Several notable things about this week’s print edition of the Stranger:

1. Thank your favorite deity. A terrible injustice has been corrected. The “I SAW U” ads have returned to their rightful place. Who wants to troll online personals for potential stalkers / admirers anyway?
2. While you’re at it, celebrate a little more. David Rees‘s brilliant & cathartic clip art comic, Get Your War On is now in the paper. It fills some of the space made by moving Adrian Ryan’s “celebrity” gossip column online.
3. This is the issue chocked full of reader-purchased content. Did anyone get a tally of the total amount spent purchasing this week’s paper?
4. The Table of Contents now lists the contents of the Stranger’s website. Mind-boggling meta-commentary on the utility of indexing or a testament to online revenue?

In other weekly paper news, Jonathan Kauffman’s long feature about high end educational alcohol culture sprouting up in Seattle bars was a thoroughly interesting read. Learning while drinking: everybody wins! Try drinking while reading the article for a double bonus.[seattleweekly]

At last. The moment we’ve all been waiting for! The language [pdf] for the ballot measures that are likely to have no effect on the viaduct replacement plan have been released. In short, Option 1 is the four lane wide-shouldered tunnel with unspecified transit and surface improvements that costs about $750,000 more than the state and federal government wants to give us. Option 2 is the practical eyesore, Viaduct II.

Think they’re both great ideas? Vote yes twice. Hate them both? Vote no twice. It probably doesn’t matter, but it will be fun to watch everyone sort out the results.

(ballot text after the jump; via friends of seattle [#])
(more…)

Do you fancy yourself a Seattle expert? Do you win friends and influence people with all sorts of obscure Emerald-city-ian knowledge?* Would you like to own some professionally** laminated MB swag that proclaims your Jet City expertise? Well, today may be your lucky day for, you see, today is the first day of our Where in Seattle weekly post!

The rules are simple:

1) look at the posted picture, and
2) post a comment which describes the specific location of said thing in Seattle.

Depending upon the popularity of said feature, prizes could be awarded! Exciting stuff, eh?

Ready to jump right in? The first picture is below.*** And start your guessing…now.

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* These proclivities are not required, however. You can just happen to know the answers or like to guess or any such nonsense.
** I use the term “professional” loosely. Har har har.
*** I apologize for the darkness, but I didn’t have my regular digital camera, just my phone. Sigh.

I like meat. In fact, I have a hard time eating vegetarian, because my hunger does not truly feel satisfied with dinner until I’ve thrown enough protein at it… preferably tasty animal flesh. Mind you, I have no problem with eating my vegetables (especially if they’re fresh), though veganism to me is, well, curious. And by curious I mean “there’s no way in HELL you can convince me that lump of tempeh is appetizing no matter how much organic soy sauce you throw on top of it.”

But lately I’ve been worried about the state of my animal protein supply. Factory farming. Chicken farm pollution. Feedlots. Tyson. Diesel-spewing trucks hauling grain-fed saturated-fat-with-meat-flavor from the monster farms in the Midwest just so I can have my bacon. Oh, evil bacon. I know my cardiologist hates you, but you’re so salty delicious.

But, finally, I found a local farm that produces expensive — but damn tasty — bacon. And by local, I mean Skagit River Ranch in Sedro-Wooley. It’s on Utopia Road. You gotta love a bunch of people brazen (and crunchy granola) enough to call their road “Utopia.”

I’m getting off track. Their bacon is incredible. One slab I got was like French salt pork — not a lot of lean, but a ton of flavor in the fat. It went into lentil and bacon stew; the recipe said “the flavor comes from the bacon, so get the best you can find.” I believe I found it.

Did I mention expensive? $8 a pound. But hey, organic, humane meat from a local farm isn’t going to be cheap, is it? I mean, being a granola isn’t cheap (not since the Dead and Phish stopped touring, at least), and being a gourmet isn’t, either (Saint Julia might take exception). But really, it’s worth it, just to know you’re lining Smithfield Farms’ pockets.

They have a stall every Saturday at the University District Winter Market (which you should check out, since it’s smaller and far less crowded than the Saturday morning zoo of the summer), and they’re the nicest people. I think they also sell at the Fremont Sunday Market too — or is it Ballard? (It is Ballard — also West Seattle. Thanks commenters!) Anyway. I think you should eat this stuff.

“I have a god-like relationship with the world I’ve created. It is exactly analogous. There is creation and resolution, and it’s all up to me.” — Martin Amis

Fantasies of omniscience and all, the esteemed Martin Amis is visiting Town Hall Seattle this Friday at 7:30 PM to read from and discuss his new book House of Meetings [powells].

