Republicans were hoping to tar Democrat Don Cazayoux by associating him with scary, scary Barack Obama. One National Republican Congressional Committee ad blared, “A vote for Cazayoux is a vote for Obama.” But the results of the special election are in, and Cazayoux is the new House representative for Louisiana’s 6th CD (a traditionally red district). He’s also a newly minted superdelegate.

Meanwhile, Obama’s 7-vote victory in Guam is headed for a recount. Doesn’t look like the delegate tie is going to break, though. Darn!

Sister VixXxen of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

The best part about Sister VixXxen’s outfit?

“It’s all E-Bay, honey,” she says.

Uh oh. Earlier this week Hillary Clinton instructed supporters to bet on the filly in the Kentucky Derby. In other words: Bet on Eight Belles, the only female in the horse race (and, Clinton obviously hoped, a potentially promising metaphor/omen for herself and her chances of winning the Democratic nomination).

Well, as local sports fanatic Seth Kolloen just pointed out via email (and on his blog), it didn’t go so well for the filly today.

In a development that you couldn’t even make up, Eight Belles finished second, but broke both her ankles during the race, collapsed at the end, and was immediately euthanized on the track.

Can’t wait to see how Clinton spins this one.

Holy shit! Obama is winning Guam! This wasn’t supposed to happen, was it? One of the biggest villages has yet to file results in the firehouse primary-style “caucus,” but Obama is currently ahead 53.3% to 46.7%.

My dearest wish today is that the half-vote thing has an appreciable effect on the final delegate totals. With 8 half votes at stake, the split could actually be 2.5 to 1.5 delegates or something wacky like that.

1. You can still smoke in bars in Portland, Oregon, despite the passage of an anti-smoking-in-bars-and-restaurants law here ten or so years ago. Oregon’s smoking ban doesn’t go into effect until January of 2009. Last night I ordered a drink from a shirtless, smoking bartender. Ugh on both counts.

2. You can stand outside bars in Portland’s Pearl District with a drink in your hand—right out there on the sidewalk, like you were in Munich or London or Paris. Apparently they don’t have Washington-state-style liquor control board Nazis down here making sure there’s a moat and a drawbridge separating dissolute drinkers from—think of the children!—defenseless minors.

3. The student newspaper at Beaverton High School—home of the Beavers—is called The Hummer. It only seems fair.

Music

Nicemaster Nice at Lo_fi Performance Gallery

• See what else is happening in Music on Saturday »

Art

‘While’ at OKOK

• See what else is happening in Art on Saturday »

^{Installation shot of Jenny Heishman’s rain-activated Water Mover (2008), steel, bucket}

Water Mover is a permanent public piece at Ernst Park; its dedication ceremony is today at 4 pm. (Park web site here.)

Only one reading tonight. Cristina Garcia is reading at the Elliott Bay Book Company from A Handbook To Luck, a novel. I had a girlfriend who loved Cristina Garcia. Things ended badly with that girlfriend, and that’s why I’ve never read Cristina Garcia. She could be a lovely author for all I know, and I should totally get over it. I have a similar situation with Gretl Ehrlich.

Also, it’s Free Comic Book Day. If you go to pretty much any comic book shop, you should be able to get free comic books. Some shops that are participating in Free Comic Book Day have advertised in our paper this week, including a shop I’ve never been to, Dreamstrands, up in Greenlake. Apparently, Jonah Spangenthal-Lee thinks that Free Comic Book Day is a bunch of bullshit, but his post has some good recommendations for comics to look for if you’re interested.

And now, some advice from Ernest Hemingway:

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is ready for you now.

Have dinner with the Latinos at El Centro’s Cinco de Mayo Celebration this afternoon at the Jefferson Community Center (3801 Beacon Ave S, in Jefferson Park) from 4-9 pm. It’s free.

Traditional foods—tacos, horchata, limonada—artisan crafts, multilingual books, an Oaxacan band, an Aztec dance circle, Skin Deep Tribal Bellydance, and lots of local Latino and Latina flavor. Proceeds benefit El Centro de la Raza, a Seattle nonprofit that serves as the voice and hub of the Latino community in Seattle.

Hola!

posted by news intern Chris Kissel

Whoops: Hospital damaged, workers injured after U.S. strike in Sadr City.

Back to work: After nation-wide moratorium, thirty-five states get ready to kill some people.

Back to the polls: Zimbabwe opposition party weighs possibility of run-off election.

Russert vs. Stephanopoulos: The other big rivalry of the year.

Food woes: In the face of skyrocketing food prices, Asian Development Bank worries about gains made in reduction of poverty.

Microhoo: Microsoft gives in, makes higher bid for Yahoo.

Ace Smith, Clinton strategist: Preparing North Carolina for Hillary Clinton.

Indiana: Looking good for Obama.

Liver patient dies: Medical-marijuana user’s death demands a second look at hospital policy.

Taxed books: Amazon suing over New York’s sales tax law.

Spam reaches 30-year anniversary!

The first recognisable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC - a now-defunct computer-maker.

The message was sent via Arpanet - the internet’s forerunner - and won its sender much criticism from recipient…

…Statistics gathered by the FBI suggest that 75% of net scams snare people through junk e-mail. In 2007 these cons netted criminals more than $239m (£121m).

Statistics suggest that more than 80%-85% of all e-mail is spam or junk and more than 100 billion spam messages are sent every day.

The majority of these messages are being sent via hijacked home computers that have been compromised by a computer virus.

Correlation is not causation, but…

(The blue line is US GDP in billions of barrels of oil, at “current” dollars/prices for the given year. The red line is a four year moving average of the same. Values for 2008 are the current estimate for annual GDP over last week’s oil price.)

… check out the nifty inflection points in 1993 and 2001.

Now I want to do per-capita GDP in barrels of oil….

