I'm hot. I say this without any false modesty or bravado - I am on fire. Literally. OK, no actual flames are present, but I'm quite certain that my core temperature is hovering between 100 and 150 degrees. Closer to the 150 mark I'm guessing.This has nothing to do with the ambient temperature of my home -although I just peeked at the thermostat and it's reading a nice balmy 75 degrees in the family room with a humidity level measuring somewhere around 300 percent. No, this has nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with raising teenagers.Questionable wisdomOn Saturday morning we had out-of-town guests visiting, so naturally we had to take them out of our town in order to show them a good time. Before we left I made them a hearty breakfast consisting of a ham/onion/mushroom/cheese/egg scramble, toast, bacon and juice. As I was standing in front of the stove, getting hot (do you see a pattern here?)I was pondering the wisdom of leaving the two teenagers home and taking our two youngest daughters with us. I was leaving two teenagers alone for the day, with (and this is a biggie) car keys.As I stood there stirring the eggs, the thought appeared in my head, and yes it actually appeared, as in I saw the letters and heard a voice telling me that there would be a car accident today. Over the years I've learned to listen to the voices (no medication required) and so I began to think about how far we were going to be from our offspring and who they could call in an emergency, and then I saw something shiny, got distracted and forgot the whole episode.
When I was hired as a part-time administrator for the Queen Anne Chamber of Commerce, I encountered a small, committed group of local business people determined to keep the chamber afloat. This group fought and scrounged to maintain a strong business community. Facing a growing transient population, an influx of night clubs, traffic congestion and cuts in funds for street and sidewalk maintenance, they continued to fight to maintain our shopping districts.Concurrently the business community on Capitol Hill, namely the Broadway community ( while facing the same challenges as Queen Anne) gave up. They abandoned their efforts to keep Broadway a viable business entity and closed the doors to their chamber of commerce. Consequently the Capitol Hill business community proceeded to decline, the streets became clogged with public inebriates, kids aggressively panhandled and local businesses became inaccessible. Their store-front vacancy rate soared.Recently our mayor and city council gave the Broadway business community more than $350,000 to bring that business district back to life. These funds are to be used to develop a chamber of commerce, install neighborhood banners and maintain and repair their sidewalks.Well, I think the Queen Anne business community deserves some $$$$$.
Perhaps you saw the e-mail circulating on the Internet, encouraging everyone to display a flag-large or small-on 9/11. The e-mail talks about the terrible loss of life on Sept. 11, 2001, and of that there can be no question.The stated reason for this flag display: "We do this in honor of those who lost their lives on 9/11, their families, friends and loved ones who continue to endure the pain, and those who today are fighting at home and abroad to preserve our cherished freedoms."Honoring those who lost their lives on 9/11, showing our support for the families of the victims, showing our troops that we support them and want to bring all of them home safe and sound-these are all laudatory reasons to show our colors.Patriotism is a fine and noble attribute, but I sometimes worry that it is a fleeting value that we trot out now and then at sporting events, in parades, on Flag Day-or on an anniversary like 9/11.Patriotism, though, goes far beyond waving a flag, wearing one in your lapel or having a bumper sticker on your car-all while ignoring the outrages of our elected representatives who are hell-bent on stripping this nation of its democracy, restricting access to information, controlling the media, passing constitutional amendments against entire groups of citizens that a few of these politicians have decided violates their personal sense of morality, and kowtowing to the elite class in the country at the expense of the working classes on whose backs they achieved their wealth.
Why do I loathe what is happening around me in Allen-Hummerville, while oddly enough enjoying every sunny day in this bourgie loony bin more than the last one?I believe it is because I have a sense of humor-my own kind, granted, but I can laugh.For example, a lawyer friend of mine who lives on the side of Queen Anne Hill and reads this column said once about me to friends, "The trouble (emphasis added) with going to the movies with Dennis is he sometimes starts laughing when nobody else is. And he can't, or won't, stop."Well, it's my contention the scenes that make me laugh in the movies wouldn't be in the final cut if the director didn't know there were people like me sitting in darkened theaters across the land.
Sandcastles are transitory, and so is life. Building a sandcastle is like living your life: You build something out of millions of granules, you give it a large, intricate shape, and then it just washes away. The sands of time and all that.No such metaphors for Jeff Benesi. So why does he build sandcastles?"Cuz it's fun," he says. "It's an active, physical challenge, and it's competitive. It's also social-I do it with my friends-and it's sustainable. It just goes back to where it was."That's merely a fact, not a metaphor. Born, raised and educated in Michigan, Benesi moved to Seattle in 1974 with his wife, Kay. Not long after their arrival, they moved into the house on Queen Anne in which they still live. They now have two grown sons, as well as two grandchildren.Since 1990, the couple has operated Colorwheel Studio, a children's art school on Queen Anne (see article in the News dated 6/2/04).Benesi began sandcastling in 1983, when he joined a team of sandcastlers called the Orbital Sanders.
