Afternoon Edition: Holiday Commerce Cheer

Posted Nov. 28, 2008 at 4:04 pm by Laura Onstot

These things will be on Ebay for weeks to come.

Slow down, people. The internet allows us to get all the Seattle-relevant pro sports memorabilia we need (in case you really want to remember anything about it), avoiding tragedies like this.

If you don't keep eating ostrich cuts and lobster, now in Bellevue, the recession will win.

All Chris K. wants for Thanksgiving is a Bob Seger LP bowl. Lucky for him, that very thing actually exists.

NYTimes says spend your last remaining dollars on Four Christmases. Our reviewer says no.

Topics: Afternoon Edition

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Drive-by Patches

Posted Nov. 28, 2008 at 11:11 am by Rick Anderson

As street-gang expert Gabe Morales told us this summer, Seattle "is kind of at where L.A., Chicago, and Newark were 20 years ago. We're just now catching up in assessing gangs locally, and we've got a long ways to go with prevention and intervention. There are no easy answers, to be sure." That's what some are looking for of course, to explain the 11 shootings last weekend - three murders, eight attempted, at least five likely gang-releated. One even took place at Vito's, one of the city's oldest watering holes where the worst offenders used to be drunk sportswriters between paychecks.

Not that it allays any fears, but the explosion of shootings is a contiuum of the historical feud between gangs from the South End and the Central District of Seattle, with a retaliatory blip. One of the weekend shootings took place at Southcenter mall, putting hundreds at risk in a public setting, as opposed to a relatively easily dismissed drive-by in the Rainier Valley. The headlines grew in type after they almost hit Cinnabon.

Southcenter was a gang-shooting scene in March as well, and this should be making a larger audience mad. As Morales tells the P-I today, "Denial just doesn't happen with police agencies. It happens with communities, chambers of commerce..." At times, police also underplay the significance of the event, "just so people calm down. I call it the saturation of violence. Then everybody, police included, feel a little bit safer, and people go back to doing their business."

He adds:

These kids don't see that there are better things in life. That's what they see as the best career for them, is a criminal career, life in prison, become a prison gang member. They like that status, you know, what you get from that — you get respect. In fact, you can't even get any respect until you've done jail time. It's like the Boy Scouts, and you just got another patch.

Topics: Crime & Punishment

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Not All Companies Are Having the Most Desperate Black Friday Ever

Posted Nov. 28, 2008 at 10:59 am by Laura Onstot

This year, even good little boys and girls can hardly expect better than coal in their stockings. Unemployment is up and home values are down—if you're lucky enough to keep yours. According to rumors, Santa is considering massive layoffs at his North Pole plant. A Merry Christmas indeed.

It's no surprise the gift-sales-dependent retail industry is hurting, and the big video game giants are no exception. Stock in Redwood City, Calif.-based Electronic Arts, makers of Madden Football and Left 4 Dead (you've seen the gruesome billboards around town), has plummeted from over $60 in December 2007 to around $20 now. Same thing at Activision Blizzard, the Santa Monica company that made us all Guitar Heroes. Its stock hit about $20 during a lucrative merger last summer, but is back down to the $10 range. Neither company is turning a profit right now, according to financial statements.

But over at Big Fish Games, a Seattle studio that creates casual games involving jewel hunts or word puzzles, things are rosy. In October, the company hit record revenues, CEO Jeremy Lewis says. (Because Big Fish is private, it does not have to give audited financial reports like its larger-scale competitors.) "We've had a very busy year," says Lewis.

Ever the consummate visionary CEO figure, Lewis is prone to using vague statements about core values and mission when describing his company's success. He also points to the 600 independent developers Big Fish contracts with to keep up the constant flow of new browser-based casual games, not to mention an in-house studio that churns out a dozen or more downloadable time-killers a year.

Big Fish's games aren't as epic as anything on Wii or Playstation, and all can be played online or downloaded. There are no expensive discs or fancy controllers to purchase. Last week's release, Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst, is a spectral-themed scavenger hunt game that retails for $19.99, though the price drops to $9.99 if you purchase another game within two months. Everyone needs to escape the economic hardships, and when you can't buy a trip to Fiji anymore, why not cheap online games? "They are stress relieving as opposed to stress inducing," Lewis says. "During times of economic challenge, consumers have tended to seek enjoyment and fun and relaxation and escape by way of games."

