For some it's the familiar fragrance of stale hot dogs wafting in the crisp autumn breeze that evokes memories of the baseball playoffs. Others might associate numbers - 1995, the year the Mari-ners first tasted the postseason, or 11, the digits on the back of Edgar's uniform - with baseball in October. Me, I associate an obscure word with our national pastime: logorrhea. My first brush with the word was not a pleasant experience. Due to a scheduling conflict I was attending a play with my wife on the same night a crucial playoff game was scheduled, and I was trying to determine the length of the performance. Scanning a newspaper review of the play, I came across the following description of the main character: her "logorrhea is apparently contagious," charged the critic. "Logorrhea" didn't sound good, and the dictionary confirmed it: an inability to shut up.
In response to "Crime and punishment: the Magnolia perspective" (Sept. 14), please consider the perspective of an armed career criminal who plans on retiring in Magnolia.I first moved to the Lawtonwood area after getting out of prison when I was 21. I loved the peacefulness, the feeling of safety and the fact that unknown neighbors were friendly. It was a neighborhood.Before becoming an armed career criminal, I was a professional burglar and car thief. Since I want Magnolia to be the neighborhood that it used to be, I'm offering the following tips:
Autumn had arrived. One of my grade-school buddies, Tommy, and I were out passing a football back and forth across the yard. The huge maples and oaks that landscaped the yards of the Chicago neighborhood that was one of the homes of my youth had set the lawns afire with their falling leaves of red, yellow and orange.Up the street, waiting at the light where the main road crossed over the street where I lived, was a huge semi truck hauling a cargo of auto-mobiles covered with canvas shrouds. Tommy and I looked at each other and spoke as one: "NEW CARS!"We dropped the football and jumped on our bikes and pedaled after the fast-disappearing truck as swift as our 8-year-old legs could propel us. We tailed the truck to the DeSoto dealership, which was, luckily, only about 10 blocks away. When we rode up, though, the mechanics shooed us away while they pulled the truck inside and unloaded it.The automotive world then was an entirely different animal than what it is today. Automobiles were huge things that advertised "road-hugging weight," gasoline was comparatively cheap, and foreign cars - especially in the Chicago neighborhoods I inhabited during the late 1950s - didn't exist. The première of the new cars each fall was a major news event.
me folks love their little routine. My father was one of those. He com-plained a lot about his job at Union Central Life Insurance, but whenever you called his office, where near the end of his work-ing life he was a division manager of sorts (don't ask me what the title meant, I'm the original anti-corporate guy), he sounded suspiciously cheerful.And because of his love of habit, we were never surprised at mealtimes either.He liked meatloaf on Mondays, sausage or ham on Tuesday, hot dogs or hamburgers on Wednesday ... well you get the idea. If my mother objected to cooking by rote, she never expressed those objections where we kids could hear.If you had asked me when I was a kid, I would have said I, too, was a habitual kind of guy.
The Thomas C. Wales Foundation continues its initiative to promote public service and civic engagement by inviting nominations for the third annual Thomas C. Wales Award for Passionate Citizenship.Wales himself was a dedicated public servant, an assistant U.S. attorney murdered in autumn 2001.The award bearing his name recognizes a Puget Sound resident who inspires positive activism through the energetic, courageous, persistent and informed involvement of ordinary citizens in the issues and challenges that affect their communities.The foundation welcomes nominations from the public to ensure that the best possible candidates are recognized.
John Hay Elementary School atop Queen Anne Hill opened its doors in 1905; located at 411 Boston St., it would serve the K-5 students of Queen Anne and surrounding communities for 75 years. Following the shift of the ele-mentary school to a new campus in 1989, the original wooden structure fell into neglect and decay. However, around the turn of the century it became the home of the Secondary Bilingual Orientation Center (SBOC), which helps immigrant and refugee students prepare to enter Seattle's regular secondary schools. And in 2001, a band of neighbors and SBOC teachers organized as the Friends of Old Hay to improve the school site for its newest residents.
Gertrude, Zelda and Beatrice just cluck at all the media attention they've received lately. That includes an upcoming segment on The Today Show, numerous spreads in national magazines and a writeup this month in Seattle Homes & Lifestyle magazine.But the three represent a growing phenomenon in this country. They're so-called city chickens, Buff Orpingtons living in a modular, brightly colored, two-level pied-à-terre coop in Magnolia resident Jennifer Carlson's back yard.Carlson, a landscape designer, is more forthcoming than her feathered friends about the popularity of city chickens, noting that she's taught Seattle Tilth classes about them at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford. "We have standing-room-only classes of 40," Carlson said of City Chickens 101 and City Chickens 201. "Now I only teach city-chicken-coop-building classes."