The 3.75-mile Queen Anne Boulevard that loops around the top of Queen Anne Hill was the brainchild of the Olmsted brothers in the early 1900s, and it includes strips of park property on either side of the roads in the system.But armed with half a million dollars in Pro Parks Levy cash, Seattle Parks and Recreation is planning to install new sidewalks and improve existing ones on sections of the boulevard, said project planner David Goldberg. A priority for the improvements is to increase pedestrian safety, he explained.One stretch is on West McGraw Place between First and Second avenues west, Goldberg said. There were initial concerns that much of the project money would have to be spent on drainage improvements, but Goldberg said he was overly concerned about the problem.
The first step was taken last week in an ambitious plan to design landscaping for parking strips that would capture and clean storm-water runoff along the 34th Avenue West corridor, and extending from Salmon Bay to the north and Elliott Bay to the south.The Sept. 28 community leader meeting involved a number of community activists, Seattle Public Utilities, the University of Washington's landscape architecture program and Jennifer Carlson, a community liaison who has been involved in numerous neighborhood projects.In a sense, the effort seeks to recapture the past, when Wolfe Creek ran the length of Magnolia in the days before it was diverted into pipes until it reached Kiwanis Ravine. "So we're talking about the whole length," Carlson said. "We're taking it as a metaphoric river."We may not be able to fully daylight Wolfe Creek," she added. But the project will show how plantings can capture runoff and slow the migration of water before it reaches the Kiwanis Ravine, she explained.
The most ironic thing about our sound-bite, text-message culture is the overwhelming part corporations now play in our everyday lives.The ironies abound. Like big tobacco companies paying for smarmy commercials about kids not smoking, and big national breweries most famous for pale, light, watery beers that look like a form of human waste rather than beer, talking about drinking responsibly. As if we believe they mean that.Just buy a pint, not a six-pack.Yeah!The truth is available for those few remaining Americans who don't want sound bites, such as "Kill an Iraqi for Iraqi freedom," or "Drive faster for safer roads." But most seem to wanna ostrich it.For those who don't, here are a couple little corporate factoids gleaned from our two twinnish daily newspapers and their wire allies.The Washington Post reports that the amount of nicotine, the most highly addictive part of the commercial cigarette, has increased 10 percent in the past five years.The trend was discovered by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health; Massachusetts is a blue state that requires tobacco companies to measure and report their nicotine content.
All it takes is a stroll through a mainstream convenience-store toy aisle to realize what seed is being planted in the minds of our children: that warfare is commonplace, fun, an acceptable way to play on.Presumably, the toy aisle I find myself in is the boys' toy aisle. One perk of not having children is the luxury of avoiding such aisles; it's also why I probably sound pretty naïve to parents familiar with toy arsenals.Yet the visual assault bowls me over. And the consternation I feel is much bigger than my capacity for understanding why toy makers would want to promote plastic Repeater Rifles complete with "reliable rifle sounds" and "eject play bullets."I read over the last line and wonder if I'm the only one connecting the dots here, or is there something overly responsive or too exact about the way my mind interprets the world?
The good news is-no, wait, that's now the bad news. The bad news is-no, wait, that's now the good news. Are the conflicting studies about health, vitamins, longevity or the evolution of nose hair making you a little nuts? Welcome to the club.The latest bit of scientific mystification came out the other day, telling us the theory that if you're parents lived to be 95, the odds are in your favor that you will too, is now yesterday's fable.A recent article in the New York Times, "Live Long? Die Young? Answer Isn't Just In Genes," by Gina Kolata, points to studies of twins, presumably as genetically identical as you can get, who tend to die 10 years apart.One set of sisters, the Tesauros, rip a big hole in the genetic theory. Josephine, 92, is "straight backed, firm jawed and vibrantly healthy". She lives alone, works part time at a hospital gift shop and tools around in her 95 Olds to get to her four bridge groups, church and the grocery store.Her identical twin sister is incontinent, has had a hip replaced, lost most of her vision and has dementia. So much for inheriting great genes.
