As someone who doesn't own a gun but believes in the Second Amendment (all of it, including the parts I don't like), I disagree with the premise of Rick Levin's column of April 11 on the recent shooting death at the University of Washington.Rebecca Griego caused her own death. First, why did a 26-year-old get involved with someone 15 years [her] senior with no visible means of support and who frequently moved? That's a red flag to me.
I never got around to making a New Year's resolution this year. I got cancer instead. Well, got is probably not the correct medical term; "was diagnosed with" would be more accurate. It seems like everybody's jumping on the cancer bandwagon these days. Since Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow announced the return of their respective cancers, television, newspaper and magazine writers all over the country have been describing their own battles with the disease. I guess now it's my turn. I had been thinking about it for a couple of months but kept putting off writing about it. Perhaps it was my own form of denial. If you read it in the newspaper it must be true, right? I had been bleeding internally on and off for the last four years. Even though I'd been scoped, poked and prodded all over the place, doctors on two coasts could never pinpoint the cause.
Just enough rain to make the baseball game a muddy affair and keep the slugs actively sliming their way through our garden treasures, but not enough rain to penetrate the new, unfurling canopies of our deciduous trees. Check under your evergreen trees and shrubs and you will find very dry soil conditions. Check under and around other plants and you will find that the soil is scarcely muddy or sodden as it was just a few short weeks ago. This sudden dryness is in such contrast to the tender and verdant growth that is happening with such abandon throughout our landscapes.
Normally, it's a good thing to be wary of germs, and I applaud all instances of microbial warfare in all its forms. Except when it happens to go wrong, as it did the other day in the bathroom at our local YMCA.I try to swim every morning. After swimming, I'm pretty wet and tend to smell of chlorine, so I shower. Being the modest person that I am, I can't and won't walk around naked in the dressing room like some of the other gym patrons do. Not like my aerobics teacher, who held a conversation with me while I was fully clothed and she was not. I was trying very hard to keep looking her in the eye and wishing I could be as unembarrassed as she was. Plus, she was standing barefoot on the wet floor without benefit of flip-flops, which gave me an attack of the icks. Who knows what germs live on that floor?
On a date once I decided, after the first 20 minutes, that there wasn't a prayer that this guy and I would ever match up. That revelation caused me to relax, sit back and, as I love to do, start talking. I told him about me, my opinions (I was in my mid-20s and had one on everything) and any topic that came to my far reaching mind.I enjoyed myself so much that the date went on - for hours!Dates needn't be the dreaded, fearful experiences they get inflated into.
As someone who doesn't own a gun but believes in the Second Amendment (all of it including the parts I don't like), I disagree with the premise of Rick Levin's guest column that "Gun Laws Aided in UW Shooting Death" (April 11). Rebecca Griego caused her own death. First, why did a 26-year-old get involved with someone 15 years [her] senior with no visible means of support and who frequently moved? That's a red flag to me
People kill one another - they have since the dawn of time, starting with Cain killing Abel.Recent events on the Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) campus - where an "isolated, scary loner," according to the dailies, ran amok and killed 33 folks (if you count his own life) - allow the mass-media pundits with more subdued corporate flash than intelligence or real concern to once again weigh in for days about the tragedy. The thing pundits like best is to ask a really stupid question over and over. In cases like this it is always "Why?" closely followed by "How could this happen?"
I never got around to making a New Year's resolution this year. I got cancer instead. Well, "got" is probably not the correct medical term; "was diagnosed with" would be more accurate. It seems like everybody's jumping on the cancer bandwagon these days. Since Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow announced the return of their respective cancers, television, newspaper and magazine writers all over the country have been describing their own battles with the disease. I guess now it's my turn. I had been thinking about it for a couple of months but kept putting off writing about it. Perhaps it was my own form of denial. If you read it in the newspaper it must be true, right?
People kill one another. Have since the dawn of time, starting with the aforementioned Cain. But it is countries where everyone has access willy-nilly to firearms, like the United States, Iraq and Mexico, that feature scads of mass murderers.
Unlike Scott St. Clair of Kirkland, who takes exception [see April Courier] to Sen. Eric Oemig's Senate resolution that requests an impeachment investigation of the president and vice president, I am not the father of a Marine. However - unlike Mr. St. Clair - I am a Marine and, given his apparent closeness to the U.S. military, find his suggestion that Sen. Oemig's efforts at forwarding an impeachment request to Congress as being tantamount to giving aid and comfort to our enemies and somehow equal to providing them with the explosives to kill our troops to be the height of demagoguery and completely irresponsible.
In her recent real estate column, Debbie Walter attempted to explain different compensation systems in the real estate industry and the work agents do to earn their money ("What's the scoop on Realtor incomes? Debbie Walter, April Kirkland Courier, real estate section)She broke the business into two options: "full service" or "discounters."This certainly seems to be an oversimplification of a dynamic and changing industry.
"The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl," by Timothy EganMariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006, $14.95It measured 1,800 miles wide and weighed 350 million tons. Quadrillions of particles, most smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, formed its bulk. Headlights and streetlamps shone into, though often not through, it. "From Governors Island" at New York City, writes Timothy Egan, "visibility was so bad a person could not see the boats just beyond the shore. Baseball players said they had trouble tracking fly balls.""James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon," by Julie PhillipsSt. Martin's Press, 2006, $27.95Alice B. Sheldon's mother, the now-forgotten but once-feted author Mary Hastings Bradley, once posed for a publicity portrait "in an evening dress, seated on the skin of a tiger she had shot herself." Witty, sly, equally at home at a formal dinner or on safari in what was then blithely called Darkest Africa, she proved almost impossibly protean for her own daughter to assimilate.
Pacific Northwest Ballet's grand experiment in a dance festival ended Sunday. The buzz in the lobby Saturday night seemed in accord that it was a great idea that everyone would like to see become an annual event - although it might be nice to see dancers costumed in something other than wrinkling white underwear ("Locate" and "Spanish Dance") or flesh-color unitards ("Adin"). Maybe a "Project Runway" project to dress modern dance in something that doesn't look as if it were underwritten by Fruit of the Loom?
The National Film Festival for Talented Youth (NFFTY) will hold its launch screening Thursday, April 26, at 7:30 p.m. to showcase award-winning works directed by filmmakers age 21 and under from across the country. The event will mark the official unveiling of this brand-new Seattle film festival, which is striving to become the largest and most influential youth-oriented film festival in the nation. The screening will take place at the new cinema at Nesholm Family Lecture Hall in McCaw Hall
To savor the enchantment of "The Light in the Piazza," you must suspend disbelief and embrace the hopeless romanticism unfolding onstage. This musical is sophisticated yet delicate. And utterly unique in the world of musical theater. Exquisitely directed by Bartlett Sher, the national tour of "Piazza" comes home to Seattle, where the musical had its world première at Intiman Theatre in 2003. Two years and many changes later, the production, also helmed by Sher, subsequently opened at Lincoln Center in New York City and snagged six 2005 Tonys, including best score. With music and lyrics by Adam Guettel and book by Craig Lucas, "The Light in the Piazza" is best described as a chamber musical, ideally suited to an intimate theatrical venue. The closer you are to the stage action, the more you'll enjoy this show.