Free Comic Book Day (FCBD) is, in concept, a great thing. Tomorrow, you can walk into just about any comic store and walk out with an armful of free comics. The event is supposed to pump more money into the long-stagnant comic industry by drawing in new readers and get people to see that (some) comics are more than just a bunch of big dudes in spandex punching shit.

Well, FCBD’s supposed to help change that perception. There are plenty of great independent, non-superhero books on the market right now, but FCBD isn’t doing doing much to push those books on the public and, unfortunately, FCBD is really set up to benefit the big two: Marvel and DC

For FCBD, comic shops can order batches of books at cost—about 12-40 cents a book, depending on the title—but in order to get a break on independent books, retailers first have to buy about 250 copies of ten different mostly superhero books. At cost, that only works out to about $50, plus shipping, but according to one local retailer, that pricing scheme is keeping comic shops from promoting indie books.

Aaron Tarbuck, owner of The Dreaming in the University District—full disclosure: that’s where I get my comics—says he’d rather promote books like Atomic Robo than give Marvel and DC more money. “The independent, [who is] probably not even drawing a profit, he’s the guy who needs me to be buying these from him,” Tarbuck says. “The big guys can write this off.”

It’s unfortunate FCBD doesn’t put as much of an emphasis on indie books, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hunt something down when you’re in a comic store tomorrow.
Look for Ganges by Kevin Huizenga, Glamourpuss by Dave Sim or anything by Oni Press. Or just ask your friendly neighborhood comic book guy for a recommendation.

I got this letter in the mail today, along with a self-published cookbook:

Nobody here at the office can recall anything like this happening before. I guess that I must give off that “My reviews can be bought for twenty bucks” vibe. Should I just return the money, or should I do something more creative with it? Someone suggested using the money to buy groceries to make some of the recipes. Or there’s always booze.

News:

Wee but savvy Picturehouse may merge with struggling distribution label Warner Independent Pictures.

Nicole Kidman is set to play Dusty Springfield in a biopic written by—uh oh—Michael Cunningham (The Hours, Evening).

Paul Verhoeven thinks Jesus was the product of a rape!

Opening this week:

You have precisely one week to see the following image on the big screen (at the Varsity):

Charles Mudede reviews Flight of the Red Balloon, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s tribute to the beloved ’50s French film The Red Balloon, which recently got a handsome DVD release from Criterion. Charles takes advantage of this opportunity to write about why we go to foreign films: “The class of people who frequently watch foreign-language films must not be separated from those who frequently travel to faraway places to experience other worlds. The foreign-film lover is a species of this larger type, the tourist, with the sole exception that he/she doesn’t travel far to see strange things, wonderful places, bizarre habits.”

And in the print edition of On Screen this week, the no-good, very-bad rom com Made of Honor (me: “Do not make me address the abhorrent pun in the title”—though I kind of wish I had written: “Made of Honor is made of poop”), Helen Hunt’s directorial debut Then She Found Me (Paul Constant: “It’s hard to imagine anyone clamoring for Helen Hunt’s directorial debut [outside of Helen Hunt, of course]”), and—oh my goodness, this one isn’t excruciating—the dark pop musical Love Songs (me: “The film never fails to fascinate, if only for the exceedingly French way it deals with ethnic types, from comic lines about Ismaël the uncircumcised Jew and Erwann the gay Breton to self-consciously sober shots of more exotic immigrants passing silently in the streets”).

Only to be found online this week is Andrew Wright’s review of Iron Man (“The megabucks cinematic adaptation is pleasant enough, but it doesn’t live up to the promise of its almost obscenely qualified and willing cast”).

Also online only: The DVD column returns! For an issue. Here is the inimitable Michael Atkinson on the stop-motion auteur Ray Harryhausen: “Unlike CGIs, Harryhausen’s homely behemoths obey the same laws of movement that constrain the actors, and inhabit the same space, turf, gravity, and sunlight. Their three-dimensionality is not illusory, and their hesitant, abruptly animalistic, unblurred motions remain qualmy and loaded with frisson.”

Lindy West went to the Seattle Polish Film Festival last weekend, and found more stop-motion genius. Scarecrow Video would like you to know that, no matter what the Seattle Polish Film Festival asserts, they do have a copy of The Tale of the Fox. It’s PAL, though, so for region-free players only.

Tucked away in Limited Runs this week is every single movie playing at the Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival. Quite a few filmmakers are attending, and the info is noted in the film short—I’m told Everything’s Cool director Judith Helfand is quite entertaining. Also: Blade Runner: The Final Cut at the Egyptian, NWFF’s Duel of the Cool—pitting the Jean-Paul Belmondo of Le Doulos against the Marcello Mastroianni of 8 1/2, the nutso Japanese creation Maiko Haaaaan!!! at the Grand Illusion, Four Sheets to the Wind and more in Northwest Folklife’s City Folk Film Series at SIFF Cinema, the “sweet, nostalgic” Graduation at the Varsity, Rawstock at ACT Theatre, Young Frankenstein at Central Cinema, and, starting again Tuesday, more United Artists films at SIFF Cinema, including Marty, In the Heat of the Night, and Night of the Hunter.

For all your movie times needs, use ours.

My week is ending poorly.

Rather than go into a lengthy whine about irritatingly arrogant-yet-foolish coworkers, crappily designed and maintained websites, the evil of both the SAX and DOM XML parsers in Python and “what, you can only do one miracle at a time” management, I’d rather present you with an appropriately glum bit of my knowledge.

Thus, I present to you Science’s top five most awesomest nuclear weapons of all time!

V. Little Boy

Little Boy was the first nuclear weapon used on a human population during the decimation of Hiroshima. I happen to love the evil simplicity of the beast.

Let’s take a moment to talk about what makes an atomic bomb go boom. Every element secretly, deeply, desperately wishes to be iron—atomic number 26. The bigger or smaller you—Mr. element—are, the more you yearn for iron-ness. As the fatter elements or skinnier elements get closer to the ideal of iron, they breathe some relief—in the form of a massive release of energy. Boom!

