Does anyone want to take bets on how long it will take for some news outlet to pick up on Josh Feit’s “Monorail Meshugaas” story [stranger] without getting the point that it’s meant to be (and actually is) funny? I guess it would be more understandable than the Beijing Evening News reporting on the Onion’s story about the U.S. Congress threatening to abandon Washington, D.C. unless it got a new, modern Capitol building, complete with retractable roof. [pekingduck].

Bonus points if it’s picked up domestically or if the secondary reportage fails to recognize that the anti-Semitism in the article is in reference to Cindi Laws who reportedly made anti-Semitic comments at a candidate forum and implied that there was Jewish plot to kill the monorail [p-i].

I know, I know — I didn’t move to the city for serenity and monastic silence. But still, it does seem as though car alarms have been a particular nuisance recently in my neighborhood. (This seems odd to me. Aren’t car alarms over? Passé? They seem so … nineties.)

Just about a week ago we suffered through several nights punctuated by the sound of one of those alarms that modulates its way through a series of increasingly annoying variations:

bee-boo, bee-boo, bee-boo, bee-boo
beeboobeeboo, beeboobeeboo, beeboobeeboo, beeboobeeboo
beeboobeeyoop, beeboobeeyoop, beeboobeeyoop, beeboobeeyoop,
booOOooOOoo, booOOooOOoo, booOOooOOoo, booOOooOOoo,
beebeebeebee, beebeebeebee, beebeebeebee, beebeebeebee
yoopyoopyoopyoopyoopyoopyoopyoopyoopyoopyoopyoopyoop

And so on, in a seemingly infinite loop.

(more…)

Obviously, butterflies have a season just as flowers do. According to the Washington Butterfly Association, that season is from March to August or September. Enjoy those little flapping wonders while you’re out in the sunshine this weekend.

And speaking of little nectar-sucking flapping wonders, have you heard a noise that sounds a bit like a bad-tempered cricket? Look up, down and all around, and you might see little baby Anna’s hummingbirds like this one, practising their flight skills. August is one of your best bets for hummingbird sightings, since we not only have our local year-round Annas, we also have Calliopes and Rufous hummingbirds coming and going.

Fever? Red rash?

While most of us have probably been innoculated against the measles, or gotten it in childhood, there’s at least one person on the Eastside who hasn’t, and who spent last week unintentionally spreading it around town. So if you live or work around here, you haven’t had the measles, and you haven’t been feeling good, there’s possibly a good reason.

Why are we so excited about measles? Some complications of measles include encephalitis, bronchopneumonia, and meningitis. This combined with the recent sending of our children back to school, creates a more-than-likely chance that reports of measles will be making it into the news all through fall.

For future reference for you oldsters out there, the general recommendations in non-plague situations are as follows:

• If you were born before 1957, you’ve probably had the measles, as it was quite common in those days, along with having to walk uphill, through the snow. Relax! We don’t think you’ll get it again.
  
• If you were born after 1956, and you got an inactivated-measles-virus vaccine in the early 1960s or an inactivated-mumps-virus vaccine between 1950 and 1978; you might need revaccination with two doses of the live MMR vaccine. (This will cause no harm even if someone had a previous live-virus-mumps vaccination.)
  

In the meantime, if anyone coughs or sneezes on you, it’s probably not an overreaction to run screaming from the room and dunk yourself into a 10 percent bleach solution. Well, ok, maybe it is.

In a frivolous display of “here’s what we consider news” yesterday, King5 news reported on the grand opening of Lush at the Bellevue Square mall. Already open for the past two weeks, Lush staff reports that Bellevue shoppers were excited by the new addition since now they wouldn’t have to go to Vancouver for their Lush products. It’s an odd thing to say in this day and age, when you could just hop online and order whatever you want and get it delivered to your door. Or maybe it just indicates the kind of person who would like to have Lush products.

The short news byte focussed mainly on super-secret new products arriving in September to celebrate Lush’s 10th anniversary (some sort of frozen shower gel that you keep in your freezer, and cake-shaped soap) and the “bath bomb” (which is some sort of cute girly idea to dump a ball made of scent and glitter in with your bathwater, and then steep yourself in it). As well, they touted Lush’s “handmade, freshmade” philosophy, which goes as far as to identify the soapmaker for each product by name and photo.

Personally, I’ve always felt that Lush’s best seller would be the shampoo, conditioner, and combined shampoo/conditioner bars. Hey, I don’t travel a whole lot, but I do travel from time to time and I’m always afraid that the shampoo and conditioner bottles will explode and ooze through their double-bagged barrier and lay claim to the rest of my suitcase. It could happen. It never has, but it could.

