In Seattle

Seattle, Washington, where I lived for 17 years during the eighties and nineties, is a nice and pleasant city, with weather generally confined to a placid range of 40 to 70 degrees year round. Seattle is a locale of temperate emotions, where folks pride themselves on never straying too far toward the extreme passions of human behavior. If and when you visit during the summer and find yourself in need of directions, you are likely to find a queue of friendly residents waiting to help get you on your way - tempting you to believe that Seattle must be the grandest place on earth.

But the price of living in such an affable but passionless place can be high - you are likely to find yourself living on the same Seattle street for a decade, without talking with or meeting your neighbors.

A strange place, Seattle, Washington - an aloof Pleasantville, with low-hanging clouds 300ish days a year.

In keeping with the Seattle oddities I came to know, I had to laugh at this recent piece from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Honking your horn could diminish something a bit more physical than the pompous ego of that guy who cut you off.

Turns out that blasting your horn at that idiot talking on his cell phone could end up costing you money -- a fact that comes as a surprise to many drivers and even some police officers.

According to state law, car horns are for emergencies only, and leaning on it because you're feeling peeved is punishable by a $124 ticket.

Earlier this summer, a Seattle police officer decided that Mark Cruz of Renton was honking out of turn. Cruz was waiting to turn onto First Avenue from Columbia Street in downtown Seattle when he realized that the driver in front of him was oblivious to a newly green light.

"He was yakking on his phone, if I recall correctly," Cruz said.

So he honked. The car in front of him lurched into motion. Cruz completed his turn and started to turn into a parking garage.

Then he saw the motorcycle officer pulling up behind him.

"He actually came around next to my window and he said to me, 'You were honking at the car that was in front of you,' " Cruz said. "I kept waiting for him to get to the real reason he pulled me over."

The officer let him off with a warning, but "I was dumbfounded," Cruz said.

"Your horn is for warning, not for talking," said Kris Jensen, a Seattle-based lawyer familiar with fighting traffic infractions. "It's OK to use your horn at the point you're getting cut off. But if you go up behind them and start honking, well, that's not OK."

SMC 11.84.320: The Seattle Municipal Code extends the state law to city streets and alleys

Happy 24th Birthday

Cameron Benedict!

I love you,

Dad

Remembering Labor Day History, 1937

Waitresses at Woolworth's staged an eight-day
sitdown strike in 1937,singing, dancing,
exercising, doing each others hair and nails
until finally management recognized their union
and gave them a five-cent per hour pay hike.

Words for Today

Woody Guthrie

I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you've not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.

To Begin September...

Our fear of death
is like our fear that summer will be short,
but when we have had our swing of pleasure,
our fill of fruit,
and our swelter of heat,
we say we have had our day.

- John Donne, 1620

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

- Carl Sandburg, Under the Harvest Moon