Results tagged “bubble”

Today in two-newspaper town coincidences: real estate made the front page of both the Seattle Times and the P-I. "King County home sales edge up in June," says the Times, while the P-I makes a stronger claim for temperature-based sales, "Local housing market warming up with the weather."

The mass insanity of the housing bubble over the last few years has pretty fully revealed itself by now. One need only visit our good friends over at Seattle Bubble to read about the increasing devastation. On Jan. 15, Tim posted the big news: according to the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS), King Co. finally posted year-over-year median closing prices on housing. According to the same report, active listings are up in the YOY comparison (51%) and pending sales are down (by 33% YOY), both records. In other words, the market is flooded, demand is down, and housing prices are falling.

On Saturday, we took our godson, his mom and his dad to Baby Loves Disco. Since we don't have a kid of our own and don't have any experience with kid-themed events, 17-month-old Eli agreed to let us interview him about the party.

Baby, it’s getting cold outside. Not that we need that excuse, but the nip in the air has us craving something volcanic. Time for some soon-doo-boo chigae.

Did you know that there's only one credible real-estate industry voice in Seattle? It's a marketing firm in town that works with real estate developers. We've learned this from reading Aubrey Cohen's real estate reporting in the Seattle P-I. Here's a search on articles containing the exact phrase "Williams Marketing" -- they're quoted in at least one article per month since last November. (Who are the schmoes paying the P-I for ads when there's so much free ink available?)

Gas Works Park may not recover its former place as our #1 greatest park ever after its little tar leak last week. We took a walk over there yesterday and wandered around what was basically an empty space on a gray and prematurely cold day, pressing our nose up against the chain link here and there and dwelling on what exactly this park sits on top of: benzene, mercury, lead, etc. It's gross.

Since our last Uwajiwhat focused on coconut milk, it seems appropriate to address the other staple in our Thai pantry: curry paste. And the best of the bunch is again Mae Ploy.

We randomly checked out the Walkmen and Kaiser Chiefs show at the Showbox last night, mostly in the dark about their work. Although we had seen the Walkmen live once before, we couldnt remember if they had made much of an impression. During the opening, a friend summed up their sound as "like the Strokes except not irritating." That's a good enough summary although we'd swap out the Strokes with Rod Stewart, who Walkmen lead singer Hamilton Leithauser sounds exactly like and if you don't agree then fuck you.

--The real estate bubble really is getting crazy.

Special Gonzaga correspondent Sean O'Connor reports that the Zags will make the tournament.

Blue Door is part confessional crisis, part historical saga -- or part Philip Roth's The Human Stain and part Alex Haley's Roots. It's showing in the smaller Leo K Theatre at the Rep, which features continental seating (no center aisle) and jumpy Rep subscribers. We sat down 10 minutes early and stood up 8 times to let people in and out. Holy crap. Don't let anyone tell you older people are all ruled by the pull of gravity.

Tuesday, February 6

'Member when we made a funny ha-ha joke about thieves breaking into staged homes for sale? Well--irony of ironies--a thief did same to a friend's house last night, so we had to Tivo Saturday morning's Husky game while we spent the day repairing a broken door frame.

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost.

David Lynch premiered his hopeless, boring mess of a film last night at the Cinerama and the only thing worse than sitting through three hours of mindless scenes of people staring in to space and nothing happening was the insipid, gushing fannish Q&A with the Lynch freaks immediately following the film. Did you know that Lynch's fans are all filmmakers too? You do now. Do you care that every one who took the mic wanted to remind Lynch about their conversations they had with him (BFF!) earlier that day at the Scarecrow signing? Too bad.

If you're in the mood for some wide-eyed, Kool-Aid stained boosterism, look no further than this article in today's P-I. It's in response to the New York Times piece announcing a condo-sales slump. The tone is strictly "move along, nothing to see here."

A Seattle real estate investor discovered last night the petrified corpse of a fried dead rat baking on the heating element in his new condo. This will come as unwelcome news to certain gloom and doom real estate haters because it demonstrates that the Seattle market remains bubble proof. When you look at other real estate markets outside of Seattle - Darfur, Glod, Buffalo - first time home buyers have to a pay a premium for condos that come with fried rat carcasses.

