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So you're sitting at home, and you decide you want to watch something on Netflix. You've got Comcast (excuse me, Xfinity) broadband, streaming is a snap. You pay extra for that bandwidth, but it's worth it and now is one of those times.
You'd be upset if Comcast looked over your usage and charged you $1 for streaming a movie from Netflix, wouldn't you? You're already paying them for bandwidth. And Comcast knows that.
So that's why they're charging the company that streams Netflix movies instead. Level 3, Inc., operates one of the internet backbones that Netflix uses to stream their content, and Comcast presented them with a "take it or leave it" offer on November 22. If they didn't pay up, Comcast subscribers wouldn't get Netflix, at least, not online.
"With this action, Comcast is preventing competing content from ever being delivered to Comcast’s subscribers at all, unless Comcast’s unilaterally determined toll is paid--even though Comcast’s subscribers requested the content," said Thomas Stortz, Level 3's Chief Legal Officer.
"Comcast, the largest U.S. cable TV company, has set up an Internet 'toll booth,' charging Level 3 whenever customers request content," sums Bloomberg. It may be a toll booth, but it's a phantom toll booth, at least to Comcast customers. If Level 3's costs go up and they charge Netflix more, and Netflix's costs go up, and they charge you more, that's...well, that's good for Comcast's On-Demand division, isn't it?...
Piper. Bagpiper. (Photo from Lux Tyro in our Flickr pool.)
Tomorrow is the last day of National Novel Writing Month. Seattle's team, the Hydrophobic Ducks, is still in first place with a total word count of 49,289,518. Los Angeles, Germany, London, and New York City fill out the rest of the top five. I'll have the full wrap on Wednesday, after my hands quit cramping.
In the meantime, and if you're not participating, maybe you could read a book or something.
11/29/10 3 p.m. Barnes & Noble U-Village
Carolyn Douglas
Storytime
Rescheduled due to snow. Children's stories with anchor Douglas.
11/29/10 6 p.m. Pilot Books
Writer's Group
"New exercises every week. Come prepared to write and discuss." Aye, Cap'n!
11/29/10 7 p.m. Elliott Bay Book Company
Jack Shoemaker
presenting the work of Gary Snyder
Counterpoint Press editor Shoemaker presents reissues of Snyder's work, with a screening of a documentary about the poet.
11/29/10 7:30 p.m. Town Hall Seattle
Antonio Damasio
Self Comes to Mind: Constructing The Conscious Brain
"...my head I'd be scratchin', while my thoughts were busy hatchin', if I only had a brain."
11/30/10 10 a.m. Barnes & Noble U-Village
Interagency Academy with Jordan Babineaux
Poetry Reading
The Seahawks player reads poetry with students from IA. Fabu.
11/30/10 6:30 p.m. UW Campus, Kane Hall, Room 120
Wes Jackson
Consulting the Genius of the Place
Jackson will be discussing "The Need of a 50-Year Farm Bill and What it Might Look Like".
11/30/10 7 p.m. Secret Garden Books
Molly Coxe
Benjamin and Bumper to the Rescue
Ultimate Tuesday reading with the author.
11/30/10 7 p.m. Elliott Bay Book Company
Nancy Medwell
Eternal Moments
The Seattle-based artist presents her new book of photos.
11/30/10 7:30 p.m. Town Hall Seattle
Fen Montaigne
Fraser's Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica
Our friends in feathered formal-wear are in grave danger! Send help....
End of October, a wave of credit card fraud caught people's attention, with BECU acknowledging some 100 cases reported by its Capitol Hill customers. A month later, the U.S. Secret Service is saying that over 1,000 credit and debit card accounts may have been breached by a foreign hacker. Reports Bank Info Security:
The scheme appears to involve the sale or distribution of the stolen account information to numerous individuals across the country, as well as in foreign countries. Those individuals then used the information to make purchases against the consumer accounts.
Capitol Hill Seattle (CHS) reported on the story from the ground up, discovering that the Broadway Grill restaurant was the victim of a hack of its software, and then the hacker was able to "leapfrog from the restaurant's access to a critical server in the transaction process where account information was available."
"He was able to access numbers off the server going back prior to October," Secret Service Agent Bob Kierstead told CHS, gaining access to accounts of people who had never eaten at Broadway Grill. At that time, fraud reports had totaled about 400. ...
We're headed for a "very wet Monday afternoon" says KING 5's Rich Marriott, as a storm blows in with wind and rain. Up in the mountains that means snow, and if you're planning on a trip through the passes, consult with WSDOT first. Higher elevations are expected to get some six to twelve inches of snow from this storm.