Take Uranium, for example. At a mighty atomic number of 92, it’s so irritable! This is a big boy, coming in isotopes of 238, 235 or 234; the rare 235 variety is particularly ready to cause some mayhem. When it spontaneously splits into two smaller atoms—a little bit closer to iron. YES!—it flings off high energy neutron bullets that have a tendency to split other obese atoms. Get enough U235 in a small space, and a chain reaction starts, resulting in a whole mess of atoms splitting in a short period of time. Combine all the energy and you have a big boom.

So, you’re tasked with building a bomb around these ideas. Some general comes to your desk and tells you “here are kilograms of Uranium enriched for 235. Make a bomb that will definitely work. We don’t want to look bad in front of the Japanese. Boom, or it’s your ass!”

You think to yourself… hmm… if I put this much U235 together it’ll explode. Let’s split this amount into two pieces, and put them on opposite ends of a loooong track. One piece will be bolted in place, the other on a little track, with wheels and shit. Put a little chemical explosive charge at the end of the piece-on-wheels, careening it towards the fixed bigger piece. When they meet, BOOOOM! Excellent. While the bomb might blow itself to pieces before all the U235 can fission, spreading incredibly radioactive half-split products all over the place, who gives a shit! They’re just Japanese! And it’s my ass if there isn’t a boom.

Ah! Little boy was invented.

Very few actual atomic bombs have this design. What if the little piece falls of the track?! No boom! No dead Japanese! It’s your ass. The Fat Man-style plutonium implosion device is quite a bit more popular. Still, not everyone has gotten the memo. The North Korean nuke, so far as we can guess, was most likely a Little Boy-like device. Hence more a fizzle than a boom. I cannot imagine what the poor North Korean bomb engineer’s week-after was like. To quote Ghostbusters, “Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!”

Continue reading "The Top Five Nuclear Weapons of All Time" »

Jesus Christ, people! Seventy-somthin’ somethin’ comments on a post about Tao Lin’s feature this week! Lin does seem to be a bit of an inter-web lightning rod. In June of last year, Gawker had it out with Tao Lin:

Tao Lin, I know you’re reading this. I just want you to know that because of your ill-conceived self-marketing strategy, you have 100% guaranteed that I will never read your damned book with its oh-so-wacky title…Your publicity games aren’t a play on fame-seeking or celebrity culture. Actually, you’re maybe perhaps the single most irritating person we’ve ever had to deal with—and you wouldn’t believe our in-box. Stop it. Stop it now. And now we will go back to never mentioning you again.

but then they pardoned him for the piece that he wrote for us back in November, about the varying levels of greatness that American writers can attain.

Then he got into a fight with n+1 by printing his entire correspondence with editor Benjamin Kunkel. He also ran some of an e-mail that was probably not intended for him:

Well, I read or tried to read Tao Lin’s story. It’s not horrible, nor horribly written—some of it is pretty nice—but I found it over-rhetorical, full of the deliberate whimsy afflicting many of our younger writers, and it seemed kind of aimless too, although I might not have thought so if I’d read through to the end.

And then he or a friend of his might have accidentally called someone a faggot.

I just read a little of that right before going to a reading at Melville House where Tao was in the lineup—I hadn’t seen him in maybe six months. Weirdly, he read a story with me in it as a character, incorporating my emails and gmail chats. Afterward I finished reading the comments and they seemed so exasperatingly stupid/ugly that I posted, “Judgments of quality aside, many people posting here in “defense” of Tao could stand to be a lot less obnoxious about it…” A couple minutes later—although I didn’t see it until the next afternoon—Zachary German wrote, “you are a faggot…you have sex with other gay men like yourself” on my blog, and then “syke.”

On Eric’s blog, Tao said, “i don’t approve of calling people faggots…” When I noted that his friend Zachary German had just called me a faggot, Tao said, “he typed that as a ‘joke’ just to show me on the screen then i accidentally pushed ‘enter’ or something.” Accidentally! I’m laughing.

The comments for all of these posts are numerous and fervent. All of which is to say that apparently, Tao Lin is the master of the Internet.

New York City: Racial bias in skyrocketing pot arrests.

A study released Tuesday reported that between 1998 and 2007, the police arrested 374,900 people whose most serious crime was the lowest-level misdemeanor marijuana offense.

That is more than eight times the number of arrests on those same charges between 1988 and 1997, when 45,300 people were picked up for having a small amount of pot.

Nearly everyone involved in this wave of marijuana arrests is male: 90 percent were men, although national studies show that men and women use pot in roughly equal rates. And 83 percent of those charged in these cases were black or Latino, according to the study. Blacks accounted for 52 percent of the arrests, twice their share of the city’s population. Whites, who are about 35 percent of the population, were only 15 percent of those charged — even though federal surveys show that whites are more likely than blacks or Latinos to use pot.

South Korea: Six teachers busted getting high.

Which employers aren’t drug testing? These ones.

Alcohol Impact Areas: Meaningless.

Thrifty Consumers: Cutting back on Starbucks.

One Down, An Infinite Number To Go: Colombia kills kingpin.

Probed: Wachovia for drug-money laundering.

Rerouted: Cocaine to Europe.

Detained: Child placed in state custody after father accidentally gives him hard lemonade at baseball game.

The 47-year-old academic says he wasn’t even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.

“I’d never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it,” Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. “And it’s certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old.”

But it wasn’t until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo’s hand. “You know this is an alcoholic beverage?” the guard asked the professor.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.

The Comerica cop estimated that Leo had drunk about 12 ounces of the hard lemonade, which is 5% alcohol. But an ER resident who drew Leo’s blood less than 90 minutes after he and his father were escorted from their seats detected no trace of alcohol. But it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte’s wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.

The Nigerian author of this book…
…Dr. N.D. Audu, is also author of: I Love Raising the Dead. Who can better that title? Who?

Just wanted to chime in re: Paul’s assessment of Pike Street Fish Fry. It is awesome.

