Results tagged “paulallen”

...is not even a remotely true headline, but we can't resist a pop cultural allusion. However, if you rearrange the words a bit, suddenly the truth snaps into focus, like a section of sagittal tissue on a microscope slide: the Wired story is about the brain-mapping going on at Paul Allen's Brain Institute. Science writer Jonah Lehrer takes you on a tour of the facility, explaining the "brain atlas" concept that maps what we know about the brain, from "gene expression to a cellular level." Also, there are robots, working day and night on mouse brains. It's pretty ingenious, but for all our sakes, we hope they never get loose.

In the white collar world, stealing a highly-skilled employee from your competitor is called "poaching" (we're looking at you, Google), and it's a practice that has become a source of pride (and dollar signs) amongst the business start-up community. However, if your new business is, say, an MLS soccer team, attempting to woo a championship-winning coach from his current team while he's still under contract is called "tampering," and according to league rules, strictly forbidden. Or should we say verboten, since the coach in question is Sigi Schmid, soon-to-be-former Columbus Crew head coach, who last month led his team to the league championship and now is being pursued by Seattle Sounders FC. According to GOALSeattle, the Crew have filed tampering charges against the Sounders and are awaiting a decision from the league office. Or a shoebox full of cash. Whichever.

We wrote this before watching the end of last night’s Blazers vs. Rockets OT thriller, won on a Brandon Roy three with 0.8 seconds left.

• The Slog brings the sad news that The Cascade People's Center is set to close after the City Council cut funding. The People's Center has been a bastion for the neighborhood that we once called Cascade before Paul Allen took over the place and decided to call it South Lake Union. The CPC will close its doors on December 31st if it cannot come up with $75,000 in funding.
• Capitol Hill Seattle is excited that CNN decided to show a little love to Seattle and their neighborhood, recommending hill hangouts like the Cha Cha and Elysian Brewery. Even more exciting to all of us neighborhood bloggers, it was one of our very own, Scott of Central District News, who helped CNN with the list.
• Speaking of Central District News, they are recommending you secure your Obama yard signs and such, as the now 'commemorative memorabilia' is being stolen from yards all over to be sold on eBay.

It's no secret that Seattlest, like every right-thinking film fan in this town, loves the Cinerama. (Most recent visit: the restored print of The Godfather a couple of weekends ago.)

• Kapow! Coffee, inventors of the Ride the S.L.U.T. t-shirts, the proposers of a 300-foot Paul Allen statue, and the makers of the best espresso in the Cascade neighborhood, are looking for a new home after their landlord decided to open up his own coffee shop in the location.
• Capitol Hill Seattle gets a little snarky about John Curley and we love them for it.
• The Belltowner has the scoop on the sudden closure of the McLeod Residence. The building isn't up to fire code and the entirety of Seattle's hipster elite are in mourning.

At the Port of Seattle's "Ship Canal 101" tour last week (the tour so nice we're posting it twice) they handed out a little quiz that you were supposed to be able to complete by the time the boat returned to the dock. Questions like "What was the name of the woman who founded one of the featured companies over 115 years ago? (Hint: She was the inspiration for the movie Tug Boat Annie)" only scratched at the surface, though. The candid and all-knowing salts narrating the tour actually revealed so much more. Here's what we took away:

..Comes the proposed 300-foot-tall Paul Allen statue. The coffee pullers and community activists at Kapow! Coffee have begun a (satirical) petition to erect a 300-foot statue of Paul Allen, destroyer of the Cascade neighborhood and creator of South Lake Union, in the middle of a local park. Jeremiah of Kapow!, who we've always appreciated as much for his wit as his divine espresso, ribs, "We have to show the proper respect for all the wonderful things he's done for the neighborhood." We support the Kapow! petition and believe they should include an addendum to just rename the neighborhood "Allentown."

