There are innumerable times I’ve wanted to do exactly this:

He was there to edit. Yes, edit. Toting markers, chalk and white-out, the man known as the Indiana Jones of typos had come to do battle with this city’s misspellings and botched punctuation.

Seattle, bookish as it may claim to be, was revealed to be barely literate.

There was the sign for “Dillettante” chocolate. The board announcing “Todays sample.” The posters for “recepies,” “cake’s,” “birthday candell’s.” The parking-lot warning that you get “no in/out priveleges.”

Oooh, just knowing those mistakes are roaming loose in the city makes me cringe. (I’d break out the red ink, but my technical writing instructor says it’s psychologically damaging to see your work return as a bloody mess of edits. To my consternation and her luck, I left my arsenal of eye rolling at home that day.)

It’s no leap to posit that these sign writers didn’t see enough red ink during their grammar school years.

New trolley saddled with mocking name

Officially, it’s now the South Lake Union Streetcar. But the trolley name already has caught on, and in the old Cascade neighborhood in South Lake Union, they’re waiting for the SLUT.

At the Kapow! Coffee house on Harrison Street, they’re selling T-shirts that read “Ride the SLUT.”

“We’re welcoming the SLUT into the neighborhood,” said Jerry Johnson, 29, a part-time barista. Johnson said the T-shirts were done just for fun, but they seem to have tapped into something: The first 100 sold out in days and now orders for the next 100 are under way.

I sometimes wonder how folks can come relatively close to what I think is the right conclusion in one aspect of freedom and be so blindingly, painfully off-base in another.

Robert Jamieson of the Seattle PI bloviates:

But anyone who truly values democracy doesn’t want safety if it comes attached to a troubling string: Big Brother-like surveillance.

Video eyes threaten civil liberties. And if we are not careful, we might end up like a frog in a pot of water that slowly warms up. We won’t realize the worst has occurred until we’re cooked.

Funny, Mr. Jamieson, but you didn’t think civil liberties were all that important when it came to the right of self-defense through firearms ownership. You were more than happy to leave us at the mercy of all those downtown thugs who you now think the equally thuggish police need to do something about.

Just how much bullshit do you think they’d try if they suspected even HALF the workers downtown were armed and trained? Do you really think we’d need cops and cameras on every block if these little aggressive shits knew there was a 50/50 chance the next person they fucked with had the means to defend himself?

Oh, I suppose THOSE civil liberties don’t matter. But just one last question… if and when free speech is obliterated, and the time comes to defend your civil liberties with something mightier than the pen, precisely what weapons will be left for you to pick up in your world free of private firearms?

Why on earth do I continue to be surprised at government idiocy? You’d think that by now, I’d have long since accepted the fact that stupidity has no bounds… that we have, indeed, invented a better idiot at every junction in social evolution.

As I was driving home yesterday, someone tossed a rock (or something heavy–I never found it) off a freeway overpass and smashed my moon roof. Fortunately I had the sun shade closed, so there were no injuries.

Knowing my insurance would ask, I reported it to the state patrol. And even now, I’m astounded at the level of warped thinking that led to the response I got. First, they didn’t get back to me for 20 minutes, ensuring that whoever threw the rock was long gone. And then they drop the bomb on me–if they file a report, it’ll go down as a collision on MY driving record.

Unreal.

Police visit but make no arrests at what appears to be speak-easy

About 3 a.m. Sunday, a uniformed officer attempted to follow a patron into the club, only to have the door slam shut on both of them.

I love it! Subversive behavior AND giving a nosy JBT with no warrant exactly the entry he deserves–none at all.

Does it get any better?

Looks like their response to crime and thugs is to turn downtown into Stormtrooper Central. I hadn’t noticed it today, given that my mind is on other things, but I’ll be keeping watch over the next few weeks. I carry my camera with me at all times, so if I get any interesting pictures, I’ll post them.

