We just got back from the Bridge Motel, the art installation that everyone is talking about.

Our visit was brief—the event is a huge success, the place is absolutely packed, congrats to dk pan for putting this together. But it was too successful—and too crowded—for most folks to appreciate the art, installations, and performances. I was too nervous to wait forever on crumbling staircases and balconies that were not designed to support the weight of hundreds of people. So I wasn’t able to crowd into any of the Bridge Motel’s rooms and check out works by Implied Violence, Jack Daws, Davida Ingram, Laura Corsiglia, Sarah Kavage, and others. I’m sure folks born too late to remember the collapse of a pair of walkways at the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1981—I was 15 at the time—weren’t bothered, got in eventually, and enjoyed the art. But the crush of people, the wait, and my inability to shut off the voice in my head that’s constantly screaming “You’re going die!” prevented me from enjoying much about Motel #1 save the festive scene in the parking lot.

Maybe I’m an increasingly bourgeois fuckstick, but standing around in the parking lot I could only think, “Gee, maybe they should have sold or given away tickets that admitted workable numbers of people at specific times?” That way more people could’ve gotten in and, you know, actually been able to view the work. Oh well, maybe next time.

And to the dopes that refused to clear off the second-floor balcony after they were done touring the rooms (yeah you guys, up there enjoying the view of downtown), which made it nearly impossible for other people to get in: What the fuck?

I’ll be on David Goldstein’s radio show today at 7pm for the weekly installment of The Stranger News Hour.

I want to spend the whole hour talking about the SPD’s ignominious sting (a fancy word I kept out of the print story, but have been gravitating back to all week to describe the city’s tacky and defining freak out crack down).

Goldy gets a little bored with SPD news, so expect us to move on to Dino Rossi’s deceptive non-profit, Forward Washington.

We’ll also talk about the Stranger’s first ever: Political Genius awards.

Alan Keyes—batshitcrazy Alan Keyes—has announced his intention to seek the Republican nomination. I suppose a Keyes v. Obama rematch is too much to hope for. The last one didn’t go so well for Alan.

Keyes is a raving homophobe—and Jesus rewarded him with a queer daughter, Maya, with the nerve to come out. (Here’s what I had to say about Maya back in 2005.) Keyes disowned his daughter and threw out of the house. But Maya’s picture is still up on Keyes’ website…

That’s her on the left there, with her father’s hand on her shoulder.

Art

Motel #1 at Bridge Motel

• See what else is happening in Arts on Saturday »
• More Stranger Suggests for this week »

Christine Larsen, a Capitol Hill resident and mother of 3, says she’s tired of ferrying her kids to outdoor pools in West Seattle and Magnolia during the summer months. Earlier this year, Larsen founded Project Splash—a “group of neighbors who are tired of driving across town”—to lobby the city for an outdoor pool east of I-5.

Seattle already has 3 indoor pools east of I-5—Meadowbrook, Medgar Evers, and Rainier Beach—but Larsen says while indoor pools are “great for laps and senior aerobics,” a new outdoor pool would act as a community gathering place.

Outdoor pools might seem like an unwise investment for a city that has miserable weather 9 months a year. However, according to Seattle Park’s Aquatics Director, Kathy Whitman, Magnolia’s Pop Mounger pays for itself.

Mounger gets more than 80,000 visitors between May and September, which pays for almost all of the pool’s $400,000 annual budget. By contrast, an indoor pool costs about $600,000 to operate year round, about $300,000 of that is subsidized.

With Seattle’s Parks Department already strapped for cash, and with no new levies on the horizon, I asked Larsen where she expects to get the money to fund such a major project. Larsen says she’s looking for private contributions or county and state funds. According to Parks’ Whitman, Pop Mounger pool was financed through community contributions. “There was no Parks Department money that went into it,” Whitman says. Larsen estimates a new pool would cost between 5 and 8 million dollars.No site has been identified for the pool.

Project Splash will be holding a meeting at the Miller Community Center on October 15th at 7pm and at Meadowbrook Community Center on October 23rd at 7:15.

“Operation Sobering Thought” cost $52,000 in police time; took up 900 police hours; and involved 40 officers.

This is a lot of money. But it raises a question for people like me who argue that we don’t need a license because we already (obviously) have laws on the books to bust wayward clubs.

The question is: Do I want us to spend that kind of dough enforcing those laws when the SPD has other pressing needs? My answer is no.

Because I don’t think we need to. The reason “Operation Sobering Thought” was so expensive is because it was a show. A show for political purposes.

But you don’t need to put on a $52,000 show to stop liquor violations. As the SPD acknowledged to me when I asked why they didn’t arrest the people on the spot instead of waiting three weeks: “That would have tipped our hand.”

In other words, the bad behavior would have stopped. Indeed, they didn’t need to continue with such an elaborate operation. They could have arrested the offender right there, thwarted the behavior and called it a day.

Meanwhile, the liquor control board can fine clubs and revoke licenses. So, I don’t think the city has to spend a ton of money enforcing the rules anyway.

