Results tagged “parks”

If you’re the sort of person who looks at a parking space and thinks "That’s nice…but what would be really great would be a miniature park in that space," today is your day of days. Today is Park(ing) Day--over 30 parking spaces in Seattle will be converted into temporary parks for the day.

From the comments on SeattleTimes.com, you'd think that spending a couple of bucks on a park was High Treason. But Belltown, home to some 10,000 of us, has no park.

The sly movin' Parks Department decided to remove nearly 400 trash cans from city parks. Hoping to save $160,000, they encouraged park-goers to embrace a "pack in-pack out" policy. Now they are considering the use of $4,000 solar-powered compacting trash cans that don't need to be emptied as often, alleviating the cost of constantly taking out the trash.

Spokane doesn’t liking being confused with other "wimpy" West Coast cities, so it should come as no surprise that city officials here have resorted to blowing up area squirrels with a lethal cocktail of propane, oxygen, and fire to reduce the rodents’ impact on area parks. Who says you don’t need a hammer to kill a fly? The Rodenator Pro is to cute, furry little critters what xanax is to work ethic: imminent death. After all, nothing restores a park to its original beauty like the sounds and smells of an old fashioned subterranean fire bombing.

URGENT ASSESSMENT: Tonight at Town Hall, author and Canadian David Suzuki will offer what his blurb calls "an urgent assessment" of environmental issues. We're picturing him lecturing in double-time; after all, the environment might collapse before he finishes with even one of the topics he's planning on urgently assessing. No time to lose. Anyway, the lecture sounds promising, if you can bear to leave the park tonight.

• "Gross!" is right. The Rainier Valley Post explores reports of mouse droppings at the Mount Baker Safeway and wonders rightly, "Where is the health department?"
• While the Mount Baker Safeway is having rodent problems, the neighborhood's Rainier Grocery Outlet is shutting down next week just in time for Thanksgiving.
• Hooray! We will be keeping at least de facto nudity at Seattle area parks.

"yellow dragon on pole" by Seattlest Flickr Pool Contributor Seattle rainscreen. Thanks!

Seattlest grew up in Central Florida and, even though we haven't lived there for many, many years, we still crave the sunshine. Maybe it's because our body expects more vitamin D? We certainly don't want to add to the choruses of imported souls who bitch and moan about Seattle winters. Nonetheless, we wind up doing so, anyway, every year around mid-January.

Walking down 15th the other afternoon, we were a little Hitchcocked out by the sight of a crowd of crows (or ravens, the comments section is of two minds about which) assembled on a neighbor's house and lawn. Naturally, we immediately suspected said neighbors of being witches. (Not that there's anything wrong with that. Live and let magick, we say.) A woman got out of her car while we were taking the picture and,...

The glorious fall sunsets have disappeared along with the mouldering husks of Halloween pumpkins, and according the weather report, we can all expect a long, cold, wet weekend. But this being the Northwest, that's never stopped us from getting out and about; here's the weekend plans of your intrepid Seattlest contributors:

It's not that development in itself sucks; it's that our county and city government doesn't believe in development for art's sake, despite all those studies about the half billion the arts return to the community. When we look around, we don't see a lot of public investment in the single most expensive thing that artists and smaller arts organizations have to face: a place to work, rehearse, show, perform.

If you’re gonna make an album with orchestral arrangements care of living legend composer Van Dyke Parks, you’re gonna have to go all out to perform it right. That’s why the first half of super English major/elven queen Joanna Newsom’s grandiose show last night at Benaroya Hall featured the accompaniment of local 29-piece chamber orchestra the Northwest Sinfonia to cover her last full-length, the epic five-song masterpiece Ys ("ees"). It’s not hard to recreate a lushly recorded album when you’ve got the combination of the Sinfonia, Newsom’s three-person touring group---which she’s termed the "Ys Street Band"---and Newsom plucking complex polyrhythms (and making it look easy) on an ornate harp, itself a work of art.

Seattlest likes parks. Especially the big ones with plenty of room for family picnics, Frisbee, flag football and lots and lots of gay sex.

(This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer’s market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs.)

