Trains. Trains are good.

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One thing I have to say I really like about living in Seattle — it’s part of the Lower 48. I’ve got forty-eight states I can get to within a few days without ever having to set foot on an airplane (49, if I make the time to drive the Al-Can).

I’ve mentioned before that I seem to have developed something of a fear of flying ever since a particularly turbulent flight into Anchorage a few years back. It’s not entirely rational, but then, rationality doesn’t really seem to enter into it when I’m trapped in a multi-ton metal tube a few thousand feet in the air that’s shaking me around like one of James Bond’s martinis.

So then, what do I in my infinite wisdom do? I go and read articles about what happens during explosive decompression (“ROOF FLIES OFF!”).

A blown-out door can be perilous for pressurized aircraft at high altitudes. In 1989, the lower cargo door on a United Airlines passenger jet became unlatched at about 23,000 feet. The sudden and explosive loss of pressure tore open a portion of the cabin—nine passengers were sucked out through the large hole, along with their seats and the floor around them.

Aloha Airlines Flight 243The year before, a Boeing 737 operated by Aloha Airlines experienced an “explosive decompression” at 24,000 feet. An 18-foot portion of the roof of the cabin ripped off, and a flight attendant standing in the aisle was ejected from the plane.

No.

No, no, no, no, no.

I need to go find a happy place now.

iTunes “Mutilate” by Front 242 from the album 06:21:03:11 Up Evil (1993, 4:10).

Rush Job

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Rush Limbaugh yesterday, via Atrios:

LIMBAUGH: When does he start up this stupid little network? August? Yip yip yip yahoo. You know what Gore said about this? It’s going to be liberal. It’s going to reflect the point of view of young people.

What the hell is that, Al? What the hell is the point of view of young people? Blow jobs, that’s what they’re doing out there. They’re out there getting oral sex all day long, that’s what they’re talking about. That’s the point of view they can’t wait that your boss,

Al made sure that’s become the number one sport in high school today. So, I guess you’re going to have a BJ network out there, Al, is that what you’re going to do? You’re going to call your network the oral sex channel out there, start competing with MTV?

No, it’s not going to have any of this stuff out there, folks, it’s going to be talking about liberalism, no, no, no, that’s not what we’re about. Classic cannot even admit who he is.

(Anyone wanna bet on whether he gets slapped with a fine for violating broadcast decency standards…or for that matter, English grammar standards [oh, if only we could fine people for that particular infraction…{but then, I’d probably get busted for run-on sentences and needlessly nested paranthetical remarks (like this)}]? No? Yeah, me neither.)

Rush later (today?), via Wonkette:

I am going to apologize not for saying what I said, but I’m going to apologize if it offended anybody. I never apologize for what I say, but if some of you were offended by a graphic term involving actions committed by BILL CLINTON and MONICA LEWINSKY that have now spread to AMERICA’s high schools, I apologize. I meant to say ‘oral sex’ throughout, but the guttural term escaped my pouty lips in a moment of pure, unbridled passion. The staff was so stunned and so scared today they didn’t dare hit the delete button, the deedle button, and so it got out there…

Because, apparently, no teenager ever hit upon the idea of getting or giving a blowjob until Clinton introduced the idea to the world.

iTunes “Heavy Weather” by Caia from the album Isola D’Amore (2003, 5:06).

Google Video PC only (for now?)

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This really shouldn’t surprise me, but Google’s just-announced 1 has continued their tradition of being Mac-unfriendly at launch.

Google Video Uploader Installer.exe

At this point, they don’t even provide a backup web-upload option — just the Windows-only uploader application. Pity, that, as Ourmedia.org seems to be going through some growing pains (I uploaded a video three days ago, and it’s yet to actually appear in a useable form on the site), and I’m looking forward to being able to host some of my more bandwidth-intensive experiments on servers more powerful than mine.

Still, I’ll hope that this is just a temporary thing, and as with Gmail and Google Maps, Safari/Mac OS X support will come along before too long. In the meantime, though, I’ll just have to keep poking along as I have been until now.

Update: As of May 18th, they now support Mac (and *nix) uploading thanks to a Java-based uploader.

iTunes “Blister in the Sun” by Violent Femmes from the album Violent Femmes (1982, 2:24).