It’s the perfect combination of good food (fish fresh daily from Mutual Fish Company; housemade sauces such as tartar, preserved lemon aioli, chili mayo, salsa verde, curry ketchup) and the kind of greasy food you crave when you’re drunk. Which I happened to be the last two nights when I stopped in for dinner. (Thank god the Jack in the Box on Broadway has closed and cannot stand in the way of me and the Fish Fry.)

Wednesday night was fried asparagus (get it!), fried halibut, grilled spearfish, and Spanish fries (alas, too sweet for my taste). Last night it was a fried oyster sandwich with the preserved lemon aioli and housemade slaw, which is delicious, super tart, and made with red cabbage. But my favorite thing is the slices of lemon they fry up and serve alongside the fish—unexpected, amazing.

Pike Street Fish Fry isn’t exactly cheap (last night’s sandwich set me back $8.81), but for the quality of the food, it’s reasonable. If any of you find yourself inebriated and anywhere near the corner of Pike & 10th this weekend, do yourself a favor and stop by.

Methinks Rockstar Games would be wise to mock Seattle in a future video game. Your entries for the Grand Theft Auto: Emerald City contest were full of corruption, elitists, slums, bicyclists, asshole developers, and creative uses of landmarks and stereotypes. Well done! Thanks for building the next great crime simulator—and, in the case of entry #35, the next utter, soul-crushing depression simulator. Jesus, man.

Shorter entries with a flair for the cinematic were appreciated:

[After throwing Clay Bennett off of the Space Needle:] The silhouette of Bennett’s falling body against backdrop of Key Arena at sunset.

Kidnap the Pig on Parade from Pike’s Place market and violate it in no less than two holes.

Film a woman fisting herself on the Jimi Hendrix statue.

Jonah leaned toward these two eloquent, city-appropriate crime ideas:

Smoke a bowl, then steal a bike from a messenger and ride to city hall to hand out pot brownies to the Mayor’s staff, all while armed to the teeth.

Jaywalk.

And my personal favorite came from Steve in Chicago:

Get elected to Emerald City council. Consistently use your influence to table motions expanding greenbelt development while quietly softening restrictions on payday lenders. Also, kill a hooker. Dark irony bonus awarded if you bury her body in a P-Patch.

But, as many of you predicted, the Stranger council wholeheartedly agreed that entry #9 beat everyone to the punch with what’s probably the most appropriate “criminal mission” in a Seattle video game:

1. Pick up posse at 23rd and Jackson. 2. Down to MLK. 3. Back to 23rd. 4. Up Union to Broadway. 5. Down Broadway to Taco Bell — closed! 6. Back to Dick’s; pick up girl; start a fight.

S. Ben Melhuish, you life-long Mix-a-Lot fan, this copy of GTA IV for the PS3 is yours. Even though S. Ben later posted that he didn’t have a PS3, we didn’t care. As Jonah put it, “he can trade that shit in, or cut it up and snort it.”

The Seattle PI had a poetry contest and picked this poem as the best:

“Bloodspell” by Marie-Caroline Moir:

Now just ho there, splayed peacock,

and spare the poor girl but a ruby

from your pomegranate heart.

She’s far goner than long and

nosing that notch in your seashell ear

(the mere thought of it!)

just sends her —

wakes her daily with a tickle/thump

before the shuffling on of sun,

and the augur of hair patties from the

mystic drain.

Should you not want her,

she may end up in rubber sandals

and very loose pants,

at some artists’ commune

stuffed up in the Ozarks.

Making origami jockstraps

and other gestures of homage.

This is what the judges had to say about “Bloodspell”:

The poem demonstrates a wonderful mixture of sincerity and surprising humor, alloying its various tones and moods into something completely its own. The language leaps energetically from one verbal register to another (we go from the arcane and serious ‘augur’ to the gross and everyday ‘hair patties,’ from the antiquated greeting ‘ho’ to unmistakably contemporary language), and the imagery — pomegranate heart, hair patties, origami jockstrap — is as original as it is vivid.

The above reasons for admiring the poem are as bad as the poem itself.

On a slow news day, massive time wasters are of essential value to anyone tasked with producing blog content. Thankfully, New York magazine has produced a time waster of such staggering depth that you could literally disappear into it for hours of lost productivity:

The Electopedia is the home for all minutia—sometimes interesting, often pointless— regarding the three remaining contenders for the presidency. Who is Barack Obama’s worst political enemy? What Swedish band does John McCain threaten to play in the White House elevators? How do the three candidates get along with their siblings?

(Answers after the cut!)

It’s Friday, and it’s approaching late afternoon. Don’t even pretend you have something more interesting to be doing.

Continue reading "My Life with the Electopedia" »

In a video essay airing tonight, he tries to unpack some of the reaction to Wright’s comments—and laments the “double standard” and the media circus that he says contributed to the whole mess:

Remember that British one-hit wonder Living in a Box that performed the song Living in a Box off the album Living in a Box? I know—you were trying to forget. But Mithun Architects is keeping the memory alive. They wanted to live out every vagabond’s dream of converting an old freight container into swank digs. But there’s one catch to the metal cargo-conversion fantasy.

“It’s hard to beat the cost of wood in the Pacific Northwest,” says Joel Egan of HyBrid, a Seattle-based construction firm commissioned to build prototype residential units. So, rather than steel boxes like some pre-fab projects in Australia and England, an apartment building with ground level retail proposed for Dexter Avenue North will contain about 60 boxes built from wood (a pop-up about how they’re built is here).

Two stacked units, at approximately 675 square feet each, look like this:

Together in an apartment building—after being assembled in a warehouse, delivered by truck, and plunked down by a crane—they will look something like this:

The greatest benefits of pre-fab apartment buildings are for the financiers of development. Although the construction costs, according to Tammie Schacher of Mithun, remain the same as on-site construction (the goal is $80-90 per square foot), the construction time decreases by three to six months—reducing the window of investment risk and adding months to collect rental fees. One hopes the savings are passed down to renters.

