Flying Fish Follies

Having run out of windmills, PETA is tilting at the hideous, immoral practice of throwing (dead) fish at Seattle's Pike Place Market.

Because even a gutted salmon on its way to the oven has "rights".

A Brush With Sanity

An Episcopal priestess "female priest" and walking contradiction in terms was finally defrocked because she refuses to renounce Islam.

Maybe she should have read the job description a little more closely.

Encarta RIP

Microsoft is retiring Encarta. It's a bit personal here at Chez Szondy, as I was an editor on one of its iterations.

Still haven't received my copy.

Bye Bye, PI

The Seattle Post Intelligencer ceased publication today with only truncated online version of itself as a memorial–while it lasts, anyway.

I can't say that I'm too unhappy about this. It's always sad to see a newspaper go belly up and it does raise the question about how news reporting is going to carry on until it learns to adapt to the new technology, but the loss of a left-wing rag like the PI is no great loss. Newspaper bias is no sin. In fact, in Britain it's a sign of a healthy market of opinion. However, British papers must operate in actual competition. Cozy Labour papers must rub shoulders with Conservative papers who must contend with Liberal Democrat broadsheets and this keeps them all on their toes. In the United States, however, daily papers generally operate in a monopoly–or worse, a false duopoly with two so-called "competing" newspapers sharing plants, facilities and world views. In Seattle, this boiled down to the newspaper business dividing between the leftist Seattle Times and the raving leftist Seattle PI. We will pass over the paper for aging Troskyites, the Seattle Weekly, and the sexually incontinent Stranger with more quiet dignity than they deserve. This sort of bias is tolerable if the papers concerned remain open about their bias, but when, as the PI did, the bias is marketed as the only reasonable and "moderate" view this becomes unacceptable. When the paper in question is published in a city and state run by a political machine with whom the paper is ideological hand in party glove and willing soften the pedal and turn the blind eye, then it becomes a disservice.

It's also an appalling business model. As one commentator pointed out, it's like a burger bar refusing to offer cheeseburgers to the half of the market that is clamouring for them because the manager doesn't like cheeseburgers and he thinks that people who eat cheeseburgers are beneath contempt. In the Seattle PI's case, they refused to sell cheeseburgers and now their burger bar has been reduced to those little wheelie carts that you see in the West End after the pubs close.

Trouble is, there are a heck of a lot of those carts out there, as the online PI will soon learn. As for myself, I'm truly going to miss the Letters to the Editor page. Browsing through it was to be transported into a strange, parallel world where it is always a tie-dyed 1968.

Water On The Brain

In perfect poetic symmetry, Seattle is ordered by the courts to repay hydrant costs wrongly charged against water customers to the tune of $22 million. And how are they going to pay for this? You guessed it: Raise water rates!

This would be funny, but I live within two hour's drive of this asylum and mining the bridges over Lake Washington isn't that easy.

We Didn't Listen!

Climate refugees swarming north to escape "heat waves, fires and other calamitous effects of global warming". Migrations "on the scale of the Great Depression". People dying of heat waves. And, wait for it... Ozone pollution. Such Chicken Little "journalism" is almost quaint.

I particularly like Seattle Post Intelligencer reporter Robert McClure's extensive quotes from one J Elizabeth Jackson on the impending doom facing the people of Washington state from heat death. I might even pay more than a nanosecond of attention to it if she were a climatologist or an MD or even a reader of pigeon entrails rather than a sociologist. That being the case, I wouldn't trust her to tell me whether the sun was going to rise in the east.

I'm going to miss the PI when it goes bust in about a month. It opens a door into a new and terrible world.

Bad Timing

If the local paper is going to print a story about birds migrating north because of warmer winters, they might not want to publish it on the day a snow storm hits the region.

The Joys of Snow

The Force is strong with this one... And that one.

Endangered Hippies

The Seattle PI asks what can be done about the thinning ranks of hippies at the annual Bumbershoot festival.

Might I suggest rifles?

Duck

In Seattle, the DUKW, a rather clever bit of Second World War engineering that converted a standard US Army truck into an amphibious transport, has been conscripted, quite against its will, into an attraction called Ride the Ducks.

