The 43 was late, again. My wife was just about to give up and find another ride when it finally showed up at the Boyer Ave. and 24th stop, about 9:20 this morning.

Somewhere between five and ten minutes later, a sixteen-year-old driver tried to turn left at the same intersection, lost control of her car in the slight drizzle, and killed a jogger waiting to cross at the light.

Five to ten minutes different, and I might have been the one getting the phone call everyone dreads.

My heartfelt sympathy to everyone involved.

Tomorrow is Earth Day, and I’ll bet you’ve been wondering just how “green” Greg Nickels and Ron Sims actually are. Well, the PI is there for you.

World Changing thinks that Earth Day is actually a pretty dangerous holiday, for all it seems so innocent. (I don’t disagree, but these guys have clearly never been around someone deep-frying a Thanksgiving turkey. That’s a dangerous holiday.) They say:

The biggest problem with Earth Day is that it has become a ritual of sympathy for the idea of environmental sanity. Small steps, we’re told, ignoring the fact that most of the steps most frequently promoted (returning your bottles, bringing your own bag, turning off the water while you brush your teeth) are of such minor impact (compared to our ecological footprints) that they are essentially meaningless without larger, systemic action as well. The strategy of recycling as a gateway drug — get them hooked on it and we can move them on to harder stuff — has failed miserably.

And they’re not wrong. But we’ve got a reputation for having leaders that are a little more concerned than most, perhaps, between Greg Nickels and his challenge for all the mayors to follow the Kyoto Protocol. But today the PI asks if they’re, you know, practicing all of this stuff. The answer is “mostly”, which is much better than not at all [PI]. Nickels doesn’t grow any of his own food, but he does drive a mid-size car where Sims drives an SUV. Sims bikes a lot, while Nickels has a rain barrel. Seems like some of these should be weighted differently.

Now that this has all been spelled out, I expect Nickels and Sims to start a bet on it–you know how we love our jovial and mostly meaningless bets. It’s time for a green-off. If Sims wins, Nickels will probably have to ride a bike around West Seattle thirteen times while carrying a salmon. If Nickels wins, Sims will have to replace all the lightbulbs in his house with fluorescents while wearing a blindfold and singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Someone might even have to kiss a pig.

The 2007 Pop Music Conference [emp] continues through Sunday and is free to attend, which means that you don’t need to be an academic or professional critic to spectate (or participate) in the showcase of academics and professional critics. I went to yesterday’s morning session and found the proceedings both bizarre, fascinating, and occasionally entertaining. It is worth going for the mind-bending juxtaposition of seeing scholarly discourse on music taking place in a room decorated in blood red walls, cargo netting, a disco ball, and a flying saucer on the wall.

That was the scene where Sascha Frere-Jones discussed R&B’s dominance of the popular airwaves, the genre’s shedding of pain to become pop, the absence of a pop music response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and the repetitive tone poem that is the owners of the 2004-2005 Billboard Hot 100′s number one spot. In that same session, Robert Fink presented an audio-visual slideshow analyzing the rhythmic patterns of civil rights chants (“black power”), the parallels between that chant’s introduction and James Brown’s appropriation and response to it both rhythmically and in his dynamic performance transition into “Soul Power”. This, in a room that once housed the EMP’s Funk Blast “ride”. And later, Joshua Clover‘s funny and insightful talk about the ways that pop music attaches itself to a year, how a year becomes a “year”, and the role of music in collective memory.

This all does get a little much for the non-professional. By the time I’d heard Patricia Jeehyun Ahn exasperated and excessively scare-quoted critique of the O.C. for portraying the overwhelmingly homogenous Newport as overwhelmingly racially, economically, and sexually homogenous (she must have missed the season where Marissa became a lesbian, the Johnny & Volcheck plotlines, Theresa, the Coopers exile in trailerparkland) while half complementing the show for its episode about Kpop (and I think erring in saying that Taylor Townshend’s Korean boyfriend was unable to speak english); I had to escape before finding out whether Devon Powers would answer her question about whether rock criticism is part of intellectual history. The previous, humorous talk by Randall Roberts concerning Creem magazine’s snarky news section may have been responsible for leaving me with a mindset incapable of following along on Power’s lengthy recursive introductory paragraphs expositing on why she wouldn’t be answering the question she posed for herself.

Scholarly overload aside, the rest of the weekend looks drop-in worthy. This afternoon includes a discussion of the rise and fall of the Rocket and tomorrow closes with an all-star panel discussion of the future of professional music criticism.

