Stupid NBC

Don't they know that when I miss episodes I go to iTunes? And now they're going to be dropped because they wanted to charge $4.99 per episode and Apple wouldn't let them?

When I fell behind on Studio 60, I went to iTunes. When I wanted to rewatch an awesome episode of The Office, I went to iTunes. When I wanted to watch a Battlestar Galactica on the plane to NYC, I went to iTunes.

You guys are dumb.

Snow Falling

With the announcement that Tony Snow will resign in September, it starts to make you wonder what things will look like for Bush next year. Fredo's gone ... Rove's gone ...

I'm thinking that by October 2008 it's going to be just Bush and Cheney sitting in the Oval Office playing backgammon with each other.

Killer threads, Niki

Niki Sullivan over at GritCity discovered a New Tribune dress that had been auctioned on eBay. The dress features pages from a May 1969 edition printed on to the dress.

Then she discovered another dress in Tribune basement and proudly modeled it for her reading public. Great pic! Great dress!

It's a very cool, very retro find.

Perhaps the Trib could stock it in December for Christmas shoppers searching for the perfect gift for the woman who has everything ... but still needs a newsprint dress.

Erik's favorite hot button: annexation

While I was away, there were a few items of note on the annexation front.

First, Auburn successfully passed two expansions of its boundaries, while Federal Way's annexation proposition failed.

Second, there's an interesting fight going on in Puyallup about annexation and services.

Puyallup wants to annex North Puyallup into its boundaries. Some of the businesses, namely a putt-putt/go kart operator in that area, don't want to be annexed, because they feel (perhaps rightly) that Puyallup would zone them as residential, which would prevent them from expanding their business.

Neither side is acting well here. I understand the city's reasoning: they don't want to add services on an a la carte basis to its outlying residents. This gives them no incentive to ever want to join in with the city and actually pay their "fair share" of taxes in relation to the benefit they're receiving.

On the other hand, the City should not be attempting to contract to supply water to the go-kart operator with the clause that the owner can't oppose future annexation bids. That's a bad way to go about things.

It's an interesting fight. And one we might see repeated again in the future with other cities and businesses.

Last Day

We arrived back in town late (although it's feeling especially late since I'm partly on East Coast Time).

On our last day, Mary trolled the garment district for yarn and fabrics, her favorite pasttime. I opted to sit for a leisurely morning soaking in New York in Madison Square Park, where I worked on today's NYT crossword puzzle with a pen with no ink (I did a lot of engraving into those little boxes so that when I held it just write I could see what I'd written).

From there I wandered around and stopped in a few shops that were priced way out of my league before we met up for lunch at Pastis, perhaps the most cool restaurant in New York. It's right in the Meat Packing District--a French bistro with great food and a truly wonderful atmosphere. You can take one of those weird 360 degree tours of the main room by following this link.

And that pretty much wrapped up the fun part of the trip. From there it was a walk, rolling our luggage behind us, to Penn Station, a train, then another train, then a loooong flight against the jet stream, and we're finally back in T Town.

It actually feels good to be back. It was a good length for a vacation. Any longer and we may as well just live there so that we don't have to go out every meal. Any shorter and we would have been anxious for more.

Note: On the plane on the way back both Mary and I listened to the soundtrack for Spring Awakening. Maybe it's not a good recording or maybe you need the cast's energy from the stage, but it's not a very exciting album.

Life in 10001

We moved hotels this morning because Stay the Night didn't have a room for us tonight.

Which has turned out pretty well, since being in the 10001 ZIP puts us much closer to the action than being way up north in 10128.

I rather liked this unexpected surprise for a view from the window:



We aimed for the coast today, and took the N train all the way out to Coney Island, a destination that turned out to be far more dilapidated than we'd expected. I think we were looking for a kitchy, antique, slightly run down amusement park. But it was just kind of blah, struggling to keep things alive.



The boardwalk was actually kind of nice, and it felt great to soak my feet in Atlantic. Highlights also include the original Nathan's hotdog stand. A few old buildings like the Parachute Jump in the background of the photo above ... but we really did not need the 50 minute trip out and then back again except to tell us that we don't need another trip there for a good long time.

Oh, and I also discovered the "Shoot The Freak" booth with a live human target that you get to shoot paintballs at.



Click on the picture to make it bigger and see the guy with the metal shield in front of him.

After we got back in to town we visited H&M and Macy's, which was a lot less crazy then the last time we went on the day after Thanksgiving -- that was a crazy day.

