The City of Seattle has a couple of initiatives that seem a lot more sensible than their proposed ban on beach bonfires. (#)

The first is the Tree Fund, which provides anywhere from 10-40 trees to neighborhood groups to improve residential streets and build community. It’s part of Seattle’s Neighborhood Matching Funds program, which is worth checking out if you have a large or small neighborhood improvement project that’s been sitting on the back burner.

As a foot-commuter, I’m also interested in Seattle’s Pedestrian Master Plan, which aims to make Seattle the most walkable city in the country. Until September 15th, they’re collecting surveys on the walkability of various Seattle neighborhoods, including questions about what areas you don’t walk in, and why. It’s a pretty short survey, and hopefully will result in something getting done (personally, I’d like to have a couple sidewalks repaired post-tree-root-cracking). I don’t know if it’ll make Seattle the most walkable city in the country… but it’s certainly more walkable than most major metros I’ve been to.

vlog, take 42

(my first, and most likely last, video post announcing video commenting.)

Nick Licata, co-chair of the Seattle City Council Pedestrian Safety Committee has invited the citizens of Seattle to help improve pedestrian safety by sending in photos of dangerous intersections. As stated by Licata:

The information provided by citizens will be used, together with other sources of information and engineering judgments, to develop priorities in improving pedestrian safety. Suggesting changes or improvements to an intersection or a crosswalk does not mean that the City will make the suggested changes or improvement because the changes may not be warranted under existing standards or because the City’s professional engineering staff may not agree that changes are needed.

To submit your entries:

• Email your digital photos to my legislative assistant at frank.video@seattle.gov. In the subject line type: “Critical Crossings”.
• Name the cross streets of each intersection you submit, i.e. “Slowpoke Avenue North and Busy Boulevard Southwest”.
• Include any comments you wish to make about each intersection you submit.
• Let me know if you want to post your email address next to your photo so others can contact you.
• Submit images in JPG or GIF format. The image should be 640 x 480 pixels or larger. To insure quality, images smaller then 640 x 480 pixels will not be posted on this site.

If you are interested in information about legislation, projects and general issues impacting pedestrian safety, you can sign up to receive my pedestrian safety bulletins by emailing robin.matisse@seattle.gov. In the subject line type: “Add to pedestrian safety list.”

Source

You’re sitting in the short line at the I-5 southbound on-ramp at 45th, waiting for your turn to enter the freeway, when a Washington State Patrol car shoots past you in the carpool lane. The cop gets onto the freeway about 10 seconds before you do.

Once on the freeway, the cop immediately flips on his lights — but not his siren — and begins a slow, drunken weave across all the lanes of the freeway. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Everybody on the interstate gives the cop a wide, wide berth as you slowly cross the Ship Canal bridge, staying well back.

Once across the bridge, the cop turns off his lights without fanfare and darts off the road at the Roanoke exit. Traffic immediately speeds up to normal.

WTF?

Theory 1: The Dalai Lama, or somebody else requiring a police escort, was trying to exit from 520 westbound onto I-5 south. The cops decided to give them some space to merge.

Theory 2: Washington State Patrol has finally lost it and decreed that traffic should never exceed 45 miles per hour on the ship canal bridge.

Theory 3: You have finally found the one man in Seattle who most desperately needs a vacation.

Solution:
Barrie referred to SPUD as a CSA, when it is clearly not a CSA but a food-delivery service. She also could not have seen the SPUD website as the web had not been invented when the Encyclopedia Brown books were published. Finally, Erica C. Barnett commented on the post, which is impossible as she never reads Metblogs, only pro-Hillary websites.

