Recent Stories in Off-Task

I have a bone to pick with Forbes about their "Top 10 Coolest Cities" list. (I also have a bone to pick with the 2,000 Americans polled who thought Las Vegas was cooler than San Francisco.) There's not much to the poll--people were literally just ask to rank cities by how cool they were--so Forbes decided to crank up the page view count by making it a "slideshow"--that you have to refresh the page to advance.

New York's photo is an interracial couple in a park. Las Vegas has an Elvis in front of a Las Vegas sign. San Francisco has the Golden Gate. San Diego, a beach. Seattle gets...shopping bags. How cool is that?

It was Tuesday night and time for a Duck Dodge on Lake Union. And while the usual flotilla of sailboats heeled and tacked and bounced gently off buoys, it seemed like everyone who could found a way to get on or, failing that, near the water.

Now what?

First, no, I don't have space personally for an 84-year-old, 285-foot steamboat that carries 176 passengers. But it's owned by Seattle's Ambassadors International, and if some millionaire from Oklahoma buys it, I'll have an aneurysm. Who'd pass up the chance to pick up a pair of queens?

Franz Neumeier of Save the Delta Queen says it's perfectly safe. And a steamboat tricked out like this can go anywhere:

The Delta Queen has four decks, Tiffany-style stained-glass windows, an 1897 calliope, and the same steamboat bell that graced a ship on which Samuel Clemens traveled in 1883.

It also boasts a "library, music, or theatrical area," so I'll go ahead and add this to the list of SunBreak initiatives. Put it just ahead of district elections for Seattle City Council, rather than our current lazy-ass at-large system.

Secondly, before you throw the Kalakala in my face, I was never really in favor of that. That was all editor Dan's idea, and he's since decamped for Chicago. Anyone who set foot on the Kalakala realized immediately that "restoration" of the ferry was akin to reanimating the skeleton of your dead girlfriend. Even if it works, it's pretty creepy.

Whereas the Delta Queen just had a $3.8-million renovation in 1998, and operates as a floating 88-room hotel. At the moment, the Delta Queen is tied up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which is a long paddle from Stockton, California, where she hails from originally. Once we get her back to the west coast, the possibilities are limitless, including: floating hotel/restaurant, cruise ship, museum, casino, or theme park.

Every time you play the Hold Steady's "Gotta Stay Positive," I find myself reaching for the dial and turning this garbage off. I am getting sick and tired of this daily ritual, friends. Get it together and stop playing Hold Steady.

[Ed: Commenter "Steve Winwood" spends a good deal of time lambasting us in the comments section for failures of a startling range. So we're pleased to see he's using our U-post feature to branch out.]

August 11th marked the last day of the National Scrabble Championships, an event that America's geeks and freaks watch with all the fervor that our more sportif friends and neighbors reserve for, er, whatever those sorts of people watch. The Olympics, or something. Live coverage of the event was streamed on the internet, reaching even more millions of viewers than tuned in last year to watch tiles click.

Rafi Stern, a University of Washington student, played FINFOOTS for a whopping 203 points. The play was featured in an interview with Stefan Fatsis on NPR's All Things Considered. Fatsis is the author of (the very entertaining) Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players and a competitive Scrabble player himself.

Competitive Scrabble, and the game in general, has seen an upsurge in popularity since the publication of Fatsis's book. Contributing to the wave of younger players picking up the game is Hasbro's Facebook Scrabble game, which allows Facebook users to play "friends" or to start and join open games. The game is smartphone-compatible, which makes it relatively popular with mobile addicts.

The NSC grand prize of $10,000 went to Nigel Richards of Kuala Lumpur. Tough break, Rafi.

"This is so bad for you; pure sugar," Mike tells me.

My half-Filipino pal's only exaggerating a little, I think as a perky Pinoy woman slides our desserts towards us. Mike's introducing me to halo-halo, a frozen cup of wonderful strangeness comprised of ice cream, shaved ice, coconut, sweet beans, candied fruit cubes, and other miscellany.

