This placard is sitting just inside the entrance of the River Park Square shopping mall in Spokane, Washington. Ugh. I’m not sure what’s worse: That the management of a mall in Eastern Washington feels that it’s somehow their responsibility to honor students murdered half a continent away? Or the passive wording they chose for this memorial piece of cardboard? “We honor those who lost their lives…” Um… their lives weren’t car keys or contact lenses, you know. They weren’t misplaced. Their deaths weren’t something that just, you know, kinda, sorta happened.

Their lives were taken from them. And the responsible parties? The shooter, of course, but he had accomplices. Blame must also be assigned to an American electorate—the very same folks streaming past this placard—that tolerates a “gun culture” that wreaks so much havoc. Daniel, Catalina, Ryanne, Julianna, and Gayle didn’t carelessly misplace their lives. They were done to death by the evil fucks at the NRA, the stupid fucks in Congress, and average dumb fucks who think cheap sentiment, a stupid placard, and an ugly vase stuffed with wilting roses somehow exonerates us all.

Next on the chopping block—B&O Espresso:

Some of you may not know this yet, but a developer has proposed razing the landmark B&O Espresso on Capitol Hill.

The proposed project would result in a 65’ tall, 75-unit apartment complex with retail below. This would eliminate the existing businesses, including the B&O Espresso, as well as the two-fourplex apartments to the north of the B&O. To what degree is redevelopment appropriate and best for the community if it eliminates historical, architectural or cultural connections to our past? How much is enough when it directly jeopardizes and impacts the very core a neighborhood identifies with? Worthy of note is the B & O Espresso and Café, which was one of the first establishments offering espresso in Seattle, and recently celebrated its 30th anniversary at this location. This in itself establishes deep cultural ties to the neighborhood. Eliminating this building would destroy the unique character and cultural identity of this retail core.

And if we keep destroying what makes Seattle unique, we might as well replace the Space Needle with huge golden arches, and a sign reading, “Over 1,000,000 displaced.” Some of us do not want this to happen!

Here’s a link to a web page devoted to saving the B&O. There’s a petition you can sign, and the info where to write DPD Land Use Planner Bruce Rips. (I’m not kidding — that’s really his name.)

www.1650choice.org

The NYT’s big McCain story on Thursday was pretty weak.

But I’m not sure why one of us ‘08ers here at Slog didn’t link this fat story from yesterday’s Washington Post.

It’s almost a humor piece with paragraph after paragraph, like these, stacked up one after the other:

McCain’s relationship with lobbyists became an issue this week after it was reported that his aides asked Vicki Iseman, a telecom lobbyist, to distance herself from his 2000 presidential campaign because it would threaten McCain’s reputation for independence. An angry and defiant McCain denounced the stories yesterday, declaring: “At no time have I ever done anything that would betray the public trust.”

Even before McCain finished his news conference, uber-lobbyist Black made the rounds of television networks to defend McCain against charges that he has been tainted by his relationship with a lobbyist. Black’s current clients include General Motors, United Technologies, JPMorgan and AT&T

McCain’s top fundraising official is former congressman Tom Loeffler (R-Tex.), who heads a lobbying law firm called the Loeffler Group. He has counseled the Saudis as well as Southwest Airlines, AT&T, Toyota and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

Public Citizen, a group that monitors campaign fundraising, has found that McCain has more bundlers — people who gather checks from networks of friends and associates — from the lobbying community than any other presidential candidate from either party.

The only thing that’s missing from the piece is tying all the lobbyists (and all their clients) who work with McCain to McCain’s voting record.

Here’s a list of those clients: eBay, Goldman Sachs Group, Cablevision, Tenneco, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, General Motors, United Technologies, JP Morgan, AT&T, Alcoa, U.S. Airways, Southwest Airlines, Toyota, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. (Told you it was comical.)

It shouldn’t be too hard to find examples of McCain’s work in the Senate that benefited this corporate roster.

Here’s the dude’s voting record on significant legislation over the last few years. At a cursory glance, I see that he voted for the bankruptcy bill, a pet bill of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs—clients right there on the cronies of John list.

Hit that WaPo.

My wild guesses are as follows:

Best Picture: No Country for Old Men

Actor in a Leading Role: Daniel Day Lewis (There Will Be Blood)

Actress in a Leading Role: Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose)—this is not necessarily the conventional wisdom, and I think the role was written without nuance, but Julie Christie already has an Oscar, and Away from Her was such a quiet movie. I also think people will feel guilty for not voting for Persepolis in the animated feature category—since it wasn’t nominated for foreign film—and will try to make it up to the Frenchies here.

Actress in a Supporting Role: I almost want to say Saoirse Ronan (Atonement), because Oscar voters haven’t given it to a kid since Anna Paquin, and who doesn’t love an Irish accent? But nobody agrees with me. And besides, everybody loves a crossdresser. Cate Blanchett (I’m Not There).

Actor in a Supporting Role: Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men)

Directing: Joel and Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men)

Original Screenplay: Diablo Cody (Juno)

Adapted Screenplay: The Coen Bros again (No Country for Old Men)

Animated Feature: Ratatouille

Animated Short: I’ve actually seen all of these. Madame Tutli-Putli is gorgeous, but fairly dark for Oscar tastes. Still, you have to admire the animation, and—unlike Peter and the Wolf—it looks wonderful in film stills.

Documentary Feature: No End in Sight, to make up for the fact that the many war-themed narrative features didn’t make a dent in the prestige nominations, and because Sicko is kind of unsatisfying.

Documentary Short: I think Stranger Genius Award winner James Longley really has a chance this year. But I don’t want to jinx him. Elderly yet openminded Oscar voters want to make a statement about gay rights: Freeheld.

Live Action Short: These were all bad. I’m going to go with the lachrymose At Night, even though it’s a pain to sit through. The others are just too cheesy.

