The Big Green House

Urban Wildlife

There’s been a real uptick in coyote sightings here in Seattle this summer. We’d heard so many reports, from different neighbors, that Science Girl decided to put together a website to keep track of them. Thus was born NW Coyote Tracker. It was almost immediately linked by a couple of neighborhood blogs, which in turn lead to Science Girl being interviewed for local TV news. (Seattle peoples, check out the 11 o’clock report on KOMO tonight. They said that unless there’s a big fire, they’re sure to run her spot.)

Personally, I’ve seen two coyotes myself. The first one was a couple of years ago, but just last night, as I was driving home from work, I saw a juvenile running alongside the road in a large park near where we live. We are just over the hill from downtown, so it’s something of a surprise to see coyotes here. The ones I grew up around were really shy and would flee at the first sight of humans. These guys are much more bold; there was one report of a pair running past a couple walking down the sidewalk on Capitol Hill.

What’s the urban wildlife situation where you live? As the ‘burbs encroach on habitat, are you seeing more wild visitors in your neighborhood?

If you lie down with pigs, they'll call you a swine every time

There was a time when I happily voted for Maria Cantwell for US Senator. Then she went and voted for Bush’s catastrophic adventure in the Persian Gulf.

Now, at some point in the past three years, had she come out and said, “Y’know, a lot of people got fooled into supporting that war, and I was one of them”, it’s quite possible that she would have gotten my vote again this year. The fact that she has failed to do so had me looking at other possibilities; the fact that, just this week, she attempted to buy off her opponents (and partially succeeded) sealed the deal.

I am now officially hoping for a Lamont v. Lieberman situation, which means my primary vote will be going to Hong Tran. Aside from agreeing with her positions on just about everything, I like the fact that she refused to be bought. (Oh, by the way, Mark Wilson, I hope that $8,000 per month for the remainder of what I sincerely hope will be a short campaign for you was worth pissing away whatever hopes you may have had for a political career after this election cycle, because from now on you are The Boy Who Can Be Purchased.)

Should Tran not prevail in the primary, I will do something I swore I’d never do after the 2000 election: I will vote Green. As a former member of the Black Panthers, Aaron Green doesn’t really stand much of a chance of winning, but I’ll be fucked if I vote Cantwell again. Her actions become more and more Republican with each passing day.

Frankly, I am sick and tired of voting for candidates simply because of their party affiliation; more often than not, I feel like I’m voting against the other candidate than I am for the one who gets my vote. No more. No more appeasement, no more bullshit, no more “Republican Lite is better than the full-on Republican”. As my friend Dana would say, fuck that with a brick.

Fight for your right to party

What a bad weekend for music. Buck Owens and Nikki Sudden both passed on, and then there was that terrible murder/suicide over on Capitol Hill Saturday morning. The thoughts of Science Girl and myself are with the survivors, friends and loved ones of all those involved.

I’ve never had much use for electronica or any of that sort of thing, myself, but I‘d hate to see this become an indictment of a style of music rather than the tragedy that it is. Kyle Huff could just as easily have spent the evening at the Croc, or the Funhouse, or the Paramount, or Benaroya Hall for that matter. What sort of music he and the victims were into really doesn’t have much bearing on things. There will be some who’ll leap to the conclusion that a subculture they don’t understand (and that seems a little scary therefore) was somehow involved in the deaths of a group of young people, and we’ll get a few rousing chorus’ of “Won’t someone think of the children?”. Next thing you know, we’ll back to the bad old days of the Teen Dance Ordinance, or worse. I haven’t seen a lot of that yet, and I hope we don’t, but historically that’s been the sort of response one can expect from an event like this. Blame whatever bad chemicals (man-made or organic) that were in Huff’s head when he went and got that shotgun from his truck, but don’t blame the music.

In lighter news: I know I’ve promised changes recently, and so far they haven’t been forthcoming. Trust me, though; there has been movement recently in this regard. I should some have quasi-exciting news soon. Unfortunately, when this will happen is out of my hands at the moment, so sit tight and I’ll wait along with you.

Happy St. Paddy's Day

Begorrah.

