Given the abundance of hyper-geek elite in Seattle, I’m surprised by not having heard of any solid plans to turn tomorrow — being called “1234567890 Day” — into a blatant excuse for an early afternoon drunk.  Have no clue what the hell this is all about?  For starters, it’s all based on UNIX time.  Teach me, oh great Wikipedia!

Unix time [is] defined as the number of seconds elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds. It is widely used not only on Unix-like operating systems but also in many other computing systems.

So you see, 1234567890 Day is essentially when this 10 digit UNIX timestamp reaches, well, 1234567890.  And it just so happens that this will be occurring tomorrow, February 13th, at exactly 3:31:30 PST.  Unfortunately, there have only been idle suggestions as to any kind of Seattle celebration for this milestone in number porn.  Hopefully someone in the know will be able to correct me in the comments section.  If not, tomorrow afternoon will find me in front of the monitor as usual, with drink in hand — as usual.  However, this time I’ll be watching the count-up here, and that drink is going to be a double.

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* 6:00 PM: Happy 200th Birthday, Darwin!!! Too dead to read or sign, or even to cut his own cake, Darwin is nonetheless the star of tonight’s event at the Burke Museum. The author of The Voyage of the Beagle (1845), On the Origin of Species (1859), The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) will be feted with lectures by Mott Greene (UPS & UW), Mark Terry (Northwest School), and John Herron (UW).
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* 7:00 PM: Dystopian novels are usually set in the future, but John Birmingham’s Without Warning is an alternate history of the very recent variety. America is reduced to the PNW and Alaska by a wave of mysterious radiation. Oh, noes! What will the world do without America? My dad loves this sort of speculative fiction. Birmingham will read and sign at the U-District UW Bookstore.
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* 7:30 PM: Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the wildly popular Eat, Pray, Love, will speak about writing, life, and her current projects at the Meany Theatre. I may be the only person on the planet who didn’t care for Eat, Pray, Love, so there should be plenty of people willing to shell out for tickets, even though Gilbert will not be signing. Presented by University Bookstore.
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The theme of this year’s Noir City series at SIFF Cinema is “newspaper noir”, perfectly fitting when you consider what’s going on with the Times and the P-I of late.

The week-long celebration of movies that focus on the darker side of life includes 14 films set in the old media world of newspapers, radio and print publishing. Screenings for all seven nights are double features and this year SIFF has worked up a program that reflects the way movies were shown in 1940s theaters, pairing the feature film each night with a B-movie of the era, a shorter movie purposely made to fill that second slot.

The series begins on Friday, February 13, with Deadline USA and Scandal Sheet. In Deadline USA, the fictional New York Day is a newspaper that’s just about to be sold to its main competitor and Humphrey Bogart is a veteran Day reporter who decides to go out in style by taking on the city’s biggest gangster, racing against time to nail him for murder before the presses slam to a stop. Released in 1952, Deadline USA predicts the future of the real newspaper industry with startling accuracy. Scandal Sheet tells the twisted tale of a tabloid editor who murders his wife and then assigns a hungry young reporter to “find the killer”.

Saturday’s double bill is The Unsuspected, in which Claude Raines plays a popular radio personality who uses his murder mystery show to flush out the killer of a young woman and solve the tricky question of why his niece can’t remember the man who claims to be her husband. It’s paired with Desperate, in which a newlywed couple flees from both the police and a gang of robbers leds by ruthless Raymond Burr.

Sunday sees Ace in the Hole, a film that critics of the time called “the most bitter, cynical, mean-spirited movie ever made” in which rotten reporter Kirk Douglas purposely interferes to drag out the misery of a trapped miner in the hopes of exploiting the tragedy to boost his own sagging ratings. Second billed Cry of the Hunted sees a Los Angeles cop tracking a killer through the Lousiana swamp while battling the partner who hates him.

The editor of a “true crime” magazine makes news himself when he gets framed for murder in The Big Clock Monday night, with a Strange Triangle of an embezzler husband and the wife who will stop at nothing, not even ruining the life of an innocent man, to keep him from trouble.

Tuesday’s two are Chicago Deadline with noir-mainstay Alan Ladd as a reporter obsessed by the life and death of woman found dead in a Chicago brothel and Johnny Stool Pigeon one of the first Hollywood films to focus on drug smuggling.