Art Direction: Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer (Atonement)

Cinematography: I’m going to go with two-time winner Janusz Kaminski for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly—who wrote me an angry email when I partially attributed the blissed-out look of the film to the director. There’s a passionate lobbyist. NCFOM can’t win everything, There Will Be Blood’s Robert Elswit is this year’s Emmanuel Lubezki, and the flashiest scene in Atonement—the long Dunkirk Steadycam shot—is inert.

Costume Design: Atonement, which will be such a fuck you to Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

Film Editing: The Bourne Ultimatum, because bestest means mostest, and the Coens are hiding under a pseudonym.

Foreign Language Film: The Counterfeiters—voting for the Israeli movie that muscled out The Band’s Visit would be bad form, and the others are wacky.

Makeup: La Vie en Rose’s surprisingly effective old age makeup

Music (Score): Dario Marianelli (Atonement)—flashy but not bombastic

Music (Song): “Falling Slowly,” Once

… and the total crapshoots:

Sound Editing: No Country for Old Men

Sound Mixing: Transformers

Visual Effects: Transformers

Am I right, or am I crazy? Be here for David Schmader’s liveblog of the Oscars, tomorrow at 5 pm.

The president pees sitting down. Seriously. And that’s not right.

Just took out my first Zipcar today (whoops, I mean “Zipped up my reservation!”) Total for four hours, for a truck (now named “Tatoosh”!) that used to cost $8 an hour: $49.61. That’s $10.50 an hour, plus $7.61 in unspecified taxes and fees. (Yes, I’m driving a truck, which costs more than the standard rate of $9.50 an hour—but only because both of the two vehicles available in Columbia City—the truck and a hybrid Civic—are now in the $10.50-an-hour category. Because, you know, you should pay more if you want to drive a hybrid).

Why do you do this to me, Zipcar? Renting a car would be cheaper.

Why is Mugabe confident he is going to be reelected? Because his main opponents, Mr Tsvangirai, who heads the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and Simba Makoni, the former Finance Minister, are from Manicaland. I’m a Manica, my family comes from the mountains around the capital of Manicaland, Mutare. What is the problem with being a Manica? We are, to put it in terms that are not complicated, the smallest tribe of the the three main tribes in Zimbabwe. We might produce lots of educated men and women, but our intellectual power is not backed by the power of a large population. Because the bottom of all African politics is tribalism, Mugabe is guaranteed to hit rock bottom—he will win. In the African mind, the tribe is first and the stomach is a distant second.

A note on Makoni: I recall he was an excellent squash player. I used to watch him play in the courts at the Sun Hotel, the center of Gaborone’s society back in 1987. Makoni was then leading the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which was (and still is) based in Gaborone, Botswana. I even recall Makoni beating an Indian chap, the owner of the right to distribute cars manufactured by BMW, but that might be my imagination and not what actually happened.

Art

‘Coming of Age’ at Crawl Space Gallery

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

Attention citizens of the Slogosphere: Tomorrow evening starting at 5pm Pacific time, I will be live-slogging the Academy Awards.

Between the darkness of the nominated art (There Will Be Blood! No Country for Old Men! Ratatouille!) and Hollywood’s deep jonesing for glitz (the writers’ strike hobbled most of the year’s other celebrity trophy pageants), it should be a world-class freak show.

It might also be 17 hours long. Stock up on booze, see you back here tomorrow.

After yesterday’s drought, it’s a bona-fide mini-deluge-ette:

We’ve got a mystery reading (from a novel featuring “television legend and amateur sleuth Polly Pepper”), an open mic, two group readings at Elliott Bay Book Company (one featuring women of color, the other featuring the African American Writers Alliance) and Elias Khoury at the library, reading from Yalo, an interesting novel with a boring cover.

Down at the McLeod Residence in Belltown, Nico Vassilakis reads from his new book, Text Loses Time. Vassilakis is a local poet, and an active part of the experimental writing scene we’ve got going on here. His book is a collection of quotes, prose, and poetry, which ranges from mildly associative to the big ol’ clusterfuck shown at the top of this post, a sample of one of the weirder ‘poems’ from the book. Party Volcano downgraded this one to cold lava, but I think as a reading, it should be pretty interesting.

Full readings listings, including the next week or so, here.

Clinton Supporters Say She Needs ‘Economy’ Voters in Ohio: “Senator Obama, he’s supported artificially by people of wealth trying to protect the tax cuts they haven’t earned.”

GOP Congressman’s Family Ired Over Indictment: “We are disappointed that the Department of Justice would not allow a decent amount of time to pass to allow a son to mourn the passing of his father.”

Teen Shot Near Northgate Mall “After a while working here, you get to know who these guys are by what they wear.”

Pilots Safe, but $2-Billion B-2 Bomber Destroyed: “They have been evaluated by medical authorities and are in good condition.”

Iraq Warns Turkey Over Incursion: “But if it goes on, I think it could destabilise the region, because really one mistake could lead to further escalation.”

State House Approves Transportation Budget: “This budget is the equivalent of throwing a drowning man a short rope.”

Arrest in Fatal Shooting: “All I know is that my son is a great kid. If something like that happened, it had to be him defending himself.”

NYT Surprised by Reaction to McCain Hit Piece: “After all, we wrestled with our own doubts on that score.”

U.S. Evacuates from Serbia: “We are not sufficiently confident that they are safe here.”

Effort to Commit Harps’ Murder Suspect Before Stabbing: “He must be on medication in order to remain in the community.”

Two Players Suspended at Bellevue Christian: “We’re going to war with the guys we have.”

A little good news for women that have been frustrated by their inability to find—and enjoy—their G spots: you may not have one.

Italian researchers have found that women who claim to experience vaginal orgasms in the so-called G spot are anatomically different from those who do not. They say this opens up the prospect that a simple ultrasound may show whether a woman should keep pursuing the elusive G spot orgasm, or abandon the search.