On the con side is the potential for flat-faced, dinky-looking buildings. The boxes don’t lend themselves to the variety of shapes to create interesting visual relief as on-site construction. However, there are examples, such as one in Manchester (pop-up), which looks quite dashing. In the preferred scheme of the proposal that went up for early design guidance this week, the boxes stood clustered together like several World’s Fair motels connected by pathways through the air. This has roughly the same esthetic effect of giant hamster cages connected by Habit Trails.

We’ll hold out opinion on the appearance until more designs are in, as the city needs more inexpensive apartments and Mithun fucking rocks. As for the dream of converting a cargo container into an upscale slumber tube, “All of us are hoping we can [eventually] get to a metal frame building,” says Schacher.

(A few times a week, I take a new book with me to lunch and give it a half an hour or so to grab my attention. Lunch Date is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)

Who’s your date today? Mortarville, by Grant Bailie.

Where’d you go? This is a very special Lunch Date. It’s actually more of a Dinner Date: last night, I went to Pike Street Fish Fry. They’re only open from 5 ‘till “Late,” so it’s not strictly lunch, although I hadn’t eaten lunch when I went there at 5:30, so it still counts.

What’d you eat? I had the cheapest order of fish, which was a white fish($5.50). And I had an order of Spanish Fries ($5), which is a regular order of french fries with sour cream and spicy sauce.

How was the food? Awesome. The fries aren’t as good as Frites’ fries were, but they’re still good. The Spanish part of the Spanish fries, with the sour cream and the spicy sauce, was a little excessive: Next time I’m getting the regular fries and the curry ketchup. If I was drunk, I’d be all about getting the Spanish on, though. The fish was light and juicy and fried just right. Next time I might try the asparagus instead of fish. The biggest problem I had with the place was the lack of wet-naps: I smelled like an armless Alaskan fisherman by the time I was done eating.


What does your date say about itself? The author came to town a few weeks ago, but I just got a copy of the book in the mail yesterday. It’s about an artificial human created by mad scientists, born from a spigot, who gets a job as a mall security guard.

Is there a representative quote? Try the first three sentences: “My parents died in a fire before I was born. Drs. John and Jonathon Smithee—no relation. It was a fate that befalls so many of our better mad scientists.”

Will you two end up in bed together? Yes. I’m very excited to read this one. I’ve been on a bit of a depressing run in fiction, lately—I’ve been reading a lot of books that seem like they should be interesting, but they never really work out to actually be interesting. This one, at least, seems funny and weird and vaguely sweet.

…who was just accosted by an older African-American man who spent a minute and a half trying to convince you that you “look exactly like that girl from Kill Bill—what’s her name? The karate expert!”: You handled that very well.

(In all fairness, the clerk in question was female, and some sort of Asian, with hair. But she resembles Lucy Liu about as much as I resemble Emilio Estevez.)

A question more daunting for Barack Obama than “How do I win working class whites?” may end up being “How do I win working class white supremacists?” My feeling is that it may take more than having a beer at the local VFW Hall.

From George Packer, of The New Yorker:

J. K. Patrick, a retired state employee from a neighboring county, wore a button on his shirt that said “Hillary: Smart Choice.”

“East of Lexington she’ll carry seventy per cent of the primary vote,” he said. Kentucky votes on May 20. “She could win the general election in Kentucky.” I asked about Obama. “Obama couldn’t win.”

Why not?

“Race,” Patrick said matter-of-factly. “I’ve talked to people—a woman who was chair of county elections last year, she said she wouldn’t vote for a black man.” Patrick said he wouldn’t vote for Obama either.

Why not?

“Race. I really don’t want an African-American as President. Race.”

What about race?

“I thought about it. I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion. After 1964, you saw what the South did.” He meant that it went Republican. “Now what caused that? Race. There’s a lot of white people that just wouldn’t vote for a colored person. Especially older people. They know what happened in the sixties. Under thirty—they don’t remember. I do. I was here.”

As it often seems that, lacking any other kind of metric to decide who will win the Democratic nomination, campaign coverage lingers over how a candidate will win their most improbable demographic, this seems to be an important case study:

Will Obama assure the voters of rural Kentucky that he won’t appoint an inappropriate amount of ‘minorities’ to lord over the white race? And if not, doesn’t Senator Obama risk losing out on an important slice of the electorate that fears an impending race war?

Is the man who once coined the term “vast ring wing conspiracy” now an integral part of the monster he once decried, willingly abetting a yellow journalism vendetta against Barack Obama?! Peter Drier, of the American Prospect and the Los Angeles Times (amongst others), brings forth the case against Clintonista Sidney Blumenthal:

Former journalist Sidney Blumenthal has been widely credited with coining the term “vast right-wing conspiracy” used by Hillary Clinton in 1998 to describe the alliance of conservative media, think tanks, and political operatives that sought to destroy the Clinton White House where he worked as a high-level aide. A decade later, and now acting as a senior campaign advisor to Senator Clinton, Blumenthal is exploiting that same right-wing network to attack and discredit Barack Obama. And he’s not hesitating to use the same sort of guilt-by-association tactics that have been the hallmark of the political right dating back to the McCarthy era.

Amongst the questionable media narratives Drier accuses Blumenthal of pushing (there are many, and it is a long and winding piece):

• Obama’s high school exposure to a Hawaiian Marxist poet, who Obama mentions briefly in Dreams from My Father and who has since been elevated to an Obama father-figure by hard-right press critic Cliff Kincaid.

• The recent ‘Obama as Radical Black Nationalist’ narrative, and his Chicago connections to Weather Underground member William Ayers.

• A National Review article which accuses Obama of being an integral part of Chicago machine-style politics, which notes: “Blacks adapted to both the tribalism and the corrupt patronage politics.”

• A plethora of different Tony Rezko stories.