Speaking of the weather, Cliff Mass is excited about two new ways you have to track weather online. There's a radar aggregator the UW has cooked up (that's where the screenshot comes from), and the kids in atmospherics have put together WINDWATCH, which...well, the name is fairly self-explanatory.
It's also timely, since this storm is expected to bring high winds just north of Seattle, and you can see what the models predict. Looks like the worst of it is supposed to come around 10 p.m. this evening.
An awesome Hipstamatic shot from friend-of-the-site Jennyrh8, in our Flickr pool.
A Husky fan demonstrates size of Sark's balls (via Facebook)
Your season's on the line. Two seconds left. Down by three points. Six inches from the goal line. You need a win to make the postseason. Do you kick a field goal and try to win in overtime? Or risk the whole #$!$@% thing on one play?
Husky football coach Steve Sarkisian chose the latter, the Huskies won, and now Sark's testicles--specifically, their size and constitution--are a matter for public comment.
"Retracting (happily) my previous comments re: Sark. Giant big massive balls." -- TBTL's Luke Burbank (@lukeburbank)
"Boulders on Sark right there. Wow." -- @warrencb11
"Sark will need wheelbarrel to carry his cajones after this week." -- @kingwabbit
"Sark tiene grande cajones." -- @_bmc123_
"HOLY FUCK!!! YESSSSSSS!!!!! #HUSKIES!!! ! Sark has HUGE stones" -- @Ryan_C_M
So, Sark, how much time did you take to decide whether to go for it? "None, really," he told reporters after the game. "We've been aggressive since day one since I got here, and we're not going to change."
After deciding to go for the win, Sark had two tasks. First, to decide what play to run. Second, to rally his troops.
He'd run a quarterback sneak to the left on the previous play, and saw that Cal would be looking for it again. "They were really piled in the A-gaps and the four-point stances," he said. So he threw the Bears a change up: a dive to running back Chris Polk to the right....
The snow and Thanksgiving are over, but chances are your relatives are still in town. Take a few hours off from awkward conversation/family time with a new DVD release, care of our good friends at Scarecrow Video.
Your mom probably wants to watch Eat Pray Love, starring Julia Roberts as Julia Roberts, undergoing a soul-shaking reawakening via food, spirituality, and yoga, while your douchebag brother-in-law wants to see old men (Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Steve Austin, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger) beating each other up in The Expendables. Your weirdo cousin is interested in Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck's performance art bullshit piece I'm Still Here, and your grandma wants to watch Rob Reiner's kiddie 60s romance Flipped. Of course, the kiddos get to watch the special diamond edition of Beauty and the Beast.
But there's more to choose from than just the big releases. Twisty kidnapping thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed stars Bond girl Gemma Arterton, and Tyler Perry is back in Madea's Big Happy Family: The Play. Meanwhile, Sam Rockwell is affable as always as a girls' high school basketball coach in The Winning Season....
- Many brave the cold for the 2010 Turkey Trot (My Ballard)
- Armed man killed by SWAT team (Beacon Hill Blog)
- How they're going to demolish the McGuire (Belltown Messenger)
- Belltown: News in Review (belltownpeople)
- 15th/Union hatchet murder: Coverage round-up (Capitol Hill Seattle)
- Three say held up at gunpoint, hit with pepper spray at Columbia and MLK (Central District News)
- Fire damages Lakeview Boulevard apartment (Eastlake Ave)
- Get To Know The Fremont Siphon (Fremont Universe)
- An alternate view on snow days (Blogging Georgetown)
- When Green Lake froze: A look back at winters past (My Green Lake)
- Thanksgiving day fire in Magnolia leaves 1 dead (Magnolia Voice)
- Burglary prevention tips for the holidays (Maple Leaf Life)
- Aftermath of this morning’s Greenwood fire (PhinneyWood)
- QA pet tragically electrocuted on Thanksgiving Day (Queen Anne View)
- 911 Log: Kid iJacked at Gunpoint on Beacon Hill + More (Rainier Valley Post)
- Missing a part of your frozen flock? (Ravenna Blog)
- Cliff Mass Bingo! (Roosiehood)
- Hundreds fill streets in huge melee outside Seattle club (KOMO SoDo)
- Lightrail Happy Hour Stop #2: University St (Southend Seattle)
- Task force tries to tackle transit shortfall (South Seattle Beacon)
- Person of the Week: U-District Farmers Market’s Bill Whitbeck (U District Daily)
- Christmas display to light up Tangletown (My Wallingford)
- Followup: Storm-evicted, & rescued, Lincoln Park bees’ ‘comeback’ (West Seattle Blog)
"Savior" Must Save Himself
Probably Joni Mitchell did not write "Big Yellow Taxi" with college football in mind, but really, don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
In a previous lifetime, Husky fans didn't worry about whether their team would go to a bowl game. They worried about which one. Former head coach Jim Lambright, a defensive genius and heir to Don James, was fired after leading the 1998 Dawgs to the Oahu Bowl, partially because UW fans thought the Oahu Bowl was as beneath us as beating Oregon State by any less than three touchdowns.
