Monthly Archives: January 2012

News, Politics

After 7 Years, Governor Gregoire “Gets” Gay Marriage

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Governor Gregoire

“It’s time, it’s the right thing to do, and I will introduce a bill to do it,” lame duck Washington state Governor Gregoire said yesterday, announcing her intention to bring legislation permitting same-sex marriages in our state. “I say that as a wife, a mother, a student of the law, and above all as a Washingtonian with a lifelong commitment to equality and freedom. Some say domestic partnerships are the same as marriage. That’s a version of the discriminatory ‘separate but equal’ argument.”

If the bill passes the Legislature, Washington would be seventh in allowing gay marriage, after Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, in addition to the District of Columbia.

Reactions were predictable. Publicola quotes State Representative Matt Shea (R-4, Spokane Valley), whom they call the “lead social conservative in Olympia’s GOP caucus,” saying: “I am surprised same-sex marriage is a primary focus of the Democrats when the Legislature still has a 1.5 billion dollar budget shortfall to address as we enter the short 60-day, 2012 legislative session.”

Quite right! Let’s take a look at Shea’s work in that regard, courtesy of Publicola’s bullshit-detecting skills:

For his part, Shea is sponsoring bills: requiring parental notification for abortion; undoing the federal mandate on health care; exempting firearms from federal regulations; restricting the use of unmarked law enforcement cars on private property; and sending a message to President Obama demanding that he honor the 10th Amendment (states’ rights).

Oh, the sweet, sweet irony.

Meanwhile, The SunBreak inbox filled up with Seattle-side support for the Governor’s bill. On this point, at least, Mayor McGinn and the City Council agree. “I look forward to the moment when Seattle can join cities like Boston, New York and Washington D.C. in celebrating marriage equality,” said McGinn.

The Council’s Tom Rasmussen said, “The City of Seattle is on record supporting marriage for same sex couples and we will work with the Governor for passage this year,” while Sally Clark added, “We have work before us in this legislative session and beyond, but Gov. Gregoire’s is a critical voice in recognizing that all people are created equal and should be treated as such by their government.”

“The Governor,” reports the Seattle Times, “rejected the notion that she’s free to back same-sex marriage now because she’s not running for re-election.” There is some evidence that, as she suggests, Washington has been warming to the idea. The Times also quotes state senator Ed Murray, joking about the relative strength of ideological convictions: “I can get Republican votes for marriage, but I can’t get a Republican vote for a tax increase. Suddenly, gay marriage becomes easier than raising taxes. I never thought I’d say that.”

News, Travel

What To Do When You Leave Your iPad on a Plane

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The short answer is, Give up all hope of ever seeing it again.

As Consumerist puts it: “Airline Employees Really Don’t Care That You Left Your iPad On The Plane.” It is, of course, something that you would never do in the first place, happy person still in possession of your iPad. You will always be extremely careful with your iPad, and listen carefully to that reminder about making sure you have collected all your items. But let this Consumerist story be a lesson to you–once you’ve left the plane, your iPad is likely gone. To disabuse anyone of the notion that airlines have the time and staff to look for an iPad–more Consumerist stories aside–I can offer my own experience.

On my way back from Puerto Rico, flying US Airways, I had a connecting flight in Charlotte, where I changed planes for the final leg to Seattle. I was in the middle of reading Game of Thrones on the Kindle app, and so I stuffed my iPad into the seatback in front of me. I also pulled out my camera–since the view out my porthole was gorgeous–and spent the entire flight happily clicking away. As we pulled up to the gate, the person in the seat behind me dropped their phone, and had me look under my seat for it. Then I grabbed my camera and the extra lens, packed up, and left the plane.

About an hour into the Charlotte-Seattle flight, I reached into my bag for my iPad–and suddenly remembered stuffing it into the seatback of my last plane. Still, it’d been only two or three hours, so no reason to panic. That was the night of December 17, 2011.

Now, I’m a little astonished by my naivete. I actually had the idea that US Airways staff might, from the plane, alert the cleaning staff about my iPad. It wasn’t as expensive as my camera, but with the Logitech wireless keyboard I was using as a faceplate, it would set me back over $700 to replace. Maybe insurance will help cover that–but what starts to eat at you is the worry about what sensitive information might be accessible. Was there any? Who can be sure? It’ll lock, right? How impossible is a four-character code to break?