• And lest anyone forget, the circa February ‘Obama as Cult Leader’ narrative penned initially by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Hardball politics or cavorting with the enemy? Read the piece and draw your own conclusions.

I usually try to answer all the e-mails that come to me with at least one response, even the hate mail (Just yesterday, I wrote to someone: ” Thanks for your assertion that I “know nothing” and am “downright stupid.” I would like to point out…”).

But I’m not sure what to do about the Ron Paul hate mail.

I reviewed his new book, The Revolution (no relation to Prince’s stellar backing band), and I found it wanting:

People have called Paul a Libertarian, but that’s not strictly true; neither is he a strict Constitutionalist, as many of his single-minded followers insist. Paul is the kind of nerd who still owns issues of The Objectivist Journal that were published in 1966—he named his son Rand Paul in honor of Ayn Rand, after all. The president Paul claims most respect for is the nerdy, ineffectual Taft.

Unsurprisingly, I got letters. The one that was published this week, in our letters section, was relatively nice—at least he offered to take me to lunch—but I just feel like any sort of response would be like pissing into the wind.

But in the interest of fairness, I’m going to run the two other letters so that they can have their day in the sun. If you’re reading this, boys, I’m sorry I didn’t write back. I hope that publishing your letters unmolested will be acceptable enough. Because they’re long letters, they’re after the jump. I encourage you to go take a look; the first e-mail accuses Obama of being a servant of the New World Order, and the second one is entirely unaware of the fact that his hero and political savior is a huge Objectivist.

Hello, This letter is regarding the review by Paul Constant of the Ron Paul book “The Revolution: A Manifesto”. Basically, I am disgusted with Constant and I think he is an idiot. On top of that, I don’t think he realizes what profound influence Ron Paul has had on the general public and to say that his only achievement of his presidential campaign is “successfully renting a blimp” is simply absurd and shows how ignorant this boy is of politics. Hey, wake up Constant, just because the main stream media chose maliciously not to report on Ron Paul and the supporters he was gathering because they were shitting their pants in fear of what the man proposed, doesn’t mean the millions of supporters didn’t exist. To bring you in on some facts of the Ron Paul campaign, here they are:

Much, much more, including government cheese, why I care more about my hair than the Constitution, and why Ron Paul was against World War I, after the jump.

Continue reading ""I know you are a socialist and want to be nannied by the government because you are weak"" »

Mukilteo watch salesman-cum-Republican activist Tim Eyman—fresh from mortgaging his house to pay for his latest ballot measure—has been barraging supporters with emails begging for donations. Yesterday’s plea, subject-lined “$250,000 loan will ensure I-985’s success — PLEASE help retire this debt ASAP,” asked supporters to kick in a total of $290,000, an amount that would bring Eyman’s total initiative war chest to $612,000. “I’m jumping off a big cliff —please help catch me,” Eyman wrote. “As you can imagine, this is scary stuff — but failure is simply not an option.”

Today, Eyman followed up on his initial plea, asking supporters to “let opponents’ comments inspire you” to open their checkbooks. “Donating to I-985 not only gets the initiative qualified for the ballot and helps me out of this huge financial challenge, but you will drive these opponents absolutely bonkers. It’s win-win-win.:)”

Why does Eyman need so much money, anyway? Because under Washington State’s hopelessly flawed initiative process, the only way to get an initiative on the ballot statewide—especially an initiative that’s unpopular in densely populated urban areas like Seattle, where gathering signatures is less difficult—is to hire a firm to gather signatures for you, paying signature gatherers as much as a dollar a name. Paid signature-gathering efforts are the single biggest reason so many bad ideas make it onto the ballot in Washington State. Ban the signature gatherers, you’ll ban most of the dumb ideas.

And speaking of bad ideas, I-985 is one of Eyman’s worst yet. The measure would open up all carpool lanes to all drivers during “off-peak” hours—that is, all hours except between 6 and 9 am, and between 3 and 6 pm—and on weekends. Given that many roads in the Puget Sound region are now experiencing “rush hours” that last allday with congestion starting in the early morning and not letting up until well into the evening, Eyman’s proposal would effectively render HOV lanes useless. With no incentive to carpool (because the HOV lanes will be just as clogged as the general-purpose ones), the number of people driving alone during “off-peak” hours will go up… making traffic congestion even worse. (The initiative would also make conditions worse for people riding on Metro and regional buses—again, eliminating the incentive to take transit instead of driving to work alone).

Eyman’s proposal would promote congestion in other ways, as well:

• It would restrict the use of funds from high-occupancy toll lanes (carpool lanes that solo drivers can access for a fee) to building and operating those lanes; all other revenues from HOT lanes would go into a special “Reduce Traffic Congestion Account,” which would pay, in part, for “expanding road capacity and general purpose use to improve traffic flow for all vehicles.” In other words, Eyman would siphon money from transit, carpool, vanpool, and trip reduction services and pour it into more general-purpose roads.

• It would also redirect all proceeds from traffic tickets obtained through red-light cameras toward Eyman’s road-building account, siphoning money away from cities’ general funds; and he would end all transportation-related funding for public art, directing that money to roads as well.

• Finally, Eyman would prohibit tolls on I-90 (and require that all tolls on 520 be spent exclusively on 520, rather than going, say, to HOV lanes and transit)—an idiotic proposal that would have exactly the opposite effect of what Eyman’s “congestion relief” proposal promises. State transportation planners generally agree that if 520 is tolled, I-90 will have to be, also, to prevent people from clogging up the “free” cross-lake bridge and making congestion even worse.

Eyman’s proposal, like Dino Rossi’s single-solution road-building plan, would worsen traffic congestion and reduce transportation alternatives in the guise of improving the roads for all. Let’s hope that this time, Washington State voters won’t let him get away with it.

