickets cost $5. The night I attended, previews consisted of ancient Popeye cartoons and a truly bizarre and fascinating cinematic marital aid, a 1950s instructional film about a young husband and wife learning to communicate, budget, and yes, love. Also, there is beer. It’s good and cold and brought directly to your seat by attentive waitstaff. There is also wine, and coffee, and dessert. Just past the movie’s halfway point, there’s a five-minute intermission for smoking and peeing. It’s all so civilized. And the screen is large—big enough to make it feel like The Movies.
Here is the Central Cinema’s schedule of upcoming screenings. If there’s anything that’s even remotely interesting to you, go. (If you’re a fan of John Waters, Arrested Development, or brilliantly offensive comedy, I recommend this weekend’s screenings of Richard Day’s Girls Will Be Girls.)
NASA has just released a series of 3-D photos of the the Sun.
Way to be late to the game NASA. You should’ve dropped these last Friday.
As predicted, on Sunday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a plan to turn New York into ” “the first environmentally sustainable 21st-century city” by implementing 127 new projects and regulations across the city and region. Unfortunately, the most contentious (and potentially effective) proposal, an $8-a-day “congestion tax” on people who drive their cars into Manhattan below 86th Street, faces an uphill battle in the state Legislature, which would have to approve the program.
Bloomberg’s proposals also include: A $200-million-a-year investment in major infrastructure like the new Second Avenue subway; the construction of platforms over rail yards and highways to create land for housing; the elimination of sales taxes on hybrid cars; a new system of bike paths; the planting of more than a million new trees; and improvements in express bus service in neighborhoods poorly served by subways.
New York is responsible for almost one percent of all US greenhouse gas emissions; however, it is home to three percent of the nation’s population, making New Yorkers’ per capita emissions just one third of the national average.
Yesterday, I was indifferent to Sheryl Crow. Today I have learned to loathe her.
First, there’s the Rove incident that Dan posted earlier:
In his attempt to dismiss us, Mr. Rove turned to head toward his table, but as soon as he did so, Sheryl reached out to touch his arm. Karl swung around and spat, “Don’t touch me.” How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow? Unfazed, Sheryl abruptly responded, “You can’t speak to us like that, you work for us.” Karl then quipped, “I don’t work for you, I work for the American people.” To which Sheryl promptly reminded him, “We are the American people.”
Ugh. That awful, presumptuous twit.
Then there are these selections from the quotable Crow, as reported today by the BBC:
I have spent the better part of this tour trying to come up with easy ways for us all to become a part of the solution to global warming. Although my ideas are in the earliest stages of development, they are, in my mind, worth investigating…
I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting. Only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required.
In her war against paper napkins, Crow has also designed a clothing line with a “dining sleeve.”
How removed from reality must a person be to think grown-ups will want to wipe their mouths with their sleeves?
Stupid Sheryl Crow.
Untitled (Gene Simmons Inspires Me), alabaster, weathered foam, 2006
I like you (I almost don’t hate you anymore), mixed media, 35 x 21 inches, 2007.
Untitled (neck crack), alabaster, 8 x 6 x 7 inches,2006
Debra Baxter is the only sculptor—and one of only two emerging artists—to be nominated by Bard College to receive the Joan Mitchell Foundation 2007 MFA grant award. (She goes to Bard in the summers but lives here the rest of the year and is a member of SOIL, where she recently had a striking show that included the Gene Simmons homage and the neck-crack in alabaster above.)
The award is $15,000. It is designed to “help painters and sculptors as they begin their professional art careers outside the academic environment,” according to the foundation’s notification letter.
This year’s round of awards includes about 50 graduate schools, each of whom was invited to nominate two candidates. The jurors will select up to 15 finalists to receive an award. Past winners have included Tara Donovan, Nicola Lopez, and Anthony Goicolea.
UPDATE: Seattle’s Tivon Rice won the award last year and is heading out for a recipient’s group show this June in NY.
Betsey over at Hankblog broke the news about Lead Pencil Studio: They’re winners of this year’s Rome Prize!
They’ll spend 11 months in Rome starting in September, working on a project centered around X-raying the volumes of architecturally beloved spaces using something called Lidar technology.
