You know those jokes about construction workers just standing around? Washington’s Department of Transportation just put up a timelapse video on YouTube of what they did over the weekend that will make you feel pretty lazy in comparison. SR 520 was closed from 11 p.m. Friday night until 5 a.m. Monday morning, and one of the projects WSDOT worked into the bridge inspection was the installation of an 11-foot-diameter culvert beneath all lanes of SR 520 just west of I-405. (The fish say thank you.)
The weekend passes in one minute, forty-eight seconds, and the action is non-stop. I give it five stars, even if the race-against-time setup feels a little predictable.
We wanted to leave you with something topical for the July 4th holiday, and stumbled across this video ride-along of the Ladder 10 firetruck responding to a call. Perfect! Someone’s bound to set something on fire for the Fourth. There are tons of public firework displays, but more than a few people like their gunpowder to singe a little, despite the fact that they’re illegal in Seattle.
“[I]f you’re caught with fireworks you could spend up to 1 year in jail, or have to pay up to a $5,000 fine,” reports KIRO 7, adding that police strongly advise you not to call 911 when the inevitable M80 goes off. Call (206) 625-5011 instead, they request.
Ladder 10, so you know, is part of the Seattle Fire Department’s Battalion 2, and lives at 1300 East Pine Street, on Capitol Hill. It gets called off before it reaches the scene, so it’s a bit anticlimactic.
We don’t know what this videographer’s precise reason was for the trip–other than the obvious “that’s just what we do“–but we do know you have to be a) at least 18 years old, and b) have a “business reason” to go on a ride-along. A 20-minute fire house tour, on the other hand, sounds a lot easier to set up. One major caveat is that the fire department personnel may run away from you if they get called to a fire, and you may feel foolish for a moment, just standing there.
Also: “Birthday party groups meeting the age requirement are welcome to tour a fire station but may not hold party festivities at the station. No cake and ice cream, please.”
Back in November 2010, this video posted to YouTube of walking from SeaTac baggage claim to the light rail station. It’s since had more than 8,000 views (with no thumbs down — some kind of YouTube record). Sound Transit’s Central Link light rail, running almost 16 miles between downtown Seattle and SeaTac airport, is the cheapest and easiest way to make the trip. The full distance from SeaTac to Westlake Station takes just under 40 minutes, and costs $2.75.
(Map: Port of Seattle)
Depending on time of day, the trains run every seven-and-a-half to 20 minutes. Monday through Saturday, the last train leaves SeaTac at 12:10 a.m. (first train, 5:04 a.m.). On Sundays [because Seattle is not a real city — ed.] the last train leaves at 11:05 p.m. (first train, 6:19 a.m.). Is it that smart to spend $2.57 billion on a transit service and not run it all hours?
One thing the video skips — it does point out the one-time ticket machines — is the placement of the yellow card readers for ORCA card holders. They’re not on the platform where you board the train, they’re down by the ticket machines and easy to walk right past without noticing.
But first you’ve got to find out where the train is.
Signs pointing you to the light rail station, which is connected via a covered walkway about 1,000 feet long, are too few, small, and infrequent once you exit the terminal itself. Like almost all airports, travelers are faced with a thicket of signs for every conceivable thing, so it’s difficult to call out one destination or mode. But certainly the Port of Seattle could do more to orient travelers at that crucial moment they exit the doors of the terminal and begin turning in circles.
1,000 feet is a significant investment for a footsore passenger (note that if you are at the farthest baggage claim the full trek is almost a half-mile). Plus, there are enough bends in the passageway to keep you wondering what’s at the end of it, so you’d really want to see something continuous that confirms you’ve taken the right path, like perhaps a stenciled light rail train running down the floor in front of you. We won’t even suggest the prospect of a smart sign indicating when the next train leaves, stationed at the beginning of the walkway.
Sound Transit’s light rail home page offers travelers no walking map , nor even a link to the Port of Seattle’s map. Puget Sound transit agencies often seem to engage in a sort of counterintelligence when it comes to things like this.
[UPDATE: ST’s Bruce Gray points out the Sound Transit home page does have an airport-light rail map, which makes the absence of a link from the light rail home page particularly strange — if you search Google for “seatac light rail” after all, that is where you end up, not Sound Transit’s home page. To get to the map from there, you need to click on a “Rider’s Guide” that covers all of Sound Transit, read through 10 options, and then choose Popular Destinations, then choose SeaTac Airport.]
What’s interesting about the video above, as traffic for it continues to grow, is that seems terribly easy for Sound Transit and the Port of Seattle to have produced their own version, and yet they have not.
DCFC’s hangdog nice-guy Ben Gibbard takes a walk on the wild side in the video for “Teardrop Windows.” His new “Thug 4 Life” tattoo inspires a series of hugs. Keep at it, Ben: Fake it ’til you make it.
In “Sleeping By Myself,” Eddie Vedder fills the lonely hours by making a ukulele. When’s the last time you saw a band sander in a video? Attentive viewers will also learn the names of different Hawaiian woods. It’s nice to know Vedder has something to fall back on if this Pearl Jam thing doesn’t work out.