“For the first time it is possible to determine by a simple, rapid and inexpensive method if a women has a G spot or not,” said researcher Emmanuele Jannini, of the University of L’Aquila.

So says Seattlest.

So we hear that Chris and Jen, founders and owners of Victrola Coffee, have sold “Capitol Hill’s living room” to a new guy, an established independent coffee entrepreneur, whom we believe is Dan Ollis of the Whidbey Coffee Co….

The sale is not all that surprising, given that the development of Victrola’s roasting operation meant there were really three businesses to manage, one wholesale operation and two bustling retail locations. It was a long, long way from the tiny little shop Victrola was when it opened.

(Posted, laboriously but hopefully accurately, from my iPhone.)

Remember that parolee? That “person of interest”? The sometime Cornish student that the police thought might be the man that murdered Shannon Harps? And wasn’t? Well, someone just stabbed him to death. From the Seattle Times:

A man who had been identified as a “person of interest” in the New Year’s Eve slaying of Shannon Harps was found fatally stabbed early Thursday in North Seattle.

The body of William Francis Ball, 29, of Seattle, was found just after midnight in the 10300 block of Greenwood Avenue North. Seattle police said he suffered a single stab wound to the chest. He was taken to Harborview Medical Center, where he died.

Last Thursday, I Slogged about a bill that would preempt new King County health regulations that are set to go in place in August.

Both the state rules and the KC rules would require fast food chains to post nutritional info about all items on the menu. However, the state rules are weaker than King County’s. KC rules would require the information to be at the point of sale; the state rules would just require that they be “prominently displayed.” And most important, KC’s rules would apply to more restaurants—about 1,400 more individual restaurants. (King County’s rules apply to restaurant chains with 10 stores or more. The state rules apply to restaurant chains with 25 stores or more.)

A bitter dispute over the bill between KC health regulators and the Washington Restaurant Association, which wanted the weaker state bill to apply (and preempt the county rule), ended up tabling the bill.

Substitute legislation calls for a study. The substitute legislation also puts the KC rules on hold until the state comes up with new legislation after the study.

King County Health spokesman James Apa says the state shouldn’t be able to prevent local jurisdictions from implementing local standards and says they strongly oppose the substitute legislation.

I couldn’t be down in Oly on Tuesday to report on the big cutoff day for sending bills over to the other chamber. It turns out I missed a real bruiser between Gov. Christine Gregoire and House Speaker Frank Chopp.

I haven’t seen details of it reported elsewhere, so voila:

The big climate change bill, which Gregoire introduced on the first day of the session, still hadn’t come to a House floor vote as the clock was ticking down on Tuesday.

House Speaker Chopp wanted to amend the governor’s bill so that key language giving the Dept. of Ecology rule-making authority was amended to grant the legislature the authority instead.

The changes Chopp wanted would have actually rolled back authority that Ecology already has.

(I had asked Gregoire about this very issue in my interview with her the day before, and she said she wanted the legislature to have the authority to approve the cap and trade plan that the bill authorizes Ecology to design. However, that’s far different from giving the legislature authority to micromanage Ecology’s rule-making authority.)

So, as the story goes, Gregoire set Chopp straight. Gregoire marched into Chopp’s office around 3:30 on Tuesday, kicked out all the extra aides, and told him he had to run the bill and not amend it to usurp Ecology’s authority.

And that’s exactly what happened … although not before Chopp talked one freshman Rep., Troy Kelley (D-28, W. Tacoma), into voting against the bill later in the evening when the bill finally passed. It was the last bill to come to a vote in the House on deadline day.

Kelley says Chopp talked to him, but recalls that it was about a different bill—a bill dealing with military bases that Kelley was trying to get a vote on. He says he voted against the bill because he needed a fuller understanding of it and he needed to evaluate it from “my district’s perspective, which may be a little different from the being in line with the rest of the caucus.”

The bill passed by a big margin, so Rep. Kelley’s vote wasn’t key, but Chopp reportedly convinced Kelley that he was in enough of a swing district that a vote against powerful antagonists of the bill, like the Building Industry Association of Washington, could jeopardize Kelley’s reelection.

The bill passed 64-31.

Although, there is some annoying news about the bill: One aspect was amended from the initial version. The timber industry wants to get an offset credit to count against the carbon emissions cap because trees trap carbon (not so, says Grist!)—and language was added into the bill to give them the offset.

I had asked Gov. Gregoire about this issue on Monday as well.

Me: Weyerhaeuser wants credit in any cap-and-trade system for the carbon offset of growing trees.

Gov. Gregoire: I’m not going to do that today. That’s part of the process. I don’t want to get involved in a bill that decides who’s bad and who’s good. That’s premature.

Looks like she won one and lost one.

There’s a bug going around editorial—several staffers are out sick or “sick” or are MIA today… here’s what the dedicated skeleton crew claims to be doing this evening:

“Barbecuing and then going to Jules Maes in Georgetown to play pool.”
“Checking out the Belltown bar scene, starting at Queen City Grill.”
“Lifting weights until I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
“Going to a bar to look at a pretty woman.”
“Going to West Seattle, to Talarico’s to eat a slice of pizza as big as my head, then CD shopping at Easy Street.”
“Seeing WET’s new show, Mr. Marmalade.”
“Watching Narc on DVD—the cinematography is supposed to be great.”
“Either seeing Drop Dead Gorgeous at Central Cinema or Be Kind, Rewind.”

And you?

…it’s clearly time to think about death in general and, in particular, Charles Mudede’s lovely books lead from this issue, about David Shields’ new book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead.

This is a book review, and a very good one:

If there is a leading theme in Shields’s work, it is exposure in a world where there is nothing left but humans, their bodies, fears, families. Not even the religion of literature offers us protection from the elements of reality. This is why Shields’s language is so clear, so transparent. Everything from the world makes its way through the words to the reader with little or no distortion.