We wrapped up the night with a good dinner at Pete's Tavern, which has been around since the 18somethings and is where O Henry wrote "The Gift of the Magi." It's also where Mary and I had our last dinner in the City in November.

Real Walking in New York

I thought Friday had a lot of walking ... but that was Friday. Today we walked across the park at 96th St, which put us on the narrow path that circles the (very beautiful) reservoir.

From there we walked all the way south to MoMA at 53rd. 43 blocks! Of course, we were able to break it up by visiting the Museum of Natural History (classic overheard line from the lobby: "It's not at all like the movie; there are three dinosaurs here."), a lunch at the Manhattan Diner, visiting the Imagine circle in Stawberry Fields, and then wandering through the Park the rest of the way to the Museum of Modern Art.

The new MoMa building is very attractive and showcases the art well. I liked seeing Van Gogh's Starry Night as well as some other classics and there was a lot of overlap with the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum the day before. But I also noticed a few cool overlaps with art I'd seen before: Barnett Newman's sculpture "Broken Obelisk" is at MoMa but I knew I'd seen it before. A quick check on the iPhone revealed the original is in Red Square at UW. Also there was a large exhibit of Richard Serra's work, whose name I didn't recognize but whose mammoth metal art I did recognize from the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, which I visited in April. This is the cell phone pic I snapped then:



His art worked better outside than at MoMa, but props to them for actually having gallery space big enough to hold it.

From there we swung by Trump Tower for the world's best ice cream, according to some guy I saw on a reality show a few years ago.

And then to the Apple Store a block away. ... Let's just say that Macs are popular.



We've been enjoying our last night at Stay the Night on our deck with a few beers and deli subs. Tomorrow we're transferring hotels into Midtown and then heading out toward Brooklyn and Coney Island.

Spring Awakening

Spring Awakening has been called a lot of great things by a lot of critics, but back in Tacoma I was only hearing mixed reviews.

Before going I downloaded the soundtrack, because it's always easier to see a musical if you have some idea of the music ahead of time, and I wasn't too impressed. It sounded like a Rent ripoff, and I wasn't such a fan of Rent, either. After not-so-stellar reviews and the soundtrack sounding not so great on my speakers, we were both a little tentative, but we had our tickets purchased.

We were feeling much better about it even just a few minutes in.

The musical is based on a scandalous-for-the-time German play from the 1890's about horny teenagers discovering a world hidden from them by their parents and teachers (a parentocracy, one calls it). It's not exactly what you think of when you think of source material for Tony-winning plays, but it manages to work pretty well.

The first act is high energy, the music is great, the story generally moves along save for a few slow scenes. Then there's a rather surprising scene of a beating with a switch followed by the end of Act I climax of two teens really discovering things, complete with some scandalous-for-our-times nudity.

Unfortunately, you could spend half of the 15 minute intermission writing down what's going to happen in the second act and you'd probably be right. The play loses steam, there's a bit too much preaching about issues that it seems like we've moved past already, but it's biggest flaw is just being cliche and predictable.

The second act does have the most high octane song performance in the show, Totally F***ed, although I find The Bitch of Living is in my head more often (those titles should tell you something about the show).

I left feeling generally positive about the show, and I would say that it's execution was quite good. But the story needed some extra creative spark to get its way through the second act and keep it interesting.

NYC: Saturday

We decided late last night that instead of venturing south to Atlantic City that we would stay in the city Monday night, adding nearly two full days of things to do here.

Because of the extra time, I elected a slightly more moderate pace than the whirlwind of Friday, but even still--we were busy. The day started at the Jewish Museum to see the work of Louise Nevelson, a sculptor admired by Mary and new to me. From there it was just two blocks to the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, a museum that Mary, being the graphic designer that she is, has been looking forward to seeing for some time.

The Cooper Hewitt was short on exhibits as they were installing two new galleries, but their garden exhibit "Design for the Other 90%" was moving in their portrayal of design which has helped--or can help--with disease, poverty, education, etc, in the Third World.

We also met up with an old classmate from Bellarmine, Pat B. He's moved here three months ago and is working on auditions, casting calls, etc. We had a good lunch at a Mexican restaurant in the East Village called La Palapa.

From there we wandered the East Village and Soho before settling on our chosen activity for the night: movies. What's New York without film you won't see anywhere else (at least not for a few months)?

We started at the Angelika Film Center with the directorial debut of Julie Delpy, 2 Days in Paris. I should mention the title is a bad choice, considering that the sex-tape of Paris Hilton was marketed under the title 1 Night in Paris, which--technically speaking--would fall between Day 1 and Day 2 of this 2 Days in Paris.

