Hopes were raised last week when Port Commissioner Paige Miller announced a plan to save the George Benson Waterfront Streetcar Line by extending it 1.2 miles north and by relocating the maintenance barn.The barn has to go to make room for the planned Olympic Sculpture Park, but Miller, a Queen Anne resident, was short on details about who would pay the bill, or even exactly how much it would be.The proposal, she explained, involves using Port-owned right-of-way for the tracks, which would extend to the Amgen campus. The proposal also includes adding two new stations: one near a planned pedestrian overpass at Thomas Street and one near Amgen.
Northwest Center has new competition in its donation-collection business, and staffers at the non-profit organization are crying foul.For one thing, rival Retex Northwest has taken to putting its donation bins at some of the same locations Northwest Center uses, said Denise Small, business developer for thrift sales at Northwest Center. One of them is in the triangle parking lot in Magnolia Village, where a Northwest truck stations itself from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day to accept donations of household items, clothing and shoes, she said. Other locations occupied by both entities include a Bothell Safeway and a Sammamish QFC. Retex also has added collection bins where Northwest Center has placed bins at a Redmond Safeway and a Mukilteo YMCA, Small said. "They will place their bins right next to ours."Retex collects only used clothing and shoes at its bins, but donations to Northwest Center staffed stations have been cut in half in locations where Retex has located its bins, according to Small.
At Ballard High School for the next few weeks, a clutch of computer-savvy students will be lending their older compatriots a helping hand by bringing a group of seniors up to date on such modern contrivances as e-mailing and Googling."GenerationLink," a program bringing together students, seniors and the Internet, was launched Thursday, March 24, with much media hype, as kids and their 60-plus-year-old students packed themselves into a computer lab at Ballard High and started pointing and clicking. It seemed at times that representatives from EarthLink, the sponsoring company, and media toting cameras outnumbered their subjects in what proved to be a highly controlled experiment in soundbytes and corporate charity.But let's separate the wheat from the chaff. Regardless of who's doing what for publicity, this program is a symbiotic boon for both students and seniors.
For his autumn film series, Seattle Art Museum film curator Greg Olson observes a quarter-century-and-counting tradition of programming 10 classics of film noir. However, a year may be too long for some noiristes to wait for their fix, and so, in an admixture of compassion and sinister calculation, Olson has reserved spring this year for "Love Crimes: Sixty Years of French Film Noir."Let the arguments begin! What, no dark-side-of-Jean-Renoir ("La Nuit du Carrefour," "La Bête Humaine" or "La Chienne," which Fritz Lang remade in America as "Scarlet Street")? No brooding, foggy sampling of Carné and Prévert ("Hotel du Nord," "Quai des Brumes," "Le Jour se lève"), whose late-'30s wallows in doomed romanticism intoxicated American arthouse audiences and exerted a strong influence on '40s American noir? No "Le Corbeau," the 1943 film about a poison-pen misanthrope's reign of terror that took such a stinging view of Gallic human nature it got its director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, pegged as a collaborator after the war? Nothing from the philosopher-king of French screen gangsterism, Jean-Pierre Melville ("Le Samouraï," "Le Deuxième Souffle," "Le Cercle Rouge")? Sacrebleu! But also, by all means, let the celebration begin. Thursday nights, April 7 through June 9, are going to be a banquet of perversity and dark genius in Plestcheeff Auditorium.
They straggle into a small conference room, some hooked up to rolling chemotherapy poles. Strangers, most of them, all they have in common is cancer and a desire to laugh.Their host, certified "laugh leader" Michele Caskey, takes out her props: little bottles of bubble stuff and a rubber fish purse filled with comical words ("kumquat," "guppy") on slips of paper. But her job is to get people laughing for no reason at all.Laugh Club, which meets monthly at the Seattle Cancer Treatment and Wellness Center, on 16th Avenue East, isn't about jokes. There's nothing particularly funny about Caskey's forced-laugh exercises - one of which is to literally produce a series of hee-hees, ha-has and ho-hos - but the body doesn't know the difference.Faked or genuine, laughter gets the blood pumping, the lungs breathing more deeply and the brain synapses firing. It dampens stress hormones, which also feed tumors as it juices the immune system.It even works the abdominal muscles, Caskey points out, and is a lot more fun than doing crunches at the gym. In short, laughter really is good medicine, which is why the Cancer Center and other sites have started hosting Laugh Clubs or Laugh Yoga, as it is also known.
