Well, the World Cup is here, and Pioneer Square is looking gorgeous. Though, checking the till here, it seems a few people are missing. Has anyone seen Spencer Pratt poking around and advising anyone on homelessness policy? He didn’t advance to the general election in LA’s mayoral race, and there’s not another reboot of The Hills on the horizon—so his schedule is wide open.
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Mayor Katie Wilson has had quite the staffing kerfuffle. This month, the third mayoral office staffer resigned or was removed from their role since Wilson took office in January. Uh oh! At least we don’t have the big bad problems of Bellevue—they think the light rail is too loud!
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Wilson fell far short of her goal to create 500 shelter beds in time for FIFA’s arrival. She only added 75 new spots. She said the point of putting that number out there was to “talk about the scale of need.” She held a press conference to celebrate this victory, which felt a bit like a sad parent taping a quiz with a big fat red C+ on it to the refrigerator. Or like watching a woman drive her car directly onto the Mount Baker light rail tracks, or another woman crashing into a semitruck filled with milk. We’re not saying women can’t drive!
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Cops around the country sure are interested in women drivers, especially those they’ve dated. At least 18 cops, who do not need a warrant to use the surveillance system, have been caught using Flock for stalking purposes. One Florida cop looked up his ex-girlfriend’s license plate number on the automated license plate reader system 69 times. He checked her mom’s plate 24 times and her dad’s plate 15 times. Isn’t surveillance technology beautiful? Really keeps the family together.
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Maybe that’s what Mayor Wilson was thinking about when she decided to flip on those surveillance cameras around the stadiums, just in time for Seattle’s first World Cup game. Wilson said that she’d received intel from SPD and the FBI showing “general but credible threats to safety and security during the games.” She did not say when she would turn the cameras off.
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The American Spirit is flowing through us. To celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday, Trump pulled out all the stops. He fixed the reflecting pool with an all new peel-away coating; he held UFC fights on the White House lawn on his 80th birthday with the aid of seven federal agencies and $60 million that could’ve gone to your dying grandmother; he started a star-spangled $1.776 billion slush fund for his political allies “persecuted” by the Biden administration; and he kept our anxieties high with bouncy ball gas prices and a war that has been killed and regenerated more times than Doctor Who. Earlier this month, the BBC canceled the show’s greenlit Christmas special after the showrunner and producer jumped ship.
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We wish we could jump ship, or at least onto a ship. Imagine a wealthy man whisking us away to the far side of the world. Us gazing over the prow, the wind tousling our hair, and him, looking like the Babadook with a frightening white smear of sunscreen on his face. But we’ve missed our chance—Mark Zuckerberg’s mega-yacht has departed Seattle’s waters. Perhaps he’s off to buy a bigger one to compensate for not becoming the world’s first trillionaire. Thanks, Elon.
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Underneath those waves, there is mystery, and there was about to be a whole lot more. The Trump administration wanted to spend 15 months dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a decade-old, $368 million deep-ocean observation system that monitors currents, ecosystems, and coastal environments. A bipartisan group of senators came in with a last-minute save.
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This country hasn’t felt right since the summer of 2016, when we all wandered our neighborhoods training military drones. Oh, you thought you were chasing Pikachus? All that location data was for the benefit of the robots, thanks to gamemaker Niantic Spatial and intelligence firm Vantor—a real “prepare for trouble and make it double” situation.
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It’s official: Bad boyfriends with Nazi tattoos are qualified for the Senate. Graham Platner won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary. If he beats the awful Senator Susan Collins, we may get ourselves an oyster-flavored Fetterman. It’s an aphrodisiac.
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They’ve taken all of our small pleasures, and it feels horrible. Let’s stop the cycle here and now and allow the nation’s birds to masturbate without reproach. Scientists say it is normal for birds to explore their bodies, though further study is needed to determine if they need to scream “choke me daddy” to climax. You are a pretty bird who deserves his crackers, but we’re tired of you mocking our needs.
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Sometimes we need to cream on the beach. It is not a crime to sun our nips and taints on the shores of Denny Blaine—or, at least, it didn’t used to be. The legality of our bare-assed freedoms on the LGBTQ lakefront haven are the subject of an ongoing trial between homeowners and the city. If the plaintiffs, Denny Blaine Park for All, which is bankrolled by the beach’s wealthy neighbors, get their way, the city could be forced to ban nudity or temporarily shut down the park.
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Fluids used to be cherished in this state. Washington’s only water park, Wild Waves, will flow for one more season this summer before it turns into a one-million-square-foot warehouse. Cue the Joni Mitchell. At least, Seattle has agreed to ban the construction of new data centers for a year. Cut the Joni Mitchell.
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A chemical tank implosion at Nippon Dynawave Packaging Co. in Longview killed 11 workers, whose remains had to be decontaminated before their families were allowed to identify them. The 900,000 gallons of caustic white liquor contaminated nearby waterways, killing hundreds of fish.
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Eastern Washington’s fire season will be particularly bad this year. Lower-than-usual snowpack also melted earlier than usual, exposing normally snow-covered timbered areas sooner, causing them to dry out. The early snowmelt also accelerates the growing season. When grasses and foliage grow earlier, they dry earlier, too.
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Go Knicks?