All of that pop music discourse should put you in the appropriate frame of mind for the rest of the night’s entertainment:

• Epic, spacey, dramatic rock from Blonde Redhead paired with Annuals, the most enthusiastic young rockers out of North Carolina [showbox]
• Up the hill, Junior Boys may hold the title of sexiest music made by sweater-vest sporting Canadians. [chopsuey]

There are some great movie choices around town this weekend, everything from semi-schlocky sci-fi from back in the day to classic political satire to the story of a man’s transformation into a hamburger

Films playing in Seattle this weekend include:

• The Grand Illusion [site] brings you Friday night and Saturday/Sunday evening showings of Our Man in Havana starring Alec Guinness and Noel Coward in the story of a vacuum cleaner salesman turned spy. (Friday at 7 & 9 pm, Saturday & Sunday at 3 & 5 pm; Later in the night they’re screening Hamburger Dad, a locally produced film about a man who one day wakes up to find himself turned into a hamburger. See how he copes (and ask the attending filmmakers just what they were on when they came up with this concept) Friday and Saturday at 11 pm.
• Over at SIFF [site] Friday brings Fires on the Plains at 7:30 pm, Kon Ichikawa’s 1959 film about the last days of World War II on the Phillipine island of Leyte. 10 pm the same night you can catch Kurosawa’s High and Low about a businessman, a kidnapping and a search through the underworld. If you miss Friday night’s presentation, you can see High and Low on Saturday at 2:45 pm then go out for some sushi and get back by 7:30 to watch Kurosawa’s legendary Seven Samurai, a movie that influenced everyone from Sam Peckinpah to Francis Ford Coppola, and then some. Sunday at 2:30 is another showing of Fires on the Plain at 2:30 and then Seven Samurai again at 7:00.
• Northwest Film Forum [site] presents Cats of Mirikitani, a look at Jimmy Mirikitani, an artist who stuck with his motto of “Make Art, Not War” even when he found himself homeless on the streets of New York. Filmmaker Linda Hattendorf took him in on 9/11/01 and eventually created this film which shows Mirkikitani’s history, art and life in detail. The film runs until the 6th, but if you go Friday night at 7, Linda Ando of the Tule Lake Pilgrimage [site] and CAssie Chinn of Wing Luke Museum [site] will be on hand for some Q&Q. On Saturday at 7 Linda Ando returns with Stan Shikuma, also from the Tule Lake organization.
• This weekend Midnight at the Egyptian [site] is Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan, a movie for which a good number of people have a great deal of fondness. Me, I remember thinking when I saw this movie just after its release: “Huh, I guess I’m not a diehard Trek fan, after all.” Their prime time film this week is After the Wedding [site] a well-reviewed film about a young man who runs an Indian orphanage and the drama that ensues when he returns to Denmark to request heolp from a wealthy benefactor.

photo by Dustin DeKoekkoek [flickr], via our group pool [#].

• Those intrigued, as was Ari Spool [slog], by today’s Thursday Styles story about the hot new trends in men’s undergarments [nyt] will no doubt be pleased to learn that the Sweatshop has their fingers on the throbbing pulse of America’s most fashionable groins with a window display of sporty, locally-designed boxer briefs.
• Whatever happened to the viaduct debate? It went behind-the-scenes. [crosscut]
• Sad news for fans of deliciousness in the form of soup, smoothies, and organic produce. After months of emptied shelves, Rainbow Grocery is rumored to be closing up shop on 1 May. [capitolhillseattle]
• Grotesque scholars at UW covered with moss and guano. [seattledailyphoto]

Fans of stellar music writing and music in general: Set your alarm and think up your excuses for being late to work. the New Yorker’s music critic extraordinaire Sascha Frere-Jones addresses the 2007 Pop Music Conference on Friday morning [emp] on a panel about “year zeroes”.

• Sunset Rubdown is one of Spencer Krug’s side projects. Their songs bear a strong resemblance to the Wolf Parade songs he writes and sings — delirious imagery-heavy lyrics squirming through alternately bombastic and retreating instrumental layers — except more spacious, raw, and immediate. Which makes the band interesting support for headliners Xiu Xiu, who are sort of like a non-trite, authentic, interesting, and unhinged Dashboard Confessional. Whether he’s playing a tiny guitar, harmonium, or supported by the rest of the band and their crazy custom keyboards, Jamie Stewart opens his emotional floodgates for electric, often uncomfortable, mesmerizing performances. Locals, Das Llamas open; they won’t be wearing animal costumes. [neumos]
• Velouria shows off their spring collection in an indie rock fashion show. I’m not sure whether the fashion is indie rock or if it’s just the soundtrack, provided by Siberian and Ghost Stories. [crocodile]

related: four great Sunset Rubdown tracks [daytrotter]