Delpy you might remember from Before Sunrise and the sequel, which is much better, Before Sunset. Here she starred, wrote, directed, edited, and scored, which is pretty good it seems. Her co-star is Adam Goldberg, who you've seen in a few things, including those Friends episodes when he plays Chandler's new roommate who puts goldfish crackers in his aquarium.

But I digress.

After the Anjelika we had a spicy dinner at a Cajun restaurant called Acme (on Great Jones St, by the way, which is an awesome name for any street, so awesome it's also the title of a Don Delillo book).

And then on to the three-screen, non-profit, art-house theater (sound familiar?) called the Film Forum. We caught a late show of Rear Window, a film that we had tried to get at the Grand for the Hitchcock film series in 2005 but couldn't because we didn't have the right kind of projectors.

Rear Window is set in New York during a summer heat wave, and seeing it in New York during a summer heat wave is just the thing, especially when you can do it with a crowd of people, some who've seen it, some who haven't it.

It's actually been years since I've seen the film, and seeing it on the big screen is absolutely worth it. It's funny, exciting, and creepy. Getting to see it here in these circumstances was very cool.

After the late show it was back to our own small courtyard that looks out at many other rear windows and balconies ...

Made for walkin'

Our trip up and down New York City today was on food and by subway; we traversed a pretty large section of this island.

We're staying at a nifty place on the Upper East Side called Stay the Night which is sort of like a bed and breakfast, but not at all since we don't see anyone. It's more like a non-hosted hotel, which means it costs a whole lot less than staying anywhere else on Manhattan. Plus it's awesome. If you're the New York-o-phile, you may want to avert your eyes from this picture of our awesome deck. (That's right--a full deck looking over a private courtyard.)



From our cool place we traveled very far south and set out from Union Square on foot. We covered Greenwich Village, the Meat Packing District, the cusp of SoHo, and Little Italy ... before jumping back on the subway and shooting back home in the afternoon.

We cleaned up (needed after sweating through the day) and aimed for Midtown. The Top of the Rock beckoned. Last time we summited the Empire State Building. This time it was Rockefeller Center and it was a sight.

Here's the South view.



And the North.



As dusk came, things started to get kinda hazy up top, as you can see. (Since we hadn't planned on going up to the top today, I didn't have my new digital camera with me. The pics above are from the iPhone's camera if you can believe it.)

After that, we walked to Times Square and had a drink before venturing in to "Spring Awakening," the 2007 Tony winner for Best Musical. I'll review that later in a separate post, but we had a good time at the show.

Afterward we dined on sushi and sake at Ruby Foo's, a place Aaron and Erin suggested we go. Our dining was actually quite good today. Lunch in the Meat Packing District at Florent; cupcakes from the Magnolia Bakery; gelato and tartufo at Ferrara in Little Italy; soup and sandwiches from a small take-out store in Rockefeller Center.

We're hitting up a fair number of museums tomorrow. We've also canceled our trip to Atlantic City and will instead be staying in Midtown for the last night. It didn't take too long hanging out here to realize that we could stay an extra two days if we switched our hotel for the last night from Atlantic City to New York. So we did, for just $30, and will be in NYC all day Monday and most of Tuesday before the return flight.

Looking forward to it!

Late night here ... nearly two. A review of Spring Awakening will be forthcoming.

New York Minute

Mary and I are venturing off to the Big Apple tomorrow for a long weekend of ... of Big Apple activities obviously.

Honestly, the list of things to do is close to this:

• Walk the streets.
• Eat good stuff.
• Repeat as needed.

We'll be seeing Spring Awakening, too, which won the award for Best Musical at the Tony's this past year.

And then it's one night in Atlantic City to finish things off. More on that later. So for awhile it's no more Tacoma blogging and back to the great fun of travel blogging.

I'm never going to open a restaurant

So let me get this straight. A group of bloggers invited their readers to create a flash mob on opening day at a new restaurant ... and then complained about slow service?? That's not cool.

Nikki at GritCity is right: go in shifts.

Name an independent restaurant in Tacoma that could handle 36 people showing up at once (Ed Murrieta's count; KFnet calls out 19 by name) and get you served within an hour, even 2. It's really hard and requires a big staff to do it.

It is unfair to criticize Mary's Burger Bistro for service in these circumstances, or to even chalk it up to opening day kinks. Service was slow because 36 people showed up at noon. Those people showed up at noon because the bloggers invited them there.

There's a reason a professional food critic visits a restaurant multiple times and orders multiple dishes and gives the staff a few months to work the kinks out: because opening a restaurant is really hard.