Now, after seven seasons without a postseason appearance (despite the fact that the number of bowl games has grown 40 percent in that time), Husky fans would be thrilled with any bowl. Beef 'O Brady's St. Petersburg Bowl? Sign us up, and pass the Nachos 'O Brady (TM).
Teams need at least a .500 record to make a bowl game. The Huskies are 4-6. So they'll need a win Saturday at Cal to keep their hopes alive. The Dawgs are a 7-point underdog against a Cal program that's in disarray. A 48-14 blowout loss to Stanford in "The Big Game" has Cal fans disheartened. Their once potent passing attack was already bad with disappointing senior Kevin Riley behind center--then Riley got hurt. Replacement Brock Mansion, a junior, hasn't thrown a TD pass in any of his three starts, and has tossed 4 interceptions....
Pro tip: A laptop aids in the pounds-per-hour to kilograms, and Fahrenheit to Celcius conversion.
Our correspondent Mindy Jones is a Seattleite living in Paris for two years. When she's not busy trying to figure out what the French are saying, she's busy trying to figure out what to say to the French. She posts frequently at An American Mom in Paris.
Holidays abroad can be lonely. When a holiday rolls around, we ache a little and talk about home a lot. We put on happy smiles for the Skype session involving every relative we have, plus a few we didn't know existed, all of them crammed into one room chatting and laughing and having drunken angry fistfights while we suffer the family togetherness from too far away. Then we crawl into the corner to cry and drink wine.
Thanksgiving, especially, can be bleak because it's a non-event here in pilgrim-free France. Christmas and New Year's are happy times because the city is full of fellow revelers but for Thanksgiving, you're on your own. You still have to go to work and you don't get the long weekend to eat cold turkey sandwiches and buy bigger pants.
Last year, determined to make Thanksgiving happen in the middle of Paris, we banded together with a group of fellow American ex-pats. New York Mom was in charge of procuring and cooking the bird. The butcher's eyes widened when she said she wanted to purchase the grandest turkey in all of France. He frowned and said the turkey she wanted was way too big for seven adults and a handful of children. She said, Duh, that was the point. He unhappily sold her the bird, probably assuming most of it would go to waste, but he doesn't know Americans like we know Americans.
I was in charge of my specialty, midwestern cheesy potatoes--"midwestern" because the recipe calls for a can of cream of mushroom soup and a crunchy corn flake topping. I was also responsible for tracking down a jar of cranberry sauce. No one in our group liked cranberry sauce but we agreed it should still be present on the table, preferably plopped into a bowl and still in the shape of the can like mama used to make....
Photo: Capitol Hill Seattle blog
Mid-morning Monday, as snow was falling, Michael LaRosa walked up to a man he didn't know and repeatedly struck the 58-year-old's head with a hatchet, killing him, say Seattle police. The murder, on the 1400 block of East Union Street, occurred in view of students in a nearby school. ("I don't know what came over me, because I've never done murder, you know," LaRosa later told detectives.)
The Seattle Times contacted LaRosa's half-brother, in Florida, who said LaRosa has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but occasionally believes he's well enough to quit taking medication. "Since moving to Seattle nearly three years ago, LaRosa had become a patient at Sound Mental Health on Capitol Hill and enrolled in Seattle Mental Health Court as part of a 2009 municipal-court case involving an assault on a security guard," reports the Times.
For Capitol Hill residents, those circumstances bring back all-too-vivid memories of the 2007 New Year's Eve murder of Shannon Harps by a Sound Mental Health patient with paranoid schizophrenia. (CHS: "In 2009, James Williams, who was receiving treatment and medication from Sound Mental Health prior to his crime, pleaded guilty to the stabbing murder of 31-year-old Shannon Harps....")
About a year ago, I wrote a piece called "King County's Mental Health is Deteriorating," based on an interview with Amnon Shoenfeld, director of the King County Mental Health, Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division. Schoenfeld mentioned the stress his department was under to deal with people whose mental illnesses made them unsafe for society, as funding was being cut for programs that paid for medications, and kept the dangerously unstable under constant supervision. ...