The Post Intelligencer has an article today on the pesky old buildings that dot Seattle and the heroes who have been swooping in to convert them to condos. No need to tear down a perfectly good old building, necessarily, although that sometimes works too, but you can only wring so much out of renters before you shuffle them off to Kent or something where they belong and get some buyers in there.

If the voting public of the United States had gotten a chance to vote directly against Donald Rumsfeld last night, it would have been a landslide on the order of Seattle Initiative 91. Doesn't matter who the other guy was. It could have been Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer himself, or Mike McGavick even, getting sworn into office in January. We can dispense with all that, though, because all the Democratic voting for State legislatures, Federal legislatures, governors, etc, etc, apparently got through; pierced Bush's bubble. Rumsfeld resigned today and he's stepping down to be replaced by former CIA head Robert Gates. See ya.

-If you thought high demand is responsible for high housing prices, Seattle Bubble asks you to think again.

As Slate will sometimes publish a book review or commentary by Armond White or Stanley Crouch, one gathers that toothlessness in a writer isn't always a condition of employment. How then to account for the uniform awfulness of Slate's film section since Edelstein's departure? How then to account for the myopically prejudicial "old boys' club" atmosphere that deems who will and who won't have "room" in an online publication that's updated daily? (And is losing money anyway.)

-We'll trade you our Droogs for your Stinkin' World.

Sometimes you need to clean yourself up, get serious, and move in with daddy for a few months before you head to Latin America for a new gig. The District bids Jenna Bush adios. D.C.-based television shows have an elderly audience and DCist has Butterstick the panda bear a birthday bash.

In Bothell this weekend there's something called Country Village that's apparently a period piece shopping experience. So, kind of like a smaller version of Port Gamble? And 4Culture and the artist Amy-Ellen Trefsger will be doing an installation there in which AE lives on a small boat in the village for nine days.

Seattlest is still buzzing after the wonderful Redfin-sponsored Techcrunch meetup a few weeks ago (what can we say, free pizza goes a long way). That said, we had tempered expectations regarding Tuesday's (also Redfin-sponsored) nPost networking event, but found ourselves happily surprised by how enjoyable this pure networking gathering turned out to be.

and drink lots of beer

Seattlest serves up musical jambalaya for the masses… Delicious!

Thanks to local bean fiend tonx, Seattlest was alerted to the "soft" opening of Espresso Vivace's new espresso palace, across the street from REI on Yale Avenue North. From the new Vivace cafe, you can peer into the verdant foliage in front of REI. Camping gear mecca, meet espresso mecca. The Grand Opening is April 18.

Professor Jared Diamond might be wicked smaht (said with a proper Bawston accent like his), but he's no Edward Tufte. Stay with us on this one... We've attended one presentation by Tufte, and even considering the potentially drought-worthy material in some people's eyes (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information), he is more entertaining than Space Mountain. Despite the fact that Seattlest is mighty interested in the subject of Diamond's most recent book, that couldn't save his lecture for the Town Hall Science Series last night.

A friend and Seattlest discovered the UW surplus warehouse while walking home from Agua Verde one day a couple of years ago. We just walked in and started wandering through the shelves of cast-off computers, unidentifiable but important looking measuring equipment and bad office furniture. To us, techies both, it was like two sixteen-year-olds accidentally wandering into a porn shop for the first time. This is before we'd come across Re-PC. Everything had a little yellow price tag on it. Computers were marked $10. Strange machinery with big bubble displays cost $50. Half of the stuff in there looked like it could have been ripped from the set of Flash Gordon or Frankenstein's laboratory - We were suckers for that kind of thing. Luckily, we realized that nothing was for sale to the public before we gathered a complete haul. We were the public, unaffiliated with the University in any way shape or form. When questioned about our department at the checkout we tried to make something up, "Uh...English?" which, of course, didn't work at all.