Results tagged “train”

Thank the gods of Olympus! Amtrak's twice-a-day Seattle-Vancouver train service starts a week from today, on August 19, 2009. (UPDATE: Seattle Transit Blog says Thursday the 20th. Here's the current train schedule.) Seattle rail passengers will be able to depart at 7:40 a.m. or 6:40 p.m. and arrive in Vancouver, B.C., at about 11:35 a.m. or 10:45 p.m, respectively. From Vancouver, the southbound Amtrak Cascades train will leave at 6:40 a.m., hitting Seattle four-ish hours later, and arriving in Portland at 2:45 p.m. We get the train to help us get to the 2010 Olympic and Paralympics Winter Games, with no promises for after the Games are done.

                  

Employees of Sound Transit were understandably filled with a certain pride yesterday morning as they showed off the new light rail operations and maintenance center for the collected media.

KIRO TV has a slideshow of the light rail collision, shot from their copter. The accident happened at MLK and South Dawson, and their photos show the car's occupant being wheeled off in a stretcher. This is why we can't have nice things. The damn thing's not even officially running yet and it's already all scratched up.

We can vouch for this because we've been IMing with a friend of ours who is on the Amtrak Cascades train to Portland, and other than getting false disconnection notices, it's working like a charm. We filled him on the Seattle Metblogs story about Seattle atheists buying ads on Metro. That seemed like a good use of WiFi. Tell Portland! The atheists are coming!

As we were delivering people to the airport on Monday morning--by the power of Subaru!--one of our passengers glanced up at the light rail line under construction and said, "This ought to be the last winter you have to shuttle people to the airport." Which we were pleased about. But then we got to thinking.

Tonight, everybody's favorite local chanteuse Jesse Sykes plays a free KEXP show at Seattle Center's Mural Ampitheater, featuring music from her new EP Gentleness of Nothing. (Tomorrow night, Rocky Votolato plays the Mural.)

Amtrak has some good prices going fast for its fall fare sale. You have to order your tickets by Friday, August 8, and you can get to such exotic locales as Wenatchee ($19), Spokane ($37), and Portland ($24). Whitefish, Montana, is just $67 and...let's see...multiply the denumberator...323 hours away. Those are all one-way prices, and you gotta travel between September 2 and December 11, 2008. Still, $48 r/t to Portland is not bad, though we advise you to invest the savings in business class, or, if you decide to stick it out in coach, a beer helmet.

Our bike route to work from Magnolia to Capitol Hill takes us down a short hill on 20th Ave W to the Pier 91 bike trail. That little street runs right along a ton of train tracks leading into the train yards. (It's on the back side of the Interbay Golf Center.) Generally it's filled with locomotives connected to empty cars or lines of containers waiting to be shipped one place or another. Noting terribly exciting, though if you're lucky, a train whistle will blow as you go by and scare the beejesus out of you.

We've been locking our keyboard in a drawer to keep ourselves from putting up any "this is the weekend the green line would have begun service" posts, both because it's been done and because it's history. Yes, it would have been great to have, but we decided against it. If there's anything like a blog to mark the day in the distant future when we'd have it paid off we'll be impressed.

Making up for weeks of hibernation and workaholism, Kim will hit the parties this weekend. Tonight, she’ll don her Groucho glasses for a lesbian function at Jabu’s celebrating the births of her two favorite Sagitarii. Saturday, it’s to the War Room for a company party with the missus and her workmates. Finally, she’ll ship off to the sub-tropics on Monday, where she’ll spend what remains of 2007.

As previously mentioned, Les Savy Fav play Neumo's tonight. If the idea of a pregnant dude spitting water on you doesn't quite float your boat, head to the Croc to check out Cave Singers and Fleet Foxes. Tonight is also a free-free-free hip hop show at the War Room with Bun B and Swizz Beatz, care of the redundantly good people at Goods and Zune. Show up early; the last event like this, with Clipse...

If you were here right now, you'd see us looking around suspiciously like we don't quite trust we're awake because we just read Knute Berger's latest deep thought over at Crosscut and we...agree with him.

While promoting green consumption might be politically more palatable than getting people to change their habits and expectations, promoting consumption still offers an answer that doesn't solve the bigger problem. Global warming's hawks have to be honest with us: Fighting the good fight isn't all economic upside. We're going to have to do more with less.

We're not yet convinced that the current War on Plastic Shopping Bags/Global Warming will stand the test of time, but we sure are intrigued that everyone everywhere seems to be trying to make the eco-friendly message stick (do you really think NBC's "Green Week" is destined for the history books? Neither do we.).

Trouble in Tahiti / Rita: Seattle Young Artists Program @ CHAC

Prop. 1, the roads and transit measure. Supporters say it will help solve our gridlock problem. Anti-tax opponents say"no it won't" and environazi opponents say "roads are killing the planet, it's transit-only or nothing." Tomorrow's election day. Here's how Seattlesters are voting.

We got an Amtrak phone survey call over the weekend and they wanted to know if having a snack bar in business class would make us more/less likely to travel by rail. How much would that be worth? In-station hotspots? Now how much would we pay? Private lounge with butler?