But it’s also about something that we should all remember when it’s gorgeous outside and everything seems to exist for our pleasure:

Science has more than doubled our life spans but at the terrible price of living with the truth—that life is a process that has no shaper or shelter, that life is not about humans but about something else, something out of our control.

These sorts of days are always better when there’s a little death lingering at the edges. I promise that if you read this book review right now, it will improve your weekend. You can yell at me on Monday if it doesn’t work. Go read it.

Depressingly, obviously, it’s because Americans don’t stop eating until the TV show is over (if then).

John McCain’s wife, Cindy, left. And Vicki Iseman, the lobbyist people thought John McCain might be having a romantic relationship with, right.

The New York Times couldn’t prove a romantic relationship between McCain and Iseman (though it did prove they spent an unusual amount of time together). Both McCain and Iseman say there was never anything romantic between them. But a Slog tipper—a straight guy who presumably knows a lot more about hetero men and blondes than me—thinks these pictures suggest something about McCain’s tastes.

Throw Me the Statue: Perform on a Washington State ferry.

Speaker Speaker: Perform an Elevator to Hell song at Sonic Boom in Ballard.

Boris: Declared “the greatest living rock band on the planet” by Brian Cook.

Exodus, These Arms Are Snakes: Are playing in Seattle tonight.

Cross-Dressing, Beer, and Bowling: Appearing at Sunset Bowl this Sunday.

Menomena, Blitzen Trapper, BOAT and Monotonix: Are also playing tonight and I forgot to say so in my initial “Tonight in Music” post. Sorry.

Gwar and Belle & Sebastian: Finally together.

Jeffery Lewis: The anti-folk singer from Portland covers 12 Crass songs.

PWRFL Power: Appears in an esurance commercial, interviews himself, and is also one of this year’s Young Ones.

Mates of State: A little something to listen to on this sunny day.

Joy Division, Edie Brickell, Jim Reeves: Their words have been floating in Charles Mudede’s head recently.

Dave Grohl: Pissed that his music is being used to promote geek shit.

The Lashes: Post new songs for free.

Teen Cthulu: Balances out all that pop business I posted earlier.

The Black Crowes, Maxim, and Gawker: (Surprisingly) surviving together.

I’m still obsessed with those tiger pigs:

I just couldn’t decide which of the five million photos from the Triple Grand opening party to put up here (how about some editing next time, vassertron?), so I went with this Tom Selleck head instead, from Flickr pooler shapefarm. Because who doesn’t love Tom Selleck?

• #72: Study Abroad
• #45: Asian Fusion Food
• #57: Juno
• #35: The Daily Show/Colbert Report
• #68: Michel Gondry
• #69: Mos Def

But don’t take my word for it—read the blog.

For the record, I’m barely even half-white; the other half gets a boner over sentences like this:

Cuauhtémoc Figueroa, Obama’s national field director, vowed that the candidate’s effort in Texas would be different.

EDIT: Skitt! In my constantly-working-on-secret-new and exciting-developments-for-this-website lifestyle, I have neglected to read Slog for, like, a week and missed Charles’s post about the same blog. Of course, this post was just an excuse for me to highlight my favorite subject—Aztecs in the News.

News:

Academy Awards! I don’t know what it is—no massively embarrassing contenders for best picture, a writer’s strike that successfully curtailed hysteria season, a colorful presidential primary—but I’m having trouble getting worked up about the Oscars this year. I’ll post my predictions tomorrow or Sunday afternoon, but for now, I give you this badly edited NYT forecast (why does Carr talk about Diving Bell randomly in a category it wasn’t nominated for?)—because he was right on Crash—and Jeffrey Wells—because it’s short.

And, just for the next couple of hours: If you’re doing a movie times search for a Landmark/Seven Gables theater (that’s the Crest, Egyptian, Guild 45th, Harvard Exit, Metro, Neptune, Seven Gables, and the Varsity), don’t use our site. We got some bad data, and I’m trying to fix it, but I’m not there yet. Here’s Landmark’s Seattle page for now.

Opening this week:

From On Screen: the Michel Gondry film Be Kind Rewind (Charles Mudede: “None of this makes sense, none of it is bad, and none of it is as impressive as Eternal Sunshine. What can we call this kind of movie? A very strange fish”), the teen movie Charlie Bartlett (Andrew Wright: “Writer Gustin Nash’s greatest coup may be in the creation of the title character, who comes off as a throwback to the genre’s glory days: smart without being preternaturally wise, cool without seeming forced, and endearing without skimping on the vaguely dickheaded tendencies that made the likes of Ferris Bueller and the kid brother from Just One of the Guys so iconic”), the political thriller Vantage Point (Bradley Steinbacher: “Vantage Point aims to add a little Rashomon to the standard template. It misses the mark badly, resulting in a clunky, unnecessarily complicated thriller that never earns the gimmick of endless repetition it forces the audience to sit through”), the Alabama period piece Honeydripper (me: “John Sayles is good at magnifying details until they look the size of legends, but he’s no good at lengthening moments until they feel like sweaty Southern afternoons, thick with insects and resentment. Honeydripper is long (over two hours), but it doesn’t feel spacious. It feels hopelessly crammed”), and the horror triptych The Signal (Steinbacher again: “You can’t help but wish the directors had abandoned the three-director stunt in order to maintain the near-perfection established in the first act”).

Limited runs:

At Grand Illusion, the Rural Route Film Festival (including the SIFF repeat Huldufolk 102) and the late-night sexploitation film Pets, for real this time; at Northwest Film Forum, the excellent The Cool School: How L.A. Learned to Love Modern Art and a documentary about the making of a piano, Note by Note; at SIFF Cinema, a bad movie about erotic cookery, Eden; at the Market Theater in Post Alley, a marathon festival of short films by and about women; and at Cinerama, the immortal Tron in 70 mm.

