We're looking up Washington from Occidental. Nowadays this part of town is missing a few teeth, but back in '29 it was still totally built out with cheap, well-worn structures.
Re:Take: Livin it up in the Hotel Yukon
Return of the Occidental Tourist
Yesterday Seattlest broke out of the office at noon, grabbed a Tats'trami and headed to Occidental Square. There's nothing like passing a short hour with a book and a gut bomb in a square... Actually, had a book along, but it was only cover for our real mission which was to watch all the little people go about their little lives and they happily obliged by showing up and staring back at us. What? Just eating a sandwich and reading over here. Nosy freak.
Movie, March, Toga on Saturday
This Saturday offers at least three ways to make a difference in Seattle, or at least look like you care whilst furthering your own selfish interests.
Occidental Tourist
Occidental Square has always been kind of awesome and uniquely Seattle, to this writer at least. It's walled in yet open, yet cluttered, yet ordered. There's a distinctive sense of wood, but the predominant building material is stone or brick. There are no people, but there are trees! Have you ever been to a square in Europe? They're great in their own quaint little way, but they're somewhat of a celebration of treelessness. "Hell yeah there was a forest here when we showed up - We fucking hacked it down and replaced it with all these cobble stones and scary churches and shit." That kind of thing was cool a few centuries ago.
Close the Viaduct already
The Viaduct's closing this weekend for repairs and we should keep it closed. We're never going to decide anything while traffic is flowing freely because the problem isn't apparent enough. The Viaduct isn't safe. We're going to replace it with a tunnel or a bigger viaduct or maybe nothing at all, but we'll vote on that for the first time at the end of 2007 and who knows how long it'll be after that. We'll be zipping around with jetpacks and hover cars before we decide anything so either an earthquake is going to bring it down or we're going to decide it's time to shut off traffic.
Wi-Fi-nally
Seattle is a great progenitor of technology, but only now, in the year 2005, is municipal Wi-Fi finally coming to town. To put this in context, Spokane has had a wireless downtown corridor for over a year. Is Seattle behind the times?