They explained this to me about a month ago (I was holding onto it until the academy made its announcement), but this morning I called for a review. The technology is “not exactly an X-ray, but works in a similar way,” Annie Han, one-half of LPS, said. “It’s survey equipment that sits on a tripod and is often used in mining, to see how deep a tunnel goes. We’ll be using it to map the interior spaces of the great buildings of Rome as well as the spaces between buildings.”
The interiors of the Parthenon and the cathedrals, the pockets of space in the narrow streets between huge buildings—Han and partner Daniel Mihalyo will be measuring them, capturing them, seeing “what we find out.” They’ll bring the results back to Seattle next August.
This prize is a great honor for the artists, but no surprise to me. My love for LPS is well-documented here, here, and here.
They have an installation up at the Exploratorium in San Francisco through June 3, and when I talked to them this morning they were in Colorado to give a lecture. Ten days from now, on May 3, they open their first solo exhibition at Lawrimore Project, with all new work, including installations, drawings of fictional spaces, and manipulated and documentary-style video and photography works based on Maryhill Double, their outdoor installation last summer.
It’s worth noting that Seattle artist/architects are becoming a franchise in Rome: Alex Schweder won the prize last year, and returned with all new bodies of work, including the beautiful A Sac of Rooms Three Times A Day, which recently closed at Suyama Space.
As regular Slog readers know, I am a proud non-car-owner. I get around by bike, on foot, and by bus. Occasionally, I use FlexCar. Which brings me to my confession: I am in love with a car. Specifically, this one:
OHMYGOD, this car is fun to drive. If the regular FlexCar Civics are boring, rugged mountain bikes, this is a supersleek road bike—all you have to do is think about turning, and the thing turns. Even better, you can park it pretty much anywhere. And everything about it is unbearably cute—from the giant cartoon speedometer in the middle of the dash to the podlike rearview mirrors to the “tic-toc” sound it makes when you signal. Oh, and also? It’s fast. The best part is that it costs the same as all the other FlexCars—between $9 and $10 an hour.
The only disadvantage: Now I want to drive ALL THE TIME. Thanks, Flexcar!
OLEG THE OFFENSIVE
Perhaps I have missed something in the past several issues of The Stranger, but I find your silence as to one subject somewhat startling and disturbing. If you are not aware, the Fox network is currently running what amounts to a racial smear campaign of propaganda against Middle Eastern immigrants featuring “Oleg the Cab Driver.” For further details, Fox has provided a website. This is quite possibly the most offensive racial bigotry perpetrated by a national network I have ever encountered. In fact, I can find zero media coverage as to this blatantly offensive stain on the face of television and the American public. I am appalled that nothing is being said or done to stop this. This is not institutionalized racism, which may slip unnoticed into general western behavior, this is a slap in the face to racial equality that has seemingly flown under the radar for far too long. I do not understand how a network can perpetuate this sort of racial prejudice, seemingly without purpose, and not come under fire for it. Especially considering the recent events with Imus, this is particularly frightening.Naomi
The Seattle Times has an interesting story this morning about a former Lake Washington High School principal who caused a lot of concern among his supervisors in the Lake Washington School District.
Mark Roberston, the former principal, eventually agreed to leave the district in exchange for a settlement, but not before looking at a porn newsletter on his district computer, hiring his sister against district policy, and firing a football coach in a manner that led to a lawsuit and a $60,000 settlement paid to the former coach by the district.
You can read the story here. The Times frames it as a look into the difficulty of dealing with a problem employee in a public school setting:
Robertson’s story exemplifies challenges districts face when dealing with a low-performing school administrator.
However, for those keeping tabs on eastside pastor Ken Hutcherson and his Antioch Bible Church, the story also offers a look into Antioch’s financial dealings with Lake Washington High School, which rents Antioch its gym each Sunday so that Hutcherson can hold services there. (Antioch Bible Church has no physical church; instead it rents public school property.)
Robertson is a member of Antioch Bible Church, and the arrangement Lake Washington High School reached with Antioch while he was principal may suggest one reason that Antioch was in no hurry to stop holding services in a high school gym: It was getting a sweet deal.
As principal, Robertson was in charge of rental agreements for groups using school space. The biggest of those groups is Antioch Bible Church, headed by pastor Ken Hutcherson. Robertson is a church member.Hutcherson said the two agreed it was best for Robertson not to be involved in Antioch’s rental agreement. A school staff member handled the contracts.