The flight attendant did not drop everything to alert US Airways Lost & Found HQ of my emergency, you probably have guessed. People–other people, not you, happy person still in possession of their iPad–forget and leave their iPads on the plane all the time. I was supposed to tell the agent at the gate when we arrived in Seattle, which I did. She directed me to the Lost & Found at SeaTac’s baggage claim area, where I filed an incident report sufficient to ID my iPad, complete with the seat number where it was located.

But, again, this information was not going to be communicated to anyone who might walk onto the plane and check the seatback in question. If an iPad was found by a cleaning or maintenance crew, and they noted the seatback it came from, it might help. I left SeaTac with the number for the US Airways Lost & Found at the Charlotte airport (704-359-3075), and called and left a message the next morning, giving them the pertinent details.

They called back, and said a) they don’t normally call back to say they have found nothing, and b) they hadn’t found my iPad. I was to give them another day and call again. Which I did. Still nothing, though they had several other iPads on hand that they powered up to check if any were mine. (The Lost & Found has an iPad power cord to deal with dead batteries.)

It was in the course of these phone calls that I learned no one was ever going to just walk onto the plane and check the seatback for me. If a cleaning crew didn’t find my iPad, it would have to wait for a passenger to notice it. An added wrinkle, with iPads, is that if you’ve enabled Find My iPhone tracking software, you can tell if someone has used it to connect to the internet, and even determine its location. (Mine remains obstinately offline.) But knowing that it wasn’t being used made me suspect it hadn’t simply been stolen, but perhaps had traveled with the plane to another airport.

After an hour or so on the phone with US Airways, I learned that they were unable to tell me where my plane had gone to next. This was a little hard to credit, as was their assurance that my missing iPad would have been found before the plane took off again. But in any event, all items unclaimed from US Airways Lost & Founds after about a week make their way to what I fondly imagine to be a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style warehouse-sized Lost & Found in Charlotte, NC. You email them a passenger property form (pdf), and, in my case, in two days they send you an email that reads:

Dear [MvB]:
Thanks for contacting US Airways. I’m sorry to hear that you misplaced an item during your trip.
I reviewed your Lost Property file and your iPad has not been located at this time. I’m sorry the result could not have been better.
[MvB], if we do find your item, we’ll be sure to contact you right away. Thanks for flying with US Airways.
Sincerely,

Goodbye, iPad. For two and half months, we shared some times I know I’ll never forget. Maybe you’re in a better place.

Crime, News

A Belltown New Year’s Eve Shooting Passes Without Much Notice

If you went downtown and unloaded a clip on a crowded New Year’s Eve sidewalk, you’d think people would take notice. People in the vicinity did. One @DoubleAyeee tweeted: “I’m in belltown and was standing right by a shooting never ran so fast.” As it happened, the superhero-costumed Phoenix Jones and a film crew were standing across the street, so you can try to count the shots. I hear 13 or 14.

But when the frightened revelers turned to Seattle media to find out what happened, there was silence. The shooting of a park ranger at Mount Rainier, perhaps, was claiming everyone’s attention. The Seattle Police Blotter does have an entry on a New Year’s Eve “shooting downtown,” but they mean the one at 8th and Pine that left two wounded. (The Gang Unit now believes that both the shooters there were apprehended.) SPD’s media officer wanted to be sure I knew how many reports of gun shots they had to look into each New Year’s Eve.

If you look at the listings under Weapon in the police reports, there’s nothing to indicate Belltown, but under Assaults there is this felony noted at the “1XX BLOCK OF BELL ST”:

Offense : #1 1304 – 0 ASSLT-AGG-GUN – COMPLETED
Offense : #2 1305 – 0 ASSLT-AGG-WEAPON – COMPLETED
Offense : #3 2903 – 0 PROPERTY DAMAGE-NON RESIDENTIA – COMPLETED
Offense : #4 3599 – 5 NARC-POSSESS-PILL/TABLET – COMPLETED

Until this morning, the best summary we had was still Belltown People’s word-of-mouth report: “We heard from a witness that the gang units were investigating and at least one person was shot, two people were seen leaving the scene in handcuffs.”

But Seattlepi.com’s Inside Belltown Blog tracked down Phoenix Jones to get his recap of events: “The gunfire happened in an alleyway behind a fire truck that was apparently still on site for the Aid Response called in earlier. According to the video and Jones, Seattle Police arrived roughly 35-seconds after shots were fired and immediately captured one of the shooters, and chased the other shooter down the alleyway.”

In response to concerns about crime downtown, the city is launching an effort to clean up Third Avenue. “The City Council also added more than $500,000 to the 2012 budget for street improvements, better lighting, bus shelters and more frequent cleaning,” reports the Seattle Times.

News, Transportation, Travel

Paying to Cross 520: Is It Worth It?

