At this late hour, it looks like we’re perilously close to a garbage strike in Seattle and King County.
What would a garbage strike mean? In all likelihood, residential and apartment rubbish will stack up until there’s a resolution. The last time Seattle had a strike (February 1997) the trash was not picked up for three days. This time, the two sides are close, so maybe it will be short again.
If not… this town will stink.
UPDATE: Strike averted. At least for now.
The parking lot of the SoDo Home Depot abuts a railway track — perhaps a spur line or a storage area for the more active line that occasionally cuts off east-west traffic between Occidental Ave S and 3rd South. On one of the boxcars stored there was the curious admonition pictured above. No text, just the imperative against hammers. Any ideas what it could mean?
The Central District has quite a few Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants, but one I hadn’t tried before was Adey Abeba. Named for the Meskel daisy (አደይ አበባ) which grows after the Ethiopian rainy season, Adey Abega is located at 2123 East Union. Inside you’ll find an interior a step above many comparable restaurants, with warm yellow walls and widely-spaced tables. Check out their online menu for a glimpse of the offerings. For those new to Ethiopian food, the food is usually eaten with the hands — a thin pancake called injera serves as a kind of edible plate as well as an eating utensil itself. Meat- and vegetable-stews, called wat, are arranged on top of the injera — featuring everything from chicken and beef to carrots and corn. Pictured here is the Adey combination, which at $11 qualfies as one of the city’s best deals in terms of both diversity of flavors and bang for your buck:
Four people have drowned down at the waterfront recently, and since three of them were fishermen it seemed like as good an excuse as any to try and kick the rest of the fishermen out of Fishermen’s Terminal [P-I]. The Port is going to be starting a revitalization project to bring more tour and dive boats in, and the city would like to have fewer corpses floating about to discourage them.
Except that the people who live on the boats do so for lots of reasons, most of which are financial. They don’t want all of their equipment hanging out at the docks unsupervised, and they can’t afford to keep their deckhands at hotels in between fishing trips. Besides, who wants a cleaned-up and sanitized fishermen’s terminal? I’ll keep my fishermen crusty and weather-beaten, thanks.
But for now, the fishermen can stay [P-I]. “The port has the authority to push through the rules, detailed in Thursday’s Seattle P-I, but said it would not do so. Instead, four committee members will rewrite parts of the existing rules, trying to preserve the rights of active fishermen while sending the partiers packing.” They’ll review the rewrite on May 25th, and construction on the new docks will start in the fall.
It’s Saturday! And spring! Time to shake off that hangover and get out there, champ. Might we suggest:
If you listened to our advice a couple of weeks ago, then you’ll be spending the next 24 hours at Mind Camp. It’s a conference completely without agenda: “On Saturday afternoon, after everyone has lunch and introductions are made, we’ll open the Session Grid to all comers. A large sheet of butcher paper will be blocked out with hour slots along the x-axis and room names down the y-axis. Each attendee who wants to present a session will enter their Session Title and their name in whichever block they can manage to claim. Then, everyone steps back and takes a look at the signups, picks their session, and makes for the appropriate room.” If you’re not going, you won’t even get to know what you should have been jealous about until people start blogging about it on Sunday.
Or, from 10-5 today you could visit the FlorAbundance Spring Plant Sale out at Magnuson Park, benefiting the Arboretum foundation. It’s the Pacific Northwest’s biggest plant sale, and you know your garden’s getting thin.
Last I heard, there were still some tickets left for the Rock Lottery happening at Neumos. Twenty-five local musicians are picked, and at 10 a.m. they’re split into five bands and given 12 hours to create three-to-five songs. At 10 p.m. they’ll file back into Neumos and hopefully impress an audience that will have had two hours since the doors opened to get good and drunk. Remember last year, when Sean Nelson and one of the girls from Smoosh played a song about a spider? Yeah, me neither, because I missed it, but I’ve certainly been hearing about it for the last year. I don’t intend to make the same mistake twice, and all proceeds go to KEXP.
Sorry, folks. I have been remiss in not pointing out a good source of free coffee: Peet’s Coffee & Tea, celebrating their 40th anniversary, have been giving it away throughout the month of April. This weekend is your last chance to take advantage, with complimentary cups of coffee between 1 and 3 today (Friday) through Sunday. Plus, there’s a little something extra going on every afternoon. Today: you can get a free 1/4 pound of their Anniversary Blend (which they describe as “bold, bright, sweet and complex”). Saturday: there’s a home brewing workshop from 2 to 3. Sunday: there’s a coffee tasting from 2 to 3.
[List of Peet’s locations in the Seattle area here.]
You know what we need in this town? We need a new giant chain restaurant with a theme. Lucky for us, then, that we’re getting one–a new House of Blues is going to be opening eventually right next to the Paramount P-I. You know, ’cause Planet Hollywood did so well just a few blocks away. (That’s possibly unfair of me. I always associate the two because of Downtown Disney, which is just one of the things that is wrong with my home state, which is not the point here.)
The Seattle Theatre Group hastens to assure us that the programming at the Paramount isn’t going to change, no matter what moves into the neighborhood: “The theater is going to continue with the shows they have always had, some of which includes shows by us. The House of Blues development at the Paramount Tower is really more about providing hospitality services to all of the Paramount patrons.”
One can only hope that the hospitality services involve a late happy hour equal in awesomeness to the one at the Dragonfish.
The Stranger‘s weblog posts now are their own pages with the associated comments appearing below. It’s like the future over there. [Ed: isn’t this obsession with another weblog’s technology weird? yes, but I can’t help it. and no more so than these fake editorial discussions.]
This weekend, the Egyptian is playing host to Japanese gore-fest Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. Made in 1991, the movie is set in the year 2001. Riki has been sent to jail for avenging his girlfriend’s death at the hands of a gang of attempted rapists, but when he arrives he finds that the system is corrupt. Theoretically, there’s a plot to this movie, but all of the yuck in it is distracting. I remember being in college and hearing that people would consume substances and sit around watching this movie–I walked in once during the scene where a guy tries to strangle Riki with his (the guy’s) own intestines, and that was enough for me. Nevertheless, this movie has a very enthusiastic following, a following of people who really enjoy crushed heads and missing eyeballs.