Topics: Business

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Seattle Sinner Expanding to St. Louis

Posted Nov. 28, 2008 at 10:40 am by Mike Seely

In a move that mirrors Denver-based Modern Drunkard magazine's appropriately haphazard national growth strategy (Philly, anyone? Okay, cool), the Seattle Sinner will soon be expanding to St. Louis, where it will also have an "office" (i.e., a staffer's living space). Here, the gothy, irreverent alterna-alternative will enter an outside-the-mainstream media landscape dominated by the formidable Riverfront Times, my professional alma mater and SW's sister paper.

"Yes, we are expanding to St. Louis," says Sinner publisher Chuck Foster. "Our office will be there, which like this one, will be out of our humble abode. We have someone taking over the helm here in Seattle: Darren Rose, our newest sales manager. Our future plans will be to make Seattle our main office, if all goes as planned. We've been [to St. Louis] a few times, most recently when we went searching the midwest for a new city. I really enjoyed St. Louis, and I certainly believe they need a little independent media. Well, we're betting the farm and a fifth of Fighting Cock on it."

Topics: Newspapers

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Server Reboot Wednesday: Over the River and Through the Woods edition

Posted Nov. 26, 2008 at 4:44 pm by Suzie Rugh

From Paul Jensen, our System Administrator who The Weekly is very thankful for:

Things That I am Thankful For (in no particular order):

1. My ability to walk behind someone having a computer problem, look at their screen, and having that problem disappear without me doing anything. Seriously. I know nothing about computers. It's all done with magic. I'm the Doug Henning of the IT world.
2. My Scottish clan, the McKinnons, who had the wherewithal and know-how to invent Drambuie, thus creating the delicious cocktail the Rusty Nail. You're welcome.
3. The healing power of food wrapped in bacon.  Also: bacon.
4. Perfect pop music: "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5, "Girl Talk" by Dave Edmunds and the bridge to "I Saw Her Again" by the Mamas and the Papas.
5. Bees. 'Cause, you know, we need bees.
6. Hulu.com - suck it, Comcast.
7. January 20, 2009
8. The Seahawks. They've totally freed up my Sunday afternoons.
9. The comforting fact that all y'all will be so kind as to close all your programs before leaving the office tonight. Even Wendy. Maybe.
10. Working late the night before a day off. Makes the bourbon taste that much sweeter.

Reboots start at 8pm.

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Afternoon Edition: School's Out for...Thanksgiving

Posted Nov. 26, 2008 at 3:10 pm by Mike Seely

Topics: Afternoon Edition

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A Note From Dino Rossi

Posted Nov. 26, 2008 at 12:24 pm by Don Ward

 

Republican Dino Rossi has been under the radar screen since losing his bid for election Nov. 4. After being in the middle of the maelstrom of statewide politics for nearly a year, there has been a nary word from the Sammamish businessman for nearly three weeks after conceding to Gov. Christine Gregoire.

Last night, the Rossi campaign sent out a mass e-mail to campaign supporters thanking them for their help and giving an update about state politics.

In short, Rossi says "See I told you so" in regards to the state budget deficit. During the campaign he warned that it was projected to pencil out to $3.2 billion. Now the shortfall is at $5 billion.

I guess now is the time to maybe start about raising taxes.

He has no plans to be a candidate in the future (The Weekly is checking to see whether that is 75 percent certain or the full monty) and there are still a couple boxes of his autobiography for sale.

The entirety of Rossi's message is below...

Continue reading "A Note From Dino Rossi"

Topics: Books & Authors, Campaign 2008, and Politics

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School Closure Bombshells

Posted Nov. 26, 2008 at 11:36 am by Nina Shapiro

Students at Summit K-12

The bombshells in last night's four-hour-plus meeting on Seattle Public School closures were the proposals for Summit K-12 and Lowell Elementary. Summit, an alternative school, would move from the very north of the city to the very south, to be relocated in Rainier Beach High School, a school that has struggled mightily over the years to improve academics and reverse its declining enrollment. Meanwhile, the academically advanced students in Lowell's Accelerated Progress Program (APP) — a premier program with a fiercely protective constituency — would be split up and moved to two different schools: Hawthorne and Thurgood Marshall elementaries.

Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson and her staff presented academic rationale for such moves beyond mere cost-savings, but it seemed thin. The supposed similarity between Summit and Rainier Beach, that both stress performing arts, veils vast differences between the two. And the idea that two cohorts of APP students would allow the district to "compare and contrast so that we can improve," as Robert Vaughn, manager of Advanced Learning, put it, had a dubious ring to it. The "school within a school model," whereby a program of gifted kids is plunked down in a regular school, as at Garfield High, creates its own problems. Board member Sherry Carr alluded to this when she talked about the importance of creating a feeling of "one school so that you don't have haves and have nots."