Sue Reynolds and Cherie Mueller, who own Java Jazz on 15th Avenue West, had a problem on their hands that led them to become victims of a vehicle prowl in August. Happens all the time, but Reynolds said she ended up helping Bellevue police solve the crime by checking out the Internet for clues several weeks later. The original problem had to do with a generator used to power an espresso step van the women own and park in the triangular parking lot in Magnolia Village. "The generator had been acting up for a week or two," Reynolds said.
Celeriac (suh-LAIR-ee-yak) is an unattractive little root that's of limited popularity in the United States, but don't be deceived by appearances: it'll make you the best bowl of soup you've had in a very, very long time. Round and often sold with a mass of medusa-like shoots on one end where the stems have been trimmed, it has skin similar to that of jicama, which must be peeled before eating. Also known as celery root, although it's actually only a cousin to celery, celeriac has an intense, celery flavor and a texture that's similar to that of a parsnip. It's a popular vegetable in France and throughout Europe, where it's served hot or cold and makes a tasty salad when julienned. The root is low in calories (about 40 a cup) and has measurable amounts of Vitamin C, potassium, calcium and protein.
A new season starts this week at On the Boards (OtB), and audiences should continue to expect the unexpected at the tiny theater at the bottom of Queen Anne Hill."We try to bring artists to the community that would not necessarily come here," said OtB artistic director Lane Czaplinskiv. "We're interested in artists pushing the boundaries of dance, performance and theater."Choreographer Sarah Michelson is exactly the type of artist OtB seeks to import to the Northwest, he added. "If somebody has never been to a dance performance, or is not very familiar with dance, it can seem like a very strange enterprise. Sarah plays with that experience [of the first-time visitor] and makes it more accessible." The two-time Bessie-award winner's latest work "Daylight" opens OtB's season tonight, Oct. 5, and runs through Sunday, Oct. 9.
With upwards of two decades and some 10-plus albums under his belt, Joey Kline could be considered one of the elder statesmen of the Seattle music scene. He's certainly one of this city's most talented and prolific songwriters, an artist who moves easily between pop balladry, driving rock and the country-tinged swing of his Montana upbringing.Kline and his latest band, the Plaintiffs, have followed up their 2003 debut "To Helen, a Handbasket" with a rock opera of sorts, a cycle of songs that flows like a short-story cycle in the American hard-boiled tradition. "La Familia," with its narrative meditations on crime and life's hard knocks, contains some of Kline's strongest and most sophisticated songwriting to date, and the musicianship backing the effort is topnotch. The album is a gem.
by Vera M. Chan-PoolThe following are selected reports from the Seattle Police Department's East Precinct. They represent the officers' accounts of the events described.■ Big theft: Someone broke into a home in the 200 block of 25th Avenue East between 8:10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on Sept. 19, stealing a laptop computer, a network router, a backpack, $2 in loose change and a $10,000 men's 1-karat diamond-solitaire ring.
Did you ever notice how some memories in life are so clear and others remain a blur? One clear memory for me was living (pre-Madison Park) in Riverton Heights, an area just east of Bow Lake. It was a summer filled with excitement. Mom, Dad, my dog Lucky and I had just moved from a one-room, converted garage to an old, two-bedroom house. Lucky and I were to get our own room. No more Army cot.Just before Christmas, life as we knew it changed: We were at war. Dad joined the military, the house was sold and everything else went into storage. I said goodbye to all my buddies and gave Lucky to one of them.
Several hundred people turned up at Town Hall on Sept. 21 to honor and roast David Brewster, the Madrona resident who was retiring as Town Hall's executive director.They came, as co-host Mark Sid-ran, in his best Woody Allen imitation, put it, "to celebrate David. And also bury him." It was a moment of Seattle history worth noting.Brewster, former publisher of the Seattle Weekly, bridged the era between old Seattle, the pre-1962 World's Fair establishment that still misses the Frederick & Nelson tearoom and the narcissistic, dynamic and "discovered" Seattle that emerged in the mid-1970s.
As money pours in from around the country to help the displaced survivors and relief workers of Hurricane Ka-trina, a licensed Madison Valley acupuncturist plans to aid them in person.Lindsey Lawson, with Glow Natural Health Center, 2719 E. Madison St., Suite 203, plans to travel to Louisiana for a week in early November with the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association's Acupuncture Without Borders. She will provide free ear acupuncture to those dealing with post-traumatic stress.