By ChristineMphotos in our Flickr pool.
BOOM goes the SNOWnamite.
Wednesday, November 24th
- It's set to be a very chic night, with the art rock of Blonde Redhead and Icelandic singer-songwriter Ólöf Arnalds @ the Showbox
- Truckasaurus celebrates their new album release with a party @ Chop Suey
- Celebrate Thanksgiving Eve with a tamale from new neighborhood restaurant Patty Pan @ the Bottleneck
- Last night to catch the terrific what's-wrong-with-the-bees documentary Colony @ Northwest Film Forum
- Michael McLean stars in The Forgotten Carols @ Benaroya Hall
Thursday, November 25th
- No cook handy? Try a Thanksgiving dinner @ one of five local eating spots
Born at Wazzu, Woodland Park Zoo's grizzlies, 16-year-old brothers Keema and Denali, are Cougars! From Nov. 25 through Dec. 5, wear any apparel from Washington State University or UW (or show a valid student ID) and receive 50% off admission at the zoo in celebration of the Apple Cup. Photo credit: Lisa Allen...
Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancers Lesley Rausch and Jeffrey Stanton in George Balanchine's Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (Photo: ©Angela Sterling)
Pacific Northwest Ballet has just sent out a news release announcing that principal Jeffrey Stanton will retire after the 2010-11 season. He will have danced with PNB for 17 years, after coming to Seattle from San Francisco Ballet.
"I can now retire from my professional ballet career knowing that I gave it everything I had," says Stanton. Peter Boal remembers in particular one performance that Stanton did just that: "Jeff is perhaps the best hoofer I have ever seen in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. During one of his triumphant performances in this role he suffered a severe sprain of his ankle. Sitting in the audience, I never knew. Jeff continued to dance with all of the charm and swagger that the role required. Audiences would never have guessed that Jeff left the theater that night in a wheelchair."
Read the full release after the jump:...
Isaiah Thomas
Lucky Dawgs. Instead of suffering through #snOMG, they're in Maui (today's high, 81 F) playing in the elite Maui Invitational. Today at 6:30 p.m. PST they'll play against a nationally-televised game against one of college basketball's legendary programs, the University of Kentucky.
So, in a sense, lucky us. With a night that's almost guaranteed to be spent indoors, your entertainment options aren't limited to whichever CSI is on tonight. Instead you can watch what I expect to be one of the most thrilling games in Washington basketball history.
If you read any article about this game, you will no doubt encounter the fact that star Kentucky freshman Terrence Jones originally committed to Washington, then changed his mind and went to the Wildcats. This has been anointed a "Story Line" by rabid fans and media, but "Story Lines" rarely make for compelling sports.
What makes this game so compelling is the battle between talent and teamwork. The Huskies have humiliated all three of their opponents this season. Not just offensively (the Dawgs are averaging 107.3 points/game, best in the nation), but on defense, where the Huskies have forced 68 opponent turnovers.
The Dawgs aren't just talented, they are playing with a team focus that I've never seen from them before....
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.
...
As skeptical as I was about going on a food-related trip to Whistler, I was even more skeptical about making a similar trip to Vancouver Island. I’d been to both places about fifteen years ago, but I figured that Whistler had probably evolved more. The Olympics were there, foreigners hung out there on an ongoing basis, and you could drive there from Vancouver. It’s part of Canada, whereas Victoria is, what, part of England? I always told inquirers that it’s a place you only need to see once. Too prim-and-proper. See the Gardens, enjoy the buskers, maybe have tea…but bring some cartons of Chinese food from Vancouver if you want something good to eat.
And then, recently, I got gifted a bottle of balsamic vinegar from Venturi-Shultze, and told that Vancouver Island is a bounty of good food. One sip of the vinegar, and I was already making plans to give Victoria and environs another chance.
And am I glad I did!It’s an easy trip from Seattle. My partner and I planned on the Victoria Clipper outbound and then a return via a Kenmore Air seaplane in order to experience the trip both ways. Three hours on the boat gave me time to review our itinerary, as the eating would begin almost immediately upon arrival. It was a majestic entry into the harbor, and then just a quick (five-minutes or so) walk to the Inn at Laurel Point, our home-away-from-home in Victoria....
This morning, the following roads are closed:
- 1700-2200 block of East Madison Street
- 19th Avenue Eeast and Boyer Avenue West
- Dravus Street from 20th Avenue West to 27th Avenue West
- 6th Avenue South from Yesler Way to South Main Street
- Northeast 51st Street and Latona Avenue
- Northeast Denny Way from Melrose to Stewart
- 23rd Avenue East at Alder Street
- Marion Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue
- Northeast 50th Street at University Way
- Northeast East Marginal Way South at South Michigan Street
- 6th Avenue at Madison Street
Our Flickr pool's Chris Blakeley came across this SUV "abandoned maybe fifteen feet away from the top of Queen Anne." Other drivers weren't so lucky.