Also, at the Varsity, starting today and running through Thursday at 4:45, 7:15, and 9:20 pm (with an extra 2:30 show on Sat-Sun), Alice’s House:

The lovely, intelligent actress Carla Ribas plays Alice, a middle-aged manicurist living in a crowded São Paulo apartment with her three sons, her mother, and her philandering husband. To the continual hum of the television set and a beloved astrological radio show, Alice’s mother cooks and cleans up after her flock, pretending she doesn’t notice glaring evidence of her son-in-law’s misbehavior. The boys tussle with one another and hustle on the side, as a particularly brazen young lady stops by to ask Alice for potions to seduce married men. Meanwhile, Alice’s husband is constantly trying to put her mother in a nursing home, apparently oblivious to the fact that the old lady takes care of all his laundry. Documentarian Chico Teixeira’s first narrative film is casual but busy, and though it seems somewhat longer than its 90-minute running time, the quiet characterizations soon get their hooks into you. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The final results from the omnibus world primary, Democrats Abroad:

Obama is in green, Clinton is in blue.

While a big win for Obama, the enterprising contributor at the website OpenLeft who compiled these numbers noted Hillary running up some fantastic margins in the Dominican Republic and Israel, and winning convincingly in Somalia.

Also, apparently Antarctica is totally an Obama stronghold.

Delegates are won from Democrats Abroad in .5 increments, meaning Obama was awarded 2.5 of the possible 4.5 delegates up for grabs. For those wondering what this is all about, The New Republic did a pretty definitive article on this slightly off-kilter process, which can be found here.

Arkansas university bans Sondheim musical.

A student production of Assassins, the award-winning musical, was to have premiered Thursday night at Arkansas Tech University, but the administration banned it — and permitted a final dress rehearsal Wednesday night (so the cast could experience the play on which students have worked long hours) only on the condition that wooden stage guns were cut in half prior to the event and not used.

The local newspaper reported that the administration was so concerned about the production that reporters were barred from the dress rehearsal. Adding to the anger of many on the campus is that the film American Gangster, featuring plenty of blood and violence — and none from singing historical figures — was screened on campus this week.

(Via ArtsJournal.)

Low-income housing advocates are nervous that Rep. Maralyn Chase’s (D-32, Shoreline) bill to adequately protect tenants who are displaced by condo conversion—which she moved out of the House a few weeks ago—is going to die in the Senate’s consumer protection committee.

The chair of the commitee is liberal Sen. Brian Weinstein (D-41, Mercer Island). Why would Sen. Weinstein sabotage the condo conversion bill? The theory was this: Sen. Weinstein wasn’t going to move on the House condo bill until the House moved on his homeowner protection bill.

Well, I just talked to Sen. Weinstein, and he said, “I expect to pass it,” by next Friday’s deadline. (Bills from the opposite house have until February 29 to pass policy committees.) “I have no problems with the bill,” he said

He also said the theories that he was holding up the condo bill to wait and see what happened on the House side with his homeowners’ rights bill are wrong. “They’re not related,” he said.

He also said he had a good meeting with House Speaker Frank Chopp (D-43, Capitol Hill) about the homeowners’ rights bill. Last year, Weinstein accused Chopp of caving to the BIAW by snuffing Weinstein’s homeowner bill.

He didn’t say Chopp promised to move the bill forward, but he did say: “It was a good discussion. He asked good questions and it was a good meeting. Last year at this time, the bill was dead.”

So: He expects the condo conversion bill to pass and Chopp hasn’t killed his homeowners bill yet.

Don’t do it, Nader. Just… go play with lead toys somewhere. By yourself.

Dems, you might want to stock up on this DVD for emergency loans. It’s a pretty good documentary, actually.

Says her new Texas ad, which again hits the talk vs. action theme:

Photos of a poshlust paradise:

Nabokov on what constitutes poshlust:

English words expressing several, although by no means all aspects of poshlust are for instance: “cheap, sham, common, smutty, pink-and-blue, high falutin’, in bad taste.” My little assistant, Roget’s Thesaurus, (which incidentally lists “rats, mice” under “Insects”—see page 21 of Revised Edition) supplies me moreover with “inferior, sorry, trashy, scurvy, tawdry, gimcrack” and others under “cheapness.” All these however suggest merely certain false values for the detection of which no particular shrewdness is required. In fact they tend, these words, to supply an obvious classification of values at a given period of human history; but what Russians call poshlust is beautifully timeless and so cleverly painted all over with protective tints that its presence (in a book, in a soul, in an institution, in a thousand other places) often escapes detection.

More on poshlust:

A hundred years ago, while civic-minded publicists in St. Petersburg were mixing heady cocktails of Hegel and Schlegel (with a dash of Feuerbach), Gogol, in a chance story he told, expressed the immortal spirit of poshlust pervading the German nation and expressed it with all the vigor of his genius. The conversation around him had turned upon the subject of Germany, and after listening awhile, Gogol said:

Yes, generally speaking the average German is not too pleasant a creature, but it is impossible to imagine anything more unpleasant than a German Lothario, a German who tries to be winsome… . One day in Germany I happened to run across such a gallant. The dwelling place of the maiden whom he had long been courting without success stood on the bank of some lake or other, and there she would be every evening sitting on her balcony and doing two things at once: knitting a stocking and enjoying the view. My German gallant being sick of the futility of his pursuit finally devised an unfailing means whereby to conquer the heart of his cruel Gretchen. Every evening he would take off his clothes, plunge into the lake and, as he swam there, right under the eyes of his beloved, he would keep embracing a couple of swans which had [65] been specially prepared by him for that purpose. I do not quite know what those swans were supposed to symbolize, but I do know that for several evenings on end he did nothing but float about and assume pretty postures with his birds under that precious balcony. Perhaps he fancied there was something poetically antique and mythological in such frolics, but whatever notion he had, the result proved favorable to his intentions: the lady’s heart was conquered just as he thought it would be, and soon they were happily married.