If you've never encountered it, you are blessed. The "Duck" carts tourists about town and through the waters of Lake Union to the accompaniment of tour narration, twee music and duck quacks.

Amplified duck quacks.

Not surprisingly, you can find where the tours start by looking for a giant rubber duck, though why you would do so is beyond me. Personally, I give it as wide a berth as possible, which is why I keep a small mountain between me and it. Whenever I drive into town I have a hunted look as I crouch behind the wheel in case someone sees me within a hundred yards of the thing and my greatest dread is that my mother will see it on a visit, want to have a go and I'll be without my false beard.

My one bit of solace was the happy thought that when I go back to London I will be as far away from the "Duck" as one can get without bedding down in a yurt with a billy can full of boiled tea mixed with rancid yak butter. Unfortunately, that comforting thought has been ripped from me now that I've learned that a similar enterprise is operating under the very shadow of the Palace of Westminster.

And so another crack appears in the tarnished facade of civilisation.

Bonfire of the Insanities

Greg Nickels, the mayor of Seattle, having decided that only his city has the power to placate Blessed Gaia and Save the Planet™, has turned his baleful eye via the Park Department upon another global warming threat; beach bonfires.

This is rather on a par with a recent comment that there is no point in New Zealand meeting its Kyoto targets because if the entire country sank into the sea the effect this would have on the climate would be precisely zero. So it is in Mr. Nickel's own little world. Seattle gets almost all of its power from hydroelectric plants and the largest local carbon emitter is a cement works, so the city is about as "green" as you can get already, however Mr. Nickels has never heard of the law of diminishing returns or that Seattle is a city rather than a nation the size of China, which means that his efforts are on a par with Seattle being a suburb of Christchurch going beneath the waves. In this equation, beach fires rate somewhere around rotting seaweed in CO₂ production.

Standby for this sort of logic being taken to its conclusion when the sale of cabbage is banned to cut down on farting.

So Much For The Obesity "Epidemic"

Seattle PI headline:

World food crisis hits home
Costco seeing higher demand for staples

Translation:

Panic buying at food outlet
Media hype drives out common sense

A Cloudy Crystal Ball

The Seattle PI on 19 March 2008 shows a profound mixture of wishful thinking masked as prophecy:

Spring's sprung earlier, warmer
Climate change puts the greening season ahead of schedule for many species in the Northwest

And a month later my spring plantings were wiped out by a series of frosts and snowstorms.

Nice one.

No Cheese for You, No Jobs for Us.

How the Seattle Times is like a burger bar that refuses to serve cheeseburgers.

Mind you, it doesn't help when the burger is a bit rancid as well.

Earth Hour Update

Well, I can confirm that Earth Hour was a roaring success. Within minutes of the Space Needle in Seattle (where all the power is hydroelectric!) going dark as a sacrifice to Blessed Gaia in an effort to fight global warming, Chez Szondy was hit by two degrees of frost and three inches of snow.

Any more successes like this and we'll be wrestling polar bears in August.

Update: Tim Blair calls Shennanigans.

Green Cab

Seattle's mayor Greg Nickels has decreed announced that all of the city's taxi cabs must be high-mileage hybrids by 2013. This is despite the fact that it will cost a fortune, leave the city with taxis too small for extra passengers or luggage and will mean the inevitable rate hike.

The reason for this is to (all together now) combat global warming. According to Mr. Nickels,

In the era of global warming, it doesn't matter if our cabs are orange or yellow or gray. We think they should all be green.

Whether or not you operate under the misapprehension that CO² is a pollutant, buy into the whole global warming thing, or think that preventing a few hundred tons of carbon being cycled through the air will make a tinker's dam worth of difference to the climate, it might possibly be time to take Mr. Nickels aside and explain to him as one would to a little child that as a city mayor his job is to pick up the rubbish, fix the roads and have the drunks swept off the pavement in a timely manner.

It does not include Saving the Planet^tm.

Man in Space With Sounds

Over at Heino und Jerry in Uber Space you can listen to the "supersonic" soundtrack that played in the famous Bubbleator at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair.