Bloggers in my neighborhood

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Here’s an interesting little web toy: feedmap.net. Give it your weblog address and (if necessary) physical address, and it returns a map of other weblogs close to you in the real world.

Apparently there’s about 154 other webloggers close to me though it seems to be a fairly loose definition of “close” — the map radius extends from Bremerton to past Sammamish east to west, and Woodinville to Renton north to south. Not terribly surprising, given how tech-centric Seattle tends to be, but fun to know.

Time to start clicking around to find out who all my neighbors are!

Kirsten’s here!

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Kirsten, The Vogue, Seattle, WAOver the past few days, I’ve had the pleasure of playing host to Kirsten, as she spends a couple days in Seattle in the midst of her vacation. She came into town on Sunday, just in time to kick back and relax here for a while before heading out to drop by Fetish Night at the Vogue, and takes off tomorrow morning for her first-ever visit to a foreign country.

She’ll be venturing into the wild, uncharted northern wilderness of Canadia Canuckistan Canada.

Okay, so it’s not the world’s most exotic destination — still, one has to start somewhere, right?

Much fun has been had (including an oh-so-wrong discussion of the alternate uses for Spam jelly), I managed to weasel out a little bit more information about her impending marriage (yay Kirsten!), and it’s been a good few days. She’ll be back briefly this coming weekend too, before heading back to Anchorage, though that will just be a quick overnighter from late Saturday until early Sunday.

Hooray for visits from friends. :)

iTunes “Tower of Naphtali, The” by Bolland, CJ from the album Electronic Highway (1995, 7:17).

But it’s funny because they’re gay!

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For the past three weeks, I’ve been using bittorrent to watch Grey’s Anatomy, a new medical drama based here in Seattle. So far, it’s struck me as fairly average-but-watchable television — nothing groundbreaking or award winning, but not horrid.

Gray's GeographyMuch of the fun for me (and many others, see Seattlest’s week one, two, and three wrapups; Metroblogging Seattle’s week one, two and three wrapups, for example) has been laughing at the bizarrely twisted geography of this alternate universe Seattle, where the main character can live on Queen Anne, drive north to work along the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and work in a hospital practically underneath the Space Needle that has a picturesque bay window view of the Pike Place Market sign, and yet has South Seattle’s distinct lack of high-rises in any exterior shots.

One thing about this week’s episode really bothered me, though. There were two subplots in the episode that both dealt with essentially the same situation, but they were played in very different ways. On the one hand, we had Meredith dealing with the overly aggressive attentions of a fellow intern, a bike messenger, and a doctor (the last being her primary love interest on the show); on the other, we had George’s discomfort at being under the very appreciative eye of an obviously gay patient.

What got to me was that each situation was dealing with unwanted sexual advances, yet where Meredith’s were played more seriously (complete with Dr. Yum coming to her rescue), George’s scenes with the gay patient were played very much for laughs. I’ve seen this type of double standard a lot, too — if a man harasses a woman it’s a Serious Matter that Must be Dealt With; if a man hits on a man, it’s Comic Relief.

It’s an attitude that has always bugged me. Sure, we’ve come a long way over the years, in that the humor of the situation these days is more often expressed through the straight man’s discomfort, rather than the gay man’s homosexuality, but it still strikes me as just another side of the same coin. It’s still homosexuality being used as a comic foil.

In this particular instance, toward the end of the show the gay character brushed his advances aside as “just flirting”, but he was still doing the same thing that the straight male characters were doing with Meredith — pressing their advances onto an obviously unwilling and discomforted victim. If his lines had been coming from a straight man talking to a straight woman, they would be seen as rude, aggressive, and creepy.

It’s rather sad — though not entirely unexpected — that we still can’t seem to seem to treat homosexuality as anything other than weird, threatening, freakish behavior, something to be laughed at. Maybe the laughter is a little kinder, a little less malicious than it used to be — but it’s still laughter.

iTunes “To the Mountain Top” by Edelweiss from the album Wonderful World of Edelweiss (1992, 4:43).

It’s illegal to photograph Seattle bus stations?

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Looks like another Seattle-area shutterbug has run into more bogus “no photography” harassment from heavy-handed officials. This time, Alex Williams had his digital film card confiscated after taking pictures at the Pioneer Square bus station.

