I've never watched Robert Redford's Sundance Channel but an ad caught my eye for Season 3 of a series called Iconoclasts. The show features pairings of famous people hanging out and sharing their lives and secrets of success. Last week, the program headlined the spiritually elevated team of Mike Meyers and Deepak Chopra. Tomorrow (Nov. 15) the guest celebs are Starbucks' Howard Schultz and producer Norman Lear who, among other things, walk around the Pike Place Market sipping coffee while salmon are being tossed for the tourists. Thank goodness this iconoclastic show avoids cliches.
King County's leap into the ferry business makes sense politically, maintaining a passenger-only service being abandoned by the state. The big winner is King County Councilmember Dow Constantine, whose district includes West Seattle and Vashon Island.
But from one perspective, this news is a head slapper.
In Seattle, the CNN star whacks Boeing, Bill Gates, and the Bush-Clinton dynasty – plus he predicts that none of the current 2008 presidential candidates will make it to the White House. Or perhaps that's just wishful thinking.
Defeat Proposition 1, as happened last week, and you leave a lot of taxing authority on the table. Not surprisingly, local governments are pouncing. Their greediness perhaps got out of hand this week, with the Metropolitan King County Council launching a county ferry system, jacking up bus fares, and wading into programs to rebuild levees and help mental health.
In what's called "Tax Hike Tuesday," the Port of Seattle also got into the frenzy, approving a $78 million property tax levy, in a kind of premature celebration of the likely departure of its one anti-tax commissioner, Alec Fisken, who appears to have been defeated. Grab it now, was the mantra.
Without fanfare, as far as our eyes and ears can reach anyway, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has birthed itself a new online-only site – SPI – for those young readers who are supposed to save the newspaper industry.
When I heard that comedian and Bob Barker replacement Drew Carey was helping to bring Major League Soccer to Seattle, I shared the information with a friend who was appalled. So was I. My friend was horrified that one of Hollywood's big (and rare) conservatives was messing around in our town. I was reacting to the fact that an un-American foreign sport was invading our turf.
A frequent visitor to Seattle's sister city in Italy evokes the richness of daily life there. It is steeped in history and good living, and he worries that a squalid murder might long alter the world's perception of the hill town.
Twitter
Facebook
RSS Feeds