So, I’ll throw the question back at the gung-ho Mayor’s office: If club security is such a burning issue for you, are you willing to prioritize the money that way? How are you going to enforce a special city license? With expensive stings? Or are you just going to do low-profile enforcement like the liquor board already does? If so, what’s the point of the special license?

And if you’re not willing to spend that kind of money, then shut up about the license.

The man:

The woman:

The Mayor’s budget comes out on Monday and, according to several sources, he’s pushing a new $460,000 park ranger program. The rangers, who would patrol Seattle’s problem parks, would be part of the parks department. According to one source, the $460,000 would pay for 6 park rangers, although that number seems low for the amount of money involved.

This summer, the Pioneer Square Community Association (PSCA) employed a security guard, who patrolled Occidental Park. According to Craig Montgomery, Executive Director of the PSCA, the patrols “completely changed” the feel of Occidental—traditionally occupied by pigeons and homeless people—for the better. Montgomery says the security guard kept an eye out for problems—and picked up trash—but didn’t have the authority to kick anyone out of the park.

The city’s rangers would be able to boot people from parks by issuing “exclusion citations,” although we were not able to verify the guidelines for citations. While the rangers would be unarmed, they would be trained in self-defense and deescalation. They would be patrolling downtown parks, like Steinbrueck Occidental and Freeway Park.

The Mayor’s office had rangers in last years budget, but the council scrapped the plan in favor of using the money to pay for new police officers. While the $460,000 would pay for 4 new police officers, SPD has had trouble meeting their recruitment goals.

So… uh… if you were walking to work and saw someone throwing a rope over the limb of a tree, clearly about to hang themselves, or preparing to jump from the Aurora Bridge… do you say something? Anything? “Hey, man—sure you wanna do that?” Or do you walk on by?

Heading in to work this morning I passed a young woman—late teens, early 20s—on the street. She was clearly anorexic. She looked like someone in a photo taken at a Nazi concentration camp after liberation—if, uh, people in concentration camps had blonde pony tails, iPods, and pink work-out suits hanging from their emaciated bodies. And it was anorexia—she wasn’t suffering from leukemia or breast cancer or a brain tumor. People reduced to skin and bones by cancer don’t go out running. If it was cancer, she would have been in a bed in a hospital, morphine dripping into her veins, not out exercising.

She was anorexic, starving herself to death, committing suicide.

Should I have said something? “Hey, can I buy you some breakfast? A bagel or six?” I didn’t, of course, because… it would have been rude. And considering the prerequisite mental damage that anorexia requires, it would have been futile. Maybe a single comment from a stranger—“Sure you wanna do that?”—can convince someone not to jump off a ledge or a bridge, but can a single comment enough to save someone disciplined and determined enough to starve herself to death? Kinda doubt it.

Still, you hear that anorexics believe they’re fat, and that they walk around thinking that everyone that looks at them thinks they’re fat. But what if every person an anorexic walked past said, “Jesus, you’re skinny! Eat something!” Or, “Can I get you a sandwich?” Would that help? Would it hurt? Have no effect at all?

All I know for sure is that I felt terrible all morning, like I passed someone preparing to jump off a bridge and I didn’t have the courage—the simple human decency—to say, “Hey, you sure you wanna do that?”

In case you hadn’t heard, Ron Paul is in town today.

He spoke at Seattle University this afternoon before heading out to Microsoft for another speech, after which he will head back to Seattle for a rally at the downtown Westin.

Jeff Jared, the campaign’s special projects coordinator, told me that Paul expects to bring in $50,000 - $60,000 from his one-day swing through the area.

I went to the Seattle University lecture, which was packed. In terms of rhetoric, I didn’t hear anything new from Paul. But then again, a major reason people like Paul is because he’s so consistent—he’s had the same libertarian positions forever, and when your cache is never shifting your positions, you don’t have to change your talking points much on the campaign trail.

So there was his usual talk about the importance of strictly following the Constitution; his distrust of our monetary policy; his warnings about the welfare state; his distaste for the IRS, the Federal Reserve, and so on; and his reverence for the Founding Fathers.

One noteworthy exchange: When a member of the SU College Republicans asked Paul about endangered species laws and King County’s critical areas ordinance, Paul appeared to come out against federal endangered species protections.

“I’ve been reading the Constitution now and then,” he told the crowd. “I can’t find endangered species written in the Constitution.”

He quickly added that his comments shouldn’t be interpreted as meaning he’s opposed to protecting endangered species. “It’s the bureaucratic approach vs. the free market approach,” he said—and he wants the job of protecting endangered species to be left to the free market.

“Private property owners would do a better job than we would through federal regulations,” Paul said.

I’m not sure that’s what liberals in King County want to hear, but Jared, Paul’s special projects coordinator, told me he thinks Paul has a chance of doing well in this area.

“I’m hopeful he’s going to kick butt out here,” Jared said. “A lot of his message is attractive to liberals.”

I wrote a feature about Paul, and his appeal among local liberals, for the Aug. 9 Stranger. You can find it here.

…and Hump! 3 is about to sell out. A few tickets are still available for the 6 pm shows October 5 and 6.

