Remember that movie with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? No, not Joe vs. the Volcano [Ed: best Tom Hanks movie of all time! --agreed.]. The the one that’s about a guy who lives in Seattle. You know, the one with the title that gets punned off in about one of every three headlines about Seattle. The one that caused the rest of the country that everyone out here lived on a houseboat?

Right. So the geniuses at tomatopatch.com have worked the sort of magic that turned the Shining footage into trailer for a romantic comedy instead of a horrifying tale of cabin fever insanity. Click over to College Humor and check out the re-imagining of Sleepless in Seattle #] — it will make it even easier to laugh at the tourists who buy the t-shirts with the film’s logo after all these years.

(via kottke, who also links to a trailer for Top Gun remixed with Brokeback Mountain [#]. Get it while you can — I doubt that the Scientologists will let it stay online for long.)

With yesterday’s announcement that the WB and UPN television networks are merging came this oddity for Seattle:

Tribune Co., a Chicago-based media company and the owner of KTWB and KCPQ/13 in Seattle, will relinquish its 22.5 percent stake in The WB in exchange for a 10-year affiliation deal to carry the new network on 16 of its stations…. The CW also will be carried on 11 stations owned by UPN, a unit of CBS Corp., including KSTW, guaranteeing the network carriage in about 47 percent of the country and 20 of the top 25 TV markets.

So, both media companies with an interest in The CW (which sounds like “The Conventional Wisdom Network” to me, evoking images of Gilmore Girls on the McLaughlin Group) own a station in town. So, who gets the network? Channel 11, of course.

KSTW will be switching affiliations for the FIFTH time in its 53 years on the air. It began as a CBS affiliate (signing on as KTNT) before a legal battle with KIRO eventually had it become an independent in 1961. It remained independent until 1995, when, thanks to an ownership swap, it became a CBS affiliate again. (During that era they had billboards all over town with the slogan “Make the switch, CBS did.”) Just two years later, though, another set of ownership swaps involving KING, KIRO, and KSTW saw CBS moving back to KIRO and UPN taking over KSTW. Viacom would later take over UPN and later buy CBS, effectively making KSTW CBS-owned, breaking irony meters all across Seattle. And now comes this week’s announcement that they switching to CW (breaking even more irony meters because of KSTW’s flirtation with the WB in 1993, right before the CBS affiliation fell in their lap). Whew.

To summarize for those of you scoring at home, that’s CBS-Ind.-CBS-UPN-CW, along with one call letter change.

As for KTWB-22, they now find themselves as an independent channel again after 11 years of The WB. Since they’re in a duopoly with Q13, you can expect to see a lot more Fox stuff on there, similar to the way KING rebroadcasts some of its syndicated programming and its Sunday morning lineup on KONG. It also means that you’ll see more prime-time movies and syndicated shows on channel 22. All in all, if you like your rabbit ears on your television, things are about to get better, while those of you who hate TV… well, nothing here really to tempt you to buy one now.

If your plans for Saturday night don’t involve the words, “going to see a gay Asian/Pacific Islander beauty pageant,” then I suggest you change those plans posthaste. At 7:00 on the 28th, “Drag queens and drag kings from across the Pacific Northwest will descend on Seattle’s Capitol Hill…” [SGN]. They’ll be at the Broadway Performance Hall.

The theme is “Asian & Fabulous,” and there will be evening gowns and swimsuits, national costumes, a talent portion, and dragon dancers. This is your way to celebrate the Lunar New Year Seattle-style. It’s being organized in collaboration with the API International Council and the Mpowerment Program of Lifelong AIDS Alliance, and will, I suspect, be chock full of fantastic. Afterwards, there’ll be a party at Neighbors Underground.

Tickets are $12 at the door or $10 in advance.

Aside from all of the hometown pride and the decades with a team that hadn’t made it to the Superbowl, I think that my favorite part about the Seahawks upcoming trip to Detroit is seeing all of the stories about Seattle that are making their way through the wire services. By far the best to date, in terms of cliché value is this entry from the Detroit Free Press:

Who are these people? Based on a string of accolades and accusations bestowed on Seattle by magazines, university studies and the Republican Party, they’re quite possibly the nation’s fittest, most literate, polite, highly educated, artistically inclined, liberal-leaning, nature-loving, hippest football fans in the history of the sport. [freep]

I’ve quoted only one paragraph here, but the entire article is worth your attention. It is such a remarkable convergence of stereotypes that it might cause your brain to explode [Ed: that's why we usually break them up into different posts]. Brace yourself for a couple more weeks of this, it’s all part of the ride.