September is the time for back to school, for clearing out the closet, putting away summer clothes and making room for fall and winter apparel - in my case, a task long overdue. While cleaning out my clothes closet, I found a tailored Harris Tweed suit I'd brought from England with me in 1963. It still looked terrific. The young college student who was helping me - she of the polyester tanktop, bare midriff and designer jeans - had never heard of Harris Tweed, didn't even know that the Tweed was a river in Scotland. So thereby hangs the tale once more; let me tell you the story of this wonderful cloth. Obsolescence is a rule of thumb in the fashion industry, but obsolescence doesn't apply to this famous hand-woven fabric; it's chic even with elbow patches. But the cloth doesn't grow on pegs in expensive stores. It comes from Scotland's Outer Hebrides, as full of legend and as romantic as the fabric itself. The Vikings discovered the island group around 800 A.D. The "Clo Mor" (the bog cloth) was woven even then - though the invaders wore skins. Scratching a living in those bleak, unyielding, windswept isles was always a challenge, but seldom harder than in the 1840s. With famine threatening, the wife of a nobleman who had acquired lands tried to help by finding a market for the locally produced tweeds. Later she brought in experts to perfect the cloth, which until then had been made solely for the islanders' own use. Dismayed at what the Industrial Revolution had wrought, the locals sang long and loud in praise of the independent, sociable and courageous artisans who applied their skills in the crofts ("among their familiar crags and hills") rather than in England's "dark, satanic Mills." An infant industry was about to be born.
I have found the real axis of evil. It's actually a trifecta of terror: Kraft, Frito-Lay and that ultimate evil, General Mills, makers of Häagen-Daas.However, today I want to warn you about just one of these denizens of doom and extra poundage. It's Kraft.At some point, and I'm not quite sure how this happened, I passed from my teens into what is termed middle age. It happened rather quickly and without my consent. When you cross over like this, they say that your metabolism slows down to the speed of a slug. This means that where you were once able to consume an entire bag of Cheetos without seeing a rise in the scale or a tightness in your formerly loose clothing, you will now notice orange goo oozing out from your pores, and buttons will begin to pop off your shirts. Therefore, I've been trying to reverse time by going back to the gym. I'll let you know how that goes.
Ever know anyone who just couldn't start the day without a cup of coffee and then either a chocolate chip cookie or a Hershey bar? I have. There's your basic "junk food junkie," and then there's the true chocolate addict.Chocolate triggers the sweet tooth in most of us. Unfortunately, it doesn't agree with everybody. For a number of years, chocolate, along with red wine, hard cheese and monosodium glutamate (not that she would eat them all together, of course) were the things that used to set off my partner, Lady Marjorie's, migraine headaches.Consequently, I tried to keep my chocolate consumption somewhat concealed and away from the house. Nowadays, I've graduated and I'm somewhat the main cause of her migraines.A few weeks ago, on my usual prowl through the newsstands, I came across an entire magazine devoted to the satisfaction of the chocolate fetish. This periodical wasn't a cheap thing printed on newsprint and cranked out on a basement mimeograph machine either; but a slick, high-volume, four-color bimonthly with a rich list of advertising clients.
I have found the real axis of evil. It's actually a trifecta of terror: Kraft, Frito-Lay and that ultimate evil, General Mills, makers of Haagen-Daas.Today, however, I want to warn you about just one of these denizens of doom and extra poundage. It's Kraft.At some point, and I'm not quire sure how this happened, I passed from my teens into what is termed middle age. It happened rather quickly and without my consent. When you cross over like this, they say that your metabolism slows down to the speed of a slug.Therefore, I've been trying to reverse time by going back to the gym. I'll let you know how that goes.So on Monday I went to the pool at the gym, and then afterwards I soaked my tired, middle-aged body in the Jacuzzi. I was tempted to spend the rest of the day there, but realized they'd kick me out at some point, so I hit the showers. I then decided to go grocery shopping.This is where I encountered Satan in the dairy case.
Blogging has become an international phenomenon. Blogs, which are a shorter term for "web-logs," are websites where the creator provides daily commentary on any given subject. Subjects of blogs can range from politics to food to entertainment. Bloggers have had such an impact that many mainstream media outlets are creating their own and even adopting bloggers into their medium.The latter is definitely true in the case of David Goldstein. Goldstein runs the liberal Washington state political blog, horsesass.org. The name comes from the term Goldstein has used to describe one of the many targets of his criticism: political activist Tim Eyman.Seeking controversy?In 2003, Goldstein filed Initiative 831 (I-831), which sought to "officially proclaim" Eyman as a "horse's ass." The initiative wasn't serious, but it was meant to criticize the state's initiative process. "The point was that the initiative process was so broken that one could use it just the way I did," Goldstein said.When news broke of I-831, Goldstein found himself launched into the political arena. His assault on Eyman had him appearing on the front page of the Seattle P-I and landing regular spots debating conservative radio talk-show hosts. "Eyman is a good story," he said, "and I became a good story, too."In addition to Eyman, Goldstein has gained other adversaries and critics. Stefan Sharkansky, who runs the conservative blog Sound Politics, said about Goldstein, "He's very passionate about what he believes in, but he tends to put partisanship above accuracy. If he finds himself on the losing end of the argument, he'll often resort to using ad hominid [sic] attacks and potty words."