I have been so focused lately on Seattle's growth, Mike McGavick's extraordinary retirement bonus and Mel Gibson's anti-Semitism that I've missed - and you, faithful reader, may have missed - a whole slew of interesting little news and feature items from here, there and everywhere in the crazed world we share.
The Blue Moon, an ancient and honorable watering hole and musical venue on the west side of the University District, has finally come to some sort of agreement with our goodly-sized mayor's office and will be allowed to continue to do business. The city was trying to close the venerable tav down, citing alleged problems with drug dealers the bar denied hosting.
Cynics in the area thought maybe it was the fact that the Moon's clientele don't generally look like condo owners with tiny dogs of unpronounceable breed waiting outside coffeehouses, yapping away merrily, a form of noise pollution the new Seattle, Queen Anne division, doesn't seem to mind much at all.
However, Gustav Hellthaler, the Blue Moon's owner, didn't sound inordinately pleased after the settlement was worked out, at least not when he talked to a Seattle Times reporter.
This, in one broken-out para in the Times, is what I have been trying to say in columns and long conversations with friends about my adopted home, Seattle, since my return in 2002 from Hawaii.
Said more succinctly by Gustav, I might add:
"It's not the same Seattle as when I was here 25 years ago. It's gone from being a very clever, working-class town to a very tedious bourgeois city."
I (who first came here 22 years ago) haven't been able to say it better myself. The problem is, even in decline Seattle is preferable to Cincinnati, Chicago and other crime-ridden precincts east. And even though I like Denver, winter in the Rockies ain't in the cards for a man who has strode (or crept along) the earth for almost six decades.
AN ITEM ABOUT the Little League World Series highlighted the bone-deep hypocrisy that has plagued our land since Thomas Jefferson wrote about liberty by day and slept with his slaves by night. (It took DNA testing to prove it, but Ms. Hemming's descendants are carrying some of that good old Master Tom blood.)
Anyway, a team from Long Island didn't go gentle into that good baseball night the other day back east at the hallowed Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa. An ESPN audience got to hear a losing, preteen player yell out a single obscenity. That sound was followed by the noise of the manager, an adult, slapping the potty-mouthed kid.
ESPN has now gone to a five-second tape delay in their remaining telecasts so that no baseball fan runs the risk of hearing a 12-year-old say Boo, or something a bit more scatological.
This is a land where every alternative weekly newspaper runs escort service ads with pictures of scantily clad young women that say: actual photo. And offer services once restricted to Miss Kitty's establishment.
Hey, kids cuss. They want to sound like the grown-ups. And in this place where we hear endless blather about the Seahawks, Sonics and Mariners and their will to win, or lack of same, shouldn't the young bad loser be commended for taking his loss hard enough to wanna shout out a little obscenity?
Spare me the protection of tape delay, eh?
HOW ABOUT THE homeless man in Detroit who, while searching a trash bin last month, found 31 discarded U.S. Savings Bonds in a bag of discarded clothes? The man, Charles Moore, 59, took the bonds to a worker he trusted at a nearby homeless shelter. The family whose bonds they were had thrown the clothes, and unwittingly the bonds, away >I>two years previously.
And for Mr. Moore's honesty, an honesty that stands out in a country where political leaders and wannabe political leaders are shading and even stealing night and day with both hands, he was rewarded by the absent-minded bonds owners with $100.
$100!
Who said honesty is the best policy?
In a postscript, some folks more able than a near-indigent columnist to put their money where their mouth have, thankfully, added to Moore's reward.
He was quoted as saying: "The reward don't matter. The bonds belonged to them."
A hundred-dollar reward for finding $21,000 they threw away two years before. Now there's a family I don't want to live next door to. But who knows, maybe they are saving to buy a condo on the water in Seattle. Priorities, priorities.
AND FINALLY, JUST SO you don't think I think the only rich people preying on their poorer brethren are American corporate heads, here's a little tidbit that makes me want to run screaming to the nearest public house if we but had some.
Queen Elizabeth II spent 4.2 percent more taxpayer money in 2005 than in 2004. The Queen's palace spokespeople blamed overseas visits and extra security.
So what did the Queen and her balding son Charlie and the rest of them take from poor old declining England's taxpayers?
$67.3 million.
For once the President formerly known as P------ is looking pretty good. But I hope nobody shows him the Queen's books before January of 2009.
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