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Tolling on 520 has begun, meaning that it could cost you as much as five bucks to get across Lake Washington. Obviously, if you work at Microsoft, the old adage, “You’ve got to spend money to make money,” applies most vigorously. But the rest of us must make a decision. Is it worth it?

While the Eastside is a lovely place to live and work, there isn’t much over there you’d go out of your way to see. No Eastside location appears on this Top 10 Washington Attractions list, nor on this one or this one or this one. The closest thing the Eastside has to a unique destination is the underrated Rosalie Whyel Museum of Doll Art. I say underrated because I’ve never seen anyone rate it and it does at least seem to exist.

A couple of top Northwest outdoor attractions — Snoqualmie Falls, Mount Si, the Issaquah Alps — must be reached by crossing Lake Washington, but they hardly qualify as being on the “Eastside” as we commonly think of it. Besides, you take I-90 to get to those, and I-90 remains completely free!

Restaurants are a different matter. Two of Zagat’s top 10 Seattle-area restaurants–Herbfarm, in Woodinville, and Cafe Juanita, in Kirkland–are best reached via 520. But if you’re eating at Cafe Juanita or Herbfarm, I’m thinking that parting with $5 isn’t likely to cause undue financial strain.

For those of us who prefer to keep our dinner tabs in the double-digits, the best reason to pay $5 to drive over the Lake Washington Floating Bridge might be simply this: to drive over the Lake Washington Floating Bridge!

Consider: It is actually the largest floating bridge in the world! Due to the fact that the rest of the world stupidly thinks waterways look better without pavement on them, our area has a near-monopoly in the longest-floating-bridge rankings. Four of the world’s five largest floating bridges are in Washington state, with only Guyana’s Demerara Harbor Bridge interloping on our floating bridge dominance. 520 is #1.

Just think, as you drive across, that no one in the entire world has ever driven an vehicle across pavement that’s floating on water further than you are at that moment! (Until we blow Guyana out of the top five with a bridge across Lake Washington lengthwise.) For only $5!

As you may know, you can reduce the cost of your world-record-tying voyage by traveling at non-peak hours. From 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., there is no toll to drive across 520. If you must travel during the day, you will pay pay less if buy the state’s pre-paid tolls card, the “Good to Go!” Pass, which was named by a committee of heavily caffeinated seventh-grade boys. The $5 peak-time price is only $3.50 if you pre-pay–and that $1.50 you save could pay for an extra drop of wine at Herb Farm.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Local Hero LeRoy Bell Plays to a Partying Audience at the Moore

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The Moore Theatre was pretty packed New Year’s Eve for LeRoy Bell’s first concert since his appearance on The X Factor. If the audience was made up entirely of judges, he was certainly a winner with his soulful performance.

Bell made occasional mention of The X Factor (which he called “a show I’ll keep nameless”), providing the following insights:

  • At the Key Arena audition (Bell is from Edmonds), he was told last-minute that he couldn’t use his backing track because it contained the briefest of vocals, so he had to sing his original a cappella. Afterward, judge L.A. Reid asked, “Do you do anything we know?” Bell then performed the chorus of “Lean on Me,” praying he didn’t have to go into the verses, which he couldn’t have done because “I don’t know other people’s songs.”
  • He described his experience with The X Factor as a pregnancy, as it started back in the spring and just finished. He misses the constant 75-degree days of southern California, but is glad to be back to the mellow lifestyle of the Pacific Northwest.
  • He laughed off the prevailing notion that he’s a postman who came back to music, explaining that he’s been a working musician through the years. Bass player Terry Morgan added that Leroy Bell and His Only Friends released five CDs in the past decade, and that “we’re not waiting for someone else to tell us what to do…we’re already doing it.”

When Bell asked how many people watched The X Factor, an audience member yelled “only because you were on it.” Much of the crowd clearly knew his music, calling out requests and cheering consistently. Bell’s voice rang clearest in his solo performance of “Mama Said,” but what surprised new fans (and might have bolstered his national support on The X Factor) was his energy while playing guitar and harmonica, as in the crowd-pleasing “How Many Times.”

Songs like that brought the young people (predominantly women) toward the stage to dance, and even some of Bell’s 60-something peers (okay, he’s just sixty, though you’d never know by his looks) to their feet.

Bell, who said he’s “usually asleep by midnight,” led the audience in ringing in the new year, and promised a return as part of a tour in 2012.

Here’s LeRoy Bell performing “How Many Times,” recorded live on the “Bob Rivers Show” on 95.7 KJR: