Results tagged “suburbs”

"WTOpolice_1" by Seattlest Flickr Pool contributor ntisocl. Daaang, he got right in there. Thanks!

When Amazon.com announced Amazon Fresh last week, it piqued some bloggers' curiosity, but we didn't spend much time thinking about it. Grocery delivery? Interesting, but we weren't going to dive in.

BOOK CRUSH: Librarian Nancy Pearl´s latest book is Book Crush, a guide to books you loved when you were growing up. How does she know? Head over to the launch party and find out.

WOMEN & MONEY: Personal finance expert and author, Suze Orman talks about the complicated and dysfunctional relationship that women have with money in her book, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny.

On the phone, Jim Haynes invites us to come for dinner on Sunday, something he's been saying to visitors for decades. By now, well over 100,000 people--most of them total strangers--have accepted his invitation. Mostly, but not exclusively, American visitors.

Today marks the final edition of the King County Journal, a newspaper that, in various incarnations, has been covering suburban King County for like, a hundred years or something.

The funny German word means something like "in-between city," and it has to do with replacing the old notion of the city as central core with with a more diffuse, polycentric amalgam that contains suburb and urb. (We know! It's hard to focus on work with this kind of exciting thinking going on.) This flies in the face of pro-density dogma, so we're glad to see the Stranger hasn't turned on its own, what with Zwischenstadter Matthew Stadler coming to town.

There's a small item in the P-I today about Governor Gregoire's proposal to halve the price of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Toll for those drivers who carry an automatic toll transponder in their car. People who participate would pay $1.50 round-trip instead of the $3 everyone else pays. Presumably there would also be a fast lane for the traffic that used the transponders that would allow them to drive straight through, although at a somewhat reduced speed, instead of waiting in toll lines.

No, not the game company. (We'd love to know how many hours Cranium's lawyers spent agonizing over Cranium's Collectibles, though. And whether or not Cranium will be buying craniums.com.)

The October issue of the Atlantic Monthly is on newsstands now and on its cover are the words "America's Smartest Cities." Please, nothing draws a Seattleite to a magazine faster than a tagline that indicates his intellectual ego is about to receive some much needed stroking. On the other hand, we've seen articles with this kind of headline on the internet and they're generally disappointing. Yeah, yeah, we have a lot of college graduates and bookstores - Give us our World's Smartest ranking and go away.

You've been in a meeting all morning. Exactly how many coworkers have to pontificate on the benefits of the new TPS reporting system before they let you out of there? All of them, apparently, even though everyone in the room knows you're moving to the new reports. "Um, excuse me, but can we go over the submission system again?" "Which part of it?" "All of it. I just got here." It looks like a few people have weird jaw aches, but they're actually reaching for cynide teeth. Come noon you're going to bust through those revolving doors like a bat out of hell and head straight to the nearest convenience store for a frosty Pabst Ice.

A few weeks ago, we posed this question, prompted by a debate on Wikipedia: Is Bellevue a suburb?

Seattlest's kneejerk answer: Um, yeah. Is this a trick question?

Bus Rapid Transit as an alternative to actual mass transit sucks. It's what anti-transit people offer to cities to ridicule their efforts at light rail or monorails. "You want to move people around without cars, eh? How about this ridiculous thing, then? You can't say no! It isn't a car! Look, it can move people from poor inner suburbs to job sites just as well as elevated trains and it costs nothing so in two years when you shut the hell up and buy another car we can just sell off the buses and the right of ways we grabbed and be done with it." It's like a game of transit chicken with each side wondering how the other could possibly be serious. But then, a few of these systems have actually been implemented.

Londonist prepares a Happy Birthday bath for Buddah this week and then things get all cliched. A madman goes on a rampage while axe-wiedling and London's mayor warns an American diplomat to avoid the kitchen if the heat bothers him so much.

Today, One Reel canceled their Summer Nights concert series, which was to move from South Lake Union to Gasworks Park. The move comes after a group calling themselves Friends of Gas Works Park, but who we call a bunch of hippie assholes, claimed that the concerts would bring crowds, traffic and parking problems to the area. Boo-fucking-hoo.

Back in the mid '80s, when Seattlest was experiencing the mysteries of adolescence firsthand in the suburbs of Milwaukee, one of the local radio stations offered its listeners a chance to pick the programming. Submit your favorite songs and you could play them on the air! Very exciting.

This just in from the "No Shit Sherlock" department at King County: There are more overweight people in the suburbs. Please someone, stop the presses.

Seattlest should have mentioned by now the weeks-old news (months-old in blog years) that the cartooning chores for the Batboy comic strip appearing every week in America's Leading Newspaper have been outsourced from the quaint suburbs of Ballard to wherever the new cartoonist lives.

King County will be holding its primary election next Tuesday; however, in two races the primary will also act as the general election. Because Democrats live in the city and Republicans live on the Eastside, the two races that feature only candidates from a particular party will be decided next week (or in the courts sometime next June).

We dropped our Stranger vs. Weekly faceoff feature (lawsuits), but we do occasionaly still flop those rags open for a scan. Last night we were grinding through the top-heavy feature section of this week's Stranger, when almost without noticing we began flying through one of them. Take us away, Stranger, take us away. Until suddenly we came to a screeching halt on a single word: gimcrack. Gimcrack..? Raban! Our eyes scanned upwards and sure enough, the one man in Seattle good enough to drop a "gimcrack" from time to time was our host for this trip. Jonathan Raban, we love you.

, published in the mid-twentieth century, tells the tale of her decision, along with her husband, to quit their suburban Seattle lives and rough it on a farm out on the Olympic Peninsula. We love the book because it's real, and funny, and because the lust for a simpler life (and the realization, as David Lee Roth once said, that "the simple life ain't so simple") hasn't changed to this day. We also love it because it's fun to read about Seattle back when Laurelhurst was the suburbs and the Peninsula was impossibly remote.