Samey Winehouse: David Schmader on Amy Winehouse’s Dopplegangers.

Smash Your Head, pt 3: Band of Horses on licensing to, Stealing Batteries from Wal Mart.

Terror Clubbed: Institubes Beats Me Down.

Smith-Ra: The Cure Descends Upon the Gorge.

“Anything for a Blond Dyke”: Kanye West and Ellen Degeneres.

I Can’t Go For That: Hall & Oates’ Fan Club Scam.

Maps of the Stars’ Larynges: Trent Moorman on Axl Rose, Enya.

Sweet: Terry Miller on Lesbian Concentrate.

The Trooper: The Couch, the Bobble-Head, and the Hand Farts.

Appetite for Destruction: Anthony Bourdain and Queens of the Stone Age’s Very Special Christmas.

Best Song Ever (This Week): The Chromatics - “Running Up That Hill”

No Metal Men: Metal Men Reschedule Show.

“Leave Britney, the Beatles, and Sergei Eisenstein Alone!”: Les Savy Fav’s “The Equestrian”

What is the meaning of this?

“[U]nderstand that their success [Iraqi leaders] will require U.S. political, economic and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency.”

Another possibility: GWB imagines the war will not expire when his presidency expires, which means he sees the war as something that has a life of its own, a life outside of his presidency. The war will go on without him because the war has a purpose that is independent of his presidency. According to this imagining, the war would have happened even if he had not been the president. The war was the logical result of historical forces. GWB did not cause the war, the war caused him. He was a victim of the “cunning of history.”

Ultimately, what this type of thinking wants to conceal is the fact that one man has the power to spend more public funds on, and to send more American lives into, the vacuum of a war. Just one man. Remove him, you remove the war.

At least that’s what I’m calling it until I come across something better. It was “Artempo” (forgive the cheesy name) at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice. The old palazzo is crumbling and grand, Miss Havisham-style, and the exhibition of painting, sculpture, video, photograhy, shrunken heads, devotional objects, corals and minerals, scientific devices, installations, and many, many other, well, things, spans the building’s four floors.

Each floor is quite different in architecture and light, and the exhibition has a different character on each floor. The mashing up of all that artistic, scientific, and religious material—stuff, for lack of a better word—sounds tedious, like it would level everything to the blank relativism of anthropological looking, but instead it is absolutely, absolutely magical.

More on it on Monday morning, but for now, this Friday afternoon, I’ll just leave you with an intro to the show’s hundreds and hundreds of lasting images.

^{The exterior of Palazzo Fortuny with Ghanian artist El Anatsui’s tapestry of recycled metal and copper wire.}

^{A closeup of the tapestry.}

^{A view of one of the rooms, featuring an elephant’s ear on the right and a Lucio Fontana painting on the left. (Just out of view on the left is a stool by Le Corbusier.)}

Czar Struck: Yesterday the White House Drug Czar, John P. Walters, held a press conference in Seattle to trumpet a $10 million anti-meth ad campaign in Washington and seven other states.

Alongside Representatives Dave Reichert and Rick Larsen, Walters gave the impression that the campaign, which runs through March 2008, is based on messages of hope and the success of treatment. (That is the story over at the PI and Seattle Times.) Walters said we have “to put our arm around somebody to get them to treatment.” He drove home the point that rehab is effective: “The biggest single obstacle is people believing treatment doesn’t work.” Also, two-dozen framed black and white posters around the room and handouts in every press pack read, “Life After Meth,” each with a photo of a former addict and their tale of decline and recovery.

But Walters was elusive when pressed for the campaign’s content. He eventually said he didn’t know how much of the new campaign used content from the posters and handouts and how much was lifted from the Montana Meth Project—which saturated airwaves and ran copious print advertising, making it the leading advertiser in Montana in 2005 and 2006, but had questionable results. (A survey found Montana teens who believed that trying meth just once created “great” or “moderate” risk of getting hooked decreased from 95 to 92 percent, which is within the poll’s margin of error but shows no indication that the ads worked.)

Afterwards, I spoke to Mark Krawczyk, of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, who revealed that the “Life After Meth” images, despite being the only print ad examples provided to reporters, was “not part of the media buy.” The posters are just a touring display. But images and televisions ads from the Montana Meth Project, such as the one below, are in the media buy. The scare-tactic pieces are the ones in the national Meth Project’s gallery and the only ones we’ve seen in Washington thus far. Earlier this week, I wrote about why I think those ads are flawed.

Furthermore, the talk about treatment was lip service. The ONDCP isn’t allocating any additional money for treatment in the eight ad-campaign states. And Doug Allen, Director of Washington’s Division of Alcohol and Substance Abuse, said the state’s ability to provide treatment falls far short of demand. So while you can argue that scaring kids shitless with graphic images and abstinence-only messages might dissuade them from using meth – even though stats show that isn’t effective – it’s disingenuous to claim this campaign is one about treatment and recovery.

Club Drugs: Partying Brits get swabbed.

Temptations: Narcotics officer arrested for stealing coke and meth from evidence room.

