Slumberland

Your tax dollars at work: “A ‘zero tolerance’ crime drive, focused on the Pike Place Market, began yesterday with the deployment of an undisclosed number of officers.” Zero tolerance of what? Drunk driving? Running red lights? Illegal parking in handicapped zones? No. Jaywalking. They say it’s to make people in the area feel safe. It doesn’t make me feel safe. It makes me feel like they should get the hell out there and deal with some real crime!

I remember in the 1980s, reading Rolling Stone’s back page to see what the current UK top 20 album and singles charts were. They were almost always better than the equivalent US charts of the time. But I always wondered about the mysterious Now That’s What I Call Music volumes that generally hogged the number one album sales position. What the heck where they, glorified K-Tel? Well, sort of. Eventually the US version came out and, yup, they are what K-Tel used to be. Now there’s a website that discusses the first 20 UK Now! LPs in extreme detail. It’s a lot of fun. Despite some real howlers, they are pretty good compilations of their time.

“The Passing of the Miracle Whip Wide Mouth Jar” - I’m not sure why, but I really like this brief story. I found it while searching for “Miracle Whip” on Google, because some of us were arguing over the ingredients. This has nothing to do with the ingredients, but it’s a nice tale nonetheless.

“‘We were lucky to have him in Seattle,’ Johnston said. ‘He nailed it so perfectly, and he touched so many people’s lives.’” It’s probably normal to think that today’s kids “don’t have it as good as we did,” but in the case of children’s tv, they really don’t. Because they don’t have J.P. Patches. Hm. J.P. does birthday party appearances… my birthday is next month…

8 rules of rock & roll etiquette. I would like to alter rule #2 to “Don’t smoke at all, jerks.” Maybe then I can go to more shows again.

“He asked me how I felt,'’ Moyer said. “I told him, ‘I’m ready to go and I can’t go anywhere until you get off the mound.’” Wow, I wish I could have gone to that game. I didn’t even get to see it on TV! But at least it’s baseball season and daylight savings time — summer is right around the corner! Soon it’ll be 78 and sunny while I sip Cokes in the Safeco Field bleachers.

BAD photographer. At first I thought the story said he had been a Times photographer since 1988, and I was appalled that such an experienced photog would manipulate a news photo in such a way. But then I reread it — he’s been there since 1998. Maybe his entire career has been digital. I don’t know, but you would think that he would be aware of what a violation of journalistic ethics this is.

Found on MetaFilter:
The story of someone who just “can’t handle money.” It would be funny if it wasn’t the story of my life. (And once again, Blogger is non-functional at the time of day when I do most of my posting. What did they break this time? I see they had hardware failure yesterday, but it is supposedly fixed now.)