It's cold; it's so packed with natural sugars that it'd put your average diabetic into seizures; and it's oddly, wonderfully tasty. You know you're in for a treat if the food's so exotic that even your well-heeled tour guide/host can't identify the chunks of yellow fruit pulp bobbing in the cup's center (it turns out to be jackfruit).

"Welcome to Pinoy cuisine," Mike tells me as he jabs a spoon into the mixture and begins stirring with glee. Welcome to Pinoy everything, I think with a smile.

I'm joining Mike on this warm August 1 for Pista sa Nayon, Seattle's 21st annual celebration of Filipino music and culture. On this day, Seward Park's transformed into Ground Zero for the Emerald City's Filipino community, and it's no end of fun to be an onlooker.

On the surface, Pista resembles any one of the scores of ethnic festivals hosted at the Seattle Center during the spring and summer months, only liberated from the sometimes-staid atmosphere of the shiny cosmopolitan Center. There's a relaxed vibe to things: Filipinos and Filipino Americans from every strata of the local topography waltz through the Park's grounds, eating, laughing, hanging out, and drinking deeply of their culture.

B-boys and elderly widows weave cooperatively past one another, bonded by little more than their mutual heritage, and that's more than enough on this inviting day. The wide-eyed experience sponge in me enjoys it heartily, and my Filipino ex-pat chum is reveling in showing me around.... (more)

Seattle's decade-old Viaduct debate came to a tragic end today during a Blue Angels practice run...

The day had to come eventually--after 20 years in Seattle, I visited the Hiram S. Chittenden Locks. Technically, counting the afternoon I sat on a boat and drank beer as the water dropped by 20 feet, I had visited the locks before. But there's much more to see if you're not on a boat. There are the locks in operation--the boats float up, the boats float down--a fish ladder, and the Carl S. English, Jr., Botanical Gardens. And it's all free. Run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, there's a federal grandeur to the grounds. No city-park "that budget's been cut" chintziness, no for-profit banners screaming about exhibits or stuffed toys. Just the smell of the sea, massive poured concrete structures, and manicured lawns.

It's viral and virile, isn't it? Here's the enigmatic set-up: "A few weeks ago, the 2010 AquaSox pitching staff decided to grow mustaches. Slowly but surely the mustaches have crept on to the faces of over a dozen players. Can you match the man to the mustache?"

We don't do nearly enough reporting on religion, so here's the equivalent of a thousand words, and a promise to try harder.

UPDATE: How could I forget Bing? But here we see a troubling ignorance of the variety of things that Jesus is up to:

The Woodland Park Zoo writes to tell us that after counting more than 2,600 ballots, there are officially eight southern-African-inspired names for the mob of meerkats, back at the Zoo after a 10-year sabbatical:

The top vote getters and new names for the four female and four male meerkats, in order of greatest number of votes received, are: ZIMBA (Zambian town), NATA (southern African river), MOLOPO (southern African river), KIWANO (Kalahari fruit), KALAHARI (African desert), DINAWA (“beans” in Tswana), ACACIA (African tree), and NGAMI (lake in Botswana).

The photo above is by Dennis Dow. For more watermelon-and-meerkat viewing, visit the Zoo's blog.

Seattle's least-hardcore (unless you consider the costumes) sailboat races are back for the summer, and last night's Duck Dodge on Lake Union featured actual wind, heeled-over boats, and one involuntary dunking when passenger-ballast leaned out too far. Though you frequently do, I didn't see any ducks last night, so Rule #12, "Never make a duck change its course," was easy to observe.

Last night's theme was "Red Wine, White Wine & the Blues," in honor of our approaching Independence Day; next Tuesday is '80s Night. (Other themes are Pirate, Superhero, Tropical, Toga, Pajama, and Prom.)

