Results tagged “michigan”

Photo of One Be Lo by Kyle Johnson.

No, Seattlest is not just a fan of alliteration and 80's slang, as the headline might suggest. Burying the beef, is the current plan of the Seattle Public School District to rid itself of 230 cases of possibly contaminated beef. The beef, provided to school districts through a USDA lunch program, came from a California slaughterhouse in the center of the largest beef recall in USDA history.

"The Next Slum" is the name of the article in the March Atlantic (not online yet), and Seattle gets lots of mentions. Author Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues that as demographics and energy use changes over the next 15-20 years, there will be a growing surplus of large-lot homes that no one wants, decaying on the market.

Stealing Seattle's basketball team apparently isn't keeping Sonics owner Aubrey McClendon busy, so he's found another community to screw over: tiny Saugatuck, Michigan.

Eaten: An onion burger and brick of fries.

The Seattle Times has a quickie little snippet about some ski resort ownership swapping, namely that Boyne USA has bought the Summit at Snoqualmie from Booth Creek. At first we were a little concerned, namely because Booth Creek has a great track record from a customer service perspective, especially when they extended our season's pass for free after the disastrous winter of 05-06. But after a little more research, we're very excited because this is excellent news for mountain bikers.

At work the other day, Seattlest was talking to a coworker and friend who originally hails from Minnesota. Naturally, we talked of the bridge collapse. As one would expect these sorts of conversations to go, the conversation logically ended with us looking up the coordinates for the northernmost point in Maine.

Microsoft, Amazon, Disney, Nintendo, The Robot Co-Op; the list of big name tech companies in the Puget Sound region includes some of the biggest, which is why we were surprised by the recent bandwidth report that ranked Washington 18th among U.S. states in high-speed internet access. Illinois is 17th, Michigan is 19th. Two fine states but what tech shops do they have? Rhode Island is number one, Kansas 2 and Jersey 3. Apparently the presence of large technology companies has shit to do with the speed of the general interweb in a region. California is 38th (phbbbbttt!) and South Dakota is dead 50th, which should be a warning to us all. Don't be like SD. We take it on faith that a slow internet leads directly to things like full-on abortion bans, although when we tried making a Red State vs Blue State map with these speed rankings it didn't pan out.

We were delighted to find out that offerings from Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales have hit the shelves in your better beer stores around Seattle.

Yes, this story about some sad sack of a cop and his wife in Michigan is a few days old, but the really enjoyable aspect of this news item comes to you courtesy of Seattle's own Q13 Fox news. Enjoy.

Seattlest is too cool for the Gap and too busy for thrift. How's a thirty-something guy to dress himself, then? We handle it by wearing the same two pairs of jeans and the same four shirts in different configurations every day. Then, once a year, when we're in Chicago to visit family and friends we make a point to get to H&M downtown to replace two of our shirts. Right now we're kind of hurting--the last visit to Chicago happened to be in February when it was a billion below. We were on Michigan Avenue, even, but couldn't make it the last few blocks to H&M. It was like being turned back from the summit of Everest with only a hundred feet or so to go: we could have gotten our two shirts but we would have sacrificed a few fingers or toes to frostbite for them. If you're not familiar with H&M they're like the Ikea of clothing. Aside from also being Swedish, they sell stylish (arguably), cheaply manufactured (arguably) clothes for reasonable (unarguably) prices. You can look reasonably well-dressed if you outfit yourself head to toe there, and, ok, it is a little like Urban Outfitters but you'll be a lot less cheesy, a little more Euro and will be enfattening the wallet of some faceless Swedes instead of that right-wing guy who owns Urban Outfitters. The first time we went into an H&M we were in Berlin where they were on almost every single corner, like Starbucks or something. It was paradise. We buy our underwear there, and almost exclusively there. We need a fifth shirt, badly, to round out the work week. It's been a while and we're getting desperate, which is why this wholly unsubstantiated, but entirely believable rumor has us so excited:

More snow--today's games are postponed. they'll play a doubleheader on Sunday, and try to make the third game up during an off day later in the season.

THAT STARBUCKS "I WAS A CHILD SOLDIER" GUY: At twelve, Ishmael Beah found himself fleeing rebels, wandering from village to village. At thirteen, he was a soldier in Sierra Leone, hooked on drugs and capable of things he would never have imagined. Now, rehabilitated and living in the U.S., he tells his story in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, in an attempt to raise awareness of the child soldier phenomenon.

This week the Washington State Senate is deciding whether to make Washington to the first state in the nation to ban the fire retardant deca-BDE [ESHB 1024]. (The House, where Jamie Pedersen was a sponsor, passed the bill this February.)

AUTHOR, AUTHOR: In Bich Minh Nguyen's memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner, a young family escapes from Vietnam shortly before the fall of Saigon and relocates to Grand Rapids, Michigan. "In her recreation of a world populated by family ties, Ritz crackers, and Judy Blume books, she has captured the 1980s with perfection," says Kirkus Reviews.