Gas Works Park may not recover its former place as our #1 greatest park ever after its little tar leak last week. We took a walk over there yesterday and wandered around what was basically an empty space on a gray and prematurely cold day, pressing our nose up against the chain link here and there and dwelling on what exactly this park sits on top of: benzene, mercury, lead, etc. It's gross.

Seattle. Portland. Which one's better? You may say: "How can you choose? Each has their good points. It's like asking which religion is better." Guess what, asshole, that Negative Nellie attitude is the reason nobody ever asks for your fucking opinion. Jerk. Yesterday, Jeremy Barker advocated the pro-Seattle position. Now, it's Portland's turn.

Seattlest spent this weekend visiting friends in Spokane. We know, we know. "Why, in God's name would you go to Spokane?" Trust us, we've heard it before.

Late summer is berry season, which means it is also bear season. A 51 year-old man mountain biking in Banner Forest (near Port Orchard on the Kitsap Peninsula) was attacked by a male black bear last week. His dogs were running ahead of him, and he heard them barking. He turned a corner, and was face-to-face with the bear, which then attacked him. Attacks by black bears are remarkably rare, which makes the situation all the more puzzling. Miraculously he survived and is in good condition, and both dogs are alive and well. Every mountain biker, hunter, hiker, random person that Seattlest knows seems to have their own opinion: he shouldn't have had his dogs off leash, shouldn't have been riding by himself, he was in a freaking "Forest" what do you expect...and so on.

Join the dozens who have already voted in this year's primary and have your voice politely nodded at.

You may see incumbent councilwoman Sally Clark at a local candidate forum, but you won't see one of her opponents, Bob Brown.

Jason Holstrom may be known as a founding member of two local bands, Wonderful and United State of Electronica, as well as a producer for such acts as Dolour and Aqueduct, but now he's got a new group up his sleeve: The Thieves of Kailua, a one-man island-pop project. Through its sunny surf sounds, layered loungey vocals, and a mixture of production techniques both old and new, the self-titled album evokes a Hawaiian vacation--starting with the visitor's first enchanting aloha, the typical tourist encounters, and a brief brush with the titular thieves, all the way to a bittersweet "Hula-Bye." We spoke to Jason about his island adventures on the cusp of the Thieves of Kailua's CD release show: Thursday at Chop Suey, $8, doors 9pm, 21+.

Yesterday, when a reader informed Seattlest of an enclosure going up at Gas Works park for a private event, we posted some smart assey thing about the park's recent unfriendliness towards private events. We were aghast that public property could be employed as someone's personal party space, but, you know, not really. We pictured a dog run-like chain link fence enclosure near the back of the park, maybe in that newish area that no one really uses. Someone's having a party--a birthday party, according to our intrepid commenters. Or possibly a wedding... Who cares! Gas Works park is only a couple of blocks away from Seattlest's place of residence, but we couldn't quite muster the indignation to haul ourselves down there last night to check it out.

Seattlest took a little jaunt up to downtown Pacific Rim Canada the other weekend. Vancouver is the Toronto of western Canada and, just like its gritty eastern counterpart, we just *big throbbing heart* the place. We love its density, its layout, and its landscape. We love the architecture, even its endless kilometers of glass and steel high rises. Moreover, it's a walkable city. If you're a reasonably able-bodied tourist, you should be able to stomp all over Vancouver's geo-stylistically pornographic downtown peninsula without problem.

Seattlest grew up in a tiny town you've never heard of in Central Florida, where a real sandy ocean beach (on which you could drive) was 20 minutes in one direction, and a crystalline gulf beach was an hour and a half in the other. Now that we live in the Land of the Rain, we wait all year for weeks like these, when the sun is high and hot, the breeze is soft and frequent and there are enough daytime hours to book it to the lake beach after work.

So anyway, the Japanese Garden, right. As you can see there are ducks involved, and a flotilla of oversized goldfish (we're using goldfish in the non-technical sense, meaning "large shiny colorful whozits") that swim up to you and demand the contents of your lunch sack. Turtles sun themselves on rocks. Even with tourists it's peaceful and serene -- and there are plenty of nooks and overviews back from the duck-and-turtle action where you can ponder the flitting, vagabond nature of life and work on haikus. We recommend it anytime of year; it's probably even good in the rain. If you can't make it in the near future, we have more photos apres le saut.