I was shocked to read just now that as a young man David Sedaris felt pretty much the same way I did about cigarettes. From his piece in this week’s New Yorker:

How could [my mother], or anyone, really, make a habit of something so fundamentally unpleasant? When my sister Lisa started smoking, I forbade her to enter my bedroom with a lit cigarette. She could talk to me, but only from the other side of the threshold, and she had to avert her head when she exhaled. I did the same when my sister Gretchen started.

It wasn’t the smoke but the smell of it that bothered me.

It was always the smell that bothered me too. I’m convinced that my father’s smoking did more damage to our relationship than my homosexuality. When he would smoke at the table, I would refuse to eat. My mother would demand that my father put out his cigarette so that his sensitive third son—one of his two asthmatic children—could eat. Frustrated and in the grip of what has proven to be a lifelong addiction, my father would refuse, turn in his chair, grandly hold his cigarette to the side, and exhale his smoke away from the table. This wasn’t good enough, of course, because the horrible smell filled the room just the same and it made me nauseous and I would refuse to eat until my mother forced my father to put out his damn cigarette.

My mother smoked too, slyly, over the kitchen sink, but would one day summon up the nerve to quit. And two decades later her lungs would rebel against her and kill her anyway.

Back to David Sedaris: He’s long been a kind of a folk hero to America’s embattled smokers. An unapologetic smoker and a bestselling author, Sedaris asked for ashtrays in bookstores and, of course, was provided with them. He smoked his way through a reading at Bailey/Coy books in the mid-90s. He smoked on stage at theaters that didn’t allow smoking, he teased his smoking readers with details about his adopted home, France, where you can smoke in movie theaters, and his author photo, above, was the kind of smoking-is-glamorous shot you don’t see anymore.

David Sedaris announces in this week’s New Yorker that he’s quit—wait, that’s not the word he likes to use. He’s announced that he’s finished smoking.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut is the midnight movie at the Egyptian tonight and tomorrow. This 2007 release, overseen by Ridley Scott on the occasion of the film’s 25th birthday, is a new digital print with polished special effects, audio remastered in Dolby 5.1, extended pivotal scenes, more violence, and some minor dialog and plot alterations.

Go, especially if you haven’t seen it since you were a kid in the ’80s. The dystopian classic is more gripping, more lush, and sexier than ever.

Not just any ‘ole drug bust…

With the Indiana and North Carolina primaries coming up on Tuesday, a Slog poll:

How sick of the Democratic race are you?

That video linked in the Morning News is a fake. From the Huffington Post:

Mickey Kantor, who served as campaign chairman during Clinton’s 1992 run for the White House and says he has offered help and advice to Sen. Clinton, insisted that the tape was a fraud and that he was exploring legal steps against the individual who posted it online.

“I’ve never used that word in my entire life, ever, under any circumstance, ever,” an angry Kantor told The Huffington Post, citing his and his parent’s work fighting for civil rights. “I have listened to [the video] and so have you. You can’t tell what it is I’m saying in that second sentence, you can’t decipher that.”

Indeed, a review of the original copy of the 1993 film The War Room, from which the excerpt was taken (around the 4:40 mark) is virtually inaudible. The sound suggests, if anything, that instead of saying “How would you like to be a worthless white n****r?” Kantor says, “How would you like to be in the White House right now?”

The director of the film, moreover, says that Kantor never uttered those words. “He does not say that. He does not say that,” D.A. Pennebaker told Ben Smith.

Meanwhile, a blogger at Daily Kos thinks it’s all an elaborate ploy to make Obama look bad:

The video clip of Kantor talking to Carville and Stephanopolous is most likely intended to get Obama supporters to embrace a fake smear. It’s an old trick people and it works.

The story isn’t going to be that a Clinton aide back in 92 insulted Indiana. The story is going to be that Obama supporters pushed a fake video trying to smear Hillary.

This is classic Rovian shit. We all use the phrase and talk about the evils of Rove but we always forget what that actually means.

(Via Sullivan.)

In France in the 1970s, Victoria Chaplin (daughter of Charlie) and Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée (a French movie star) started performing a kind of circus act nobody had seen before. It was a marriage of the new and the nostalgic, vaudeville for drug people, that ditched the traditional flashy costumes, animal acts, and other three-ring hooha for dreamy clowning.

People called it cirque nouveau and it became the fountainhead for the cabaret and circus revival that’s everywhere today, from Circus Contraption to Cirque de Soleil. None of that would be possible without Chaplin and Thiérrée, the American actress and the French movie star who fell in love and ran away to their own kind of circus.

Aurélia Thiérrée is their daughter and is coming to the Seattle Rep, to perform her show Aurélia’s Oratorio. We talked on the telephone—me sitting in the park in Seattle, her sitting in her apartment in New York. She did not want to talk about her grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, or her great-grandfather, Eugene O’Neill.

You grew up performing with in your parents’ circus?
It was a way to keep the family together. Sometimes we were on the road for eight or nine months. We had tutors who came to give us lessons two hours a day in each city.

That’s nice. So if you had a teacher you hated, you knew you’d never see him or her again.
Well, sometimes yes. But sometimes we would be in one city for a few months.

What was your parents’ circus like?
They were the first to believe circus could be changed, but circus performers weren’t ready to change. They were using traditions that had been passed down through the generations. Changing their acts, their costumes, or no more animals—it wasn’t possible. So my parents created their own circus to do whatever they wanted.

Your mother created this show?
My mother and I together, little by little, while I was working with the Tiger Lilies. As a family, we always work together.

What were you doing with the Tiger Lilies?
I prefer really to focus on this show, because that’s my reality today.

What’s it like?
It’s difficult to describe. It’s not circus, not dance, not a children’s show, and not theater. The original idea began with a book of medieval drawings of the world turned upside-down. They reverted situations to create humor and were also used as politically—maybe a man riding a horse upside-down or women going to war, things like that. That was the idea: to take a tableau you’re familiar with, but everything is upside-down. Also, I had the idea of a woman going completely mad.

What will people see at the show?
I’m reluctant to describe the acts precisely.

