As promised, we review the Stranger valentines [#] addressed to “Seattle.” Only three fall into the general spirit of loving the whole city. We expected a little more love, but we’ll take what we can get{

• ALL OF SEATTLE! ♥♥ You’re beautiful and I’m sorry that I ever took you for granted. I can’t wait to come back!

• TO SEATTLE ♥♥ Visited you two times this year from Vancouver and fell hard for you. Be proud of yourself and stay a blue state – Sijeka.
• SEATTLE ♥♥ 178.61 miles to kiss you on V-Day is a given. One day, the kisses will outweigh the miles. I love you, dear -PDX

And then there are those with lust in their hearts for specific subpopulations of our fair city. Interesting that the anonymous one is the more ambitious. I guess he’s hoping for the hotties to self-identify and seek him out:

• HAPPY VALENTINES ♥♥ to all of you hot little Seattle ladies. I love you and want to make love to you all.
• SEATTLE DACHSHUNDS ♥♥ You make me smile every time I see your little legs and sweet faces. I’ll love you forever. Sarah

(via evan’s amazing stranger valentine search-o-matic [#])

They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. But have the hippies over at Soap Lake taken in more trash than treasure?

Plans to “borrow” Target Corp’s giant 50-foot-tall lava lamp (last seen at New York’s Times Square) were going swimmingly until the dismantled pieces arrived in Washington on four flatbed trailers. All thirty thousand pounds of it.

That was when someone realized that setting up a giant lava lamp was possibly going to be a little more complicated than setting up a table-top lava lamp. Now the Spring Fling opening is in jeopardy until they can raise the thousands of dollars needed to pay a team of giant engineers to put it together.

On a seemingly unrelated note, does anyone know how long pot brownies keep for?

I hardly ever get to the botanical garden, but it seems to me that there’s always something flowering there.

The camellia tree outside the visitors’ center is in full bloom and looks to have been working on it for a while, judging by the number of dropped flowers all over the place.

An adorable herd of drawf irises pose in front of a boulder at the rock garden.

This month at the photo meetup, someone commented that a particularly mild winter had confused the plants up at the Bellevue Botanical Garden, and they were starting to flower early — something that will no doubt continue until the next good frost punishes all of the early adopters. The opinion was that if all goes well, there might actually be a double-flowering season this year: once now, and once in the fall. I had to go take a quick look for myself of course, and I did see a few crumpled and confused-looking hyacinths, before I was driven off by some rather grumpy robins.

This week’s edition of the Stranger [#] is the annual Valentine’s Issue, which also announces Seattle’s Sexiest. As we flipped through the pages, we couldn’t help but notice that our pleas for reader love simply didn’t pay off. The staff of Check Free: featured as sexy. The staff of Metblogs: completely ignored.

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Even though you crushed our spirits, we won’t hold it against the deserving winners. Even though we’ve only seen one winner in person (Eli from Sonic Boom), we trust that the system was fair enough and not some trick of local models slumming for coverage.

Don’t worry. We’ll get over it tomorrow when the Valentines are online and more easily searchable. Then we’ll break out the scotch and search for our own name to fabricate a fanbase.

This past weekend, I went to see “I Was Born, But …” and “Tokyo Twilight”, two of the films featured in the Ozu retrospective currently playing at the Northwest Film Forum. Both were stunning pieces of cinema and it was a real pleasure to see them in the Film Forum’s spacious new home. While I was a little dubious about the scores commissioned for the silent films, the musical accompaniment to “I Was Born, But …” was excellent and definitely added to the film’s overall effect.

The second week of the series begins tomorrow, with evening screenings of “Woman of Tokyo” and “An Autumn Afternoon”. The other films playing this week are “Late Spring”, “What Did the Lady Forget?” and “Dragnet Girl”. (The full schedule is available here.)

The Ozu “six pack” — 6 of the festival films, including one with live musical accompaniment, for $40 ($30 for members) — had been sold out, but more are now available according to the NWFF website.

Every advertisement for a lost (or found) pet tells a small, sad story. For some reason, I find this particular poster both tragic and amusing — perhaps because I myself own a hateful black cat. If he were ever to be unleashed upon the world, I can easily imagine the dismay would-be rescuers might feel as it dawned on them that he really, really didn’t like them one little bit.

Karsten Schneider wonders about the implications of turning the Space Needle red to promote the American Heart Association’s “Go Red for Women” [#] campaign:

it reminds me of the thieves who stole the Eiffel Tower. Does this mean the nighttime likeness of the Space Needle is now copyrighted? [kaslog]

We commend the high-minded thoughts regarding parallels with the intellectual property issues being faced by photographers and citizens of cities like Paris and Chicago. When we saw the red glow coming from the needle, we assumed that some sort of Hooker’s Ball was in progress.

Surprising findings in the news: (1) there are grocery stores called Thriftway in Seattle and (2) at least one of these stores allows customers to pay using their fingerprints:

US chain Thriftway introduced the PayByTouch system in its shop in the Seattle area in 2002 and now sees thousands of transactions a month using the [fingerprint] payment method. [silicon.com]

Has anyone been to this store (the fingerprint payment system has apparently been available for years)? Is is secret agent chic to buy groceries biometrically, or just invasion of privacy style creepy?

At yesterday’s State of the City address, Mayor ‘unopposed in 2005′ Nickels triumphantly proclaimed, “Seattle is Back.” [daily, seattletimes]

We like optimism as much as the next cynic, but we sort of wonder what he’s talking about — should we all start unpacking our flannels? Unfortunately, he probably meant something about the crumbling viaduct and the bickering over the practical details of light rail. Or perhaps the revitalization of downtown as measured by the influx of chain restaurants in the retail core?

While he’s tabulating achievements in preparation for a re-election campaign, we recommend that he focus on the FAO Schwartz bear eviction as a signature achievement. What are your favorite aspects of the Nickels Era?

It’s time for another installation of local media watch!

1. We begin with the big news that the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer are planning to double the price of weekday copies of the paper. Under the new price structure, your laundry money will dissappear twice as fast, as issues will now cost two quarters instead of one. As of press time, there’s no word on whether you can expect to get anything more for your money (we’d like a flying car). For now, enjoy the last few weeks of the golden age of twenty-five cent papers; the price hike is expected to hit at the end of the month. [seattle times]

2. Because not everyone spends enough quality time in the U-District, or stumbling into classes after an evening of moderate drinking, we continue to spotlight the hilarity of the Daily. Today’s issue investigates the effect of the weather on winter recreation [# and is accompanied by a photo of a barefoot undergrad playing frisbee on the quad. [jpg] As if flip-flop wearing among students has any relationship to the weather.
3. per usual, there is no item three. maybe next week!