The race begins at 7 p.m. with a "Fast Boat" start (7:05, Half-fast; 7:10, Cruisers; 7:15, Dinghy). They've now added a "Volunteer to crew" page to the website, if you're short a boat but long on sailing enthusiasm. You can also buy a Duck Dodge vest for just $20, to help support the rum delivery website and associated costs.

"Before the arrival of settlers from the United States, the principal feature of Ravenna and Roosevelt was the creek that drained Green Lake and emptied into Union Bay," mentions HistoryLink, in its entry on Ravenna.

"Ravenna Creek is a stream," reports Wikipedia, contrarily.

It's about 3,500 feet of creek (or stream), thanks to daylighting work that added 650 feet to its length. It arises in Cowen Park, then runs down to the bottom of a playfield, where it enters a pipeline that lets it empty into Lake Washington's University Slough. A trail meanders alongside its meanderings, and small wooden bridges cross it.

As Heraclitus knew, it's never the same creek twice.

The Monorail has its charms. Look! You drive it with a friggin' joystick! How awesome is that? Still, the world's only single-rail train is frequented almost exclusively by tourists, because who else goes to Westlake? I kid! I'm at the Washington State Cougars-themed apparel shop all the time! It's worth taking a trip if you haven't. Here's how.

Courtesy of Forbes and the IRS's free datasets, the internet is busy playing with a map of inter-county population migrations from 2008. (The IRS also offers state-to-state migration patterns.)

With this visual aid, you learn that 83 people moved from the Aleutians West census area to King Co., and that 200 people arrived from Miami-Dade Co., home of Tubbs and Crockett. 268 showed up from Fairfax Co., Virginia, with a per capita income of $62,000. Virginia sends lots of people our way.

In general, though, you can see that Seattle benefits most from West Coast and northern U.S. migratory patterns, with some more determined snowbirds making a beeline for the Florida panhandle. Enjoy.

Early Thursday morning on the second floor of Westlake Center, and we're both confused. Me, because I can't understand why the Sprint Wireless store is closed. The college student leading a trolley bag has the same problem, re: the Monorail.

"Excuse me," she says softly. "Do you know why the Monorail isn't running?"

"Probably because it's too early," I say. "Probably doesn't start running 'till nine."

"But I think it should be open," she insists.

Having never met anyone so determined to ride the Monorail, I re-examine the situation. Person in a hurry with trolley bag. Ding! "Wait, are you going to the airport?"

"Yeah," she says.... (more)

Nice! A TSB network partner just won a Seattle Weekly Best of the Web 2010 award. For "Seattle’s Best Online Presence - News," it was Seattle Crime. "It's innovative and focused, and the iPhone app is cool," says judge Ethan Lowry. (The SunBreak's Flickr pool was nominated--an honor!--but we did not win.)

The Seattle Crime iPhone app is indeed cool. Besides the site feed, it shows you a map of Seattle with all 911 calls in progress, and lets you create your own crime reports on the fly. It's free, so there's really no excuse for not having it.

This was the scene at Cal Anderson Park today, over lunchtime. I'm not sure what the plan here is. But it's an attention-getter. UPDATE: Via Twitter, @ryanhealy comments: "It's technically a sail for kite surfing. You don't want to jump from a plane with that."

The Johnston Ridge Observatory volcano cam is maintained by the USFS and is located 5 miles from the crater.

The competition is close, but I think the HD cam trained on Mount St. Helens just slightly wins in a cam-to-cam comparison with the three cams watching Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano. These two aren't even in the running. The resolution is pretty good, but not great, and they're a bit smaller. (I should add that when the volcano is acting up, they are all slow to load from traffic.)

This web cam is located in Þórólfsfell, which has a view over the river Markarfljót and the glacier Eyjafjallajökull.

This live feed from a cam located in Þórólfsfell, on the other hand, is huge and copes relatively well with nightfall. The instructions say that nighttime viewing can be exciting, in fact, thanks to glowing from the volcano.

Speaking of coping, the BBC headline is "Flight chaos to continue into weekend."