Board members brought up other practical problems with these two proposals. Harium-Martin Morris noted that Summit "is an all-city draw. I can't help but think it would be better in a central part of the city." Michael DeBell pointed out that putting half of Lowell's APP students into Hawthorne would overfill the school. "It's hard to know how you would do that without displacing neighborhood students," he said. He also didn't see how the APP program would have room to grow with this new configuration, as district staff first suggested. "There's not going to be a lot of room to grow," Vaughn conceded.

Indeed, the board questioning on all the proposals was intense. It is a mostly new board, replacing one that was initially perceived as reformist but eventually as dysfunctional. This is the biggest challenge it has faced, and members are showing their mettle, acting neither as rubber stamps nor as obstructionists, in the mode of previous boards, but requiring detailed data and reasoning. "The gravity of these decisions makes me nervous about data that is soft," DeBell said at one point.

One sideline related to the closures that escaped last night's lengthy discussions was the significance of the proposal to close T.T. Minor. This was the school that philanthropist Stuart Sloan dumped a bunch of money into, beginning in the late '90s. Sloan's partnership with the district was controversial, although it eventually extended to The New School, which is not targeted for closure. But his intention to create a model inner city school was worthy and, in the case of T.T Minor, now seems to have gone for naught.

Topics: News

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Busted for that Hot Dog Bash

Posted Nov. 26, 2008 at 10:32 am by Aimee Curl

Continue reading "Busted for that Hot Dog Bash"

Topics: Civics 101

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Rep. White's Case Goes to the PDC

Posted Nov. 26, 2008 at 9:33 am by Rick Anderson

Newly elected Democratic state representative Scott White of Seattle will not be criminally charged for his county ethics violations, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg says, but the prosecutor has asked the state Public Disclosure Commission to investigate the case for elections-law violations.

A week before he was elected to the legislature Nov. 4, White was found to have used his county Department of Transportation computer and fax to work on his campaign for the 46th District seat. A King County Ombudsman's probe found an electronic trail of campaign-related entries on his desktop computer.

White said it was just a technology error, and that he'd learned a new lesson about interfacing. A bug in his handheld Treo digital assistant left a false trail when linked with his desktop, he claimed, making it appear he'd campaigned on county time. He said he did "not believe that I've ever worked on campaign or candidacy-related documents on my county computer."

But Ombudsman investigators clearly didn't believe his denial. Tests could not explain how the files could open without the user opening them, and a computer expert said some files were updated more than two weeks after the Treo had last interfaced with the desktop. (White would not allow an independent test of his handheld). The Ombudsman concluded there was "strong prima facie evidence, backed by forensic analysis, that Mr. White opened campaign files on his county computer."

In his Nov. 21 letter to the PDC, Satterberg said there was no evidence of criminal conduct but urged the state to review the case "for further investigation and potential enforcement action." That review is now underway.

Topics: Campaign 2008

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Bad News For Moneytree: The City of Seattle Wants to Steal Its Customers

Posted Nov. 25, 2008 at 6:37 pm by Mark Fefer

Seattle-based check-cashing and payday-loan giant Moneytree is a homegrown success story that has made great strides in changing the shady reputation of its industry, as Laura Onstot described in a cover story last March.

And some thanks it gets!

Continue reading "Bad News For Moneytree: The City of Seattle Wants to Steal Its Customers"

Topics: City of Seattle, Money, and Seattle Weekly

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Afternoon Edition: You Know What? Chairman Mao Sucked

Posted Nov. 25, 2008 at 5:03 pm by Chris Kornelis

— If you can think of a better album title than "Putin, I Fucked Your Wife," I'll give you a quarter.

- Our music columnists finally has a bar she can call home.

— Krist Novoselic: 'Election Over' does not mean it's time to go back to business as usual.

— I you're in the market for 1,000 pounds of bacon, it's your lucky day.

— You're not ordering the wrong thing, you're bartender's just an asshole.

— Damon Agnos wants a J-Hawks T, and some shirts with shoulders.

Topics: Afternoon Edition

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Still in the Dark

Posted Nov. 25, 2008 at 2:36 pm by Brian Miller

A month ago, I wrote about Seattle City Light's new program to systematically replace the bulbs of its 80,000-plus streetlamps—rather than simply waiting for citizens to report the burnt-out lamps. (Crews don't go out and look.) But during the roll-out of the four-year private contract, the city told me, we taxpayers could still avail ourselves of the municipal Web site to report inoperable bulbs, which city crews are then supposed to fix within nine business days.