"I don't really like it, to tell you the truth. It doesn't feel like Capitol Hill, it feels more like Queen Anne" - Nicholas Lvancich
Have you dropped in on the Broadway Market lately? It re-opened last fall, and yellow banners still announce its grand opening. It's safe to say the Broadway Market feels a little different these days. No longer is it an urban shopping arcade of small, mostly independent stores and kiosks with Fred Meyer as an anchor tenant. Last summer's major renovation turned the lion's share of the main floor into a super-sized QFC. This came at the expense of Fred Meyer, who's former digs the new QFC also occupies. The mega-supermarket, one of the largest in the city, occupies nearly two-thirds of the Broadway Market's retail space.Reviews of the grocery store have been mixed, though most would agree it looks nice. Walking through the main entrance and past the checkstands a visitor will likely notice, for instance, the bakery, deli, seafood counters, rather than food staples. A Starbucks is close at hand; there's even a sushi bar. Finding a lot of the grocery basics, though, takes a little searching, a little winding through the vast ground floor space. The extensive beer and wine section is located on the second level, which can be a logistical challenge if there's a lot of shopping on your list. (There is an elevator.)On what was Fred Meyer's lower level a variety of house wares can be found. Ranging from small appliances to a limited selection of furnishings, you can buy a vacuum cleaner there, pillows, small table lamps and basic plumbing supplies. It isn't a variety store, but it's not your standard issue grocery store, either. Then again, when the Safeway one block north closed shortly after the QFC reopened, anyone who shopped at the north Broadway grocery stores was left with the mammoth QFC as their only option.
At Ballard High School for the next few weeks, a clutch of computer-savvy students will be lending their older compatriots a helping hand by bringing a group of seniors up to date on such modern contrivances as e-mailing and Googling."GenerationLink," a program bringing together students, seniors and the Internet, was launched Thursday, March 24, with much media hype, as kids and their 60-plus-year-old students packed themselves into a computer lab at Ballard High and started pointing and clicking. It seemed at times that representatives from EarthLink, the sponsoring company, and media toting cameras outnumbered their subjects in what proved to be a highly controlled experiment in soundbytes and corporate charity.Regardless of who's doing what for publicity, this program is a symbiotic boon for both students and seniors. The former get to hang out with some older citizens they'd not normally meet, and the seniors get hooked up, wired in and turned on to the computer age.
CHERIE HUGHES"I think that it is tragic. [So much] coverage seems to be politically motivated, and it's deplorable that politicians are exploiting the private pain of this family. It's interesting to note that the funding for Terri Schiavo's hospice care is covered by Medicaid and the settlement of a medical court case, both of which have received strong criticism from the current administration."LAURA LEAHY"I think that there are a lot of people dying in the world, and someone who is brain-dead should not be garnering this much attention."
Northwest Center has new competition in its donation-collection business, and staffers at the nonprofit organization are crying foul.For one thing, rival Retex Northwest has taken to putting its donation bins at some of the same locations Northwest Center uses, said Denise Small, business developer for thrift sales at Northwest Center. One of them is in the triangle parking lot in Magnolia Village, where a Northwest truck stations itself from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day to accept donations of household items, clothing and shoes, she said. Other shared locations include a Bothell Safeway and a Sammamish QFC, but Retex has also added collection bins where Northwest Center has placed donation bins at a Redmond Safeway and a Mukilteo YMCA, Small said. "They will place their bins right next to ours."Retex collects only used clothing and shoes at its bins, but donations to North-west Center manned stations have been cut in half in locations where Retex has located its bins, according to Small.
Hopes were raised last week when Port Commissioner Paige Miller announced a plan to save the George Benson Waterfront Streetcar Line by extending it 1.2 miles north and by relocating the maintenance barn.The barn has to go to make room for the planned Olympic Sculpture Park, but Miller, a Queen Anne resident, was short on details about who would pay the bill, or even exactly how much it would be.The proposal, she explained, involves using Port-owned right-of-way for the tracks, which would extend to the Amgen campus. The proposal also includes adding two stations: one near a planned pedestrian overpass at Thomas Street and one near Amgen.
While out running one day, Marc Antal had an idea "that wouldn't leave me alone." An avid music lover - particulary of R&B and soul thanks to his Southside Chicago upbringing - this fifth-grade school teacher has devoted the better part of two decades putting together bands and struggling to pump out the sound that's been pounding in his heart.
I noticed that the leasing office has opened in the Avalon Bay Apartments down in Juanita Village sometime in the last month. That means things are really moving along nicely towards bringing both residential and commercial tenants into the Village as the redevelopment of lower Juanita continues.
Profile subject: Archie DrakeCurrent profession: opera singer, bass-baritoneFormer profession: seamanCareer statistics: more than 140 roles in 85-plus productionsBirthplace: Great Yarmouth, EnglandHome: Queen AnneAge: 80How did your profession shift from seaman to singing?After I'd been at sea a number of years, the big British company I worked for decided I needed time ashore in Vancouver getting ships ready to go back out to sea. I began to go to concerts, joined the Vancouver International Club and began singing, even took some lessons. After a while I thought, "If you don't want to spend the rest of your life at sea, why don't you give this a try."
Neighbors in North Rose Hill are investigating the possibility of a child-designed, community-built park similar to the unique play area at St. Edwards Park. For those not familiar with the play area at St. Edwards, it is a very unique structure that was designed by kids from surrounding schools and built by community volunteers and with donations.