House of Meetings takes the form of a novella and two short stories and is an exploration of Russian history and character, political intolerance, anti-Semitism, the psychology of incarcerated life, the problems of freedom, and the weight of crime on the conscience. [ths]

In addition to being an accomplished writer and major influence on the likes of Zadie Smith and Will Self, Amis is no stranger to controversy. His recent statements regarding Islamic presence in Great Britain were widely criticized and earned him the strange title of Blitcon [wiki]. Friday promises to be interesting on several fronts.

Town Hall Seattle is located on 8th and Seneca. Tickets are $5; available at the Elliott Bay Book Co. or by calling 624-6600.

• become a classy wino this weekend on 15th Avenue [capitolhillseattle]
• people who don’t speak english think “diarrhea” sounds pretty, and other facts from the Pacific Science Center‘s grossology [#] exhibit [seattletraveler]
• Worried that you’re getting a bad deal on your rent? Plug-in your address and find out if you’re paying more than your neighbors. [rentometer]

Okay, so I know some of you will be watching the finale of Top Chef tonight, but hey, that’s what DVR is for! Here are some alternate ideas if you are like me and are sick of being sick and stuck in your apartment:

• At 7:30, 826 Seattle and Elliott Bay Books bring Vendela Vida to town to read from her novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. Vida is coeditor of The Believer and famed for many things including two other well received novels and co-founding the original 826 (Valencia) down in San Fran. [wiki] Is she a better writer than Dave Eggers? Attend and find out. [eb]
• If you’re more into films and how they’re made, perhaps the Screenwriter Salon, “Fly Films Take Flight” is for you. This month’s session will be the debut reading for this year’s SIFF Fly Film Festival scripts. Free for SIFF members but only 5 bones for non, starts at 7:30. I would totally be going to this, but for the next item on the agenda… [seattlefilm]
• All the silly people will be at UW tonight attending Christopher Moore’s reading from his latest, You Suck. This UW bookstore event highlights the fact that Mr. Moore has been on a serious publishing streak lately. I mean seriously, I bought A Dirty Job for a friend for Christmas thinking that was the latest but apparently not. Who does he think he is? Stephen King? [uwbookstore]
• And finally, if music is more your speed, might we suggest Division Day at the Sunset in Ballard? No, not the Elliott Smith single, but the up and coming Los Angeles band. As always, check their myspace page for a pre-show listen. [sunset, dd, myspace]

As if the stressful publish or perish quest for tenure wasn’t appealing enough, the University of Washington is looking at options for making faculty positions more attractive. The latest idea percolating into the news cycle is a plan to lure new hires to the University by creating near-campus housing options:

The UW provides plenty of student housing but has never offered homes to faculty and staff — aside from a mansion for the president. But it hopes to transform two University District parking lots it bought last fall into six stories of multifamily living. … The UW is considering a separate development in a former Navy barracks it owns in Sand Point Magnuson Park, which could yield 150 more units. [times].

When this happens it will probably be a substantial draw for young faculty: all of the collegiality of dorm life, with wine and cheese parties in place of kegs, a few kids running around, and a shorter commute to campus than biking in along the Burke-Gilman.

Possibly even more effective in improving the neighborhood than expanding the student conduct code to off-campus [thedaily], too.

The countdown to condoification of the hallowed section of Pine Street stretching from Winners Circle to Kincora has begun and hangs like the now absent cloud of smoke over Captiol Hill drinking occasions. Just as generations of public transit users will have monuments to the Bus Stop as they wait for chronically late Metro buses to spirit them away, the Cha Cha will forever be memorialized, like Jimi, in bronze and at the intersection of Pine and Broadway:

The day before, he was on his hands and knees in the same spot in a hole on Broadway and East Pine Street on Capitol Hill, positioning cha-cha-ing sets of shoeprints — one in the shape of a man’s shoe, and another in the shape of a woman’s.

With his gloved hand, he arranged gravel and mud to support mounted steps, so that when the sidewalk concrete was poured into the hole, the footprints would be on the street’s surface. [p-i]

The rest of the article deals with another Capitol Hill institution on the move. But unlike the Cha Cha, the Elite won’t have any dance steps added to the sidewalks. Instead, they’ll get a new location with pinball machines and pool tables. Not such a horrible trade-off.

The Henry [site] is currently hosting an exhibition of works by acclaimed media artist Wallid Raad that runs until early February. Tonight they’re sponsoring a Raad-selected film and video program at the Northwest Film Forum [site], featuring works by Anri Sala, Peter Greenaay, Gene Gort, Lisa Steele and Julia Meltzer and David Thorne. The program starts at 8pm; tickets are a mere $7.