Yes, everyone who went to Mary's Burger Bistro was generally positive, and it's great that a group of bloggers would hang out and support a local owner. But it's not cool to fault them for slow service when you yourself were the cause.

I have grown very wary of blogged restaurant reviews. I've enjoyed writing them from time to time, but I've also noticed the Tacoma blogosphere has been hard on restaurant openings. Masa suffered from blogger buzz before they were ready; St. Helens Cafe was tried, sentenced, and executed within its first week by many.

I think that we need to give these local owners a lot more time before any negative comments. 6 hours into the life of the restaurant doesn't seem like enough. Restaurateurs are trying to make it in one of the most difficult businesses out there. Their success is Tacoma's success by getting people out in their hometown.

But when every restaurant has to be perfect on opening day to avoid bad comments from bloggers, the small family owned restaurants that needs a month to work out the kinks isn't going to make it.

Behind every small restaurant opening is an owner stretched to the gills and it would be good if those with megaphones gave them a chance before a review.

UPDATE: I really didn't want to attack anyone, so sorry if you felt that, Ensie. The Tacoma blogging community truly is a group of citizen journalists. Some post reviews, other post experiences, as Jenyum points out. I just felt that 6 hours after opening is a hard time to test drive a restaurant and feel it's too early for a negative comment in print. Clearly, every review was a positive one. But if we are citizen journalists, I think it's important to remember how seriously the printed word can affect things.

The geography of my life

I've been playing around with Google Earth for a bit today. At some point it dawned on me just how incredible it is to have access to satellite images of the entire globe. So I started typing in places I've seen to check them out by air.

And that's when I was inspired to find the satellite images of every place I've lived and see what my life looks like from space.



Stonewood sub-development, University Place, WA - 1980 - 1987
Many formative years on this cul-de-sac



Geiger Street, Tacoma, WA 1987 - 1998 (then summers after than until 2002)
The home street. With my grade school's ball field and gym in the top right.



Carleton College, Northfield, MN 1998 - 2002, with lots of breaks for summer vacations and study-abroad trips.
Dorms included: Watson, Meyers, Hager, and Burton.



Sea Education Association, Woods Hole, MA - Jan & Feb 2000
On my first study-abroad I lived here at the Sea Education Association campus in Woods Hole, MA.



Port Royal, Roatan, Honduras, 2 nights in March 2000
Legitimately I wasn't here that long, but it's the best satellite photo to represent the six weeks I spent cruising on the SSV Westward. We anchored here for 2 nights. I hiked that dirt trail you can see that crosses the island with Alison and Mark.



Avalon Hotel, Cartwright Gardens, Bloomsbury, London, England - 10 weeks in the fall of 2000
My second study-abroad trip. It was a pretty awesome place.



St. Helelns Ave, Tacoma, WA - 2002 - 2007
I've lived on two different pieces of St. Helens for the last 5 years.

Is there anything to be gained by the exercise of looking these places up? I don't know. It's a shock to see some of them and find out even how vividly a satellite image can bring back memories. And it's surprising how much you can learn by looking at the surrounding environs of each photos. Suburbs for the first two; rural town for the second; eventually to an urban core by the end.

If you don't have Google Earth, I recommend the free download. It's a pretty awesome world out there.

20,000 Leagues

This afternoon my trusty steed passed 20,000 miles on my trip back from the Lake. That's 20,000 miles after 3 years and 5 days of driving (I got my Elantra in August of 2004), an average of 6,666 miles per year.

But for the first two years when I worked at the Grand and seldom drove to work, I only put 6,000 miles on the car each year. So that means commuting to Bellarmine (all 3.2 miles to work according Google Maps) accounts for an extra 2,000 miles a year. Considering the relatively short distance, those miles still add up. I'm glad it wasn't a job in Seattle.

"I was raised in front of the TV and I turned out TV"

If you don't know, the title comes from a quote by Homer Simpson.

On June 1, I made a rule that I would stop watching TV until August 31. That date is rapidly approaching. I gave myself allowances though: DVDs of television shows, movies, and "events" like Mariners games.

Truth be told I've done fairly well. I bet that I've broken my own rules for a grand total of about 3 hours over the entire summer. That 3 hours consisted of a few Simpsons and South Park reruns, 15 minutes of Robot Chicken, and two House Hunters, which fried my brain more than any show I've seen in a long time. It was the same brain fry I used to get in college when I'd watch 3 episodes of Friends back to back, but a lot quicker.