Busy downtown corner is a “hot spot” for crime

It just takes police too long to respond, he said. Even for something serious like Monday’s shooting, it takes police too many precious minutes to get to the scene, he said.

Pan said he met with an officer about a month ago, but he doesn’t feel like there’s much they can do — they’re too understaffed — and the city can’t afford the number of officers it would take.

(emphasis mine)

I have a bit of an interest in all this for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that I work a block from the McDonald’s where the shooting took place, and it didn’t occur, as most incidents around here do, late at night or on a weekend. It happened at 4:30 in the afternoon on a weekday, a time when I might conceivably be out on the mean streets, as it were.

But I just have to say this: fuck you, Seattle PD. Spare me this “we need more police!” bullshit. You have apparently inexhaustible resources to place police to catch drivers who inadvertently venture onto 3rd Avenue when it’s closed to any traffic but buses. You have plenty of bicycle cops who have nothing better to do than hand out $60 tickets for jaywalking. Why? Because those activities generate revenue. Dealing with violent and property crimes cuts into your precious operating budget with absolutely no financial return, and we can’t have that, now can we? Plus, how would those poor officers meet their quotas for ticket-writing?

Not that I want to see more jackbooted thugs around here. It was bad enough when my employer decided to cooperate with your drug task force by allowing you to use some of our window offices to spy on the drug dealers below. And every fucking one of your officers did nothing but scowl at us as we went about our business in our own office space.

Just stop blowing smoke up my ass about needing to hire more officers, and the ensuing money crunch associated with hiring them. You HAVE the officers. You’ve just chosen to dedicate them to more lucrative pursuits.

It comes as no surprise, but Mr. Jamieson, who I’ve written about before, misses the final fucking piece that might have saved a life.

Remember these names the next time someone suggests that women seek restraining orders just to get a leg up in custody battles, or when law enforcement is slow to take seriously the cries of battered women.

Griego had done everything to escape the mad love of her ex-boyfriend. She got a protection order in March. She ignored the phone calls he made to her job. She told friends to be on the lookout because he was psycho. She even moved a couple of times, changing her phone number. None of it worked.

Yes, she tried to avoid him by rearranging her life. But no, she HADN’T done everything she could have done. She could have armed herself against someone obviously an aggressive, threatening stalker and the high probability he would seek her out for some kind of confrontation. (And by “armed” I don’t just mean that she could have run to the nearest gunshop and bought a handgun. I mean obtaining a firearm AND practiced with it, gaining both skill and accuracy.)

For these reasons, women need a safety plan, according to domestic violence advocates. They can make arrangements to stay with family or friends whose addresses the stalker doesn’t know. They can alert their employers so police or security will be notified when the batterer comes to the workplace. They can change their phone numbers, their route to work, their schedule — anything to make them more difficult to find.

A scared woman can turn everything upside down — as Griego did. She even had the restraining order sitting on her desk in case Rowan showed up.

Nothing short of dropping everything — quitting her livelihood or leaving town — could stop the man whose warped and angry love stole her precious life.

A scared woman can also turn the tables around, learn how to use a gun defensively in an attack. Again, Mr. Jamieson, she could have successfully ARMED HERSELF. Why is it you continue to ignore the possibility that, had a gun been part of that necessary “safety plan”, she might well be standing here today to tell reporters like you how she fought off a dangerous stalker hell-bent on preventing her escape?

The title of your commentary “A piece of paper alone can’t stop abuse,” and indeed the entire piece, are screaming “so what DOES stop abuse?” Running and hiding sure didn’t in this case. And I have to wonder why people like you think victims like Ms. Griego should have to go to ridiculous lengths in disrupting their lives in order to prevent any confrontation (or resolution) in the matter. By not arming herself, the statement is made that her attacker’s life was more important than her own.

