Saving our communal storm sewer, Puget Sound
Annals of Nathan Myhrvold and the many fathers of invention, by Malcolm Gladwell
Seattle Mariners »An international search for a Gates Foundation CEO ends on the Microsoft campus
Science / Environment »In just decades, a Lake Washington fish evolved to survive without pollution
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Seattle goes gah-gah over choo-choos
The city's own series of tubes
The Northwest's real fairy tales
Fast times and loads of fun, despite expensive gas
Spin the bottle: The climate-action mayor misses the point on drinking water
A city of scolds
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Seattle goes gah-gah over choo-choos
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Responding to her readers on paid family leave
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Why Hillary Clinton should stay in the race
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The city's own series of tubes
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Puget Sound on Prozac
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Death by sun! Film at 11
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Fast times and loads of fun, despite expensive gas
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Hillary Clinton, will you please go now!
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Memo to the owners of the Mariners
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OK, probably not — they already have a pretty good triple-A minor league team. So what the heck is going wrong at Safeco Field?
Maybe it's a lot worse than that. The Mariners finish a dismal 1-5 road trip.
The National Football League draft this past weekend yielded its usual array of players unknown to all but the growing legions of college-football-talent specialists. The rest of us may not know a long snapper from a red snapper, but we certainly know a YouTube star when we see one
Locals may gaze across the landscape past the inexplicably lit-up-all-day-and-night Qwest sports facility and see that other Elysian field: Safeco, where the Mariners play. This week, in reference to the latter, we hear or read: "You will not be going to Liberty Mutual Field, I can assure you of that."
Intergalactic visitors, depending on their reference point, might view our old globe upside down. Upon closer inspection maybe they would see that the most viable country just now is in what we dismissively call the Southern Hemisphere. Brazil has no debt, plenty of oil, sustainable growth and — most promising of all — no New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox, much less the Los Angeles Angels and Seattle Mariners.
Baseball schadenfreude, the best thing since Monday-morning quarterbacking, is sort of an anti-national pastime. It means perusing the box scores and reveling in the otherwise lamentable performances of former members of the Seattle Mariners organization.
The Seattle Mariners had a base to give during the third inning Sunday (April 13), what with Los Angeles Angels runners on second and third and two out. The not-so-angelic batter? It just had to be Bad Vlad Guerrero, aka, Nightmare on Brougham Street (looking even more horror-movie worthy this year with hair that would scare Javier Bardem).
With six games elapsed, your 2-4 Seattle Mariners may have left you with more questions than answers, though, perhaps mercifully, they aren’t necessarily the questions and answers anybody expected.
Spring training went into extra innings today as the Seattle Mariners forestalled the start of the 2008 season until the sixth frame. Then they scored for the first time, eventually putting away the Texas Rangers 5-2 in front of a capacity crowd, many fans obviously glad that a roof kept away every kind of weather except the baseball kind.
A promising roster means the playoffs are within the realm of possibility, unless individually, the players don't play — or aren't positioned to play — to their strengths.
With but a week left before the Seattle Mariners commence the 2008 campaign at Safeco Field (March 31), perhaps it's fair to ask whether spring-training stats and performances are accurate harbingers of the actual baseball season.
There's something patently phony about major-league baseball spring training, not the least of which (as we know today, March 13, in drippy-and-50° Seattle) is that most of it takes place during winter.
Local baseball patrons and mavens are inclined to try to keep one eye on the calendar this time of year and another on the daily box scores from Seattle Mariners Cactus League games in Arizona. Such optical acrobatics reveal, of course, that the March 31 home opener is approaching, with hopeful fans imagining the first playoff season since the 116-win campaign of 2001.
As the University of Washington Husky men's basketball team heads to the Bay Area this week for two of its final three league games, maybe players ought to be thinking about signs of a brighter future rather than a less-than-successful past. The most conspicuous sign being waved in the student section of Hec Edmundson Pavilion last Saturday, Feb. 23, read: "Thanks, Ryan, for three years of threes."
The ongoing paradox about the National Basketball Association's annual All-Star Game is that defense is considered offensive. That's why the final score of the Sunday, Feb. 17, spectacle (TNT, 5:30 p.m.) may resemble the Obama-Clinton delegate count.
Here and elsewhere, the predicament facing the NBA and its gradually failing franchises ought to underscore (if such a term is even appropriate for an NBA all-star game) the desperation and absurdity of staging a weekend of "nothing's-wrong-here" frivolity. This would be the case even if it weren't all happening in, of all places, New Orleans.
Another standing-room-only crowd was crammed into yet another local arena Sunday, Feb. 10, and Barack Obama had nothing to do with it. Many of us were at Hec Edmundson Pavilion to witness the best team in Pac-10 men’s basketball, few of us imagining that it would prove to be the Washington Huskies. The Dawgs may well have the proverbial rude awakening on their Valentine's Day date with Oregon, but for now the overachievers will always have a nearly wire-to-wire 71-61 win over the UCLA Bruins for boasting purposes years from now.
At precisely 11:30 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 8, a TV viewer with picture-in-picture options could watch simultaneous broadcasts featuring perhaps the two most famous American blonde women with Ivy League connections. NorthWest Cable News had Hillary Clinton (Yale Law) speaking to a campaign crowd in Tacoma. Sibling station KING-TV (5), meanwhile, welcomed Paris Hilton, a guest on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Hilton's Ivy League claim? Just two days earlier, she'd been pegged Woman of the Year by the Harvard Lampoon and her visit to the hub of higher learning included a frat party and other fun stuff. "Harvard is hot," Hilton observed, and who would know better?