Okay, I decided, let's put the citizen reporting system to the test. On Nov. 7, I submitted an online batch of dark streetlight reports, based on my bike ride home to Lower Queen Anne and a quick walk around the neighborhood. I tried to map each location's coordinates, as the Web requests. Though at night, it's hard to follow the directive that, "the light pole number is needed," being dark and all.

More than nine business days have since passed. During the interim, I received eight City Light confirmation emails, two asking for pole numbers, the rest offering confirmation numbers for the "trouble tickets." And this disclaimer: "Our crews are usually able to complete routine repairs within 7 to 10 days. However during the high-volume months of October through February, routine repairs may take longer - up to 8 weeks."

Eight weeks? When the streets are darkest and most in need of illumination? That wasn't what the city told me before. I retraced my route last night, and it appears that maybe three of roughly 15 bad lamps are now working. But some flicker on and off. How can we citizen spotters know if the work has been performed or not?

According to City Light spokesman Mike Eagan, "There is no confirmation-type email sent once the streetlight has been fixed." Crews do their work during the daytime, he adds, so the only ones likely to notice (or not) are us utility ratepayers and trippers over broken sidewalk slabs at night. (If you can't see those pole numbers, chances are that you also can't see what's beneath your feet.)

But whether repairs take place (or not) within nine days or eight weeks, take heart that spring is only four months away. By which time it should be light enough that we don't notice the problem.

Topics: City of Seattle

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Oak Harbor, Teamsters Wage the Public Sympathy Battle

Posted Nov. 25, 2008 at 2:33 pm by Laura Onstot

Two months ago, Teamster truckers (and other represented employees) working for Auburn-based Oak Harbor Freight Lines walked off the job, demanding better a better health-care package. That same day, Oak Harbor started hiring replacements—known to organized labor as scabs. It's a scene that brings to mind the movie Reds (but without the hot Diane Keaton/Warren Beatty sex) or Newsies (but without the cute outfits and great songs).

But even sans steamy love scenes and adorable hats, both sides are launching a PR war for public and legal sympathy. The Teamsters fired the first shot Oct. 2, putting out a press release saying one of the replacements intentionally hit picketer Eydie Dean with a truck. The press release quotes her describing the incident: "I was standing on the picket line with my sign way up high and the driver could see it. He pulled forward and I said stop and he just laughed and kept going, pushing me about three feet." Dean escaped unscathed.

But two can play at that game. On Nov. 7, Oak Harbor Freight Lines took the unions to court, saying strikers were chasing replacement drivers in a red jeep, banging on their trucks and on Nov. 5, one striker told a driver he would sodomize his kids. In the suit, Oak Harbor is careful to state they aren't asking the court to stop the strike, only to intervene in so far as it's creating a dangerous situation for the replacements.

While both sides trade accusations of violence, the strikers have garnered support from local activist groups, including the Church Council of Greater Seattle and the International Labor Rights Forum. This morning, the Forum released a 23-page report arguing that Oak Harbor "engaged in violations of international labor rights standards as defined by the International Labor Organization" by hiring replacements that are acting more like permanent employees, undermining the strikers.

With the holidays coming up and cross country commerce more important than ever, I wouldn't expect this fight to cool off any time soon.

Topics: Business

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Obama's Elected, But It's No Time to Snooze

Posted Nov. 25, 2008 at 10:49 am by Krist Novoselic

Novoselic, right, and his wife, Darbury, attend a public meeting. Novoselic's column runs every Thursday on the Daily Weekly.

The 2008 election has brought many new people into the process of democracy, but voting is only the starting point of civic engagement.

It's more important than ever to get involved in local affairs. With state and municipal budgets are facing severe shortfalls, private organizations doing service or charitable work could be a way of taking up the slack.

Millions of Americans of all ages participated in internet meet-up groups around the country to rally support for Barack Obama. There was a time when face meant in person and club membership was part of the fabric of the community.

But these days, Moose Clubs, Eagles, Kiwanis, Masons, Elks and many other groups are in decline. If you go to a meeting of any of these organizations you'll mostly find seniors in charge. These good folks are running things only because no one else cares to. This is a shame because civic groups exist to help others. Most raise money and resources only to give it away.

Continue reading "Obama's Elected, But It's No Time to Snooze"

Topics: Krist Novoselic: Contention & Conscious

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