(via KokuGamer) Listen up! 41,338,740 points is the new high score to beat on Asteroids. Seattle locksmith John McAllister took three days to rack it up. (The previous world-record title was set in 1982 by Scott Safran, with 41,336,440.)

If he's this John McAllister, ladies, he seems to be single, he can fix your locks, and the incredible tedium of three days of playing a 1979 video game with rudimentary graphics and audio doesn't phase him.

McAllister adds to our pantheon of Seattle-area world-class arcade gamers. Kirkland's Steve Wiebe is a Donkey Kong master. Personally, I would like to see some love given to Zaxxon.

The March 6, 2010, fireworks downtown, thanks to Lux_Tyro

With all due respect to Kara Ceriello, president of the Wallingford Chamber of Commerce, we can do without fireworks this year. Event producers One Reel, in their letter announcing the fireworks cancellation, says they were unable to secure corporate sponsorship of the event, a $500,000 fee.

You have to ask, especially now, what else our very limited supply of corporations who can afford a $500,000 gift might fund instead of fireworks? Maybe they could keep five vital non-profits open this year with $100,000 grants.

I know that spending "fun" money on serious things makes some people crazy. But our economic situation is very serious for thousands upon thousands of Seattle residents, and we seem to have lost touch with the idea of even temporary community sacrifice.

Let's not pretend we're experiencing some sort of fireworks deficit in the first place. There were fireworks downtown this March. We blew up the Space Needle for New Year's.

Fireworks on the Fourth has, in becoming an "annual tradition," become a stand-in for a creative community response to the holiday. It's the package we buy because who has time and there it is on the shelf, just like last year. We know the Fourth happened because we saw the fireworks on TV.

What would a real "Family Fourth" look like? Would it happen over several days, rather than a half-hour one evening? I feel like we can do better if we take the opportunity the recession is handing us to figure out what, exactly, we're celebrating. One Reel has hopes to bring back the fireworks next year. But this year, if we get the chance to plan our own party, what could we do instead?

The story, headlined "Google Responds to Privacy Concerns with Unsettlingly Specific Apology," contains this shout-out to our northern neighbors:

Added Schmidt, "Whether you're Michael Paulson who lives at 3425 Longview Terrace and makes $86,400 a year, or Jessica Goldblatt from Lynnwood, WA, who already has well-established trust issues, we at Google would just like to say how very, truly sorry we are."

Congratulations on Lynnwood's first namecheck by The Onion. Seattle has 88 mentions, including one from the future, where Seattle Mayor Frances Bean Cobain-Osment calls for emergency deforestation.

To catch you up for the sixth and final season of Lost, Portland-based cartoonists Graham Annable and Vera Brosgol have presented their own "Foggy memories of LOST" via Flickr.  It's got all your favorite lost moments, including Charlotte with a nose bleed, Hurley driving the Dharmamobile, and when Desmond met Jack.  Oh, misty water-colored Island memories.

Special to The SunBreak by John Hieger

Seattle lifers are experts on the random nooks and crannies of the neighborhoods they grew up driving around as shady teenagers. After a painful route running session on the luxurious Roosevelt High School practice field this week my friend, a Lake City lifer, asked if I wanted to see "the biggest rock ever"?

My inner, misguided nerd shot back, "Ayers Rock is in Australia."

"It's like five blocks away, let's check it."

So off we drove, me skeptical, him with an amused grin.  

Sure enough, around a random corner (28th Avenue NE, near NE 72nd Street) in one of those typical Ravenna/Wedgwood single-family neighborhoods sits the Wedgwood Rock, the biggest-ass boulder I'd never heard of. I was expecting something children could crawl on, but this thing could crush a school bus. You expect to see old Volvo station wagons in Wedgwood, not huge volcanic stones dropped from the last ice age 14,000 years ago.

"What did I say, bro? It's huge," my friend boasted.

I was impressed. "Why wasn't I told about this?"... (more)