I don’t know if news of rioting in Dublin has reached Seattle, but in case you’re interested in a local perspective, our pals over at dublin.metblogs.com are on the case:

It would appear that the riots have been planned and organised, and started out on O Connell street, where there is a lot of building work currently taking place, with rioters using building material to attack buildings, people and the Gardai.[mb]

The quoted post was from an out-of-town Dubliner. Keep an eye on the site for updates from other authors.

And speaking of The Stranger, they’ve managed to piss off more people than usual with their latest cover. Slog covered the controversy with their usual unrestrained glee. It also hit LiveJournal’s Seattle community.

The shot was taken by a photographer named Ye Rin Mok. It’s worth taking a spin around her site, which is full of beautiful photography (all of it SFW, as far as I could tell) and puts a much different context on the image The Stranger used.

My own take: it’s amazing how juxtaposing words and images changes meaning. When you see the same image without the words FOOD FIGHT and FAREWELL, SWEET BESTIALITY, does it seem quite as tawdry?

Update: Nathan has been kind enough to put a map together and submit it to BoingBoing. That r0×0r5. I love it that my employer anagrams into “Nonfat Wives Siring Youth.” Great job, Nathan!

sound transit

Over on BoingBoing this week people have been sending in their anagrammed versions of transit maps. For example, here’s the Tube in London. And here’s Atlanta’s MARTA.

Unfortunately, no one has done one for Seattle, mostly because we don’t have a transit system. We do, however, have a map. Sound Transit has been nice enough to do up a map of what the Central Link is going to look like when it’s finished (sometime during the Chelsea Clinton-Jenna Bush administration of 2024).

I would throw a map together, but I just got a new computer, and I can’t find my Photoshop install CD. So, hey, why don’t one of you make a map (using the ST map linked above or a screen dump from their fact sheet PDF) and send it in to BoingBoing?

Below the cut, I’ve listed the stations as currently named and planned from north to south. DANG THE IMP!
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[getty images]

It’s been a long two weeks; so by now it’s possible that your Olympic fever has already spiked and as subsided to a mere warm forehead. If that’s the case, it’s worth remembering that tonight marks hometown soul-patched hero Apolo Ohno’s last two chances to grab a gold medal in Torino. Even though he’s spent the past eight years in Colorado in training , he still calls Seattle his home; so hop on the bandwagon tonight before your forget about short track skating again for the next eight years.

Even without the local connection, tonight’s events are bound to be excellent television. The 500m event is perfect for people with short attention spans. Later, it’s team 5000m relay time. I’m not sure if any other event compares in terms of chaotic beauty — with four people from each team exchanging in and out, the pushing, potential for falls, and a reminder of your physics lessions make it more thrilling than anything you saw on the figure skating rink (where falls are less likely to cost you a medal).

Don’t worry. Even though I’m watching the competition from the future, I won’t tell you what happened. For that, click on nbcolympics or your favorite news/sports outlet.

We were on our way back from Chelan, after having spent a couple of days up there mooching off someone else’s good will. As an aside, I never really understood until this year, what the big deal about Chelan was. All the Washingtonians I knew seemed to get very excited about getting away for a long weekend to Lake Chelan, and then the one time we went there… well. I felt it was quite boring.

Get away from Chelan itself though, out into the open, and things become quite different. At night, about a million bazillion (yes, mother, that IS a real number) stars come out, and in the winter, they’re diamond-hard pinpoints. While out there, lying on the ground, feeling the cold slowly seep away my will to live, I saw a shooting star again — my first in quite a long time, since it’s been several years since I felt like dragging myself out to see the Perseids. I would have peed my pants in the excitement, but the cold had frozen my bladder by that time.

Once I thawed, we headed home by way of Leavenworth and Hwy 2 (having come up via I-90, this completed a huge circle), stopping only in Leavenworth to show my Australian visitor the Australian store. We rampaged in, a small group of four, exclaiming things like “wow, look at the the Vegemite jar; it’s so SMALL” and “yay, they have Pavlova Magic!” and “hey, where are the Tim Tams,” but there, we were stopped by the shopkeepers, who told us their sad tale.

They’ve been out of Tim Tams for the past 4 months, due to some sort of “disagreement” between the US and Australia on what to put on the food label. Of course, the Australians are right — did you even need to ask? — but America simply wouldn’t let the Tim Tams into the country. As our shopkeepers explained it, the Tim Tams were probably right now, sitting on the docks at Seattle, quietly exceeding their expiration date.

