Not long ago my wife and I had a wonderful, typical Seattle evening. We bussed downtown to The Elliot Bay Bookstore; one of the nation's great bookstores, strolled down the stairs to the deli where an author was giving a short talk and booksigning.

The author was Michael Pollan, the book: The Omnivore's Dilemma. We sat among a group of good folks, enjoying coffe, tea and pastries being educated by a fascinating, intelligent and well researched lecturer about the food we eat and diet in the 21st century.

Last night we went to The Triple Door - a great jazz club. We saw Joe Sample, a jazz icon with a finely-tuned trio, perform wonderful piano jazz.

Seattle, man. Neocons call us a fantasy land, even as the whole Reagan/Gingrich neocon, bullshit construct falls down around their ankles. They could move to Detroit.

April 19, 2006

Big shakeup in the White House today. The new Chief of Staph is cracking the whip! Boy President is coming to the realization, as the ship sinks, that government institutions cannot be run by big campaign contributors and Texas cronies.

John McCain was on Leno last night, soldiering for the Encephalitus Administration. Advising forbearance – poor bastard – I wonder how he, with his service record, likes being a mouthpiece for a bunch of frat boys who got deferments, except, of course, Boy President who simply got lost. Even Chris Matthews has been showing up all over the place walking a fine line between soft criticism of this nut-case Administration and slipping in the kind, supportive word here and there. The trend is subtle but the pattern is clear: George Herbert Hoover Bush jerked off into a flower pot and raised a blooming idiot, but even all the crafty old hacks from his former Administration surrounding Boy President can’t make this disaster fly.

Cheney along with a tax refund in excess of $1 million got paid over $200,000 last year by Haliburton. He doesn’t work for them – right? We were told that a long time ago right?

There’s a lot of talk about illegal immigrants and what to do about them. The mouth-flappers are careful to keep the discussion focused on the, some eleven million illegals who sneak over here, many from Mexico. But these folks are coming here for jobs. Someone has to give them the job. Someone is taking advantage of their plight and doing well thereby. Stop the jobs and the illegal immigration would slow to a trickle.

Those law-breaker employers are driving all this focused talk; the demonstrations, et al. One argument against actually enforcing the laws we have or creating a class of “guest workers” of some kind is that we don’t have the resources to deal with this. But these same vapid suits will spend any amount of tax revenue to arrest and jail some poor jerk with a joint, for years.

April 16th, 2006

Washington Week In Review and The McLaughlin Group are two of the discussion roundtables which, lately, have started making sense after seven years of sliding sideways with Neocon bullshit. They are finally discussing the possibility that the Bush Administration may actually have intentionally misled the public in order to get into a war with Iraq(Ohmygoddd). They are now, finally saying that things are NOT going well(the gentile reader may want to get a copy of Frank Zappa's "It Can't Happen Here" to play while reading the rest). We badly needed these discussions three years ago, but they were nowhere to be heard in the mainstream press. This is why I no longer listen to any mainstream "news" - it's total crap.

I remember the disillusionment I went through in the first Bush(Imperial Functator and First Douche Bag General) Administration and the First Iraq war when I tuned into The McNeil-Lerher News Hour, as I had religiously every night, seeking a discussion and analysis of that mass deception. How George Herbert Hoover Bush had simply sent a huge convoy of C-130's into Iraq, loaded with troups and material without consulting congress. Then, of course, congress was timid about putting the brakes on all this bald-faced adventurism, being afraid to seem "unpatriotic"; also known as ABNEGATION OF RESPONSIBILITY AND THE PUBLIC TRUST. But McNeil and Lehrer didn't say squat - they were good little boys, not journalists. And neither did anyone else(can you see them, Gentile Reader, standing at rigid attention backs arched to the point of pain, arms extended straight out at a slight upward angle, hands straight fingers together and thumbs at a right angle?).

We have had a severe Neocon distortion on the press for seven years with a lot of meaningless blather on all news outlets trying to make the outrageous seem sane. Selling the bullshit party line to the intellectually impared, television brainwashed populace.

A poster from 1930's Germany shows Hitler with metal coming out of his mouth - the caption reads(translated): Hitler; The superman eating gold and talking tin. Hitler had a lot more class than the Neocon apologists around today - today they talk pure horseshit.