Like Seattlest James, I’ve recently rented a house and moved. Granted, our situations aren’t exactly parallel: he’s only lived above the cut, I’ve only lived above it; he uses the royal editorial we, I…don’t; he moved to Rainier Beach, I moved to Madison Park. But like my fellow blogger, I’m eager to investigate my new surroundings, especially the food. And I knew early on that my first stop would be the Scoop du Jour Ice Creamery.
The Scoop is, of course, an ice cream shop. But what you might not know is that they also serve an array of sandwiches. And this array of sandwiches? It features what some, including many Bush School alums, claim is the best burger in Seattle.
And as soon as I placed my order, my expectations jumped ever higher. Why? Those magic words: “It’ll be about ten minutes.” Because a ten-minute burger is a burger that’s been lovingly hand-shaped and grilled at a leisurely pace. A ten-minute burger is serious business in the burger world. And ten minutes later, my expectations were fulfilled. The patty is an ideal balance between thick and thin, perfectly juicy, and with just enough crisp around the edges. My burger came with “everything”: tomatoes, pickles, sauce, cheese, and a pile of lettuce that promptly fell out all over the place. This is definitely a burger of the Red Mill family, and perhaps less topping would be better–I plan to settle for only pickles, cheese, and ketchup on my next visit. After all, with a ten-minute burger this good, why waste time with lettuce? If you love a good burger, I’ll see you around the neighborhood…maybe I’ll even get ice cream next time.

Like helper monkey and surveillance sea lions before them [mb], narwhals are the latest front in humanity’s quest to make use of the rest of the animal kingdom for our own purposes. Researchers at the University of Washington have hatched a scheme to measure the fluctuating arctic water temperatures by employing unicorns of the sea as amateur oceanographers. [times]

While I find this use of tusked sea mammals as climate watching drones all sorts of delightful (they’re heading deep sea diving in icy cold waters anyway, why not take along some gear for a N.O.A.A. project [gov]?), it seems that the whales aren’t particularly lining up at recruitment fairs:

To trap the beasts, which weigh a ton or more, the scientists string long nets perpendicular to shore. They then mount a 24-hour watch, waiting for a narwhal to swim into the nets.

[ ... ]

When a narwhal does get entangled, it fights furiously until the scientists wrestle it into a kind of hammock strung between two inflatable boats. Then they clip the transmitter, smaller than a deck of cards, to the animal’s small dorsal fin.

You’d think they’d be eager to help us track just how quickly we’re destroying the planet, given that the ice shelf west of Greenland is a major narwhal vacation destination and having it melt completely might cramp their style. Maybe their reluctance to cozy up to people might just be a holdover from centuries of being butchering only to have their mysterious tusks passed off to royalty as unicorn horns.

(old timey illustration via wikipedia [#], although I was really tempted to use this t-shirt instead [threadless])

You know, everyone is sick right now. All over town. Half of my office has been out this week. So I vote that you do like I did on Tuesday and play hooky and head up to Mount Vernon to see the tulips. You know, for your health.

Don’t let the weather stop you. The very nice man at the cidery told us that Skagit Valley is in a convergence zone, which seems to mean that if it’s raining on the way up I-5 it won’t be raining much on the tulips. I don’t know what that means exactly, but it proved true–while it poured on the way up, we had a lovely day in the flowers. Heading out there on a weekday means that the crowds are practically nonexistant. The tasting rooms are empty and the fields are often quiet enough that an observant tulip-gazer can hear the bees buzzing in the flowers.

If you can’t get away during the week, they’ve got a whole mess of events happening on the weekends.

I don’t usually watch much late-night TV (or much TV at all, actually) but last night I found myself watching some late night show or another on which David Arquette was a guest talking about his new movie, The Tripper [My Space> which he has both written and directed. It's not a big studio project so Arquette's been out on the road promoting it himself.

This Friday, 4/20, Arquette will be at the Regal Meridian (1501 Seventh Ave) in person to introduce his film (an anti-war hippie slasher film) to Seattle audiences. [trailer] To be honest, I have very little interest in the “slasher” genre myself, but I was impressed with how charming and enthusiastic Arquette was about promoting his film–it’s always cool to watch an artist be excited about his work. Who knows? This could be a future cult classic or a blockbuster break out–if you’re into the horror genre and want to see something new and fresh, check it out.