Alas, it wasn't to be. The Seattle Seahawk's long, glorious run to the top of the pack in the NFL came to a disappointing end Sunday, Feb. 5, as the "team of destiny" lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers, 21-10, in Super Bowl XL in Detroit. At the Boxcar Alehouse, upwards of 100 fans crowded the neighborhood bar to root for their hometown team. Steve Welch, who opened the tavern three-and-a-half years ago, said the day went well despite the game's final outcome. "Everybody was pretty disappointed," said Welch, a longtime Magnolia resident who played wide receiver at Pacific Lutheran University from 1983-1986.
Catharine Blaine School student Caleb Moore blows glass on Thursday, Feb. 2, at the Magnolia studio of artist Stephan Glover.
I love to social dance, but you can hardly call me adept. I dance because I enjoy it. It gets me out of my office and, more importantly, out of my head till I'm transported to a place I find hard to name, but not to yield to as I fall into step with the world around me.
The feline who allows us to live in the house with her, one Emmy the Kat, isn't really good at anything. She's a little slow. We've even seen her, in the middle of a dash to the other end of the house, run into furniture and then walk away with an "I meant to do that" attitude. Sometimes she falls off things. If this cat is really good at anything, and I don't think that this is a championship competition category, it's sleeping.
The recent flap over the selection of Sally Clark, 39, to replace exiting Seattle City Council member Jim Compton, a.k.a. The Frequent Flyer, highlights more than one facet of modern-day Seattle life. Before her selection last week for the $97,000-a-year job, Clark, 39, worked for the Lifelong AIDS Alliance and, at one time in the '90s, was an aide for former City Councilwoman Tina Podlodowski. Clark was not chosen on the first ballot. The flap surrounding Clark's eventual choice was treated as a two-headed issue by the local dailies. First, Clark was white, and the other five candidates who emerged from the more than 100 applicants to fill Compton's (I can't say giant) shoes, were women of color.
No "group" shot down previous plans for a new store and additional housing on the site of the Metropolitan Market. In fact, the project collapsed because it was too expensive - it couldn't be financed. And Michael Norquest's letter in the Feb. 1 edition of this paper. epeatedly refers to the "owners of the Metropolitan Market" as those who are seeking to build a strip mall in our community. In fact, the Cox family is the owner of the property, and they are the ones who want to build a strip mall.
Thank you for printing the guest column by Christina Cox in the Jan. 18 Queen Anne News. I appreciate hearing her interests and her commit-ments to the community. From what I understand of the project so far, however, it is not what she claims it to be. I'm not talking about the grocer tenant and Ms. Cox's thoughtful history of QFC; I don't doubt she has her facts right there. I'm talk-ing about Ms. Cox's commitment to making this a pedestrian- and family-friendly development.
The key players took their places last week in the tragicomedy of the Seattle Supersonics, our economically unviable professional basketball franchise currently making threats to cut and run unless the city bails the team out with some hefty tax revenues. In one corner, Tweedle Dee, otherwise known as Sonics owner Howard Schultz: The Starbucks bigwig actually had the temerity to suggest it's not a "threat" when he promises that the team will leave Seattle without the same kind of taxpayer help the Mariners and the Seahawks received in building their state-of-the-art playing fields.
When William Dunlop died of cancer on Oct. 20, 2005, at age 69, the local media scarcely blinked. The English expat and Queen Anne resident surely deserved better.
"Trouble in Paradise" ... "The Scarlet Empress" ... "Bringing Up Baby" ... "Shadow of a Doubt" ... "Laura" ... "Out of the Past" ... "Kiss Me Deadly" ... "The Searchers" ... "North by Northwest" ... "A Hard Day's Night" ... "Point Blank" ... "2001: A Space Odyssey" ... "Once Upon a Time in the West" ... "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" ... "The Shining" ... "Cutter and Bone" (a.k.a. "Cutter's Way") ... "Drugstore Cowboy" ... "Miller's Crossing" ... "Dead Man" ... "About Schmidt" ... All these movies have three things in common: 1) I regard each as the best of its year. 2) None won the Academy Award as best picture. 3) And none was even nominated. For that matter, most of my second and third choices weren't nominated, either.