Considering it's almost three months later, an hour of "unrestricted" television viewing per month isn't so bad.

But I have been going through some good television shows on DVD. The reason I have allowed myself DVD shows is that it's hard to waste away the night with them like it is watching TV straight. And they're new. It's not like watching a Simpsons I've seen 6 times already.

So this summer my TV diet has consisted entirely of Rome (I'm nearly done with Season 1) and Battlestar Galactica (I'm on Disc 2 of Season 2.0). Enough people have told me it's good I had to investigate it, and it turns out they were right. It is first-rate television, and I'm not afraid to say it, no matter how nerdy it makes me.

So what does it mean for the fall? Will I continue my television ban?

Heck no! The truth is, television right now is in a crazy good Golden Age. In many ways, TV is putting movies to shame, which can only produce sequels and adaptations.

So I'm going to watch a lot of TV this upcoming year. But it's going to be good TV. Lost, The Office, Scrubs, 30 Rock, new Simpsons, new South Parks. The opening monologues of Daily Shows and Colbert sprinkled in ... And I'll keep doing the DVD thing with Rome, Battlestar Galactica, and I'll probably do Heroes and The Wire by DVD, too, which are both supposed to be very good.

But it's TiVo that has made this possible. TiVo actually keeps me from watching too much TV, which seems counter-intuitive.

I don't see commercials for other TV shows anymore. I don't channel surf looking for something to watch, I choose what I want to watch from a list with descriptions of each episode. TiVo just makes sure that there's something good there. Also, every show is 1/4 to a 1/3 shorter than it would be with TV.

This fall, when I start watching more TV again, I'll watch only the good stuff and skip the garbage. If I miss a show, I'll rent the first season on DVD and catch up on Season 2 when it starts (my current plan for Heroes).

TV is great, but a summer without it has been even better.

"Where have all the Oldies gone? Long time passing ... "

I was raised on the Oldies. They played constantly in the car when I was young, but most importantly they played at the Lake. There's a number of songs by the Drifters, the Beach Boys, Dusty Springfield, the Lovin' Spoonful, plus many many more, that are instantly "Lake Songs" for me that take me back to swimming in the sun and dinners on the deck.

Oldies, of course, had a very limited definition. They start in 1956 (which introduced Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly) to the early 70s, when the definition gets very selective. KBSG, for example, probably never played anything of the Beatles from their last album "Let it Be" save for the title track.

So for a good portion of my life I only heard 14 years of music or so and nothing after. Pink Floyd who? Led Zepplin what? As a result, I can sing along to almost every single Oldie.

Of course, in high school my tastes grew a bit, but when everyone else was listening to the Cranberries and Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam I was discovering the Eagles and Classic Rock. But I still came back every summer to Lake Songs on KBSG. Same was true in college. New music during the school year, return to Oldies in the summer.

Then something funny happened. Oldies 97.3 KBSG lost their spot as the top rated radio station that they'd had in the early 90's and started trying to brag about how they played more songs per hour than the other stations. Of course, when most songs are 2 1/2 minutes it's a little easier. (Random fact, it wasn't until 1964 that a Billboard #1 song was longer than 2 1/2 minutes when the Animal's "House of the Rising Sun clocked in at 4 1/2 minutes.)

But the station started cutting off the beginning and ends of songs to cram more in and became much less enjoyable to listen to. By that point, I was pretty firmly entrenched on the Mountain and KEXP but it fairly well sealed the deal and I only went back to Oldies every so often for a fix--usually when I was at the lake.

Then, when that apparently didn't help, they began expanding what they meant by Oldies. Rather dramatically, too. Mid 70s started showing up, and even some early 80s stuff, while they dropped their promotion of "17 songs an hour."

But now ... now, KBSG has thrown out the Oldies label altogether. Since August 1, they have been "The B 97.3" ... because that makes sense. The B? The problem with the new station is I don't know why I would actually listen.

The music overlaps with nearly everything else because they've dropped the 1950s almost totally. I'm not saying that anyone could really make a go at a radio station that gave the 50's much play right now, but it was the 50's the anchored the station with the Oldies feel. I guess if you're trying to lose that brand it makes sense to drop them, but they will be missed. Having a place to grab Buddy Holly every so often was nice, especially as I'm heading out to the lake this weekend for the first time since June.

So long, Oldies. I've grown up but I wish you didn't have to.

More at the Seattle PI

Masa Deck for Happy Hour

Masa's deck was crazy hot last night. Like "touch the tables and burn your arms" kind of hot. We were there for happy hour, which was wonderfully cheap.

But they didn't win any favors when I used the gift certificate they gave me earlier for cancelling my reservation. The $25 bar tab for three went onto a $50 gift certificate but we got nothing back because it was "promotional." Well, in that case, give me my certificate back and I'll pay the $25! But the waitress was gone by that point.

Little turned off again. Methinks I'm going to be trying better decks around town. Where I don't cook and they don't charge me double for my food.

Pod People

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" scared the hell out of me when I was little.

Who put me in front of a TV with that movie on when I was in the 4th grade? It was freaky. These weird pod things give birth to humans without fingerprints and when you fall asleep they take over your body, except they don't have emotion.

Well, off to bed, Erik! Good night!

Since the remake of the film is coming out Friday (51 years later) I thought I would give the original another try. It's still a little thrilling at times, but my cynical cynical mind won't let me do anything but snicker at the giant pods when I see them. Which is too bad, because the storyline really does have some power still. Which is why the trailer for the remake still looks pretty good.

Scary and good.

Sunday Showcase, Sparkes then Fades

After a long weekend of reunion planning all I really wanted to do Sunday was stay off my sore feet and finish the new Michael Chabon book which I have been struggling to find time for in the last month.

But the lure of Showcase Tacoma was too great. We took the Link and emerged in the center of the action. Even for a Sunday, it was pretty busy.

Of course, the Horatio had sponsored a magic show on both Saturday and Sunday. Andrew Evans, who you might have seen in a Horatio/Exit133 podcast in July, did some pretty incredible magic for a huge crowd of onlookers.

I tried my hand at some magnetic poetry for the Library ... if you see a poem on there that says "mystery is an essential crush," you'll know which one was mine.

I liked Chris Sharp's letter press, and the Beautiful Angle Bus Stop they created. We had lunch at Pacific Grill's wine garden and listened to an up and coming UPS band while surveying a full and vibrant Tollefson Plaza.

I picked up some sweet new duds from the KPLU booth and am now the proud wearer of Exit133 gear.

Mary and I also ventured over toward Tacoma Art Museum, where we saw the new Sparkle Then Fade exhibit. I gotta say, I was quite impressed. I really liked the exhibit and the art was compelling.

A great Sunday in downtown T-Town.

Lots of work in two days

I just finished a long weekend of planning reunions for Bellarmine -- lots of parties in a weekend, and it was 9 am to midnight two days in a row.

Oy.

But I didn't have to set an alarm today, which felt great. And now I'm looking forward to using some of this comp time I built up in two weeks when Mary and I travel to the Big Apple for a weekend.

We're leaving next Thursday and staying on the Upper East Side near the Guggenheim, just off the Park. We'll also be seeing "Spring Awakening," the musical that just won the Tony. Definitely looking forward to getting back to New York. Although last time it was over Thanksgiving weekend so traveling during the summer will be a nice change.

I just don't get Second Life

It seems like every time I go browsing on the Internet I find a reference to Second Life. This article in the New York Times is about the Second Life real estate market and people settling down with houses in beautiful parts of the "world."

Here's a paragraph you just don't read every day:

“I was just gallivanting around Second Life,” he said in an interview on his virtual roof in Jalisco with DonCamilo Rodenberger, this reporter’s avatar, who identified himself in interviews as a writer for The New York Times. “A place to call home didn’t really matter. But after a while, it seemed like a nice idea.”

Apparently this island is run by a lady in Issaquah. Here's another crazy paragraph:

Ms. Beach, 46, is an empty-nest homemaker from Issaquah, Wash., who spends four to eight hours a day in Second Life. In addition to developing the island — she paid Linden Lab $1,200 for control of it — she acts as its mayor and cruise director, enforcing the rules and corralling the locals into socializing. In many cases, she helps them build and decorate their houses, at no charge.

As I said before ... I just don't get Second Life. If you want to learn more about it, though, here's the Wikipedia page on it.

Freakonomics gets star treatment

Interesting development in the blog world ... the great Freakonomics blog has moved to the New York Times. Levitt and Dubner, who wrote Freakonomics (a book I highly enjoyed when I read it last August) have been blogging on the Freakonomics site for awhile. It's been so successful that they've hired a site editor and have now moved their whole operation to the NYT.

Very cool development for the blogging world. It's a good read during the day.

Our Neighbors to the North Want to Grow

Interesting to see that both Auburn and Federal Way are considering annexation options and have sent ballots. The Tribune has the story.

Telling perhaps that this quote is in there:

Kurt Triplett, chief of staff to King County Executive Ron Sims, said the Legislature will be watching the program and the money next session.
The alternative to annexation, he said, is a continual slide in county services.

Although I labored long and hard about annexing UP and Ruston into Tacoma it is very difficult to get an incorporated city into another and would get the Legislature involved.

Far easier would be if Tacoma attempted to annex the unincorporated parts of the county down to 512 or so. City of Tacoma officials may not want to do because there's not a whole lot of money in the area. But it would significantly help Tacoma control its own growth.

Tech Stuff

Earlier today I purchased a USB hub. I thought there was no way I needed a hub with 7 outlets. Turns out I was wrong. It comes in very handy!

Looking at the hub above, you can see the power cord for the hub on the left, which is there because a computer can't necessarily power 7 USB appliances at the same time. Counting in from the left, then, is the power cord; my external hard drive connection; my wireless keyboard and mouse connection (the base of which is the black oval in the top left); my iPhone dock/charger; my camera hookup; and then the USB cord on the far right that goes from the hub to my computer with the signals from everything else.

And on top of the hub is the USB cord that goes with my Logitec USB headphones, which is helpful for Skype calls. You can also see the duct table I put over the very bright blue light that seemed entirely unnecessary to me.

I still haven't given it a full test drive since I'm just 12 hours in, but being able to have everything plugged in at once is great. No more choosing between my external hard drive and charging my phone, etc etc. It seems to be doing pretty well for the $30. Plus I have two more USB openings ready to go if I need to throw a flash drive on there or whatever else I happen to get that comes with a USB cord.

Good stuff.

365 days can feel very short sometimes

One year ago I signed a document that ended my time as the Managing Director of the Grand.

It's been quite a year since then, one I certainly could not have expected or predicted at the time.

Producing theater, returning to my old high school, creating podcasts with Exit133, my first trip to New York, getting to compete in the 72 Hour Film Competition after creating the event two years ago ... there have been many surprises.

But one of the biggest surprises has got to be a whole re-ordering of perspective. One of those kinds of shifts where a few months of thinking hard and reflecting back on some experience makes the world look a little different. Which is great. Because I get to explore all over again.

US Bridges - County by County

Andrew Sullivan has posted a very interesting map from a 1994 article in The Atlantic about bad bridges in the US.

Back then they had this quote: "The Secretary of Transportation estimates that federal, state, and local governments will need to increase their yearly funding by almost 40 percent to meet the surging need for bridge rehabilitation."

Here's another quote from the 1994 article that I found interesting.

More than 80 percent of all U.S. bridges are located east of the geographic
midpoint between the coasts. The skewed distribution is due in part to the way
the Midwest and Great Plains states were settled--in the so-called
"township-and-range" pattern, which resulted in the laying down of land parcels
and roadways in evenly spaced grids; in order to maintain this even spacing,
many bridges had to be built over small waterways. Iowa, for example contains
more bridges than Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming combined.

I've been to Iowa and I never would have guessed they have more bridges than Washington, let alone Washington plus 4 states.

Sound Transit's Extra Train

I'm happy to see that Sound Transit is beefing up their Sounder run starting August 13 with an extra train. They hope that it will help commuters deal with the awful congestion expected to begin in Seattle when they shut down most lanes of I-5 & I-90 for 19 days.

Interestingly, it only goes from Puyallup to King Street Station, not from the Dome.

I would imagine work is going to stop for a whole bunch of commuters or they will try their hand at telecommuting. But the train is a nice option so I'm glad to see Sound Transit working to help ease the burden a bit.

More on Annexation

"Tom in UP" had many good challenges to my annexation post on Monday. He basically asks, "Why should anyone want to merge into Tacoma, especially when they are doing quite well in UP?"

(Tom, you can correct me if I got the spirit of your comment wrong.)

The point of view, though, is completely understandable, and backed up by data. Let’s compare UP and Tacoma from the 2000 census and see how poorly Tacoma stacks up.

Tacoma Vs UP: The Data

The median price of a home in Tacoma is $45,000 less than in UP. The average household income in Tacoma is $12,500 less than in UP. The percentage of people living below the poverty line in Tacoma is more than double the percentage in UP.

Sure, Tacoma’s gotten much better since 2000, but these numbers are nothing to sneeze at.

Let’s make the comparison even more apparent with more recent data.

According to the Washington State School Report Card for the 05-06 school year, Tacoma had about 62% of 10th graders pass the reading requirements. In UP it was about 82%.

In math, about 36% of Tacoma’s 10th graders passed. In UP, 56% passed.

