Personal

On the bright side, the weather has been absolutely gorgeous all this weekend. On the downside, I haven’t wanted to leave the apartment — once temperatures hit the mid-80’s to 90’s, I’m quite content to lay in a near-comatose puddle on my bed. ;) However, this being the weekend for the Bite of Seattle food festival, I couldn’t very well stay indoors in the shade all weekend.

Prairie had come in to town to visit for the weekend, so Saturday morning we got up around 11, wandered downtown to see Pirates of the Caribbean (which rocked — more on that later, most likely), then walked from the Temple of Avarice to the Seattle Center to wander around the Bite for a while. As I mentioned above, it was gorgeous weather, so Seattle was out in full force. Lots of people, and at times a little overcrowded (does nobody ever pay attention to where they are walking at these things?), but aside from that, not bad at all. I even went out and soaked myself in the fountain — and boy, did that make the sun more bearable for the rest of the afternoon!

After grabbing some food and finding a seat in the shade to eat, we each grabbed an ice cream cone, and sat down at one of the music stages to watch The Retros play — if the name hasn’t given it away already, they specialize in 80’s pop, and are a blast to see. We finished our ice cream about the same time they finished their set, and, deciding that we didn’t really want to risk sunburn any more than we already had, we hopped on the monorail and came back to the apartment.

The rest of the weekend was spent mostly here at the apartment, resting and trying to avoid the heat as much as possible. Movies were watched, laundry was done, and not much else. Which, as far as I’m concerned, makes for a perfect weekend.

Many years ago, Anchorage used to have two newspapers in town. The Anchorage Daily News was the more liberal of the two, while the Anchorage Times was the more conservative. It’s been long enough now that I don’t remember all the details, but after a while, the Anchorage Times closed its doors, and Anchorage became a one newspaper town. These days, all that’s left of the Times is an editorial column called Voice of the Times that was created as a way to continue a separate editorial voice in the city.

Currently in Seattle, a similar situation is developing. Seattle’s two newspapers, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have been operating under a joint operating agreement for the past few years. The Seattle Times now wants out of the JOA, however, and it’s looking more and more likely that Seattle may soon become a one-paper town if the Times gets its way.

Having been around for the loss of the Anchorage Times, I have to say, I’m not looking forward to losing the P-I. While in Anchorage we were lucky enough to keep the more liberal of the two papers publishing, here in Seattle, the P-I is the more liberal of the two papers, and it’s the one were likely to lose. Beyond even just the editorial slant of which paper survives, though, I think that it’s important that there be more than one major public voice in a city, especially one the size of Seattle.

Once the Anchorage Times folded, I felt that there was a marked decrease in the quality of the Anchorage Daily News. Without the constant competition and opposing viewpoints, there just didn’t seem to be as much drive left at the ADN to keep up the quality that it had had before, and it wasn’t long after the fall of the Times that I stopped bothering to read the ADN on a regular basis. It just felt like much of the heart and fire that used to drive the paper was no longer there without the Times to challenge it.

On the bright side, though, Seattle does have two good weekly newspapers — the Stranger and the Seattle Weekly. This weeks edition of the Seattle Weekly has a wonderful story looking at the history of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and ruminating on everything we could lose if the P-I is forced to close.

The P-I’s newsroom culture in the 1960s and 1970s was far more freewheeling than what the staid management of the Times could have handled. At the Times, reporters wore sport coats and ties and trimmed their hair neatly and were largely a well-behaved bunch. The P-I was a newspaper that tolerated long hair and beards among its male staff at a time when those were firing offenses in many of the country’s newsrooms. It would, in the mid-1960s, send future novelist Tom Robbins and gonzo writer Darrell Bob Houston, both then copy editors, and cartoonist Ray Collins to cover Timothy Leary’s LSD conference in Berkeley, Calif. It ran a Hearst-dictated editorial endorsing Richard Nixon in 1972 but then allowed a group comprising more than half its news staff to take out an ad in their own newspaper endorsing George McGovern.

[…]

Frank Herbert, author of the Dune series and one of the most successful sci-fi novelists of all time, wrote the first Dune book while covering higher education for the P-I. He retired from daily journalism in 1971 after optioning Dune to a movie studio. Tom Robbins quit the P-I in 1970 and moved over to the Washington coast, where he eventually wrote Another Roadside Attraction, the first of seven novels. He now lives in La Conner.

There are a lot more good stories buried in the article. It may be nearly hopeless, but I’d be very disappointed if the Times ended up being the sole daily newspaper in Seattle.

I already have a tendency to find Asian women quite attractive. I’ve also long thought that clothing doesn’t have to be revealing to be sexy — leaving details up to the imagination can be a very good thing.

Then today, Jeremy posts about Yukata season in Japan…

This is probably the right place to mention that I think kimono and yukata are about the sexiest articles of clothing ever designed for women (with the possible exception of old blue jeans and a crisp white shirt). Unlike a lot of Western style clothing, they look great on people of all shapes and sizes and they provide the most tantalising glimpses of ankles, napes of necks (oooh!) and clavicles (big oooh!) as well as ample encouragement to the imagination (as if encouragement were needed). The pseudo-porn attractions of hot pants and bared midriffs are simply grotesque compared to the unostentatious (but hardly demure) eroticism of the kimono.

Damn straight. And when’s the next boat to Japan? ;)

To the group of yuppies walking down 8^th^ Ave., between Pike and Seneca, while I was walking up.

There’s eight of you, all grouped together in your power suits and nametags, on your way to or from whatever conference you’re at. Eight, stretched across the entire width of the sidewalk.

Meanwhile, there’s only one of me. And a fairly skinny me, at that. I don’t take up much space.

So why do none of you move enough to let me by? It doesn’t do any good for me to move to one side or the other, I’m still faced with a wall of corporate momos that I can’t get past. Would it kill you to leave a little space for people walking the other direction?

So that’s why I stopped dead in my tracks and watched you all. Not stalking, not trying to be threatening or obnoxious, as your puzzled looks when I stopped seem to imply. Merely waiting for you to get your little group out of my way so I could get home.

Gr.