President Gerald Ford's memorial service is today, we thought we'd present these remarks Ford (shown here with George Harrison) made about Seattle upon his visit here as president on September 4th, 1975. Not the most interesting reading, but they seem extemporaneous and are perhaps a good snapshot of what one president thought when he thought of Seattle in the 70s: fish, Boeing, and international trade:

It is really wonderful to be in Seattle, and I do thank you for the beautiful salmon. We are now the beneficiaries in my State of Michigan, not of salmon quite as large as that, but salmon. We started developing a few years ago by transplanting some salmon from this area of the world, and we now have tremendous supplies in Lake Michigan of Coho salmon. And we are proud of it. They don't match that salmon in size, but they do remind us of the west coast and the wonderful opportunities that all of you have who live here.

Continue reading "Gerald Ford on Seattle"

Back before college football got completely screwed up, the Huskies were a national power. You laugh, but it's true.

How is that these one-man-play guys are so good at building sets? Are they really as good as it seems or is it Seattlest's imagination? Set designers bust ass for weeks to put something together and/or spend thousands of dollars and guys like Mark Pinkosh of Balagan Theater's "A Dangerous Age" just pull something out of the air from their perch on a blank stage. One minute on Saturday we were adjusting our drink on a table in the lower level of CHAC and the next our socks were loaded with sand and we were sitting on a dune in Michigan, listening to the waves and admiring Chicago's nighttime glow in the distance. Next to us a couple of gay guys made out and behind us were the ominous shadows cast by military barracks, which had to have something to do with the ferocity of those gay dudes.

Local indie comics publisher Fantagraphics Books revealed last week that they'd be opening a brand-new company store in Seattle this Saturday.

Has Seattlest mentioned that we are in love with Sufjan Stevens? Yes, we love him, but it's totally not in a sexual way. Though we certainly appreciate his boyish good looks (and nicely toned arms), for us to touch someone with such wide-eyed childlike wonder would surely make us a pedophile. More than anything, we'd love to hold him close to our bosom, thereby protecting him from the cold, cruel world. Still, when a man attempts a project even he knows he's not going to finish---creating an album per state of the union, and on each chronicling the state's feel via extensive research, personalized lyrics, and elaborate folk orchestration---well, we kinda hafta fall in love with him. Especially when he chooses as his second state the place of our birth, and the big single off the album is about our hometown.

Reference help from the Seattle Public Library is going 24/7/365.25:

The Seattle Public Library now has live online reference services around the clock. For anyone up after midnight cramming for a test, stuck at home and unable to get to a library branch or even on vacation with a laptop, the library is available.

Continue reading "24-Hour Reference People"

For some reason our collegiate system places very few demands on the time of its participants. Undergrads may not believe this, aspiring undergrads couldn't be convinced of it, but post-college types generally admit that those five years were scheduled pretty lightly. Not that there weren't commitments. Parties had to be attended. Frisbees had to be thrown. Bongs have evolved, but they have yet to smoke themselves. And there's no better environment for game playing than the residence hall. Bar none.

It seems that everyone in town is buzzing about Maya Lin's new exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery. Personally, we only really know Lin through her premiere memorial in DC, and, really, there is no denying the power and simplicity of that work. There is, however, great scope to her work. The Vietnam Memorial launched her career, but she is also responsible for another simple, powerful monument--the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Creating works which inspire reflection and hope without trivializing the events they commemorate is a difficult line to walk. With the amount of criticism she endured from her first project, her own resilience has also become a subtext of her work. In fact, the 1995 Academy Award winner for best documentary, A Strong Clear Vision, revealed that resilience and exposed the sensitive soul that accompanies it.

What can you say about the Seahawks yesterday? They dominated the Panthers on offense and defense. They held Steve Smith to 33 yards receiving and a disputed return touchdown. They didn't turn the ball over and they took the ball four times. All in all, their 34-14 win was the best performance by a local team in a big game since, well, since the Huskies' 34-14 win over Michigan in the 1992 Rose Bowl. 34-14 is now our favorite football score.

The emerging storyline of Sunday's NFC Championship game is whether the Seahawks defense can stop the Panthers' Steve Smith. The buzz about Smith strikes us as familiar--he's a small-statured receiver who is the focal point of his team's offense--a brash, competitive player who runs reverses, breakout screens, and catches long passes.

Here in Seattle, it's a slow sports day. The only major local team in action is the Husky women's basketball team, who host Michigan tonight. It's high school basketball night, but there aren't any particularly compelling matchups.

The Huskies beat #6 Gonzaga last night, ending a seven-game losing streak to the Zags and proving that, despite losing three top scorers from last year, this year's Husky team is worthy of national attention.

When this week began, wrestler Eddie Guerrero and TV pioneer Ralph Edwards were both alive. No one outside Steel Country had heard of Rep. John Murtha, and Bob Woodward still had credibility. Next week is really only three days, so probably nothing will happen. Thus, we at Seattlest intend to enjoy ourselves over the weekend.

After playing poorly in the Sonics' first two games, fourth-year guard Ronald "Flip" Murray is going to be getting considerably more pine time.

This weekend, for the first time in a month, the Mariners played like a good baseball team, winning a series from NL-West leading San Diego.