10th Grade Writing in Tacoma: 62% passed. In UP: 84% passed.

So, Tom, I have won you over for annexation yet? : )

The problem is that Tacoma’s failure is everyone’s failure, while the successes of UP, Fircrest, and other suburbs are their own. My core argument is pretty simple: the current set up is unfair and it hurts everyone.

How it’s unfair

Let's take a commuter who lives in UP and works in Tacoma. This is not necessarily a problem in any way except when it comes to taxes. When we look at it through taxes, we see that the worker is taking the wealth he has earned in one city and is investing it in another through property taxes, school levies, etc. Tacoma provided the job but he is building the infrastructure of UP with his earnings.

You might say that it wasn't "Tacoma" that gave him the job, but central cities do serve as job catalysts. Some better than others, of course, by virtue of history, location, or policies, but cities create jobs.

The difficulty lies in that Tacoma's infrastructure that creates business is not being supported by the people who use it but live elsewhere. For those who work in Tacoma and live in UP, they are taking wealth they earn in one city and invest it in another. This is unfair to Tacoma.

The problem gets worse when you consider that many of the suburban cities around Tacoma have enacted moratoriums on building additional apartments within their boundary and—in some cases—have had the moratorium for some time.

This keeps a heavy amount of the lower-middle and lower class in Tacoma and encourages the economic disparity between suburbs and city. The severe stratification between Tacoma and UP is not an accident, it’s the result of a rich suburb closing its gates to non-homeowners.

UP has created an artificial wall on 19th Street that essentially says: let Tacoma deal with their problems, we’re doing just fine.

(Here’s another example of what I’m getting at, although the situation is reversed. Fife is rolling in money. The town has about 5,000 residents but because of its income from the car dealers on I-5, they have cash galore. A significant portion of that tax collection is from Tacoma residents. Fife has a city full of customers 40 times bigger than its own right next door, so it clearly benefits from Tacoma, but Tacoma never gets any of the money. This is unfair to Tacoma. )

How this hurts everyone

Now, it might seem like there’s no reason to care about that stuff if you don’t live in Tacoma. But when suburban cities siphon money off a central city, it leaves the central city in a bind. They have a lot of infrastructure to create and maintain that helps everyone who has a job there, but it’s only the people who live there that have to pay.

The central city can't fight its social problems as well, and it will have more social problems that the suburbs, until eventually the problems spill into the suburbs. Police can fight them there, certainly, but the suburbs aren't doing their part to actually support and end to the problem, they just find the results of it.

Over time, we can see the results of what this kind of city/suburb relationship looks like by looking at older cities in the East. St. Louis and Detroit, for example, have become population donuts. The cities themselves have shrunk even though the metropolitan region has grown, because all of that growth has happened in the suburbs because the central cities have become so bad. The central keep having less and less resources to fight bigger and bigger problems that affect the entire metropolis. With a dead central city, transit doesn't work effectively, crime explodes, and the quality of life everywhere goes down.

St. Louis, whose donut problem I wrote about here, and Detroit have it really bad but dying central cities is not uncommon and it hurts everyone in the suburbs.

Some cities have reversed the trend. Albuqurque has pursued aggressive annexation and is growing like mad. Anchorage expanded 12,000% (really!) and now can control its growth. Indianapolis actually convinced its outlying suburbs to come back to the city, which has created an incredibly healthy city from downtown all the way out. The Twin Cities, which are heavily divided in multiple suburbs have banded together to share tax from the Mall of America, even though it's built in Bloomington. Even Tacoma has made some steps -- there's a reason the Convention Center is the "Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center". It was funded from hotel/motel tax of multiple cities because it will fill rooms in multiple cities.

So we're on our way. But it would be better for everyone if we could just slip Ruston, UP, Fircrest, and Lakewood into Tacoma. The strength of that economic engine would give Seattle a run for its money.

Where I Got My Arguments

In many ways all of my thinking on this comes from what I learned reading the books of two mayors. David Rusk, a former Democratic mayor of Albuqurque whose book "Cities Without Suburbs" lays the problem out very clearly. And the other is Stephen Goldsmith, a Republican, and former mayor of Indianapolis who wrote "The Twenty First Century City."

I would cite more from there books but at some point it becomes plagiarism. The census statistics in David Rusk's book are compelling and it's hard not to be won over by them. I'm a big fan of this book, and the other is a good companion piece to see the conservative argument for the same approach.

UPDATE:

There's more annexation news in the Trib today about a piece of unincorporated Pierce County that is considering going in to either Steilacoom or Lakewood.