Students from Queen Anne's Center School pitched in on the morning of Jan. 28 to help eradicate invasive vegetation from Lake People's Park in the South End. Tom Rader, having whacked some insidious English ivy, gathers it up to haul away!
Goodman Racing (16-1) finished the regular season of the Majors Division of Magnolia Little League on an 11-game winning streak with a 13-2 victory over Ric's Shell.Goodman had clinched the regular season title in its previous victory over United Warehouse by a score of 8-3. The team's win streak heading into the post-season tournament has included two extremely close victories over the regular season league runner-up, Fischer Plumbing (15-2), as well as victories over the Masons St. John's, last year's Tournament of Champions' winner, and the 5-Spot, one of last year's semifinalists.-Submitted by John A. Reed
Parking along Westlake Avenue North is already a hassle, and it's only going to get worse when the South Lake Union area is redeveloped, according to the Seattle Department of Transportation.But an SDOT proposal to fix the mess with paid parking and Residential Parking Zones (RPZs) ran into a solid wall of opposition at a packed lunchtime open house and meeting last week.No one who spoke at the meeting-not the residents, not the houseboat live-aboards and certainly not the business owners-liked the ideas.The introduction of paid parking to the area came under especially intense fire, and many at the meeting were wearing Westlake Avenue North Association stickers that read, "No Pay Stations, No Paid Parking.""We were promised no paid parking unless business owners requested it," said Lynn Reister, a member of the association. "The city is changing its tune here."SDOT Director Grace Crunican acknowledged that switching from free to paid parking is a controversial move. "It's going to be a tough job," she said.But the city has to do something because the area is changing, said Crunican, who pointed to the 2007 start-up of the trolley system in the South Lake Union area as one factor. Even now, the free parking on Westlake attracts motorists who work downtown but don't want to pay for parking there, she said. "We need to make sure residents have access to parking."
For a guy who prides himself on being informed, I find as I mature (ripen? wither?) I am missing lots of things I used to catch.For example, although a veteran, I somehow missed the news that an employee of the Veterans Administration took home electronic data from the VA, which, according to R. James Nicholson, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs for the Iraq-or-bust crew, he "was not authorized to do."The news from Nicholson got worse quickly."The employee's home was burglarized," Nicholson continued, and the unauthorized data was stolen."The data," Nicholson said, "contained identifying information including names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth for up to 26.5 million veterans."In the letter I recently received from Nicholson, he advised me to "beware of any phone calls, e-mails and other communications from individuals claiming to be from the VA."Identity theft is a huge and still-growing problem in this computer-crazed society where agency after agency is stockpiling data on citizens of all stripes, including veterans. I liked the world of bureaucracy better when all my pertinent private information was locked in a file cabinet somewhere in the VA and not spread all over computers accessible to folks more ambitious than your average VA file clerk.
Greg Nickels did something amazing recently: The man who would be pothole king asked the public what it thinks about our crummy roads and decrepit bridgesSure, he's using a public survey of the so-called "dirty dozen" worst street scenes to promote a 20-year, $1.8-billion tax measure. I mean, the guy is seriously into pricey legacies. Take the Seattle Big Dig (sorry, Viaduct tunnel), for example.But the fact that Hizzoner wants to get advice from the citizenry means a lot, espe-cially since he seems supremely disinclined to do the same thing for the city council. I suspect Seattleites will have plenty of ideas on their own. After all, complaining about the city is such an integral part of "The Process" here. The survey (sorry, complaint) results will be released in July, and the top 12 get on someone's priority fix-it list, pending approval of the hard-sell funding package. There are bound to be some obvious favorites, such as pretty much any bridge in town. But I worry that tackling some of the other problems could change the character of the city for the worse.Take a streetscape issue dear to a lot of people's hearts: buckled sidewalks. They're literally everywhere, thanks to all those wonderful street trees the city has promoted with such ecological zeal.