Still, the schedule Robertson approved for the 2002-2003 school year was not updated for three years, although the district increased fees during that time, said Reith, the district spokeswoman.
In 2005, the district discovered that Antioch had been undercharged by $1,100 to $1,400 a month. The estimated loss: $30,000.
This raises the question: What is the Christian thing for Hutcherson and his church to do in this situation?
Due to the apparently lax oversight of one of his church members, the school district whose facilities Hutcherson uses for his Sunday service lost $30,000. Will Hutcherson offer to repay this lost money?
Oh shit.
Sanjaya is singing “Besame Mucho” on Regis and Kelly right now. As I type this. This very moment.
He’s awful.
I adore him.
Wow—it seems that there’s a connection between stuffing kids with sugary crap and childhood obesity.
Stockholm schools that banned sweets, buns and soft drinks saw the number of overweight children drop by six percentage points in four years, a Karolinska Institute study published on Monday showed. The number of overweight or obese six-to-10-year-olds dropped from 22 to 16 percent in the 10 Stockholm schools that participated in the study by banning sweets and introducing healthier lunches, the Swedish research institute said in a statement.A control group of schools that did not introduce specific food regulations saw the number of overweight or obese children rise from 18 to 21 percent.
It seems that MC Rove doesn’t like being touched by attractive women. What a fag.
The Seattle Times is off the mark this morning. Wildly. They’ve got an editorial trying to head off any investigation and perhaps resignation (of Pat Davis) at the port.
Davis, to the outrage of three of her four fellow Port Commissioners, unilaterally signed off on a bloated severance package for former Port CEO Mic Dinsmore.
Even conservative commissioner John Creighton has joined liberals Lloyd Hara and Alec Fisken in publicly denouncing Davis’s weird arrogance. Davis compounded the outrage by saying her fellow commissioners were in fact privy to the deal. Contradicting Davis’s story, Creighton called the Stranger after we did a minor Slog on the scandal last Friday, to announce: “This was not a question of lapsed memory. I was never at a meeting where severance was discussed.”
The Seattle Times, however, comes out for halting any investigation, saying the commissioners should apologize and “get back the people’s business.”
Commissioners!?! No. So far, only one Commissioner owes the public an apology. That’s Pat Davis.
Meanwhile, the people’s business should certainly include a full investigation into Davis’s derelict pledge.
Here’s the original PI story.
Update:
Evergreen Politics weighs in on the Seattle Times tone deaf editorial.
Then you probably missed these posts this weekend…
One of the Blue Angels crashed at an air show in South Carolina. Could it happen here? Weekend Sloggers discuss.
It must be April: the pride parade must be deep trouble, Seattle Center out as post-parade rally site, and it’s uncertain if parade will even be downtown. Or be, period. Weekend Sloggers discuss.
The Mike Daisey Experience: Christian assholes walk out, dump unholy water on Daisey’s outline/script. We’ve got the video.
I spotted this poster last night. It was pasted to the promotional signage that surrounds the hole in the ground on Broadway that will one day be the Brix condo development. I went to the website—dollarvotes.org—expecting the poster to have something to do with the condo, i.e. “If we stop buying these things, maybe they’ll stop building them!” It turns out that dollarvotes.org has nothing to do with condo development.
For the record: I think the Brix—a condo going up on a lot that was 50% parking lot and 50% empty, ugly, cheaply constructed ex-Safeway—is a good thing for Broadway, the right kind of dense, in-fill development. The Brix displaced no one and destroyed nothing.
Boris Yeltsin is dead. The Russian democracy he helped to establish preceded him in death.
RIP: Former Russian Leader Boris Yeltsin dies.
Fulfilling Commitment: NY Governor Spitzer to introduce gay marriage bill
Tear Down This Wall: al-Maliki halts construction of Baghdad barrier
Despair and Disparity: Infant deaths on the rise in the South
Straight Shooters: Schumer, Spector pushing gun law reform. Meanwhile, legislators in Olympia are firing blanks
Place your bets: Will Wolfowitz or Gonzales resign first?
Food for thought: FDA can’t keep up with food processors
Delaying the Inevitable: House votes to postpone science and math WASL requirements
End of Session Compromise: Family leave bill goes to Gregoire
Today’s Fun Superhero Fact: Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy was a heroin addict!