Macklemore, Ryan Lewis, and Mary Lambert were awarded Perez Hilton’s “gay gay gay” tag for appearing on Ellen to sing “Same Love.” The internet collectively got something in its eye and–allergies, right?–needed a moment to compose itself.
Theatre-folk Troy Fischnaller and MJ Sieber have just informed us of their new project, Seattle Stories. “The show is hosted by local actor Rob Burgess and will feature a new local comedic genius every week in the role of the ‘expert,'” writes Sieber. “For our first episode we’ve got Ian Bell.” And surprising news about Monorail and Space Needle’s ultimate purpose, it turns out. We are taken aback at never having heard of any of this before, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
Remember nature-deficit disorder? As a former nature boy who spent an inordinate amount of time ankle-deep in creeks, I recall reading Richard Louv‘s Last Child in the Woods with a great deal of interest. That’s the book where journalist Louv put his finger on the thready pulse of kids who have never been allowed to meet nature on its own terms. If they go outside, unplugged, at all, it’s to a denatured, “stay on the trail” environment.
With that in mind, watch this video of a lionness at the Oregon Zoo trying to eat a baby dressed in a zebra hoodie. She can’t, of course, because we’ve invented Plexiglass. But the sense that this video is hilarious is also fascinating. Wherever it’s posted, strident arguments break out between people who respond viscerally to the lion, and people who don’t.
On NPR’s blog, Eyder Peralta has filed the video under “fun,” and says:
You may remember that we’ve written about this genre of YouTube videos before. The last time we touched on it was in January, when Mark wrote about 3-year-old Sofia who courageously stood her ground against a lion at New Zealand’s Wellington Zoo.
Is it courageous for a 3-year-old to stand her ground against a lion? Is it brave for the boy in this video to say “kitty kitty”? It seems a fairly culturally specific reaction. As an adult, knowing what I do about both Plexiglass and lions, I’d probably still step back from this lionness because I recognize this behavior is (in other, non-Plexiglassed circumstances) very dangerous. It’s a pre-rational response, and a pretty good one, even though I have never faced a live lion. (Ill-tempered poodles, yes. Where was Plexiglass when I needed it.)
These kids don’t display that. (I don’t want to make a federal case out of two instances. Probably parents who film their kids freaking out when a lion surprises them don’t post those videos to YouTube.) They do display an astonishing (to me) adaptation to this environment, where nature lives on the other side of the glass or screen, and can’t get to you. And so do plenty of commenters, who dismiss the possibility of anything going wrong.
I know most of us don’t worry about lion attacks in daily life. But there are other animals that merit a fight-or-flight (mostly flight) response.
The other day I was watching a really gorgeous IMAX 3D film at Pacific Science Center, To the Arctic. Not all IMAX nature films are geared at younger kids, but this one clearly was. It’s a G-rated nature adventure that follows a mother polar bear and her twin seven-month-old cubs as they try to navigate a depleted habitat, harassed at one point by a male bear in the mood for a cub-sized amuse-bouche.
Wonderful footage, but narrator Meryl Streep is given an enormous amount of not-terribly-important narration, and when she is not talking, Paul McCartney is reaching a brand-new audience with some of his music. At moments, you suspect the cubs are going to discover a Coca-Cola bottle. The immersive benefits of IMAX and 3D are here marshaled into placing you into a made-up Arctic full of music and pre-school lessons about how a mother polar will sacrifice her own life for her cubs. That last point is made three separate times.
I don’t see any point in alarming the kids, but I think it’s probably just as likely that, if engaged in a fight she can’t win, the mother might sacrifice a cub instead so one might live.
The film assumes you’re on these particular polar bears’ “side,” not the male interloper, and certainly not any of the seals whose mothers I imagine do not fight polar bears to the death for their pups. (Cowardly seal moms!) These are not really the lessons of nature, even second-hand.
Denatured nature films for kids aren’t new–the irreality is just heightened when it’s seven stories high in high definition. So much attention given to capturing Arctic reality as it is, while the narration opts for warm and fuzzy reassurance–as much as is possible in a film that asks whether the Arctic habitat is doomed.
These two instances, together, remind me, firstly, that nature teaches us lessons we don’t necessarily want (Anyone else chased by territorial dogs through the neighborhood?) and that we may not have even realized we’ve learned. People who spend attentive time with animals respond to cues they might have trouble articulating–it’s not telepathy, it’s lived experience, and it’s strongest firsthand.
Secondly, there’s no beating nature as a primary source because it doesn’t exist to tell you a story with a moral at the end. Watching To the Arctic highlights our struggle to tell the “right” story about nature to kids. Somewhere there is an Arctic where cute bear cubs die, but that is not G-rated. That is not the story we’re going to tell today. It is almost never the story we tell. But this is the story that nature tells, that we do not control the narrative. We barely understand it.
