West Seattle, Washington
09 Monday
As noted and spiritedly discussed here 2 weeks ago, the driver who hit and killed City Council staffer Tatsuo Nakata at 47th/Admiral last November won’t face felony charges, but there’s a new development – the city has decided to charge him with misdemeanor assault.
-Thanks to the reader who tipped us that Bakery Nouveau is featured on the cover of Seattle Magazine’s new “best restaurants” issue. Yum.
-A new exhibit at MOHAI will feature 19th-century paintings from a daughter of the Denny party’s namesake.
-Also from the P-I, Ted Van Dyk has a good post-viaduct-vote rant. Reminds us of the interesting sight we saw while traveling up Cali after the Charlestown meeting last night — an apartment window plastered with not only a YES ELEVATED sign, but also RECALL NICKELS and even mock Times front pages with the apartment-dweller’s fantasy future headline NICKELS DEFEATED. (Perhaps a Steinbrueck relative lives there!)
So sad that he died the day before he was scheduled to return to home base. (Besides that newspaper link, the CG has an updated press release with photos.)
Heard all the sirens this afternoon, drove by but couldn’t tell what was going on — now it’s posted at the P-I site and on the local Coast Guard site: A CG petty officer died off Fauntleroy after some kind of accident involving one of those boats we saw at Don Armeni last week. (UPDATE: Thanks to Nic Templeton for sending photos taken from Lincoln Park during the rescue attempt, including the one below; a little hard to tell in the afternoon-sunshine glare but at left on the dock, you see Seattle FD vehicles; at right alongside the dock, a Coast Guard boat.)
Slog discovers that ArtsWest and a big downtown theater company announced within two hours of each other that they’re putting on the same Tony- and Pulitzer-winning play. Apparently this sort of thing (one play, two places, same city) isn’t supposed to happen. The ArtsWest boss is quoted as saying, “I try to consult with other theaters but maybe I’m just a mosquito to them.” By the way, ArtsWest is auditioning for next season today.
No surprise that Pagliacci’s WS delivery expansion inspired another mention today by that P-I guy. Unlike last time, though, no shout-out to us bloggy types, good, bad, or otherwise.
The SOA coffee shop Freshy’s gets a couple paragraphs at the end of a Washington Post article about the Starbucks malaise.
The Times reports on this morning’s biodiesel-mania at Admiral Safeway. A member of the WSB posse managed to pop by for a photo. That’s Hizzoner on the right, amid the throng.)
Look for hubbub around the Admiral Safeway gas station sometime today. The P-I says a “news conference” is planned, with no less than Hizzoner on the guest list, to show off the station’s new biodiesel (fuel from veg oil) offering. We noticed it on the sign yesterday:
Check it out. And remember, if you are interested in helping — or at least monitoring — the campaign to save the Charlestown Cafe, you can join the Our Town/West Seattle group.
This sad tale of what happened to a West Seattle man’s dog — despite it having a license and microchip — while he was on vacation, is a must-read if you have a pet.
Yet more details in a long investigative Times article today, suggesting criminal and unethical activity among employees at Huling went far beyond the infamous case that broke wide open last month. (Last part of the story says the new owners “will not try to undo the sale” but are accelerating the sign-changing process, though we haven’t seen anything new since what we posted two weeks ago.)
Just posted at the Seattle Weekly site: new information about the victim in the Huling Brothers car-salesmen scandal, suggesting the accused bilkers/burglars weren’t the only ones who did him wrong.
One day after the Tempest in a Pizza Box, the P-I’s got another story that appears ripped from the pages of West Seattle Blog (but with a few new details, such as, who’s trying to buy, and build on, that big front yard).
We appreciate Robert Jamieson’s P-I columns sometimes, but clearly he doesn’t know the paradigm is that us blogger types are supposed to run around commenting on the paper, not the other way around. Searching for a column idea in a slow news week, he lands today on our Pagliacci delivery-limits discussion. (Nice the company responded to him but not to us.) Anyway, the same guy who defended Mars Hill’s misogynist main man just a wink of time ago is now defending Pagliacci. Sorry, the “seven-minute rule” doesn’t wash (seven minutes to get from The Junction to any place south of Cali & Morgan? in a horse-drawn cart?). We personally don’t think we’re aced out for economics (our own humble shack is a lone island of affordability among a slew of expensive view homes), just non-business sense (what’s the BS about a “cold, soggy pie,” when other outlets further north can get a hot one to us just fine?) — Mr. Columnist implies that the classism claim is the only complaint here and chides us for it, yet this was included in only TWO comments out of more than 50 on the two posts where we’ve had this discussion (#1 here, #2 here). But at least Pagliacci, in his column, has removed any hope they’ll be delivering to us south WS’ers. Welcome, Garlic Jim’s!
For those of us who gaze at the waterfront homes on Beach Drive and dream of living in one, the Times’ Pacific Magazine today takes us inside the mansion of Scott Lipsky, the GalleryPlayer chair also described as having “retired” from Amazon (despite his apparently young age). Good to hear that at least one dot-com $$$-holder has enough taste to live on Puget Sound instead of clustering with the others near Gatesland on Lake Washington!
Here’s an alarming tale that reportedly unfolded at “a” Starbucks (who knows which one, considering there are three) at Westwood Village. As of right this moment, the King County jail roster lookup shows the guy’s still in jail.
This morning’s Seattle Times article has many more details, including the contention from Huling’s new owners that they weren’t really briefed by the old owners that this was about to come slamming into them like a tsunami.
-A gushy Seattle Times writeup on the “pay by touch” technology that’s in its fifth year at Morgan Junction Thriftway confirms our November suspicions that it remains the only store in Seattle using PBT. Nothing personal against the Thriftway, which we adore, but we still don’t get why anyone would link their finances to their fingerprints. If you use it, we’d love to hear from you; we still have never seen, or heard from, anyone who has.
-The whole viaduct-vote thing still has our heads a-spinning. OK, so never mind what the Gov said the other day, now we’re going to have a vote? All just complicated political positioning, we suppose. So how ’bout they throw The Third Option and even The Retrofit on the ballot too, while everyone’s changing their minds every five minutes? Or are we supposed to be happy and relieved now that at least we get some kind of vote?
-Thanks to the reader who tipped us to the effervescent Elliott Bay Brewery feature on the Seattle Weekly site. (We’re not much for beer but we like their burgers too!)
–
Has to be so. My gosh, there’s a tv news truck parked at the top of Cali Ave hill (near Ida), with its phone-pole-height antenna up in the air. The snowbound citizens of south West Seattle must be about to star on the 5 o’clock news.
–Our state rep goes high-profile in a push for equal rights.
-One of West Seattle’s hilliest streets gets the spotlight in a P-I urban-sledding photo. (We can barely dare to drive down that section of Charlestown just west of Cali in dry times, can’t imagine sledding OR driving on it now!)
According to this Seattle Times update, not only do we have most of the snow woes, we’ve got a power outage. Again.
| 4 COMMENTS