A senseless waste of human life

Still beavering away on that review. I think I may finally have turned a corner there, but that’s not why I’m stepping away from it for a moment. No.

I have a dream.

If we all work together, we can make it a reality. It will require sacrifice from all of us, although from some more than the rest of us. But it will be worth it, my friends. Oh yes, very much so.

What is this dream, this shining hope I have for all humanity? Simply this: every person involved in consulting, marketing and/or public relations, placed aboard a giant rocket and launched straight into the heart of the sun.

Harsh, yes, but fair retribution for foisting tidbits like this on the world: it took a 35 member “brand development task force”, working on behalf of the Washington State Tourism Office, a full 18 months (that’s a year and half, mind you) to come up with a new slogan.

The fruit of their efforts?

SayWA.

That’s no typo.

How much money do you think was spent on this project? Untold thousands, at the very least. Had they just corralled a few half-bright high school students and provided them with a couple of joints and a mandate to write a new slogan, I guarantee they’d have had something better than SayWA within an hour or two, and at a fraction of a fraction of the cost.

Being reduced to ash in the heat of a solar flare is really too good for them, but there’s a certain poetic justice to it. If we start work today, we can make it happen.

St. James Infirmry

Hey, I’m back. The Stooges were pretty damn amazing, and I’ll tell you about that later. Right now I want to mention something that came to me over the weekend.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent most of the last week in a state of disbelief, anger, shock, depression, and several other emotions I can’t even name. Mostly, just a profound feeling of anger at the incompetent mishandling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and an equally profound sadness for those who’ve lost their lives, those who’ve lost friends and loved ones, those who’ve lost homes and possessions. It is an impotent feeling, one that makes me feel worthless since there’s very little I can do to change the situation. I’ve donated to Red Cross, as has Science Girl (have you?); that addresses, in a very small way indeed, the need to help the afflicted. But what about afflicting those responsible for the delays in relief? I’ve found that throwing shoes at the TV has little to no effect on the government.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking of ways in which I, as a regular American citizen, can make my displeasure (to put it mildly) with the federal response to this disaster. What I came up with is enormously impractical and probably impossible to pull off. Still, it has distracted me a little from the grim reality of things as they stand, so I will pass it along in the hope that it may do the same for you.

My idea is this: a silent march on the White House. No signs, no placards, no slogans. Just a silent mass of pissed-off Americans, all dressed in black, marching behind a second line. When they reach the White House, the band stops. There are no speeches made. The entire group folds their arms and stares at the White House, in silence, for at least five full minutes. The crowd then disperses.

As I say, I doubt it could be pulled off. Somebody would have to spout off, which would ruin the entire effect. Silence is key to the whole thing. But I find the image of 100,000 angry Americans staring down the White House and its inhabitants to be very soothing.

If anybody out there thinks they can pull this together, feel free to run with it.

Everybody booze up and riot

Got your sound card working? Speakers turned on? Good. Take a listen to Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff as he essentially admits that he has no clue as to what is actually going on in New Orleans during an interview on NPR.

Now listen to the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, laying out exactly how bad things are and how they got that way. Here’s a transcript, if you don’t have sound.

Here’s what passes for a President these days, fessing up to the fact that the federal response to this national emergency has been somewhat lackluster.

Here’s me wondering what the response to such an event in a wealthy, predominately white suburb – say, Bellevue, WA - would be. Would the survivors be left stranded without food and water? Would bodies be left in the streets? Would it take five days for help to arrive in any kind of appreciable numbers? Would the head of FEMA be blaming the victims? Would dimwits like Dennis Hastert be chiming in with their opinion as to whether or not the city should be restored while people were still trapped and dying there?

The last week has been a shameful, terrible reflection of what America has become. Why was the response so slow in coming? Why has the focus been on quelling looters rather than getting people out of there? Don’t misunderstand me – anybody taking advantage of this situation for personal gain is subhuman. But why leave thousands of survivors at the Convention Center without sustenance or sanitation while chasing looters? People are still more important than property, aren’t they?

Aren’t they?