Shortages: Marijuana crop crisis in the Southwest.

Crackdowns: Reducing cocaine availability in US.

World’s Poor Dying in Agony: Doctors won’t prescribe addictive pain killers.

Just add water.

Some poems:

Judy Grahn - A History Of Lesbianism
Pat Parker - For Straight Folks

Check out the lesbian songs from this lesbiantholgy at Lineout.

There’s an article over in England that says this:

The head of the Royal Shakespeare Company gave warning that contemporary theatre would not thrive unless it addressed the most challenging political and social issues of the day, with “big plays in big spaces”.

You are totally correct, Head-of-the-Royal-Shakespeare-Company. We’ve been thinking in that direction over here, too.

It had to happen. Years ago, when the arts money dried up, theaters went broke or had to shrink by orders of magnitude in order to survive. They stopped doing big, spectacular plays. Moon for the Misbegotten and other two-to-four-person scripts were all over the place.

That wincing, wounded strategy could only work for a little while. Quiet, small work can be great, but one will starve on a steady diet of small studio plays. We need spectacle.

So it’s no coincidence that the theater we’ve been most excited about lately has concerned people who’ve figured out how to make spectacles. This year’s Genius Award winner for organization, Strawberry Theater Workshop, does everything it can—including managing its debt—to pay big casts of actors and build complicated sets that aren’t modular and throwaway but tailored to their spaces.

In an interview with me a couple of months ago, STW director Greg Carter said, in effect: Pulling punches in the beginning of our career while we chase grants is stupid. Let’s show them what we can do and, if the world likes it, it’ll give us money.

Which is admirably gutsy—they’d rather flame out with big shows than limp along with anemic ones.

And then there’s Implied Violence, who are all about spectacle.

And the seven members of “Awesome” who have been fooling around with the rock show/theater show divide for a few years now.

It’s why we liked Dorky Park at On the Boards.

It’s why we’re excited by Motel #1 this weekend.

Spectacle: It’s the future.

Stop me if you’ve heard any of this before..

Thought Crime of the Week - Polish Googlebomber faces three years in prison. The problem is having “bomb” in the word “Googlebomb.” They probably thought it was a real bomb, you know, because Polish people are stupid.

Not So Much - Yahoo!’s “Mashup Debate” won’t allow mashing-up.

iPhone Officially, Really Unlocked, for Realz, and for Free - And a nerd war begins.

Like a Cool Mountain Soda - Water so pure, it tastes like strawberries.

Spare a Gigabit, Buddy? - Bandwidth as currency.

How come everybody’s suddenly talking about Dr. Who again these days?

Free McD Goodies! - SMS 2.0, now with McDonald’s ads. This is a fantastic idea.

Prince to sue YouTube - Enigmatic rock star hires the “Web Sheriff” (serious!) in attempt to “reclaim the Internet” from the rest of us and keep it all to himself.

YouTube to sue JewTube - Or someone.

Domain Still Available - MagooTube.com

We’re Rich and We’re Smart and We Live Nearby - High-fallutin’ tech jobs abound in Seattle. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Amazon all expanding all up in our faces.

MySpace Out, Facebook In - 23% growth in a year is just sad. Sorry Rupert, the dream is over.

Time Suck - If you’re at work, don’t click this. It’s too awesome.

Every Important Invention. Ever. - Wikipedia has the definitive list. For example, did you know that the only two important things that have been invented this century are the self-contained artificial heart and the Scramjet? S’true. If we can invent three more things by the end of the decade, we can stick it to the stupid lame-ass 1990s, and their “World Wide Web.” Get busy.

Via Raw Story:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice co-owned a home and shared a line of credit with another woman, according to Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Glenn Kessler, who reveals the information in his new book, The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy.

Kessler discussed the revelations with talk-show host and gay author Michaelangelo Signorile Friday on his Sirius Radio show.

According to the book, Rice owns a home together with Randy Bean, a documentary filmmaker who once worked with Bill Moyers. Kessler made the discovery by looking through real estate records.

This evening at 6pm, everyone’s favorite alterna-Christians Mars Hill Church will be holding a mass public baptism on Alki Beach.

Go get dunked, then come get tanked at the Genius Awards!

UPDATE: Here’s West Seattle Blog on tonight’s soggy God show.

Going to the party tonight? Want to be able to recognize our certified Geniuses, maybe buy their drinks? Here’s footage (of the moments when they learned they’d won) to familiarize you.

^{*Maybe I’m the only one, but I’m never certain if it’s “PRIME-er” or “PRIM-er” in this case (meaning a small introductory book on any subject). It’s the latter: prĭm’ər, from Medieval Latin prīmārium.}

The Seattle Nightlife and Music Association, the lobbying organization for Seattle’s clubs, met at J&M Cafe in Pioneer Square yesterday afternoon. It was a meeting to discuss the “Saturday Night Massacre,” as club workers are now calling the SPD’s recent undercover sting where 17 bar workers were hauled off to jail (and 28 warrants issued) for failure to appear after getting warrants for violations like serving a minor and admitting a minor.