Looking west on E. John St.
Here's the latest street closures from SDOT:
- Northbound and southbound Alaskan Way Viaduct
- West Dravus Street between 20 and 27 Avenues
- Battery St. Tunnel
- NE 5100 block of Latona Ave. N
- Denny Way between Melrose and Stewart Sts.
I would just add that the streets are sheets of ice, and an hour ago I watched two cars do full 360s down Denny over I-5. They were creeping along, not speeding--it's just extremely slippery out there. SDOT will be out salting roads, but they warn that bridges and elevated structures require an abundance of caution. The storm is supposed to finish its snow-dumping work by 10 p.m., but the morning commute will still be ice-tastic. Less stressful photos after the jump:...
Photo: Ryan Hawk/Woodland Park Zoo
(My apologies if you were in the mood for some brawny men building a snow fort.) The Woodland Park Zoo closed to the public at 3 p.m. today because of the snowy conditions, but that doesn't mean zoo residents had to huddle inside, too. The bears were putting those fur coats to good use.
Our Flickr pool's shawnmebo is already back with snow day shots! That's fast!
UW meteorologist Cliff Mass has been putting out updates fast and furiously regarding the snow forecast for today, which is changing hourly as snow accumulates. Now he's concerned about "serious snow."
His latest post (titled "Humility") says we're pretty much guaranteed "2-4 inches south of the city, with roughly 1-2 inches on the north side. More as you head towards the Cascades and south." (Let's go to the radar!)
But looking at the way things are setting up, that might not be the worst in store:
The 11 AM surface map...just available shows a 1002-mb low over the NW tip of the Olympic Peninsula and the latest visible image show VERY unstable air offshore. If the low goes south of us and draws some of that cold, unstable air in...and it meets the cold stream from the north, we are talking about serious snow (6-12 inches).
Mass was earlier led astray by models which had the low farther south of Seattle, bringing us a blast of cold air but not much in the way of snow. ("Clearly, this was not a great success for the models--clearly more is getting farther north than forecast this morning.")
Might as well head home and fire up the hot chocolate, and wait to see what transpires.
Billy Collins needs a new publicity photo.
As everyone who has lived in Seattle for more than one winter knows, when it snows, this city shuts down. Have you looked outside? That's not flour. Not that there is much reason to leave the house, at least on the literary front.
Billy Collins is at Town Hall tonight, which will be fun for those who got tickets before they sold out. Collins is an enthusiastic and entertaining speaker, so his appearances are always a pleasure. Tomorrow, Jared Duval will visit Town Hall to discuss open-sourcing in the context of activism, and if you're in U-Village on Saturday, doing that post-ritual sacrifice shopping thing, stop by the Barnes & Noble to unload your kids onto David, the B&N Assistant Manager who has been scapegoated to keep the wee bairns occupied for an hour or so.
11/22/10 4 p.m. Barnes & Noble U-Village
Carolyn Douglas
Storytime
An anchor-person will "share her favorite stories with you." Hm.
11/22/10 6 p.m. Pilot Books
Writer's Group
"New exercises every week. Come prepared to write and discuss." Aye, Cap'n!
11/22/10 7 p.m. Town Hall Seattle
Billy Collins
Seattle Arts & Lectures
Collins served as Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, has published nine collections of poetry, and is a funny, funny guy. This might be a reason to leave the house, tonight. Alas, tickets sold out a month ago.
11/22/10 7 p.m. Elliott Bay Book Company
Elsie Hulsizer
Glaciers, Bears and Totems: Sailing in Search of the Real Southeast Alaska
The local author and her husband hit the American fjords. There may be a PowerPoint presentation. You've been warned.
11/22/10 7:30 p.m. Town Hall Seattle
Stephen L. Macknik & Susana Martinez-Conde
Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about our Everyday Deceptions
The founders of the field of "neuromagic" want to hack your brain.
11/22/10 8 p.m. Pilot Books
Jacqueline Suskin
The Collected
Poetry reading and signing....
We're going another way with Glimpses this morning. No snOMG pictures. Pure Kodachrome summer, courtesy of our Flickr pool's Great_Beyond, who writes:
"While summer '10 is all but dead and buried around town, thanks to the lag between me taking Kodachrome pictures and actually developing/posting them, we can still enjoy fragments of it.
Ah, summer...."
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