• Metroblogging Seattle reported bit-by-bit the developing story of a pedestrian cab-scooter-van accident, which proved to be fatal. A 60-year-old passenger in the pedi-cab was killed after the open-air cab alternative suffered a mechanical malfunction and ran a red light.
• PhinneyWood stays purely hyper-local reporting on two missing neighborhood pets: Sadie (a dog) and Kaitlyn Marie (a pure bred cat). While it might seem tedious or tiny to report, you better believe we'd use every electronic outlet we had to find them if one of the Seattlest guard cats went missing. We hope these folks are reunited with their pets soon.
• The Southlake reports that, even though everyone else had their block party a couple nights ago, they're going to have theirs this Friday. The Southlake Union Block Party will be hosted at the "South Lake Union Discovery Center" which is a neighborhood-positive sounding name for a Vulcan property advertisement. This year there is actually a draw, though. A few decent local music acts and it's free, until you want to eat or drink. Even then, it's just $1 (that goes to non-profits) from a variety of area restaurants. Money you can actually feel good about spending in South Lake Union.

The new $500 million headquarters for The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation broke ground today on lower Queen Anne. The foundation headquarters take up an entire city block, across the street from the Seattle Center and his Microsoft buddy Paul Allen's pet project, the EMP. The planned campus will be 90,000 square feet and include offices for 1,200 employees as well as an interactive museum. Sadly there is no word if there will be a Batman-style signal for Bill Gates and the foundation. (A new economy is struggling? A library needs new computers? You want to talk about health care in Africa? Just flash the Gates Foundation signal!) The Gates foundation hopes to move into their new headquarters, with or without our super hero signal idea, in 2010.

FACT: The Seattle Cinerama is not Seattle's original Cinerama. That'd be the Paramount, which sacrificed 1600 seats to fit the screen and three projection booths required. They screened Cinerama films from September 1, 1956, to January 26, 1958. The Cinerama we know and love today opened January 24, 1963, as the Martin Cinerama. (The Paramount twice installed and removed CineMiracle, a rival technology that never took off.)

While we've been admittedly hard on the South Lake Union street car, we are actually a fan of the idea of street cars in Seattle. With the way traffic is in Seattle today and the Sisyphean task our current public transit system faces daily, we're pretty much a fan of any and all public transportation ideas for Seattle. So we were pleased to read that the city will be holding four public meetings in the coming weeks on the potential for new street car routes in town.

When we read that the Seattle Times had a large feature on the top paid CEOs in the Pacific Northwest, we wondered what the point was. Everyone knows Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Jeff Bezos—all local CEOs—are richer than God. And it turns out everyone, this Seattlest included, is wrong. According to the Times piece, the best paid local CEO in 2007 was James Voelker, who runs Bellevue's InfoSpace—a company we've never heard of. Despite its public anonymity (outside of technology circles) Voelker was handsomely paid (okay, obscenely paid) for his work. In 2007, he raked in $38,143,383...a salary we would be pleased to have 1/64th of on our greediest days.

This Seattlest finds it slightly alarming that Paul Allen has a functioning fleet of war planes, even if they are vintage ones. Starting this Friday, for a fee--because Paul Allen really needs more money--you can see Allen's private vintage warplane collection. Again the phrase "private warplane collection" makes us quake in our boots just a little bit, and raises all kinds of questions: can Paul Allen launch these war planes from his gigantic boat? How does one begin collecting vintage war planes? Is this just a rich man's version of "boys love their toys?" Is having a fully functioning fleet of bombers the secret to Paul Allen's power? Are they the real reason that NFL and NBA owners would never consider trying to steal the Seahawks or the Trailblazers? Are they his insurance for one day owning all of South Lake Union? (If they won't be bought out, they can be bombed out.) Why is Paul Allen organizing and restoring a fleet of warplanes considered a collection and not an air force? On the other hand, if he ever decides to buy a country, rather than a neighborhood--he's all set for aerial battle.

Just doesn't have the same ring to it. But NBA owners went ahead and approved the request to move the Sonics to Oklahoma. They supported the move overwhelmingly, with a 28-2 vote. We never thought we'd say this in an unsarcastic manner, but thanks, Paul Allen and Mark Cuban. They cast the lone nay votes. Guess that Oklahoma City website that listed the Sonics as a "local team" weren't speaking too soon, after all.