Here you have poshlust in its ideal form, and it is clear that the terms trivial, trashy, smug and so on do not cover the aspect it takes in this epic of the blond swimmer and the two swans he fondled.

The New York Times piece on the spending habits of the Clinton campaign starts with this:

Nearly $100,000 went for party platters and groceries before the Iowa caucuses, even though the partying mood evaporated quickly. Rooms at the Bellagio luxury hotel in Las Vegas consumed more than $25,000; the Four Seasons, another $5,000. And top consultants collected about $5 million in January, a month of crucial expenses and tough fund-raising.

And then, if even possible, gets a thousand times worse. Just to bullet point some of the more memorable ‘you have to be joking’ expenditures:

• Hillary chief strategist Mark Penn’s firm has collected over $10 million from her campaign since she declared for the presidency, $3.8 million in January alone.

• Howard Wolfson, the Clinton campaign’s press secretary, has pulled in $730,000 from the campaign.

• $800,000 was paid to a group called Sunrise Communications, whose job it was to turn out black voters for Clinton in South Carolina.

• Over $95,000 was spent on sandwich platters in Iowa in an attempt to sway people attending the caucus.

By comparison, the article states that Obama has spent 2.8 million for media consultancy and polling throughout the entire campaign, or one million less than Hillary spent in January alone.

While the late quote in the article from former-Dean-campaign-manager-turned-former- Edwards-campaign-manager Joe Trippi might seem slightly less than objective, it probably nails it perfectly:

“The problem is she ran a campaign like they were staying at the Ritz-Carlton,” Mr. Trippi said. “Everything was the best. The most expensive draping at events. The biggest charter. It was like, ‘We’re going to show you how presidential we are by making our events look presidential.’ ”

Midday is sliding out of sight, and it’s officially time to look forward to the evening. Perhaps a perfect gin and tonic among friends, a relieved rehash of the week, a sunset viewing party?

According to various sources, the gin and tonic was an invention of the British East India company, who were quaffing bitter tonic water as a prophylactic against malaria. Quinine—an alkaloid derived from the bark of the South American cinchona tree—was the first effective treatment for malaria, used as early as 1631 in Rome, and is still prescribed in some cases. The story goes that gin—a Dutch medicinal invention of grain spirits flavored with juniper berries—was add to the tonic water to improve the taste (!?). Perhaps the lime was added to ward off scurvy.

Today’s major tonic-water brands are carbonated mixtures of water, high-fructose corn syrup, citric acid, preservatives, and a very low dose of quinine. Cadbury-Schweppes makes both Canada Dry and Schweppes brands, and we can thank German watchmaker Johann Jacob Schweppe for inventing carbonated water in 1783. Whole Foods’ 365 label tonic is sweetened with cane sugar. There is also an emerging market for premium mixers: see the U.K.’s Fever Tree, Stirrings, and Q Tonic. Before you consider the DIY route, look at this guy’s less-than superior results.

Other trivial bits that seem to warrant their own paragraph: Too much quinine can cause something called “cinchoism” (after the tree), symptoms of which include temporary deafness, blurred vision, nausea, ringing in the ears, stomach cramps, and eventually circulatory collapse, kidney failure, and coma. Quinine is an antipyretic, that is, it lowers body temperature. It is commonly prescribed to treat night-time leg crams. And quinine fluoresces under a black light (that’s why your G&Ts glow at the club).

Anyhow, a good gin and tonic is refreshing and simple:

• Add 4-6 ice cubes to a chilled highball glass.

• Pour 2 oz. of a good dry gin over the ice.

• Fill glass almost to the top with tonic.

• Squeeze one wedge of a washed lime into the glass. Drop the squeezed lime into the drink.

If you have the time, ice cubes made from tonic water prevent dilution.

Happy Friday.

UPDATE: Bethany’s Bar Exam column on Six Seven provides more fascinating details on quinine and the cocktail, including the fact that Six Seven (in the Edgewater) serves a terrific and truly homemade G&T.

Other state legislatures, the latest being New Hampshire—are capping rates on payday loans.

The measure would cap interest rates on the small loans - which now top 500 percent in annual terms - at 36 percent a year.

The Democratic near-super-majority in Olympia has killed Rep. Sherry Appleton’s (D-23, Kitsap) payday loan bill two years running now.

Coming forward with rape charges is hard enough—after the initial call to police, it usually involves a trip to the hospital, where the victim undergoes an extensive examination. The exam is generally done with forensic medical exam kit, more commonly known as a “rape kit,” which includes bags for clothing, test tubes for blood, swabs for fluid, a comb for pubic hair, and tests for pregnancy, HIV, gonorrhea, and syphilis.

Today, US News and World Report (via) gives another reason rape victims might avoid stepping forward: In many cases, hospitals charge victims for their rape kits, which can cost well over $1,000. In North Carolina, for example,

“the vast majority of the 3,000 or so emergency room patients examined for sexual assaults each year shoulder some of the cost of a rape kit test.” A state victims compensation fund intended to help cover the bills is woefully underfunded and had capped payouts for the $1,600 test at $1,000. Since Locke’s story ran, “The cap has been lifted,” says North Carolina Department of Crime Control and Public Safety spokesperson Patty McQuillan, though she noted that the legislature would still have to provide the additional funds.

Outrageous.

That Blasted Definition of Insanity: The more the U.S. spends on its “drug-control strategy” in South and Central America, the worse, it seems, things get.