Since we had just been there earlier this week, doing the Argosy Harbor Cruise (that’s the one that takes you right next to the containers), we felt rather hard done by. If we had known the containers were holding Tim Tams rather than some of the other guesses we had (Nintendo machines; designer clothing made in China; frogs legs for Saint Patrick’s Day), we would certainly have commandeered the vessel (the good ship Lady Mary), landed at the container pier, and with can-opener in hand, had ourselves a good old-fashioned Tim Tam Slam.

image via: moore

When I saw Eve Ensler [wiki] do The Vagina Monologues [wiki] in D.C. oh so many years ago and a whole country away, I was a little blown away.

It wasn’t just the topic, although, that too was part of it. No, it was the language and the tone, and the way Ensler managed to strike a balance between being confrontational and yet comforting, shocking yet familiar. I found her amazing and intense and most importantly, smart. Also, I particularly like her folklorish approach of collecting stories and recasting them in her plays. I think it’s an interesting approach to theater. So, at no surprise to you after all this gushing, when I found out she’d be in town this weekend, I squeaked.

Yes, Ensler’s new show, The Good Body will be at The Moore this weekend (and this weekend only). The play – from what I’ve read – is about the complex and often negative relationship women have with their bodies. Again, Ensler takes a narrative approach – using her own and others stories to frame this issue in an amusing yet revealing light. As she’s said, she’s “moving her focus up a few inches.”

With only three performances (Friday & Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 7 p.m.), I wouldn’t be surprised if they sold out. But then again, some might feel this is a “girls only” event. I don’t agree, I saw the VM with a male friend who found it as good as I did. So, don’t let that stop you.

That said if you still don’t want to go, there is always the book route: Vagina Monologues [amazon] and/or The Good Body [amazon]. Stop resisting me and check it out!

OK, maybe it wasn’t THAT bad this morning.

Or maybe it was.

Up on the vast rise that is Phinney Ridge there was as much as a half-inch of sheer ice lying under an inch of dense yet powdery snow, which led to all sorts of problems getting down the hills of this city. The NE 85th/I-5 interchange was closed due to a jacknifed bus — and THREE MORE BUSES piled up behind it. In addition, there were cars and buses stuck on the sides of roads and streets all over the city.

All told, what is normally a 20 minute Friday commute to the U District took me 1 hour, 20 minutes. And I drove. I can’t imagine how long it’d take on the bus — I saw scores of people waiting at stops for buses that never showed.

Other reports say that Capitol Hill was just as bad, with Madison iced over and buses stuck on Broadway.

My one disappointment is that this took me by such surprise I didn’t have time to launch KILLER ICE SNOW OF DEATH DOOM STORM 2006 last night — or issue a Jim Forman Warning advising people over 200ft to be on the lookout for his hyperbole. Oh well, I guess megastorms take people by surprise sometime, like no one expects a Category 4 hurricane to hit New Orleans and not cause any problems that would require full-scale evacuations or cutting a brush-clearing vacation short to, you know, lead.

So, what’s your KILLER ICE SNOW OF DEATH DOOM STORM 2006 horror story?

Image courtesy WSL

That breezy day we had on February 4 apparently did a bit of damage to the 520 bridge. It’s closed from 5 AM Saturday through 10 AM Sunday for repair work to the drawbridge.

Bonus trivia: Who is the 520 bridge named after? (Sir Evergreen of Pointe is not the correct answer, sorry.)

The Stranger is hosting a debate between Ron Sims, King County Executive, and Ken Hutcherson, pastor of Antioch Bible Church. It will be at Town Hall on Thursday, March 2, at 7:30 PM. Josh Feit of Slog describes the debate as follows:

“Both men, prominent figures in King County’s African American community, are driving forces in today’s gay marriage debate. Sims helped orchestrate the lawsuit filed by gay couples–currently pending in state Supreme Court–that is aimed at overturning the ban on gay marriage. Hutcherson organized the May Day for Marriage rally at Safeco Field in 2004 & has threatened to organize a boycott of Microsoft for its support of Washington state’s gay rights bill.”

King 5 Reporter Robert Mak is moderating. Might be interesting….

photo c. The O Lounge

Looking for a good way to spend your Friday night? Consider stopping in at Queen Anne’s lovely The O Lounge to see talented local singer/songwriters Ian McFeron and Amy Stolzenbach play a series of acoustic sets.

The O Lounge can be found at 2208 Queen Anne Ave N (click link for map) and features drinks and great Thai food as well as excellent music.