Responsible gun owners don’t relish the idea of shooting someone, even in self-defense. It can be a long process involving police, lawyers, and perhaps the family of the person shot. But they do at least recognize that their lives are far more valuable–and worth defending–than that of any would-be attacker. It’s sad people like you continue to refuse to do the same, and it’s upsetting that you continue to argue that she has no legitimate right to pick up the one weapon her attacker is almost certain to have.

Private Seattle school tells kids: Property rights are bad, m’kay?

According to the article, the students had been building an elaborate “Legotown,” but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore “the inequities of private ownership.” According to the teachers, “Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation.”

The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown “their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys.” These assumptions “mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.”

They claimed as their role shaping the children’s “social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity … from a perspective of social justice.”

(emphasis mine)

It’s garbage like this that make me fantasize about having a child enrolled there just so I could give the school’s staff a good verbal lashing and pull my kid out of their manipulative hands. What communistic crap, and how despicable to indoctrinate children with it. Of course, they’ll be much more pliable taxpayers later.

This is even worse than “Why Mommy Is A Democrat“. And in my own back yard no less. I feel nauseated.

The bodies of six partygoers up on Seattle’s Capitol Hill had not yet been taken to the morgue, the blood not yet dry on the porch, and the predictable calls for more gun control were off and running.

In today’s Seattle P-I, columnist Robert Jamieson has taken an all-too-familiar position - blaming the gun culture. He writes:

Don’t blame the rave scene for the Seattle’s worst mass murder in more than two decades.

Blame the guns — and a culture that celebrates firepower.

Blame the murdering madness on a country that has seen Columbine, Kip Kinkel and bullets at the Tacoma Mall, but lacks the common sense to clamp down on weapons of mass carnage.

Blame the gun lobby on the other Capitol Hill — not the rave crowd on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

I can’t begin to express how detestable this position is to me, especially after an incident such as this.

First, it smacks of an outrage that has bothered me since my school-age years: the idea that everyone should pay for one person’s sins. It suggests we all should give up something - our right to self defense - because Kyle Huff was an irresponsible, immature criminal. Excuse me, but I didn’t run amok, killing indiscriminately, so stay the hell out of my life.

Second, it’s condescending as hell. I’m sorry, but you can’t be trusted with a gun. You can’t be trusted with more ammunition than we believe is acceptable. Here, we’ll protect you. Pardon me, but who the fuck are you, Mr. Jamieson, to determine who can and can’t be trusted with a gun?

And if your justification for de-arming the public is solely that quandary - the fact that you can’t tell who is trustworthy - then perhaps you have no place in this discussion. Those who’ve chosen to arm and protect themselves don’t worry about making that distinction; to them, it’s irrelevant who can and cannot be trusted. The defensive playing field is equal for them, and people like you want to upend it, giving home advantage to the thugs and making criminals out of otherwise peaceful citizens.

Lastly, Mr. Jamieson, what do you think might have happened if just one person in that house had reached for their own firearm rather than a phone? Comparatively, what might the body count have been if the policeman who confronted Huff hadn’t happened by? It was sheer luck that the death toll stopped at seven, and overwhelming tragedy that it wasn’t stopped sooner by those with the potential to respond the quickest - the people still in the house.

Contrary to what you propose, Mr. Jamieson, I don’t love guns. I’m not a member of the Rambo shoot-’em-up culture you suggest is dominating and plaguing America. Most gun owners I know pray they are never forced into the cusp of deciding to fire. But they are also the most pragmatic, realistic side of this debate, valuing and protecting their own lives and correct in their assessment that criminals will always have guns, no matter how many laws people like you pass. You can bury your head in the sand all you want, but the gun-related crime rates in cities such as San Francisco and Washington D.C. don’t support your claims.

While you’re welcome to devalue your own life, Mr. Jamieson, it’s insulting to insist that everyone else devalue theirs. Because really what you’re trying to force-feed us is the idea that our lives aren’t worth defending, that your fear of guns is more important. Sorry, but I suspect even Linda Lovelace would have a hard time swallowing a lie that big.