This is a wonderful example of Future Past and I'm not just including it because I find the title of the track "Gayway to Heaven" somewhat ironic, given Seattle's current reputation in the sexual identity stakes.

Hostage Situation

Seattle mayor Greg Nickels shows the "caring" side of the environmentalist movement and does a marvellous impression of the Grinch:

A grim Christmas message for kids from the mayor of Seattle. Greg Nickels told small children he's launching "Operation Save Santa" to protect the big guy from global warming. At a Christmas tree lighting, Nickels warned the kids they had to use energy efficient light bulbs, or climate change could melt the North Pole --- and drown Santa, his elves and all his reindeer.

Translation: Submit to my policies or the fat guy gets it.

Put Up or Shut Up

Seattle PI cartoonist Horsey regards Islamofascism as a tiny threat made large by a Republican "fun-house mirror".

If Mr. Horsey truly believes that Jihadists are a mere neocon phantasm (9/11, 7/7, Glasgow, Beslan, Bali, Madrid, the Burning of France, the Taliban, Al Qaeda and all the rest aside), then I suggest that he put his pen where is mouth is and submit a drawing of Mohammed-- either reverent or nasty, it doesn't matter.

I'll run the book on how long it will be before Mr. Horsey is forced into hiding for fear of his life.

A Winter's Tale

Seatac airport in Seattle has found a "solution" to the ONE objection to its Christmas decorations: Abolish all references to Christmas (pardon my profanity) and replace the Christmas (Sorry!) trees with bare, flocked birch trunks symbolising-- Well, not much of anything really.

Since it is so utterly craven and vacuous, I guess we can call it the "multiculti grove".

Sic Sempter Theatre

The Reluctant Dragon has finished its run and it's been a good one. We've had some very good reviews from both the mainstream and weekly papers-- and even from The Stranger, who usually don't like any show unless it's sexually perverse and has an obscene title. In fact, we were selected as the pick of the week.

The public seemed to have liked it as well with over fifty people showing up in the park for one performance that took place in the pouring rain.

My wife and I would love to take the credit, though Kenneth Grahame is the one who wrote the original book and none of this would have happened without the director J. D. Lloyd who did sterling work with a tiny budget and a cast far smaller than what the script called for. And the cast has to be commended as well. Acting out of doors is never easy and everyone stepped up to the task-- especially Scott Morse as the Boy, Aaron Allshouse as St. George and last, but most emphatically not least, Josh Hartvigson as the Dragon. If anyone was born to play a fey lizard the size of four carthorses, it's Josh.

Thanks, everyone. And now, it's on to the next script.

Theatre Spot

A review of The Reluctant Dragon is up.

Shameless Plug

If you're in the Seattle area, then you should step away from the monitor and get over to Volunteer Park where my wife and I's latest play, The Reluctant Dragon is premiering at 5 PM. Outdoor production. Fun for all the family.

If you're not in Seattle, the play is running through August and there are plenty of flights, so book now and avoid the rush.

Apostate in Seattle

Is this headline real or not?

Episcopal Church Appoints First Openly-Muslim Bishop

The answer is no, then damn-near yes.

What's the difference between parody and reality? Four years.

Via Mark Steyn at the Corner.

Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

The Seattle Schools are conducting multiculturalism workshops that are such concentrated doses of Political Correctness that you could bottle them and were they compulsory they'd be more properly called re-education camps.

No surprise there. The Seattle School district always did look upon anyone to the right of Pol Pot with suspicion anway. What's interesting is this Orwellian quote from the land of unalloyed separation of church and state:

Muslim Prayer in Schools

Why do Muslim students need to leave my class to pray? This presentation focuses on accommodating Muslim students in school. Specifically, we cover prayer requirements for Muslim youth as well as other important information for making a school and classroom Muslim-friendly.

So the new Left orthodoxy is that prayer in public schools is a dangerous threat to the very fabric of American society-- unless you're a Muslim.

Happy Whatever

Seatac airport in Seattle is removing its Christmas trees after receiving ONE complaint.

For sale: One backbone. Hardly used.