68 people showed up to the meeting, including many of the workers who were arrested on Saturday night.

The point of the meeting, according to Seattle NMA’s lobbyist Tim Hatley, was to hear everybody’s stories and to connect workers with lawyers.

What came to light at the meeting was this: People felt the arrests were unfair because the warrants—mailed to workers’ homes—didn’t show up at their homes until Friday or Saturday. (You can only appear Monday through Friday.) The implication being: The SPD wanted to be able to make a show of the Saturday night arrests at the clubs as a PR stunt on behalf of the mayor.

People also felt unduly abused because the sting officers got workers’ home addresses by showing up at the clubs and pretending they were working on a child predator case. They’d show the bar worker a photo—saying they thought the suspect might be in the bar—and then they’d get the worker’s contact info and address in the ruse that they might need to contact the worker to help them bust the predator.

All this aside, the workers were still caught, according to the SPD, serving minors.

The alarming gun charges—the city’s smoking gun, if you will—are another story that seems to be falling apart: Tabella, the one club facing gun charges, says it let the gun owners in because they recognized the gun owners as cops. Tommy’s was also slammed in the press for allowing a gun in, but as I reported already, the press failed to read the police report. No gun got in at Tommy’s.

But ultimately, if bar workers are found guilty of allowing minors into clubs, the sting simply proves what opponents of the Mayor’s push for a club license—like the SNMA—have been arguing all along: The rules already exist to hold clubs accountable; there’s no need to give the mayor’s office the sole authority to shut down a club—which is what the licensing proposal now pending before council would do.

The city argues that they need a licensing scheme because they currently can’t hold the club accountable, they can only hold workers accountable. But that’s not true. Violations like the ones the SPD uncovered through their sting can be used as evidence to the state liquor control board to fine clubs and revoke their licenses.

The council is voting on the license proposal on Monday. (Nice timing with that sting. Pretty expensive campaign move by the SPD on behalf of the mayor.)

The vote count is reportedly: 2 strongly against the license (Peter Steinbrueck, Richard McIver); 2 leaning against the license (Tom Rasmussen, and Jean Godden); 3 for the license (Jan Drago, Sally Clark, and David Della); and 2 unsure (Nick Licata and Richard Conlin.)

Licata is floating amended legislation that attempts to appease the clubs by giving less power to the mayor’s office and more power to a commission made up of neighbors, clubs, and SPD when it comes to granting licenses and revoking them. However, Hatley reports that Licata’s legislation doesn’t go far enough to water down the mayor’s ultimate authority to shut down clubs in his membership’s opinion.

I posted this yesterday, but I’m moving up—keep those suggested questions coming!

For our upcoming HUMP issue, which hits the streets October 4, we’re going to bring back our annual Stranger Sex Survey. We’re compiling questions right now—the stuff we wanna know about our readers’ dirty, dirty sex lives—and I wanted to invite Sloggers to suggest questions too.

What do you wanna know? Post any and all suggested sex questions in comments and look for the Stranger Sex Survey in next week’s issue of The Stranger.

Bash

The Fifth Annual Genius Awards at Central Library

• See what else is happening in Arts on Friday »
• More Stranger Suggests for this week »

The computer from which super-star Pacific Northwest blogger Gen. J.C. Christian did his super-star blogging died tragically in a fall earlier this week. Jesus’ General needs a new computer, and you can help.

Please make a donation today.

The District Court and the Appeals Court in the 9th Circuit have said…. no.
Now the 9th Circuit wants to rehear the case of the motorcycle gang and their murky insignia.

Those of you who know me well know that in my deepest and most secret of hearts, Seth Green is my perfect man. Oh yes he his. Actually, he’s, like, my totally favoritist person in the whole wide world, and kind of has been since, well, Buffy. I refuse to justify this fact. I shall explain no further.

You might also know that I’ve finally come clean, just this week in SLOG comments, with the perhaps surprising and rather alarming information that Chris Crocker, for reasons that are nobody’s business really, is NOT my favorite person in the whole wide world. Indeed, Is. Not. I refuse to elaborate on this either. I just don’t wanna talk about it. Shut up.

BUT. But. This…

Seth Green Chris Crocker Outtakes

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Well. I’m beside myself. I don’t know what to say. But heed me this: the above video fills me with a confusing, uncomfortable jealousy and boiling rage that I cannot explain or begin to understand, and I’m going to kick Chris Crocker’s ass. I have no choice. It’s out of my hands. And I don’t know when I’m gonna do it….or where. But I’m gonna do it. DO YOU HEAR ME WORLD? I’M gonna KICK Chris Crocker’s ASS!

KICK IT!

A beautiful abstract for a paper called “The Collision Between The Milky Way and Andromeda”:

We use a N-body/hydrodynamic simulation to forecast the future encounter between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies, given current observational constraints on their relative distance, velocity, and mass. Allowing for a comparable amount of diffuse mass to fill the volume of the Local Group, we find that the two galaxies are likely to collide in a few billion years - within the Sun’s lifetime. During the first close encounter of the two galaxies, there is a 12% chance that the Sun will be pulled from its present position and reside in the extended tidal material. After the second close encounter, there is a 30% chance that the Sun will reside in the extended tidal material, and a 2.7% chance that our Sun will be more tightly bound to Andromeda than to the Milky Way. Eventually, after the merger has completed, the Sun is likely to be scattered to the outer halo and reside at much larger radii (>30 kpc). The density profiles of the stars, gas and dark matter in the merger product resemble those of elliptical galaxies. Our Local Group model therefore provides an prototype progenitor of late—forming elliptical galaxies.

LAS VEGAS - Investigators questioned O.J. Simpson about a break-in at a casino hotel room involving sports memorabilia, police said Friday.

The day before yesterday, on the streets of Seattle, I had an amazing music-related fashion sighting that made me glad to have eyes.

Read about it on Line Out.

This actually came yesterday, but I was out. The subject line read: “And Ron Paul is… who?”

It continued:

Hi,

Who the hell is this Ron Paul guy? I have seen a million signs and flyers for him all over town. I even saw what appeared to be chalkings on the ground saying something about this Friday.

What is going on? Can you guys do some sort of piece on this?

Thanks,

Colin

The Bush Speech: Some troops home later this year, but most stay in Iraq “beyond my presidency.”

The fact check: Bush contradicted himself and recent government reports, and The Washington Post is on the case.

Giuliani: Trying to score points on “Betray Us” flap.

Thompson on Schiavo: No opinion, and doesn’t even remember details of the case.

Newt’s odds: Says the likelihood of a Democrat winning the White House in 2008 are 80-20 in favor.

On the No Surrender Express: A dispatch from McCain’s latest gimmick.

Gentrification: Condos, bistros, cute shops, and pushed-out artists—no, it’s not Capitol Hill. It’s the East Village.

Who’s in that coalition? Debunking Bush’s talk of 36 nations helping in Iraq.

Was in a drugstore looking for mustache wax for Brendan Kiley. They didn’t have any, although they did have Hair Mayonnaise.

According to the company’s website, it’s “a reconstructive conditioner that binds incredible moisture and strength directly into the hair shaft.”

Gasworks Park will be closed on weekdays for at least the next two weeks. No, it’s not another mystery party shutting down the park. This time, you can blame the closure on tar.

That’s right, tar—leftover from when Gasworks was as a real-live gasification plant—has been bubbling up through the ground. The city is sending in special crews to take core samples and figure out how to clean up all the toxic gunk underneath the park.

I say they just cover the whole damn thing in feathers and be done with it. It’s the only way to be sure.

The drilling will take place weekdays between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. beginning Monday. The northeast corner of the park, including the play barn, will remain closed during that time. City officials expect the work to end Sept. 27.

Oh you know, just looks like some more blatant violations of the 4th Amendment by the Bush-era FBI/AT&T dream team.

And yeah, yeah, longtime liberal House Telecommunications Committee member Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), who’s been fighting the Panopticon Superstate since Al Gore invented the Internet, is calling for an investigation. Wev. Bush will obstruct as usual.

No one cares. And what’s the 4th Amendment, anyway.

As the New York Times reported today, a higher than ever percentage of children are surviving until their fifth birthday.

This public health triumph has arisen, Unicef officials said, partly from campaigns against measles, malaria and bottle-feeding, and partly from improvements in the economies of most of the world outside Africa.

So, with more babies surviving through early childhood, will there be a population boom? Maybe not.

If you live in a culture where children are the only feasible retirement plan—i.e. most of the world—it’s really important one child survives through your retirement, right? And if there is about a one in three chance that any given child won’t survive to see his or her fifth birthday (where Sub-Saharan Africa was a few decades ago), you better have several children.

Here comes some math to back up this notion. If your only willing to risk a one in a hundred chance of ending up destitute in old age, and there is a thirty percent chance than any given child will perish, the math tells us you’ll need to have four kids. Drop the mortality to fifteen percent—where Sub-Saharan Africa is today—and three kids will cut it. Five percent chance of perishing before five, like present day North Africa? Two kids will cut it. Magic. Smaller families through better survival.

Logic like this helps us understand why people in economically marginal areas of the world continue to have large families—further stretching resources, resulting in higher childhood mortalities, causing larger yet families—and how this pattern can be broken by public health.

The computer from which super-star Pacific Northwest blogger Gen. J.C. Christian did his super-star blogging died tragically in a fall earlier this week. Jesus’ General needs a new computer, and you can help.

Please make a donation today.

This building, in Dubai, has just become the world’s tallest freestanding structure—555 meters, beating Taipei 101 by forty-something meters. They want to push it up to over 700 meters, with around 160 floors.

Here’s what the Dubaians hope it will look like when it’s done:

Which reminds me of one of my favorite sentences in the new George Saunders book, when he describes Dubai’s skyline: “like four or five architects had staged a weird-off, with unlimited funds.”

Richard Dawkins has launched an atheist-awareness campaign, the OUT Campaign. Though the idea is attractive (remember when you saw your first Darwin-fish car decal?), these particular slogans and motifs aren’t compelling enough to catch on. There are major challenges in trying to expropriate “out” from the gays. And unless OUT is an acronym, it has no business being capped like that.

Yesterday afternoon, the man who placed the Hooters sign at brix called me. The guerrilla art piece got a flurry visceral reactions on Slog and a follow up article in the PI

The 36-year-old artist , who asked not to be identified, says he never thought his work would get such a huge response. “I didn’t expect that hooters thing to get to the gay community,” he says. “That wasn’t the first thing I put up there [but] no one really noticed the other ones. [Clearly] people needed to be able to voice their opinions about what they’re afraid of in the neighborhood.”

The Hooters sticker certainly got people talking. However, the artist says he never intended to freak people out. His other art, which you’ve probably seen around town, is a lot more benign.

The man says he intentionally targeted the brix development, and is considering tackling a few other developments around town, but he claims he’s not on a political crusade.
“I just want to make myself laugh, he says. “I’m looking at buying a condo pretty soon. Maybe it’ll be at the brix, I don’t know.”

The Invitation Song Remains the Same: Jonathan Zwickel on the Cave Singers.

Greece, the Musical: Terry Miller on Greece, Vangelis

Paris, the Terror: Eric Grandy on Institubes.

Bum Rockin’: Terry Miller on Native American Disco.

Voice Boxin’: Trent Moorman on the Larynx.

A Stroke of Luck?: Alex Under Cancels, Claude Von Stroke Steps Up for Broken Disco.

Death of the Party: Like Sufjan, I Made a Lot of Mistakes.

Decibel Download: Orac’s “Dance All Night, Ponies” Megamix.

S-M-R-T: The Stranger’s Genius Awards Party.

Unlike John Edwards and Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton hasn’t been to Washington State once since she declared her candidacy. Sounds like that’s changing.

A source who’s on a Washington State Democratic Party email list just forwarded me this:

From: On Behalf Of Dwight Pelz

Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007 3:19 PM

To: XXXXX@XXXXXXX

Subject: Hillary Clinton to Keynote the Maggie’s!

Save the Date!

Hillary Clinton will keynote the Maggie’s Awards Dinner, Monday evening, October 22, at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

Details to follow.

Chris Crocker’s influence reaches the White House….kinda.

(Thanks to Slog tipper Brie.)

Where were these guys when I went to high school?

Some poor kid in Nova Scotia shows up for his first day of high school wearing a pink shirt. Ten bullies surrounded the kid, mock him, and threaten to beat him up—because wearing pink means you’re a homo.

The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying.

“It’s my last year. I’ve stood around too long and I wanted to do something,” said David.

They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They handed out the shirts in the lobby before class last Friday—even the bullied student had one.

“I made sure there was a shirt for him,” David said.

GLSEN should give ‘em a medal, says Towleroad.

UPDATE: Reading the Chronicle Herald story again, this detail jumped out at me…

When the bullied student put on his pink shirt Friday and saw all the other pink in the lobby, “he was all smiles. It was like a big weight had been lifted off is shoulder,” David said. No one at the school would reveal the student’s name.

Travis said that growing up, he was often picked on for wearing store-brand clothes instead of designer duds.

So these seniors empathized with a freshman being picked on by homophobic bullies—a kid that may not even be gay—because one of them was picked on because his family couldn’t afford designer clothes.

Hmmm…

Why should we wait for GLSEN to pin a medal on these two kids? A lot of grown-up gay men out there are going to be moved by this story—I know it moved me—and a lot of grown-up gay men can afford designer clothes. And gift certificates for designer clothes. I’m thinking maybe we should thank Travis and David by sending the boys some gift certificates. They deserve all the designer duds their hearts’ desire.

What do you say, guys?

As Christopher noted in his Slog post about this year’s Genius Awards, the news team added a surprise to this year’s hullaballoo by naming a Political Genius and trio of Ones to Watch.

One of our Ones to Watch is David Hiller, advocacy director for the Cascade Bicycle club. Another One to Watch is political consultant Sandeep Kaushik. (Full disclosure, Kaushik used to be writer for the Stranger news squad and showed his first sign of genius by deciding to leave this place in 2005 and make some real money in the political world.)

Anyway, I don’t know if Kaushik and Hiller have ever met, but Kaushik has offered his (genius) thoughts about Hiller to us.

At a meeting a few weeks ago where Kaushik was pitching his latest campaign, the $17.8 billion Roads and Transit package, Barnett criticized the plan and Kaushik rolled his eyes and called her a “wacka-doodle-doo hippie enviro radical.”

Barnett shot back, “Radical? I’m getting that from David Hiller,” she said as if Hiller was Bill Moyers. “Advocacy Director of the Cascade Bicycle Club. The people that made the bike plan happen. He’s a centrist.”

Erica continued to hold the floor. Loudly, earnestly, and adamantly.

Kaushik had stopped listening. He shook his head and whispered to the others at the table: “Hiller’s a centrist? A centrist? The center of what?”