Could you describe them generally?
I tried to use whatever I could to please my mother.

What pleases your mother?
She has a very precise theatrical language. She uses old tricks but attaches them to images that are very modern.

What kind of tricks?
Optical illusions—there is a costume where I am an hourglass and then I turn into sand, using a really, really old trick but one that’s never been used in this way.

Is there a name for this trick?
If there were, I would never, never tell you.

Music

Pleasureboaters, Vampire Hands at Vera Project

• See what else is happening in Music on Friday »
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Obama gives Hillary the finger:

Via Reclusive Leftist.

Computer love:

A local council employee in Japan has been punished after it was discovered he had accessed porn websites at work more than 780,000 times in nine months. His superiors were alerted to the problem only when his computer became infected with a virus.

The 57-year-old man, who has not been named, works for the city of Kinokawa in southern Japan.

He held on to his job, but has been demoted and his wages have been cut by about 20,000 yen ($190; £80) a month.

Love in Iran:

The penalties [in Iran] for prostitution are severe—ranging from whipping to execution. But there’s a loophole in Islamic law called sigheh, or temporary marriage. According to Shiite interpretation, a man and a woman may enter an impermanent partnership with a preset expiration date. There’s no legally required minimum duration (a day, a week, anything goes) and no need for official witnesses—unless the woman is a virgin, in which case she needs the consent of her legal guardian. An Iranian who’s wary of arrest can simply escort a prostitute to a registry, obtain a temporary contract from a Muslim cleric, and then legally satisfy his sexual needs.

No love in Bahrain:

A raunchy Lebanese singer [Haifa Wehbe] is causing controversy in Bahrain, where she is due to perform for the first time.

All but one of the members of the Gulf kingdom’s Islamist-dominated parliament have approved a motion urging the government to ban Haifa Wehbe’s show.

They objected on the grounds that the pop superstar’s performance would be sexually provocative, violating Islamic conventions and Bahrain’s traditions.

This is Haifa Wehbe:

Barack Obama will be on Meet the Press this Sunday for the full hour. Despite the probability that Tim Russert will ask idiotic questions former radicals and former pastors and all manner of irrelevant things, I’m psyched—Obama’s intelligent Meet the Press appearance last fall was what made me really get on board his campaign. The episode airs 10 am Sunday on KONG 6/16.

Oh, and Hillary’s on ABC’s This Week. But George Stephanopolous is a tool and his show airs at 4 in the afternoon in Seattle. Who’s at home at 4 pm on a Sunday? (Me, usually.) KOMO, this is the most intense presidential primary contest in decades. Can’t we get back to the 9 am slot? It was much easier to take Maureen Dowd’s sultry drawl and George Will’s obnoxious bow ties before I was really awake. Well, in any case, former Bill Clinton staffer Stephanopolous has a lot to prove with this interview. It should make for good TV.

24-year-old David Duncan Clark died after a four-hour standoff with police.

As KOMO reports, officers were called to Clark’s home after getting calls that he and three other people were “acting disorderly and throwing objects out the windows.” When police arrived, Clark reportedly flashed a weapon from the front porch then retreated into the house, instigating a four-hour, SWAT-team-enhanced standoff. “At some point, Clark charged at police with the gun,” reports KOMO. “After attempting to disarm the man by shooting at him with immobilizing beanbags, two officers discharged their firearms at him. Clark then retreated into the house…Officers broke the door down at around 9:30 p.m. and found the man dead inside.” Later reports identify Duncan’s weapon as a pellet gun, and confirm Duncan died of a rifle shot to the back.

Which brings us to this I, Anonymous submission:

Dear Bellingham:

When a tragic event takes place, we must remember that those involved are real people. They are more than the sum of their parts. I urge Bellingham to remember who Dave was, and to try to not judge him by his actions. Dave was not a deranged immoral drug addict, he was mentally ill. He was sick and needed help. He struggled to maintain his hold on reality and we (friends and family) gave as much support as we could.

David Duncan Clark was a loving, caring, dedicated musician and philanthropist. He was a Western graduate, a member of our community, a friend. He had a contagious laugh, was an superb story teller and had an unshakable determination to become a professional musician. He had plans to change the face of the music industry, plans to help every musician who has a dream in their heart to share it with the world. He was going to be one of those dads who always comes home for dinner, helps around the house and never misses a game or recital.

My anger extends to both parties of this event. What Dave did was out of character, dangerous, selfish, and stupid. Yet he should have been given the chance to be held responsible for his actions. A mentally ill person does not need to be gunned down, they need help.

I am appalled by the behavior of the Bellingham Police Department. How did one man warrant the need for an armored vehicle and a swat team?! The media has created this image that the BPD did society a favor by taking down an obviously disturb man. When they truly robbed the world from unknown potential greatness.

Where is the justice? At the very least take away the badges from the officers who took away all they could from Dave, his life. We have seen the abuse of police power, and the abuse of police force too often. Who is responsible for ordering shots to be fired? Someone must be held accountable for Dave’s death. The Bellingham police used unnecessary force. It is horrific the way in which the police responded. Where were the tazers, the mace? What happened to police procedure? Where was the negotiator? Why was there no effort to contact someone who could talk Dave down? Why wasn’t a dog used? Why were they so quick to use lethal force after only one non-lethal attempt? Doesn’t a SWAT team own riot gear and bullet proof vest? Did a 150 lb man truly seem so menacing that he needed to be killed rather than persuaded? What kind of police dept does not teach non lethal disarment? Is a torso that hard to miss? Why was he shot and then left inside to bleed to death?

Yes Dave endangered the community but he did not deserve the degree of force used. It was excessive and it cost his friends, family and the world a unnecessary loss of a wonderful man. I hope that our community will respond to this event with compassion and a desire for justice.

Sincerely,

A friend in mourning

For what’s it’s worth, cops reportedly tried to subdue Duncan with bean-bag shots and a Taser before fatally shooting him in the back.

Condolences to everyone.

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