Anyway, let me reiterate. Lush’s grand opening: today (5-9:30PM). Come for the goodie bags, stay for the soap.

If there’s one thing that Americans love it’s looking at rankings of themselves, which improves upon narcissistic reflection gazing by adding a quantitative element. Today’s Metblogging Love of Lists ongoing featurette series brings you the latest pecking order of the fattest U.S. Sates. Regardless of whether the count includes the overweight with the obese, our state can at least console itself with it’s placement in the bottom half of the heaviest list:

Washington ranked 29th in the U.S. in highest rate of adult obesity at 21.7 percent, according to F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies are Failing in America, 2005. It ranked 32nd in the U.S. in highest rate of obese and overweight adults combined at 58.6 percent. Mississippi ranks as the heaviest state, Colorado as the least heavy, and rates in Oregon remained the same. Over 25 percent of adults in 10 states are obese, including in Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, Michigan, Kentucky, Indiana, and South Carolina. Seven of those 10 states are in the Southeastern U.S. [healthyamericans.org]

Isn’t it nice that the D.C. based policy group includes a summary for the geography-impaired by subtly pointing a finger at the pudgy lower right corner of the country?

For those who want to calculate their own body mass index without getting out calculators and conversion tables, there’s an online tool to tell you if you can put “HWP” in your personal ad without being deceptive. [cdc]

(via [bbc])

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer infiltrated this month’s Weblogger Meetup [#] as an occasion to write about Seattle-area weblogs

On a map of the blogosphere, Seattle would probably stick out as a blinking hot spot for push-button publishing. [p-i]

Yes, this is a weblog post about a news article about weblogs.

In the not so distant future, the beloved Metro Tunnel will be closed to allow full-time construction work related to making it fit for SoundTransit’s light rail vehicles. When this happens, all of your favorite bus routes will probably be in different places and downtown traffic will be a whole new animal. To help deal with tunnel withdrawal, a friendly Metro driver has some words of advice:

21 additional bus routes will now have to run on surface streets. Most routes will be moved to 3rd Avenue. How do we make room for all these extra buses? We close 3rd Avenue!
. . .
Everything you know about the buses downtown will probably be wrong. [lj]

The list continues with several handy tips and words of wisdom. And, like most posts to the Seattle Livejournal commuinty, hilarity ensues in the comments section.

related:

• official guidance on the tunnel closure [metrokc.gov]

A note to the procrastinators in the crowd: the prices for Bumbershoot tickets go up on Friday, 26 August. That means that you should really make your decision about whether you need a 0, 1, 2, or 4 day pass and get to a Starbucks by the close of business on Thursday.

More on the crazy mathematics of pre-commitment: before the 26^th, a two day pass is almost the same price as a post-25^th one day pass. You should also know that tickets aren’t specific to a particular day of the festival; so you still have time to decide between Elvis Costello and Garbage, for instance.

Finally, posters for Flatstock 7 have started showing up at cafés and on telephone posts around town. If the mainstage headliners don’t have you excited about a Labor Day weekend at Seattle Center, maybe the thought of a huge exhibit of poster art will. Flatstocks 3 and 5 were among my favorite parts of the past two festivals — be sure to check it out this year, especially if your walls are in need of new high-quality decorations.

related:

• OneReel’s online ticket office for die-hard Starbucks avoiders [#]

Although I don’t know anyone who reads Seattle Magazine (demographics, probably), I’m sure there’s someone around town that’s excited by the news that the publishers of Portland Monthly are planning a northward expansion. Next March they will launch Seattle Monthly, which these theoretical readers have been demanding:

Vogel said Seattle community leaders had lobbied for a new city magazine there since before Portland Monthly began publishing. “We believe Seattle deserves a publication that embodies the spirit of this great city and is dedicated to the highest-quality design and journalism available,” she said. [bizjournals]

Whether the fictional Seattleites of Grey’s Anatomy will leave their beloved Seattle magazine behind [mb] for this newcomer remains to be seen. At the very least, there’s the hope for inter-magazine fighting in the proud journalistic tradition of Seattle’s favorite weekly and daily papers.

In other Portland invasion news: Powells will be coming to the Seattle next month to buy your used books and cart them their landmark store. This is somehow intended to help the University Bookstore break in to the up-and-coming world of used [not-just-text-] book sales. [seattletimes]