Some of us huddling in our Northwest homes Saturday, Jan. 26, awaiting the evidence of yet another questionable snow warning were warmed as noon approached with the prospect of the University of Washington Husky-Arizona Wildcat men's basketball game promised on Fox Sports Northwest. Fans didn't count on a broadcast delay of more than half an hour while the network finished coverage of the two-overtime North Carolina-Maryland women's tiff, which doesn't traditionally draw a lot of audience interest in the Pacific Northwest.
The University of Washington men's team is showing promising signs of turning around the season. The Sonics seem to have promised to perform as poorly as possible to hasten an exit to Oklahoma.
It's fourth and two, there are 12 minutes left, and you're down by 22 points. Punt or go for it? Typically, Holmgren punts.
Classes start Monday, Jan. 7, at the University of Washington. Perhaps profs should receive a campuswide edict to make all students first report to a gym, where the first one to shoot better than five for 13 from the free-throw line would receive a full scholarship and a place on the men's basketball team.
The inspired-by-tragedy Redskins were no match. Next nationally hyped playoff opponent: Green Bay.
Despite the fact they are both playoff-bound and have identical records, there's just no comparison. The Giants, after all, nearly beat a 16-0 team. The Seahawks lost to a 4-12 team.
Celtics show a packed Seattle SuperSonics crowd how it's done.
It was come and go time for sports stars, coaches and of course, a whole team.
Hey, at least there's one successful pro sports franchise in town. What's coming between now and the playoffs...
It's not often that Seattle Seahawk fans get treated to a game-long Ryan Plackemeier highlight film, but that was the case against Carolina Sunday, Dec. 16. The most memorable aspect of the Hawk 13-10 loss was the Seattle punter thumping on fourth down to end his club's first eight possessions. Old-timers would later say they couldn't recall such futility since they last toted up Liz Taylor's attempts at successful marriages. The punter moved the ball about a quarter mile. The rest of the Hawks (9-5) were good for 280 yards, many of those gathered during a meaningless TD drive as time expired.
A former Portland boy wonders — but only for a moment — what performance-enhancing drugs might have done for workaday, obscure heroes like Mickey Sinnerud.
When your opponents are 12-27, juggernaut is not quite the right term. But the fact is the Seahawks have now won a fourth consecutive division title.
Those of us who were present with two eyes ranged from the hoi polloi to the highest echelons of state public life: at least one former guv (Booth Gardner) and the University of Washington's omnipresent Mark Emmert, "one of the best [college] presidents in the whole damn country," according to UW regent Bill Gates Sr., borrowing from sports-programming parlance. It didn't matter, however, that the best and worst of us who were two-eyed witnesses Saturday at Hec Edmundson Pavilion thought Justin Dentmon's buzzer lay-up beat the clock. All that mattered was the judgment of a dispassionate cyclops: the television camera recording the event for Fox Sports Northwest. Even after the game refs allowed the scoreboard at the UW basketball court to read UW 76, Pittsburgh 75, the officiating crew members had another gander at the recorded last play. Then they had a few more.
The University of Washington Huskies football offense looked formidable the first time it was shown this season, and such was the case on the final occasion. Unfortunately, first appearances, as many divorcees and used-car buyers know, can be deceiving. Yes, the "O" looked pretty promising that first time out: last spring at the annual intra-squad game. The last time, Saturday night, Dec. 1, in Honolulu, the Dawgs hustled up a 21-0 lead against unbeaten Hawaii, mainly on turnovers and an impressive running game. But the now 12-0 Hawaii Warriors prevailed as an intoxicatingly hot Saturday night in paradise became a cold-sober Sunday morning in Seattle. The Huskies failed to score during the second half, losing 35-28 and finishing another bad-Dawg season 4-9.
The conceit has been that if you're rich you must be smart. This even applies to those who actually happen to look kind of stupid. Think of Ebenezer Scrooge, Scrooge McDuck, or their modern equivalent, Clay Bennett. The latter, undeniably wealthy and stupid-looking, in fact may be a brilliant lead owner of the Seattle SuperSonics. Just look at what he accomplished merely by having his management guys free the team of unneeded shooting guard Ray Allen and expendable forward Rashard Lewis, the two Sonics marquee mainstays of the past few seasons. Not only did he help make Allen's new club, the 11-2 Boston Celtics, better than it's been since the Larry Bird years. He also raised the Lewis-led Orlando Magic to perhaps the best team in the National Basketball Association.
The unremarkable Seahawks continue their midling march to the playoffs. And the other local teams are totally unexcellent, too.
Both teams gain some redemption with wins at home over the weekend. The Dawgs enter next week's Apple Cup at 4-7, while the Seahawks lead the NFC West with a 6-4 record.
The mighty wind of the NFC West is at their backs as the team, with only an air attack, breezes to the playoffs.
Three reasons for Monday-morning quarterbacks to be optimistic:
Seattle has become something of a half-assed sports town, and that half happens to be the first. On Sunday, Nov. 4, both the Seahawks and the Sonics were competitive going into the second halves of games against, respectively, the Cleveland Browns and Los Angeles Clippers. Late during both games, the other club pulled ahead. Sound familiar?
The Sonics open a season of discontent, or discontinuance, or something — no one's quite sure, maybe not even the lead owner, Okie Clay Bennett.
Or perhaps a high-school stadium. In any event, the University of Washington has a football program in trouble, and has been for a long time, and venue would seem to be the least of the school's problems.
The Seahawks sounded even better, but then, they lead the NFC West with a 4-3 record.
If you watch local TV news, there's always something to worry about. Take this week's weather: sunny, warm ... and apparently a coiled snake ready to strike! Local stations are famous for over-hyping storms as reporters lean into Alki breezes as if they're the next Katrina or race up to Snoqualmie Pass to prove that — you won't believe this scoop — it's snowing in the mountains in the middle of winter! But it's not enough to exaggerate rain and wind: A little bit of sun is enough to spread alarm.