On Saturday, 4/9/2005, a friend and I were photographing inside Pioneer Square Bus Station when we were stopped by a King County Sheriff’s Deputy and Transit Authority Police Officer and told what we were doing was illegal, and that the area was considered restricted.

I asked the officers explicitly if we were breaking the law. To which the Transit Authority Officer responded, “There’s no law, It’s just sort of an unwritten rule.” The Deputy rebuked my friend and me for not using common sense and repeatedly mentioned the word “terrorism”. The Deputy then confiscated my digital film and informed me that the compact flash cards would be sent to a lab to see what was on them. I offered to format the cards while he watched but he refused.

I did not receive a ticket or citation or receipt for my belongings. On parting, the officer asked if I had any questions, and I politely suggested that they may want to put signs up letting people know that it was illegal to photograph here. To which, he responded, they weren’t “going to waste time posting signs for something that’s common knowledge.”

I found out about this because as Alex researched similar instances after his encounter, he found and linked to my post about Ian Spears problems photographing the Ballard Locks last summer, which then popped up in my referer logs.

One bright side to Alex’ experience, though — after contacting a few people, his story will be on tonight’s 5:30pm KOMO 4 news broadcast.

UPDATE! (4/11/2005)
I emailed KOMO 4 news early this morning and got a prompt photocall from Molly Shen, reporter. The news crew arrived this morning and interviewed me for a story scheduled to air at 5:30pm today.

Molly had already done an impressive amout of work by the time she arrived. She talked with King County Sheriff’s officials and found out that it was, in fact, inappropriate for the Officer to confiscate my equipment. She was told that my equipment would be returned as soon as possible. Thanks, Molly!

I won’t be able to watch the broadcast, but I’ll keep an eye on the KOMO site and see if they post it online this evening.

Update: KOMO has posted their story online.

First Christian Church demolition

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I mentioned yesterday that the First Christian Church on Broadway was in the midst of being demolished. While wandering around today I stopped by the site, got some video of the work being done, and found out a little bit more about why the building’s coming down.

After coming home and doing a few searches around the ‘net, I confirmed what I’d been told today — apparently, the building has actually been closed since 2001, after it was damaged in the Nisqually earthquake. The costs to make it safe were simply too much for the congregation to bear, so they merged with another church up the street, and arranged for the demolition of the building.

The towered terracotta and brick building across from the Seattle Central campus took damage in the Nisqually Earthquake of 2001. Costly repairs were made, but the damage was a wake-up call to the congregation. They evaluated the option of making the building earthquake-safe and modernized, but “the cost of these… was in the range of five to ten million dollars.” Clark Beck, a member of the congregation since 1969, circulated a memo to the congregation and neighbors about the decision to sell the church. “The congregation felt it was more important to devote limited resources and energy to fulfilling their social and spiritual mission,” continued Beck.

Though the building is coming down, the congregation will live-on down the street. Combined with Pilgrim Congregational Church, First Christian Church is now All Pilgrims Christian Church.

One thing I was very glad to confirm — I’d suspected that this would be the case, but I hadn’t been sure until today — is that the stained glass windows have been salvaged and saved to be sold off later.

We’ve been working the site with Earthwise some time now, salvaging trim, car decking, rails, flooring, lights, and some small windows. Today started the big part of the job: removing the large Povey Bros. stained glass from the facade. A rented scaffolding was erected and by day’s end the top row of windows was salvaged and the large opening boarded up.

After getting home, I pulled the photos and videos I shot with my camera today and put together a short little mini-film about the demolition. It’s nothing that’s going to win any awards, but it was a fun little project to work on over the afternoon.

Guess what? You’re not normal.

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You're not normal, Seattle, WA

Not a bad day at all today. Woke up at about 8am, looked outside, and realized that we were in for a gorgeous spring day — mostly clear skies, bright sun, and just a hint of breeze. Perfect for going out wandering…so wander I did.

I started by heading up the hill and heading down Broadway, keeping an eye out for more stickers to add to my sticker graffiti collection on Flickr. I found a ton of stuff to add — Broadway being something of a center point for much of the city’s “freak” population, it’s got a wide collection of graffiti (stickered and otherwise) to choose from. While I found a lot of good stuff, I think my favorite from the day was this one Chickens ate my Baby Sticker Graffiti, Broadway, Seattle, WA — a ‘dollar bill’ emblazoned with the text, “Yo, chickens ate my baby!!!” Other favorites include a plea to boycott certain Safeway employees, a reason for the stickers and these teapots.