While the City Sleeps, Wednesday, stars Vincent Price as the creepy heir to a media conglomerate who challenges his top reporters to crack the story of a serial killer. Also showing: Shakedown with Howard Duff as a member of the paparazzi in 1950 San Francisco who supplements his journalism salary with a dangerous sideline in blackmail.

The series concludes Thursday, Feburary 19, with Ray Milland as a politician who sells his soul to the devil, literally, in Alias Nick Beale teamed with Night Editor in which a cop is charged with the duty of investigating the murder he witnessed while canoodling with his married lover.

Noir City is hosted by noted noir expert Eddie Mueller who will be on hand to introduce the films.

photo by Jeff Carlson [flickr] via our group pool [#].

• The city’s putting the kibosh on hipster gym class on the Cal Anderson tennis courts; trying relocate dodgeballers to more suitable terrain. [capitolhillseattle]
• Almost certainly the least interesting “scandal” of the day: the Stranger doesn’t serve location-specific ads on its website; so out of town readers see advertisements for Seattle businesses. [dailyweekly]
• Hooray! The Twilight Exit will open its new new home on Friday afternoon. [centraldistrictnews]
• MyBus has been flaky lately; luckily OneBusAway seems to be getting better and better. [seattletransitblog]
• the Stranger put its news intern to work trying to find the most popular (read “most commented”) writers at the P-I. [slog]
• Jordan Royer is running for the city council seat that Richard McIver’s planning to vacate. James Donaldson hasn’t decided which position he’ll run for. Have we all grown so weary of the nonsensical system by which these positions appear to be entirely arbitrary that we just stop mentioning it? If we can’t do it by district, then why not have everyone run in the same election and pick the top vote getters? [publicola]  

Browsing Consumerist this afternoon, I came across this. Drill down to Seattle, and you can browse “shovel-ready” projects that the state has requested federal stimulus dollars for.

This is a completely volunteer built site and there is no official interaction with the Obama Administration, but sometimes sites like this do catch the right eye and can actually make a difference. At the very least, browsing the various projects and voting is a great way to waste a little time this afternoon.

I’m personally a little amused that the most negatively rated project is the Provision of Handheld Ticketing Devices to Traffic Enforcement Police Officers.

Apparently, birds that want to take down airplanes at SeaTac airport have got a big job ahead of them. The airport has a wildlife biologist on staff who not only plants things that birds don’t want to land on and covers the water with nets, but actively goes out of the way to harass any intrepid birds out of the immediate airspace:

Osmek uses a laser with a scope on it to shine a green light near birds. The light flashing near the birds mimics a predator stalking them, Osmek says, and usually causes them to take flight. For more persistent opponents, Osmek reaches into the deep arsenal of what he calls his “pyrotechnics.”

They are explosive shells that he uses to ward off birds — sometimes large flocks of them — entering airspace near the airport’s three runways. Osmek fires the shells with a variety of pistols or a shotgun. Some boom loudly, and others scream into the sky before blowing up into puffs of smoke.

One projectile travels up to 1,200 feet before exploding like a thunderclap. It is intended to ward off high-flying birds like hawks or eagles. Osmek says the pyrotechnics only scare the birds and do not harm them [CNN].

In all the time I’ve spent at the airport, I’ve never heard any gunshots or explosions, and this may be the first time in my life I’ve ever been disappointed by a lack of gunfire. On top of all of that, the airport has a fancy radar that helps figure out exactly where and what sort the birds are and how high they’re flying.

Of course, none of this is very helpful once the airplane gets a little ways away from the airport, but as a person who is terrified of birds anyway I am very pleased to find that SeaTac is doing their best to make sure that the awful things don’t cause my untimely death on their watch.

Let’s say there are 6 couples (12 people total) wanting to stay at a cabin in the beginning of summer. Where would you go?

Now before you start spouting out answers, there are a few requirements:

1. It must be 2 hours or less away.

2. It can’t be in Leavenworth or Whidbey Island.

And well, that’s it. I figured the readers of this blog would have better answers then me searching the internet so I’m thanking you all in advance.

Thanks,

Yayunicorns

Amazingly enough, tickets still seem to be available for both nights of Murder City Devils not-exactly reuniting. Tonight is all ages, tomorrow is 21+, both are at the Showbox. You know what to do. [showboxonline]