Recent Stories in Off-Task

Sometimes Twitter's immediacy is positively eerie.

And now a video preview of what you're likely to see tonight, once the roads ice back up. People, charge your cameras! If you're driving, a safety tip: Avoid really steep hills. 

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The clothing-optional Needle? A low cloud cover keeps the secret well hidden.

If there's one reason to curse on live TV, it's Goodwill's annual Glitter sale.  (Also, I don't care if they are Manolos, newslady, those shoes are UGLY.)

(h/t Videogum)

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Ford is looking for adventurous individuals to participate in live auditions for "Focus Rally: America," a real-time interactive road rally starring the new 2012 Ford Focus, to be produced by Ford and the creators of The Amazing Race.

The rally, which will be streamed real-time on HULU, will feature six teams competing to complete tasks in a challenging cross-country road rally adventure to win a $100,000 grand prize, plus ten new Focuses for fans and supporters of the winning team.

WHEN: Wednesday, Oct. 27, 5 to 8 p.m.

WHERE: Pyramid Brewery and Alehouse, 1201 First Ave S., Seattle, WA 98134

DETAILS: For more information, go to www.focusrally.com.

Photoshop I made for the website Videogum.

Photo: Charles Redell, very good friend of The SunBreak who won't sue us for borrowing

Well, finally. Coke obviously goes with anything, but Dr. Pepper always had me stumped. I hope they do one on how to tell the difference between the salad spork and the regular spork next.

Of course, not all the action at Bumbershoot is on the ground. Here we see the Space Needle creating some sort of vortex.

Then BAM! a zeppelin appears. They circle each other for a bit, like veteran boxers. Neither flinches.

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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.