A couple weeks ago, Prairie and I noticed that a gorgeous old church on Broadway right across from the Seattle Central Community College was due to be demolished. This was kind of a bummer to find out — while neither of us had ever gone there, it was a nice building, and it was a shame to see that it was to be torn down rather than renovated. When I passed it today, the work crews were in the midst of the demolition process. I’ve got to admit — while I hate to see the building go, it was kind of neat to get to watch some of the work (must be my inner six year old).

I managed to find a couple conversations as I continued down the street, too. First was a gent who I saw debarking from a bus wearing a khaki Sport Kilt, which led to a conversation about kilts and cameras that lasted for a couple blocks. Later on, one of the many street kids that prowl Broadway for spare change asked me about the kilt, and I ended up chatting with her and a friend of hers for a few minutes — Leah and Shy were their names, I think, though I could easily be wrong about that, as I’m absolutely horrid with names.

Bailey/Coy Books, one of the bookshops along Broadway, always has a sign out front Bailey/Coy Books, Broadway, Seattle, WA with the first line from a book. If you know the book that they’re quoting from, you get 20% off — and today, for the first time, I was actually able to identify the quote! Determined not to let this opportunity go to waste I headed in and picked up The System of the World, the last book in Neal Stephenson‘s Baroque Cycle, which I’d been wanting to get since it came out last year. I’ll get around to reading it as soon as I’m done re-reading the Harry Potter series, which I decided to do after Prairie and I had a “Harry Potter Weekend” a couple weekends ago and watched all three films over the course of the weekend.

Once I hit the end of Broadway, I decided to continue on and head up to Volunteer Park, which I’ve never wandered through on a “normal” day (I usually end up there for the Pride Day festivities). After a wander around I started heading back out when I was called over by a small group of kids hanging out at the amphitheatre. “We’re having a parade,” they said, “come and join us!” I wasn’t entirely sure about joining in a parade, but I headed over to chat and see what was going on.

Pre-parade gathering, Volunteer Park, Seattle, WA As it turns out, this is something they’ve been doing for the past few weeks, and intend to keep doing — get a bunch of friends together, dress up, find some noisemakers, and go wandering around Capitol Hill in their own little festive parade. Why? Why not? “Everybody gets out to march in protest, pissing and moaning about things — but nobody ever just celebrates a good day,” said the guy who seemed to be more or less in charge. “It’s a warm spring day, we’re here, nobody’s dropping bombs on us…why not have some fun?”

Seemed like good enough rationale to me, so I decided to wander along with them as photographer (not generally being one for random prancing, hootin’ and hollerin’, but still a great supporter or random silliness and fun). After a few more people showed up, it was declared time to go — and we were off.

Join the Parade! Volunteer Park, Seattle, WA This little motley group of assorted oddballs (and yes, I most definitely include myself in that) headed up and out of Volunteer Park, down 15th Avenue to John St., down John to Broadway, and up and then back down Broadway, prancing, dancing, twirling, shouting, chanting, singing, banging on gongs, bowls, and other noisemakers the entire way. “We’re having a parade! Join the parade!” they shouted at passers by and into windows of stores and open doors of shops. Some people weren’t quite sure what to make of the spectacle, but overall, I saw lots of amusement on the faces of the people we passed — they might not want to join in (though a few did eventually), but the sheer absurdity of the event was enough to bring a smile to quite a few people.

And in the end, what more excuse do you need to do something silly?

Once the group made it to SCCC they camped out on the lawn for a few moments to decide where to go next, and I took my leave of them. By this point I’d been out wandering around for about five hours, and it was time to head home and rest for a bit. I came home, napped for about an hour, then after a quick chat with Prairie before she headed out to a night at the opera (Central Washington University just got a new music building, and this was their inaugural performance), showered and headed up to the Vogue for a night of bouncing.

Bouncing accomplished, I’m home again, and now that this mini-opus is done, it’s long past bedtime for Bonzo.

iTunes “Power in the Blood (Acoustic)” by Alabama 3 from the album Acoustic Power: Underground Acoustic Sessions From the Steam Room (2003, 2:31).