In Colombia, troops this week were convicted of killing their own government’s anti-narcotics agents, funded by the U.S., and a prosecutor in the case has been accused of offering to aid the defense in exchange for dough. In Mexico, where drug-related murders have soared along with U.S. aid, our undeterred Drug Czar wants more of the same—more money to bust pot traffickers. The apparent logic of Drug Czar John “hope for treatment” Walters is that, rather than reducing demand in his own country, the U.S. must increase funding for interdiction campaigns abroad. But that’s obviously not working. Back in the U.S., former Drug Czar staffer John Carnevale released a scathing indictment of Bush’s insane drug-control spending from 2002 through 2009.

A review of the federal drug control budget shows that the current administration continues to favor supply reduction programs over demand reduction programs to reduce the demand for drugs by youth and adults. Since federal fiscal year (FY) 02, the budget has emphasized what research has shown to be the least effective ingredients of a federal drug control policy.

According to data from the Office of National Drug Control Policy, resources for supply reduction have grown the most since FY02, by nearly 57 percent. In fact, supply reduction resources now represent nearly two-thirds of the total federal drug control budget. By comparison, resources for demand reduction grew by less than 3 percent and its share of total resources now represents only about one-third of all resources.

Bush Administration Federal Drug Control Spending, by Function
FY 2002-FY 2009 (Budget Authority in Millions)

Get Them Off Drugs: Bill proposes withholding welfare from folks who fail piss test.

Get Them Off: Playboy launches new energy drink.

Get Them a Drink: Elysian winter beer festival on Saturday.

Double Jeopardy: Gov. Spitzer proposes crack tax.

Double Scotch: Liquor companies opposing China’s ban on lunchtime drinking.

High Strung: Man puts out girlfriend’s cigarette with fire extinguisher.

High Tide: 100 lbs of cocaine wash up on beach.

High Time: Bill would require F.D.A. oversight of tobacco.

On His Knees: Aaron Carter allegedly caught with pot, held in Texas jail.

I found this at the bottom of my snail-mail box…

I have no idea how long this Polaroid has been in my box, and I don’t recognize the folks in the shot. Can someone help me out here?

In other news, Polaroid is dead. Long live digital photographs!

This is awesome.

Stop Josh Feit before he ruins Oly

Published by Emmett on Friday, February 22, 2008 at 8:00 AM

I’ve been quiet throughout most of the legislative session about the cruel metonymy of Olympia.

While I’ll probably never be able to stop reporters, bloggers, pundits and conservative politicians from using the term “Olympia” to signify “state government” or rather “everything I hate about state government,” Feit of the Stranger has gone too far.

In recent posts on Slog, Feit has started to use the shortened “Oly” when talking about state capital campus goings-ons:

Oly Update: Take Heart Carless in Seattle
Oly Action
Oly Inaction

I’m sure you’d say: sure, Feit writes for the Stranger, so it could be assumed that he’d use the hipper, shorter “Oly” when writing about state politics.

Hell no!

Olympia is not Oly.

Olympia is the capital of the state of Washington, identifiable on maps in classrooms and travel lodges nationwide. It is a city that every elementary school kid memorizes (do they still do that?) as a state capital of a state near the end of the list of states. It was the first state capital and through a hard fight with Yakima and Ellensburg, stayed the state capital. Now we have fancy greek type buildings on a hill. It is home to state agencies, even the ones that are in Tacoma. And, for a couple months or so every winter, we’re home to folks like Josh Feit, though we actually try hard to ignore them.

Oly is a hometown, its where a lot of us are from. Though, tons of us are not from here (I’m from here, btw), the transplants will defend Oly with the fervor of a converted Catholic. Oly’s connection to Olympia is that we have some activists and many of us feed at the public trough. But, Oly as Oly has more to do with Evergreen, Lakefair, the house that Kurt Cobain lived in, and the Spaghetti Bowl. And the wood bat tournament. Oly is Oly in relation to Tumwater (Scumwater) and Lacey Sucks.

While I’d rather people use terms like “state government” or “the state legislature” when they’d rather be lazy and say “Olympia,” using the term “Oly” is entirely unacceptable. Please stop.

The wood bat tournament? I’m hoping that’s about bats—like flying nighttime bats—and not maple baseball bats.

My apologies, Emmett. I’m sure there’s much more to Oly than the goofy state capitol grounds. I have had some nice times sitting at the bar at Ramblin’ Jacks and perusing the great record and book shops on 4th St.

If you’ve got some other recommendations for proper Oly Action—good pizza?—let me know. I don’t tend to get off campus much.

This is worth checking out: Next Wednesday, Feb. 27 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at UW Medical Center, there’s going to be a panel discussion about the contention that pharmacists should have the right to refuse to dispense medication they don’t approve of. Last year, the state Board of Pharmacy adopted rules requiring pharmacies to fill prescriptions for all medications, including Plan B.

What’ll make the discussion interesting is the presence of panelist Donna Dockter—a former member of the Board of Pharmacy who pushed the “conscience clause”—and owner of Sand Point Clinic Pharmacy.

Dockter, whose pharmacy has never refused to dispense Plan B, is a liberal—I profiled her in a feature story I did on the debate in 2006. But her cantankerous arguments on behalf of dissident pharmacists challenge liberal conventional wisdom on the issue.

It was Dockter’s strong will on the issue—in private negotiations with the governor and women’s health care advocates in the fall of ‘06—that ratcheted back the health care advocates’ demands for sweeping regulations to force all pharmacists to comply with the pharmacy board’s rules.

Certainly, the state’s guidelines—now being challenged in court—guarantee that women can get supposedly controversial medication like Plan B—but the guidelines weren’t as stringent as the advocates originally wanted.

For example, a pharmacist who hates you for requesting Plan B can pass you off to a coworker.

Highly recommended.

We saw it coming, though we hoped it wouldn’t—Velocity Dance Center has been priced out of Oddfellows Hall. They’ll move out July 31st, 2008.

This is a tragedy, not so much for dance (I am confident Velocity, which won one of The Stranger’s first Genius Awards, will find a new home), but for architecture: Velocity is one of the prettiest theaters—one of the prettiest anythings—in Seattle, with its gleaming blonde wood floorboards, frieze of roaring lions, ceilings so high they make a person dizzy, and, in the foyer, dark wood tables and benches that look like they were carved and pieced together by someone long ago, maybe on the beach of a tropical island, and floated over to Seattle in the hold of a tall ship.

(The furniture’s nice, but the hardwood floors are my favorite. You can’t tell unless you look closely, but the wood—that, from any normal distance, glows like skin—is beautifully scarred with thousands of tiny pockmarks. “Somebody went crazy with a staple gun,” former director KT Niehoff told me two years ago, for this column about Velocity’s tenth birthday. “A handful of us spent a week, all day and all night, just pulling up staples.”)

You should drop by Velocity soon, just to admire its insides.

Kara O’Toole (dancer, choreographer, and current Velocity director) says the dance center needs a temporary residence for about three years and hopes to eventually move into Washington Hall, the dilapidated building with a dignified history on the corner of 14th and Fir:

The building used to be home to On the Boards and its stage has been graced by W. E. B. Du Bois, MLK, Count Basie, Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, and so on.

The Sons of Haiti currently own Washington Hall, but Historic Seattle is trying to buy it in the hopes that CD Forum and, now, Velocity can move in.

Back in November, Ted Schroth, the new owner of Oddfellows, wrote: “Paying retail for a building and not tearing it down creates the economic reality of having to raise rents to market levels in order to make retaining the building feasible from an investment standpoint.”

Two months later, he said, more directly: “I don’t want to sound like a victim, because I’m not, but I can’t afford to subsidize the arts.”

Don’t be mad at Mr. Schroth. He is as good as his word.

Still—July 31, 2008 will be a dismal day.

Eat more drumsticks:

Broiler (meat) chickens have been subjected to intense genetic selection. In the past 50 years, broiler growth rates have increased by over 300% (from 25 g per day to 100 g per day). There is growing societal concern that many broiler chickens have impaired locomotion or are even unable to walk. Here we present the results of a comprehensive survey of commercial flocks which quantifies the risk factors for poor locomotion in broiler chickens. We assessed the walking ability of 51,000 birds, representing 4.8 million birds within 176 flocks. We also obtained information on approximately 150 different management factors associated with each flock. At a mean age of 40 days, over 27.6% of birds in our study showed poor locomotion and 3.3% were almost unable to walk. The high prevalence of poor locomotion occurred despite culling policies designed to remove severely lame birds from flocks. …

Worldwide approximately 2×10¹⁰ broilers are reared within similar husbandry systems.

(Gluten fearing monkeys, dog parasites and bullies after the jump.)

Continue reading "Imbibing, Brains and Bullies" »

Yesterday, I wrote about how the Booker Prize people were awarding a “Best of the Booker Prize” Prize.

Today, news comes that bookmakers have placed Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi way up on the list of potential winners.

Jesus fucking Christ.

The Life of Pi is the M. Night Shyamalan movie of the book world, an embarrassing piece of fluff strung out into a “twist” ending so weak and unnatural that the author had to couch the twist with its own criticism in order to get away with it.

I remember when Martel read here in Seattle, just after winning the Booker, and someone in the audience asked him, basically, why he’s so great and why his book is so goddamned wonderful. “Well,” Martel responded, his voice thick with the condescension of a Wise Man about to Distribute Knowledge to the Ignorant Masses, “I think you can look at the book in three different ways…” And then he proceeded to provide thoughtfully fawning, awestruck, in-depth literary criticism of his own book. I have never seen this before or since, and I have attended readings by John Irving, who believes that John Irving is the Messiah. My jaw (literally) dropped, but the audience lapped it up and gave a huge round of applause.

If Yann Martel wins the Booker King Prize, I will stop reading Booker Prize-winning books. This isn’t a huge sacrifice, of course, because the nominees for the Booker Prize that don’t wind up winning are actually almost always better than the winner of the Booker Prize. But it will be the strongest piece of evidence yet that lit prizes don’t mean shit. And there’s a lot of evidence that points in that direction already.

The Independent Spirit Awards are tomorrow, and competing for the producers award are two NW players: Portland’s Neil Kopp (Old Joy, Paranoid Park) and Seattle’s Alexis Ferris (Police Beat, Zoo, and—maybe this one should be on the DL—Cthulhu). The other nominee is Anne Clements, who produced the lovely, if less high-minded, Quinceañera.

The award is accompanied by a $25,000 grant. Here are Variety’s mini-profiles of the contenders.

Also on Saturday: a sendoff party/fundraiser for Lynn Shelton’s boy-bonding drama My Effortless Brilliance, starring Calvin Reeder, Basil Harris, and Sean Nelson, Emeritus. The film is premiering in competition at SXSW on March 9. The party is at Northwest Film Forum at 11 pm: food, booze, Sean singing, good times.

I’ve already given some Slog to the the Democrats’ election-year tough-on-crime kick. (Don’t want those Republicans to think Democrats are softies.)

Now this bill has come to my attention. The bill, co-sponsored by Seattle House Democrat Mary Lou Dickerson (D-36), broadens the definition of “gang member” and increases the punishments for crimes that are then considered gang related.

Activists focused on the unfair treatment of African Americans by law enforcement are alarmed by the bill—which also puts $2 million into a grant program to help fight gang activity. (I’ve included an e-mail from Justice Works below the jump that highlights some of their concerns about the bill.)

There’s a public hearing on the bill scheduled for next Wednesday.

Continue reading "Oly Action: Democrats Continue Pushing Tough-on-Crime Agenda" »