Barnett, making several more points about HOV lanes, I think, didn’t hear the comment, but everyone else broke down laughing. Barnett stopped: “What?”

One of Kaushik’s colleagues repeated the quip. Barnett wound up to hit back. Paused. And then started laughing her ass off along with everyone else.

Dear Erika, Josh, and Dan:

David Della is the biggest peace of crap on city council. He’s running for reelection and Tim Burgess is a decent enough candidate to serve all of our interests. I believe Tim’s position on gay issues to have evolved in earnest. If you do too, then you really got stop beating him up on this issue and start saying Dump Della.

I completely share your sentiments about Tim’s earlier statements; I found them personally offensive—I am a former PFLAG board member and sat on the ERW lobby task force for the last two years. These are my issues even more than urban and sustainable ones. However, Tim seems good enough and David doesn’t. You’ve ran Tim through the ringer enough to make a point to him and anyone else attempting to run for council, but whatever you do don’t help David get reelected.

Get back on the pro-Tim band wagon before Della starts picking up the progressive votes. We’ve got a terrible city council and need Burgess. He’ll do well.

Sean Howell

My friend Alex just got a job in Antarctica. He will be washing dishes and doing other cleaning in the research station down there for the duration of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer. Antarctica looks like this:

Before he gets there, he has to train for a few weeks in New Zealand. New Zealand looks like this:

Understandably, he would like to enjoy the color, literally. He will probably not see anything green the entire time he’s in Antarctica! But here’s the thing: Travel guides for New Zealand are…pedestrian at best. They don’t seem to provide the kind of entertainment or lodgings that would be in Alex’s time frame (short), budget (extremely small to non-existant), or aesthetic (straight-edge, adventurous, not into resort bullshit).

Where can he go? What can he do? He’s got to do something great down there before he gets locked in the coolest research station (no pun intended) on the planet for six months.

Google is just the search tool bar for Wikipedia.

Oh, and tickets are on sale NOW.

In disappointing news, Greg Oden, recently acquired Pacific Northwest sports treasure and the #1 overall NBA draft pick, will likely spend his entire rookie season on the Portland Trail Blazer’s bench. Exploratory surgery today found cartilage damage in Oden’s right knee, and microfracture surgery was performed. This totally sucks. Thankfully, microfracture isn’t quite the kiss of death that it used to be (hello, Amare Stoudemire!), so we can all remain hopeful about Oden’s career.

On the bright side, this means more eyes on the #2 pick, our own Seattle Supersonic Kevin Durant.

The Sonics home opener is November 1 against the Phoenix Suns. See you there.

The weakness of maternity leave as a social issue (as one that is not taken seriously enough) has its source in the initial (the ground—or even gravid) fact that woman are not paid hard cash for the labor of producing a new person (or persons). As to why they are not paid for what is clearly hard (backbreaking) work, clearly productive, clearly necessary for the survival of the whole (“species being”), this has much to do with the way men as a whole value organic production far below inorganic production.

The woman must give birth because a woman is a woman—that is the circle of her curse. A pregnant woman, then, is much like a busy bee: it must makes honey because that’s the circle of its curse. But even more than that: The bee makes honey without thinking about it. In this way, the woman makes a child without a thought. The man in the factory or the man building a house, however, has an idea (a thought) before he makes something. Having this idea is what separates him from the busy bees and pregnant women.

From Marx:

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

In “Truth and Illusion,” Nietzsche also makes a similar point:

One may here well admire man who succeeded in piling up an infinitely complex dome of ideas on a movable foundation, and as it were on running water, as a powerful genius of architecture…In this way man as an architectural genius rises high above the bee. She builds with wax which she brings together out of nature; he with the much more delicate material of ideas which he must first manufacture within his self.

The substance and result of this dominant way of thinking: Because it is natural, it is not work; because it is not work, it doesn’t deserve a wage. Only at the last moment of the pregnancy do we see a woman’s situation as labor—and even then we still pay her nothing (we still do not give her her check as we give her her child). But production is production; it’s not a matter of how something is made, but a matter of making something, bringing something new into the world. This is what pregnancy does, and so it must receive payment for all the work that it does.

Prominent Democratic attorney Jenny Durkan—she’s best pals with Gov. Gregoire, she famously argued the 2004 election case on behalf of the Dems and won big, and as Eli reported this week, she’s a big John Edwards fan—has been criticized for endorsing the Republican candidate for King County Prosecutor, Dan Satterberg.

I had talked to her about this on background a few weeks ago to find out why in a year like 2007 she of all people would help the GOP.

Then, today, this e-mail, from a Democratic Party activist, came in:

Jenny Durkan has seriously damaged her credibility as a Democrat, and that of every issue and candidate she touches by endorsing the Republican, Dan Satterberg for King County Prosecutor. The Democrats on the street, Precinct Committee Officers and “party hacks”, work too hard for our excellent Democratic candidates to have the likes of “glamorous ms. Durkan endorsing the opposition. Why don’t you write about her Lieberman like turncoat behavior?

I’m not going to weigh in on the Satterberg v. Bill Sherman race