When confronted with this, Barrie admitted she was put up to this by Bugs Meany, who was using the alias “Sean Bonner” to make everyone’s lives miserable. The stolen bicycle was returned. Also, Sally Kimball is a lesbian, but you knew that already if you read The Case Of The Girl Sally Was Totally Hot For But Didn’t Know How To Come Out About It Without Breaking Encyclopedia Brown’s Heart And Oh Bugs Meany Stole Some Comic Books But That’s A Total MacGuffin I Mean Come On Being A Tomboy But Always Able To Pick Out The Etiquette Mistakes Doesn’t That Scream “I’m Going To Get A Civil Union And A Subaru The Moment I Turn 18″ To You?

If this is totally non sequitur to you (and it should be), blame Wesa and Ryan for making me post this piece of an e-mail conversation yesterday.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we Metrobloggers would marry 826 Seattle if it would have us. And really, what’s not to love? From the good works they do to the great store (pictured), they are stupid with awesomeness. So when the email plopped into my inbox and asked for entries for their new tee-shirt design, the only thing that held me back from a post was the thought that Samantha would beat me to it.

So, yeah, they’re looking to change up their tee-shirts. I think it will be a serious challenge to beat the already fantastic design, but they are just the type of people that are always looking for ways to be better (another part of why I love them). There are rules and prizes of course, but there don’t seem to be too many other constraints on your imagination.

Might I recommend using their transporter for a quick jaunt to Pluto for inspiration? But don’t spend too long traveling, the deadline is April 15th!

Metblogs HQ has issued a memorandum regarding the recent site re-design. To summarize, things didn’t go off without a hitch. They never do (although Boing Boing likes it). In the coming days and weeks you should expect to see a darker and easier to read font, a narrower site (it’s way too wide right now), broken images and links fixed, and RSS and post updating wonkiness cured (including author-specific feeds). There are innumerable other things we’ve variously complained about since the launch that will be changed or fixed over the coming weeks. In the meantime, we appreciate you hanging in with us. Transitions like these are painful – especially when it affects outspoken and whiny bloggers.

As always, your feedback is welcomed.

Looks like the DNS servers are all starting to catch up, so more of you are looking at the new Soviet brutalist meets 1930s comic book look, than this morning, when it was basically Ryan, Shawn, Denny, and the 1700 people in Burkina Faso with an internet connection.

If you’re reading this in Google Reader, hooray, they fixed the RSS/Atom links.

So, hello. Things are still very much under construction. Corporate is promising lots of changes in the coming days, including a fix for the impressively small fonts.

The biggest change, as Ryan mentioned earlier, is that now you will have to register in order to comment. Yes, yes, we know. But hey, could be worse, I guess. At least we’re not moderating. Yet.

So, hey. Why not take this opportunity to register and comment on how much you love/hate this new look? Or maybe how much you love Soviet brutalism. I know I do. Nothing better than a skyline filled with soulless concrete apartment blocks, I must say.

The above photo was lovingly dropped in our Flickr pool by our very own Shawn. The new system is currently obliterating all the nice code we used to use for Flickr photos. But that doesn’t mean we’ll stop using them, oh hells no. Keep ‘em coming.

Welcome to the newly re-designed Seattle Metblogs. Some of us, including our fearless leader Josh, aren’t able to access the site, yet (something about DNS servers not propagating fast enough). Therefore, I’m your Welcome Committee. We hope you like the new look. There are definitely some kinks that need to be worked out and the powers that be promise they’ll get to it post haste over the next few days. In the meantime, we welcome your feedback in the comments below.

Update: I just realized readers have to login to comment. I think I speak for most of us when I say this isn’t ideal. However, I think we’re stuck with it for now. Feedback is being provided as I type.

As you already know, the Second Annual Tournament of Blogs kicked off today with group play in the “god, pols, pumpkin” and “food” categories. What you might be wondering is what—besides bragging rights and a really awesome, homemade, gold spray-painted trophy—awards await the weblog that makes it through this gauntlet of webvoting victorious. The answer is: we’re working on it.

SO, if you’re affiliated with a local business and want to contribute a little piece of swag to the prize packages, please drop us a note at seattle.metblogs (at) gmail.com . There are a whole lot of matches to be played, and naming rights are wide open.