There's nothing like the prospect of a smart hip-hop show to build up our anticipation on a Saturday night. One where we know that the act we're going to see can't fail to deliver, cranks that up a little higher than we can generally handle when we're forced to first stop by a friend's party before the show. To all those in Shoreline that we bored with excited chatter about Lyrics Born and Blackalicious at The Showbox, we're so sorry.

Local filmmaker, occasional pub trivia host, and friend of Seattlest Dom Zook blogged on September 19 that he's moving to LA.

I’ve been a stalwart Seattle fan for most of my adult life. I love this town, even though some of the people who govern it are slightly “challenged”. I love making movies in this town… but I think I’ve gone in depth about my issues here. Many have wondered why I’ve stayed so long in a town that’s only moderately supportive of its filmmakers. Why I’ve stayed in a town where actual, paying film gigs are about as scarce as tumbleweeds on Pike St. Why I’ve stayed for nearly five years at a job that’s been both good and bad to me just so I could make movies in this town.

If you scroll back through the last couple of years’ worth of posts you’ll see the trials and tribulations. I did it all. Cast negotiations, legal paperwork, business plans, investor talks, budget write-ups, etc. And frankly I had a great plan with a fantastic script (written by Faye Hoerauf and Jessica Baxter) and I knew it would be a hit. Modest hit, maybe, but a hit. Unfortunately no one was buying. No one of influence believed the script would go far. Despite at least one major name in the cast and several more just waiting for an investor to come forward, despite several awards for the script alone, despite a rock-solid business plan with proven talent (and I’m not even talking about me, Faye or Jessica here!), we were denied.

Continue reading "Another Local Filmmaker Heads to Los Angeles"

We told you we didn’t know much about Earl Greyhound, and after Wednesday night’s Paramount show, we’re still ignorant. (Will call tickets trickle in after the opening band takes the stage? Really?) When we finally made it in, Greyhound was pounding through their last song. We noted that singer/guitarist Matt Whyte had worked himself up quite a sweat. We got this photo. They exited stage right.

We had a little haus-warming party Friday to celebrate our new East Ballard digs. We've been enjoying our new neighborhood, meeting new human and feline neighbors during our walks, discovering its little nooks, and enjoying all of the old pickup trucks that seem to be one of its characteristics. We hope to start boring you with our fabricated embellished observations soon. At some point during our proceedings on Friday, local historian and awesome guy, Walt Crowley boarded a train bound beyond the mortal limits of the city of Seattle.

Seattlest just got done attending the press conference for the re-opening of the Downtown Bus Tunnel. After two years of work, it's set to reopen next Monday. That's exactly two years (as King County Exec. Ron Sims was fond of repeating over and over today) after it closed. We have to say, we're pretty impressed with what they've done.

Rick Steves. The man lives in a pleasant world. The voice, the haircut, the folksy European dinners with friends one after another after the other. Just once we want to flip to PBS in time to see Steves in Friedrichstraße going berserk on a ticketing agent, but it won't happen because the world is his oyster. A friend of Seattlest's is currently on a 5-week Rick Steves tour of Europe, which we love telling people because it invariably inspires good feelings. Really, any situation can be dealt with by referencing Rick Steves. "Hey, get your arm out of my car, gringo!" "My friend is in Italy right now with Rick Steves!" We all want to live like Rick. In fact we've paid him a ton of money to teach us how to live like him. Furthermore, he's a good ambassador. He's not loud, rude or otherwise obnoxious. He's not going to go berserk in a train station or turn up on the news in relation to some bizarre hooker-stabbing incident. Further-furthermore, he just seems like a genuinely good guy. The man lives in a pleasant world, and wouldn't it be nice to inhabit it for a while?

This past Friday, Steinbrueck Park was the site of a free, four-hour concert that punctuated Pike Place Market’s Centennial Celebration. It was a great time to be a proud, passionate Seattleite. A wonderful time to be a frugal tourist. And, despite a tiny bit of Pearl Jam-overpromising by Party promoters, a perfect time to be Seattlest.

Or you could get your ass FIRED! Just ask our old pal/arch nemesis/best livejournal trainwreck on the internet the Bicycle Hobo(TM), who just got let go from his job at the Times for visiting Fleshbot.com [evidently NSFW] while ostensibly "working." From the hobo's blog:

Londonist are starting to think their city is getting just a little bit too expensive, when even Christian Slater can't afford to go out there. And there's no escaping, as local singer Lily Allen discovered when she was barred entry to the US. The British mapping agency caused further bad karma, by blocking a 3-D representation of London in Google Earth. But the smiles returned to Londonist's faces as they interviewed Baroness von Reichardt, who has completely covered her house in mosaic tiles.

Portland's alt-country meets indie-electro sextet Blitzen Trapper has been hyped up the wazoo lately. They'll be playing a free show at the Croc tonight with Jennifer Gentle and Hypatia Lake.

Hey, whaddya know? There's another show worth your attention at the Sunset this week. Tonight it's Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan. Yeah yeah, we know what you're thinking: "Another singer-songwriter? Just look at him, all broody with messed-up hair strumming a guitar in an alley." Truth be told, we usually avoid the genre as a whole, since most singer-songwriters run the gamut from boring hippie to boring douchebag. But in this case, don't be so easy to dismiss.

We attended an advance, VIP screening of The Simpsons movie at Cinerama on Friday night (or at least that's what the guy who sold us the ticket for the special price of $45 told us).

--Galloping towards the new Narrows date.