If you’ve been lamenting the new trend of local coffee houses limiting Wi-Fi access [mb], you have a new friend: your local Seattle Public Library.

Yes, as of last week, seven branches (Ballard, Beacon Hill, Capitol Hill, Green Lake, Greenwood, North East, and Rainier Beach) joned the Central Library in offering FREE wireless service with more branches to come online in the future. I wonder. If a cafe is near a library will the access spillover? Not that I would do that.

Ahem. Wireless user beware, though, there was a caveat in the press release, “Library staff members are not able to provide technical assistance and the Library cannot guarantee that patrons will be able to make a wireless connection.” [spl] Does it make me a hopeless geek that I found that inexplicably funny?

Perhaps you’ve heard that James Frey’s bestselling Oprah-approved memior, A Million Little Pieces, is more fiction than non-. Some readers have responded to the scandal by becoming bogged down in philosophical debates about the nature of truth, the meaning of fiction, and the relationship between author and reader.

Two Seattleites, not content with all this talk, have filed suit against Frey and Random House seeking compensation for the time they spent reading the book.

In lieu of a more in-depth analysis of this state of affairs, I’ll just say: Sheesh.

Due to the closure of the downtown transit tunnel for “retrofitting,” the buses that drive along 3rd (including, by the way, almost every bus that I have occasion to ride) are stopping at every other stop. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? So we have to walk an extra block now and then … I can live with that.

But here’s the thing: I don’t have enough fingers to count the times in recent memory that I’ve missed my bus by 15 seconds, done in by walking that one extra block and waiting for that one extra light to change. Transit gods, why hast thou forsaken me? Should I make you an offering of some kind? Burn a pile of transfers in the back of the bus? Shove something delicious in the fare box? Sing a song at the bus stop? What?

Thanks, Seattle Times, for validating my crankiness today. Apparently a British scientist has come up with some sort of formula that proves that today, January 24th, is the worst day of the year [Times].

According to this Cliff Arnall, we’re all allowed to be depressed because we’re still in debt from the holidays and have probably already given up on our New Years resolutions. (I haven’t, yet, but that’s mostly because I didn’t decide to quit anything this year–I resolved to start doing a few things more often.) There aren’t any three-day weekends for a few weeks, and it’s mostly cold and rainy. I don’t know what this formula is, exactly, but it sounds about right to me.

So go ahead, Seattle, have an extra cocktail or three today. You deserve it.

I left the office yesterday and was so astounded. Not only was it not raining, but it was actually still light out. Ah, yes, it has been over a month since the winter solstice. So, I went to the US Naval Observatory site (I typed navel observatory more than once. Heh.) just for official stats on how quickly our light was returning. The news is heartening. Soon we can come out of our caves!

Naval (still heh) data after the jump.
(more…)

It seems like the Seahawks bid for the Super Bowl is just one in an ongoing string of small Seattle miracles. Whether fate was already turning a fair eye in our direction (item: record-setting rain streak cut short) or if the football win is the catalyst, things in town are starting to get a little weird:

• item: On Saturday, crowds gathered on 12th and Denny to observe the Capitol Hill Owl. [flickr]
• item: After weeks of intrigue concerning the effect of council member resignation and council member foreign travel on the presidency of the city council, the deadlock between Conlin and Godden dissolved in favor of a unanimous victory for the leftiest member of them all: Nick Licata. [st]
• item: Today, all of Seattle smells like cabbage. What is this mystery odor? Why is it everywhere? What does it all mean? And why did NYC get syrup instead [nyer]?

Please send your theories or reports of other odd occurrences.

update: the Seattle LiveJournal community confirms that the smell is everywhere [lj].

update 2!: an astute reader pointed to the story behind the stink — a wastewater regulator in the U-District that broke down and flooded. [komo]