Jim Lehrer still goes on every night with that signature serious, half nuts glare in his eye. His mouth is still moving as if he had something to say. Too bad Jim - you're several years too late. I wonder what PBS pays that hack.

April 13th, 2006


MoveOn says Bush is preparing to nuke Iran, Jay Inslee says the IRS is getting ready to sell our private information. The NRDC says Kimberly Clark is decimating half a million acres of primeval, boreal timber for toilet paper. As they go down, the Neocons are desperately, mindlessly gobbling.

I heard a commercial fisherman once say that a shark was dumped onto the deck of his fishing boat from the net and the creature - out of water and about to be attacked by several hostile fisherman spent it's last moments not trying to escape, or defending itself but devouring fish as fast as it could!


For a list of toilet papers made of recycled paper visit www.nrdc.org/land/forests/tissue.asp

April 9th, 2006

Walking around in Freemont, recently, I discovered Touchstone Bakery was closed up. No "we have moved to . . . " sign - place was just empty. It was one of the last hippie joints left in that formerly great part of town. They made the best bread there - sunflower buckwheat. It made the greatest toast you ever ate. The place was full of alternative, underdog pamphlets and posters and really nice folks wearing do-rags who understood if you were too broke to pay. "It's o.k., take care of it next time . . ." I imagine many a down-and-outer got a meal there. The pastries were delicious, heavy, inexpensive, and filled you up.

Yesterday we were walking around in the "New and improved" U. district. All the CD stores that used to blast music and the funky book stores are gone. Ten years ago the place was alive with kids in the streets - hordes of them. They were laughing and busting balls, panhandling, dashing across the streets, eating greasy, delicious food in soulful little holes-in-the wall. You could, on occassion, catch a whiff of weed wafting across the vapour.

Yeah, I know - just another old fart being wistful about an imagined lost age. Oh Atlantis! Not really, though. I spent plenty of time in the U. District in the '90's - I know what I'm talking about. When I was active on the east coast restoring Victorian-style houses in the '70's, the area we loved was populated by a half-nuts group of ecclectics. We were of every sort of diverse lifestyle. We loved the houses to the point where we bought them, moved into a dangerous neighborhood, living in construction-zone shells, sacrificing all our time and money and often a marriage to work on those behemoths, suffering freezing temperatures, break-ins, and huge fuel bills. We fought urban renewal (aka low-income housing), charges of eliteism (hah!) and all sorts of hardships. And we had great parties! We succeeded. The area became fashionable about the time Reagan started stinking up the white house. Developers came in and built expensive condos. Guess what? None of the original group of crazies - the ones who made that area great - could afford to stay there (the city raised taxes through the roof). So who replaced us? Asshole neocons, driving around in their Beemers who didn't give a shit about their neighbors or anything else. Oh, the glories of the rich!

Freemont and The U. District have gone from the wonderland of vivid pre-meanie Pepperland to the gray, humorless, proto-paranoid world of the ugly-minded Neocon. Bereft of the thrilling feeling of possibility that used to exist when Clinton ran the country.

Prediction: Bush will resign in disgrace like Nixon - only worse.

April 6th, 2006
It's getting sunny in Seattle - warmth. Seattle summers are georgeous - like living in a Maxfield Parrish poster.

Uncle Frank (not the guy on Jimmy Kimmel) visited Seattle to check on the yacht he's having built here; 78 feet, 20-foot beam fiberglass three-decker with twin Caterpillar engines. He couldn't find a boat-builder in Florida he liked. When it's done he's having it loaded onto a ship and sent to Florida. We took him to Serafina's. He liked the food but thought it was a little "basic"(the floors were uneven). At 80, he still has the world by the ass.

There are a bunch of multiple-unit projects going in all over this area (Ballard, in the north end of the city). Developers are buying single-family units and even some older multiple dwellings, demolishing them, and putting up town-houses. There are two right here on our street and three or four more within a block or two. Most of the structures in this part of town were built in the '50's through the '70's. They are archetecturally uninteresting and aren't going to be missed, still, I hope we don't end up with the mess they created around the U. of W. - towering, boring multiple-dwelling units right next to each other with no sense of esthetics whatever. Monuments to raw capitalism.

post script: 5/28/06; we learned last week the lovely old farmhouse next door to us is going to be sold to a developer. It is one of the few remaining artifacts of early Ballard, a true farmhouse and one of the few structures in this area worth saving.