The South Lake Union Trolley has struck again! Literally. Yesterday, the trolley struck its fourth car since its December debut. That averages an accident every month of the S.L.U.T.'s short existence, although this is the second accident we've reported in April. Yesterday's accident occurred when a car leaving the Center for Wooden Boats' parking lot hit the streetcar's right front bumper. No one was hurt in the accident. The collision shut down the streetcar for about half an hour, but then it returned to service.

A week from today the NBA teamowners will meet in New York to, among other things, discuss and possibly vote on moving the Sonics from Lower Queen Anne to Oklahoma City.

What does the Noo Yawk Effing Times have against Seattle?

While the printed media may be calling it the "Seattle streetcar" now, it will always be the S.L.U.T. to us. Yesterday afternoon one of the South Lake Union Trolleys struck a parked truck its backend was hanging over the streetcar's path. While the accident did not seriously damage either the streetcar or the parked truck, it did shut down service for 25 minutes, and the streetcar has been removed from service for minor repairs. No one was injured in the accident.

(For example to measure the sin of "wrath" the magazine used murder rates for cities.)

Sometime this week it's going to be announced that Seattle's soccer team the Seattle Sounders will be entering the MLS. GOALSeattle says tomorrow. Our friend in Chicago who knows about these things says it'll be announced at MLS Cup, which isn't until November 18, so we'll discount that and say tomorrow. It seems pointless, by now, to argue whether or not it will be announced. The Sounders aren't selling 2008 season tickets, Paul Allen is involved, Qwest Field, although not a fan favorite as a MLS venue, is ready and willing. It's happening. Tomorrow.

For those (like Seattlest) who are too lazy to actually visit in person the South Lake Union coffee shop Kapow! to get their S.L.U.T. tee shirts (which they may or may not even have), they are now available online.

You may see incumbent councilwoman Sally Clark at a local candidate forum, but you won't see one of her opponents, Bob Brown.

When a Californian real estate developer announced this week that he was determined to bring a Major League Soccer team to the Pacific Northwest it was good news for some and bad news for others. Fans of the game in Seattle and Portland, where Michael Keston is proposing to set up the MLS expansion team, should welcome the chance at entry into the U.S.'s highest league. MLS in Seattle has always been a long-shot with the players we have (Paul Allen, Adrian Hanauer who co-owns the Seattle Sounders) either not interested in or not capable of bringing a team here. This new guy--despite being from out of town, despite being from California, despite being a real estate developer, despite his intentions of handing the team to his son to manage--might be the guy who can get an MLS team into Qwest Field. Good news for soccer fans.

The presidential election is still over a year and a half away, and we already have our favorite bit of analysis:

Rainier Beach (public school): Black fans.

Seattle has more than it's share of space privateers, as we've noted in the past. Paul Allen and Vulcan have been making progress and it's not a secret, but we haven't heard much about Jeff Bezos and his company Blue Origin in quite some time. Until today, actually, when we found out that Blue Origin completed a test flight in November in Texas. Yeah, Texas - They have a research facility here in Kent or somewhere nearby, but it's very Area 51 - No one who works there talks about what goes on inside or even admits to working there at all. No doubt aliens are involved and have graciously awarded the Amazon founder with the gift of intergalactic travel as a reward for his successes in online retail.

--A five-car pileup on I-5 yesterday was caused by a guy looking at his BlackBerry while driving.

Initiative 91 is one answer. We just voted against spending public moneys on sports stadiums. Major League Soccer wants all its teams to play in small, soccer-specific stadiums, but we don't currently have one of those laying around and one would be tough to build in the current environment. Too bad, because those are really cool stadiums that have great atmosphere and look sexy on TV and professional soccer at the highest (American) level would be great here. Initiative 91 doesn't actually forbid stadia from getting built with public money, it only cares if there's no return on the investment and since the MLS is largely owned by a bunch of really rich guys who love soccer the ROI tends to be shit.

"I sent it to one organization, the Seattle True Independent Film Festival...and they declined by sending me an email form-letter," said Alex Mayer. We're sitting with Mayer in a coffeeshop down at Union Station--ironically in the same business park as Vulcan's glittering corporate office--talking about the delayed (by a year) Seattle debut of Mayer's new film, Paul Alien.