Results tagged “thewashington”

It seems every time we check a local news site, which is pretty regularly...okay hourly, there's a report of another malfunctioning ferry. According to our unscientific, educated guesstimate, The Washington State Ferry Service has only had a few days of normal running schedules in the past month.

The Washington State Chapter of the ACLU and local travel guide guru Rick Steves have joined forces to reform marijuana laws in the United States. Steves has long been an outspoken advocate of marijuana reformation. He sits on the board of the National Organization for the Reformation of Marijuana Laws (NORML), and has been a featured speaker at Seattle's annual Hempfest. Steves and The ACLU are comparing the criminalization of marijuana to the failed prohibition of alcohol in the 1920's and say it's time to have a national conversation about marijuana.

We have gathered some of the top political writers in the country and asked them to discuss the presidential race throughout the year. Today they discuss McCain’s new frontrunner status, religion in American politics, and Edwards’ departure.

Local comic journalist (that's a journalist working in the medium of comics, not a journalist covering comics) Peter Bagge made the cover of Reason magazine this month.

We're trying to decide if we're panicked about the bees. The other day -- sunny, warm -- we were in Volunteer Park in the middle of a patch of clover and it was completely bee-free. It would have been chilling except, like we say, the sun was out and it was in the 80s. We have a lot of respect for bees, and not just because a dead one stuck in some honeycomb took revenge on us from beyond the bee-grave. It's because they always seem to be busy getting stuff done. You rarely spot a bee just fucking around out there.

The Washington Huskies have scored their first points in the Fulmer Cup, an annual competition to see which college football team is the lawbreaking-est.

Federal Way got all the press, but more than one school in Washington can ban An Inconvenient Truth. Yakima was in on it too. The Associated Press is reporting that a panel of teachers, parents, administrators and right-thinking people have decided that the film can be shown to a Yakima school's Environmental Club. Environmental Club? At least in Federal Way it was a science class. The Environmental Club? What kind of environmental club worth it's charter hasn't already screened Inconvenient Truth. The kind in Yakima is apparently the answer.

MUSIC: The grandfather of punk (and thus the great-grandfather of indie rock) Jonathan Richman is in Ballard at the Tractor tonight. You might recall his song "Roadrunner" in the School of Rock soundtrack or you may recognize his influence in every rock band everywhere since the mid-60s.

The Washington State DOT and KOMO (the traffic authority) are saying that unless you are an indispensable worker like a doctor or a 911 dispatcher or a field goal kicker, you oughta stay home.

This is weird. The Washington State Department of Health released the results of a study yesterday that indicates that it's not a good idea to eat too much of certain kinds of salmon from Puget Sound. Chinook are mentioned specifically in the report as being high in PCBs and mercury.

Poor Mayor Nickels. The news isn't good for him these days. His plan to replace the crumbling Viaduct with a Big Dig-style tunnel is going the same way as the Seattle Monorail Project he helped kill. The Washington State Department of Transportation released estimates that showed Nickels' $2.8 billion price tag climbing to $4.6 billion. And now, according to articles in The Seattle Times and The Seattle P-I, Nickels is taking the choice out of the voters' hands this November.

As we sat down to write this week's Best of the -ists post, a car blaring "21 Questions'" passed by our house. And that started us thinking about how some of the best -ist posts out there have at their hearts questions, some of which are answered, and some of which are left open. Check out the Best of the -ists from this week, and see if you agree.

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.

Phillyist notes a fistfight between local pols that leaves one man down for the count. Jehovah's Witnesses get a Philly contributor out of bed, things get a little geeky with a film festival and geeky gets taken to a whole new galaxy when they talk with the Dragon Queen of the Dark Kingdom.

You may or may not be aware, but Congress is all in a tizzy (repeatedly) over a number of bills either recently passed or currently on the docket, and reconvened earlier this week to try to get all warm and fuzzy before the year ends. Seattlest did some digging and if any of you are even half as confused as we are, we hope this helps. We're going to break these bills down, James Brown short-sentence-with-rhythm style.

-Seattlest didn't see anything remotely resembling a flake either last night or this morning although apparently a few nearby lowlands did get some snow. The P-I warns, "Don't let your guard down, though," because you never know when a third of an inch of slush will reach up and jack you in the face.

It looks like Bellingham might be experiencing the dark side of sex offender registration. Published names, addresses and descriptions of their crimes makes these ex-cons targets for any would-be Batmen out there. Three such offenders were paid a visit over the weekend by what appears to be a FauxBI agent who allegedly alerted them that one of the men was listed on a web site hit-list before killing two of the roommates. The third roommate left for work before the killings and has provided a description to the police.

November ballot across the state.

The boys putting together the new WaMu tower across from Benaroya Hall had some trouble yesterday when a beam fell and injured three. The details are slow in coming, but somehow a beam that was designated as part of the flooring escaped the grasp of a crain that was holding it in place. One of the injured men is in critical condition at Harborview. The Washington Department of Labor and Industries is, of course, hastily dispatched investigators to the site.

If you've ever overheard your officemate on the phone saying, "Well, honey, it's black and red at the bridge but then it goes down to yellow," you know that a) they're on the DOT website, b) you're glad you don't live or work across the lake, and c) "honey" is screwed. (The image here shows 520 with "black" conditions on the left and "green" on the right.)

If you are running a bit behind on your Washington State estate tax forms, you'd better start preparing your excuse for the extension you're going to have to file. "My dog ate it," is, of course, the classic, but is unlikely to prove very effective. Seattlest suggests "My computer got a worm" as a good tack to try. You should find some empathy with the bean counters in Olympia with that one.

The Washington men's basketball team continued their consistent, poised play with a split of two games in Arizona over the weekend. Even Thursday's 92-81 loss to the Arizona Wildcats demonstrated how good this team is. Despite their worst shooting performance of the season, the Huskies stayed close, in a hostile arena, against the 11th-best team in the country. I don't know if there is a phrase to describe the opposite of a Pyrrhic victory, but this was just that, so for now let's call an encouraging defeat a "Husky special."