Oh wait, I forgot. There aren’t thousands of people stuck in their own shit at the Convention Center. Those are just rumors.

What the fuck does Chertoff actually do? How could he not have heard of the situation at the Convention Center? How could Michael Brown of FEMA not know that people have been without food and water since Monday? Look at the disconnect between what they were saying and what was actually happening. How do they justify drawing a paycheck, sucking off the public teat, without the basic knowledge that anyone who’s paid even a cursory amount of attention to what’s going on has? Why haven’t they been clapped in irons yet?

What if, gods forbid, we actually have that serious terrorist attack on a major city they’ve been scaring everybody with for the last four years? Is this the sort of response we can expect? “Whoa, you guys are fucked. Bummer.” Because that’s just un-American. We don’t leave our people in that sort of a situation.

One of the reasons we, as a people, consent to be governed is because government is supposed to come to the aid of the people in times of crisis. In this case, our government has failed, in large, catastrophic way. Can you imagine any other US president allowing things to drag out as they have? Hell, I despised Ronald Reagan with a white-hot passion, but I don’t think even he would have let things to get this bad.

People need to be held accountable for the mishandling of this disaster.

Pitchforks and torches

If you had any doubts as to what a joke Homeland Security and FEMA are*, or the truly clueless nature of the grand clusterfuck that is the Bush administration, those doubts have surely been erased by what has happened, and what continues to happen (and not happen) in New Orleans. The incompetence, the insensitivity to the suffering of others, the inability to take any responsibility, just boggles the mind. The government can’t be blamed for the hurricane, of course, but they are accountable for the preparations for such events and for carrying out rescue and relief afterwards. This administration has been all about telling us how they’re preparing to deal with disaster scenarios. Now that they’re presented with one, one that wasn’t exactly out of the blue, you can see what a crock of shit all of that is. Not to mention that if the Army Corps of Engineers had been given anywhere near the amount of funding they’d requested to shore up the levee system two years ago, this might not be the all-out debacle that it has become.

I can’t imagine what’s going through the minds of the members of the Louisiana National Guard currently stuck in Iraq. Disasters like this are precisely why we have a National Guard in the first place. This is what they’re trained for. And they’re stuck, many thousands of miles from home, trying not to get their asses blown off in a trumped up war, seeing what’s happening to their friends, neighbors and loved ones back home.

It fucks with my head something fierce, and I’ve never even been to Louisiana.

*I’m referring to the organizations. There are individuals within both groups who are busting their asses to help those in need. If only their bosses were so diligent.

Congratulations

Happy inauguration. Don’t choke on the shrimp puffs.

They keep the nerve gasses guarded day and night by caged white rabbits

We live about a mile away from the UW campus, maybe a mile and a half. Not very far, anyway. So perhaps you can imagine our dismay this morning when Science Girl opened the newspaper and found this story: UW Wants Bioterrorism Lab.

This is such a bad idea, and not just because it’s almost in our backyard. Take a look at the map from the story. Now compare it to this map. The area in question is right in that area labeled Portage Bay, which mean that a Level 3 biohazard lab is going to be right next to the U District, one of the more densely-populated neighborhoods in the city. Across Portage Bay to the south is Capitol Hill, which is quite possibly even more densely populated than the U District. If there were a breach of containment (and don’t bother telling me such a thing can’t happen, because we both know what utter bullshit that is), there would be a hell of a lot of people exposed to some really nasty shit.

This isn’t something that belongs in a large city. I was gonna say that it’s the kind of thing you do out in Hanford, but they haven’t got such a hot record either. I know this sort of research needs to be done, but why not do it somewhere where you’re not putting tens of thousands of people at risk?

Also, how smart is it to put such a facility in such a vulnerable spot? I left my tinfoil hat at home, but it strikes me that being that close to the water is something of a security risk. As Science Girl put it, what would stop someone from rowing up in a boat and firing a shoulder-launched missile into the building? Or driving up in an Oklahoma City-style truck bomb?

I think we’re gonna see a lot of local distaste for such a project. I hope it will be enough to kill it before it gets off the drawing board. Cross your fingers.