Entrance to the new place. Click to enlarge.
NPR is at the moment covering a story that includes mention of the “barrier” Israel is building in the West Bank. They do so ostensibly in an effort to appear neutral because Palestinians tend to call it a “wall.”
Let’s cut through the Newspeak here. I’ve never such a structure called so in the non-political world. If it’s made of relatively light, sparse materials, everyone calls it a “fence.” If it’s made of heavy materials (masonry, typically) it gets called a “wall.”
You just don’t hear people talking about “picket barriers,” “the garden barrier,” “a country lane lined with old stone barriers,” “the Great Barrier of China,” or “a barbed-wire barrier” in common life.
The one exception is in political propaganda, when you’re shilling for a government that’s erected a wall (almost always a wall, as they want it to be massive and hard to penetrate, governments being all about force and coercion) on extremely questionable moral grounds.
The earliest example of such language use I can think of is the late, unlamented East German government and its so-called “antifascist protection barrier,” which everybody else quite rightly gave the more accurate and descriptive name of “the Berlin Wall.” Yes, the former was the structure’s actual official designation. Go Google it if you don’t believe me.
The structure Israel is building in Palestine (and yes, all or most of it is actually in Palestine; in occupied land and not along Israel’s internationally-recognized borders) is constructed of reinforced concrete with armed watchtowers at regular intervals. Any structure even vaguely similar to it is called a “wall.”
Back to neutrality here. It should not be the job of the media to shield those who engage in morally questionable acts from criticism. If party A insists that 2 + 2 = 4 and party B insists that 2 + 2 is some vague undeterminable small quantity but definitely not four, an unbiased, impartial media should report that A is right, B is wrong, and use A’s terminology in its dispatches.
It’s a wall. It should be called such, and those who are building it should have to defend their acts as such. What NPR is exhibiting is not impartiality, but bias towards the wall-builders.
And this article reminds me of yet another reason why I’m happy not to live in California. I love the outdoors but can’t stand bright sunlight. I simply don’t have the genetic material necessary to enjoy it: all my ancestors are from Northern Europe. I hardly tan at all and I burn very easily.
California is significantly further south than either Portland or Seattle, and this fact is immediately noticeable in the greater intensity of the sunlight there. This is true even in the supposedly “foggy” Bay Area, where even if it was foggy it was often only a very thin fog with the (to my senses) viciously bright California sun blaring through it. Even in the fog, I usually felt assaulted by the environment and was rarely free from the need to continually worry about getting badly burned.
Even here in the Pacific Northwest, the only real escape from the sun in the summer months is to head into the woods. Thankfully, there’s plenty of forest here, so that’s never terribly difficult. The Bay Area has its forests, too; some of them magnificent redwoods. The problem is that it’s on the southern edge of the coastal coniferous zone and the rainfall is just barely sufficient to sustain the forests through the long dry season there. So the forests only grow in the rainiest spots.
Trouble is, the rainiest spots along the Pacific Coast are not on the beaches but in the mountains ten or twenty miles from the beaches. In Oregon and Washington, this isn’t extremely noticeable; there’s such a moisture surplus that even at the beaches there’s lush forest. But in the Bay Area the beaches tend to be treeless scrubland.
The other thing about California is that the marine layer is very strong but doesn’t go very far inland. In the Pacific Northwest, there’s still a definite marine effect fifty or a hundred miles from the ocean. In the Bay Area, go a few miles inland and climb not even 1,000 feet and the temperature goes up from the mid sixties to the mid nineties.
In other words, there is no escape. Either the temperature is comfortable and the UV is off the scale, or there’s shade at the cost of baking heat. You can’t find large areas of cool deep shade in the Bay Area. It simply doesn’t exist. So I stayed inside a lot during the summer.
As frustrated as this left me, I had one great advantage. I knew better. I knew there were places where I didn’t have to choose between two uncomfortable alternatives; I had lived in one. I can’t help but wonder if some of those people profiled in the SFGate article are really potential outdoor lovers stuck in an area whose natural environment doesn’t suit them.
And that’s just central California. It’s still a dozen or more degrees of latitude to the tropics. Without having ever been there, I think I can safely conclude that I’d hate Hawaii (or any other popular tropical resort destination) and find it far from “paradise.”
And no, I’m not saying that I always hate sunshine, just that it’s vastly overrated by most people. A certain amount of nice, soft, low-intensity Northern sunlight is very enjoyable. Just because a little of somehting is nice doesn't mean that a lot of it must therefore be even nicer.
The first apartment I saw this evening was in a building that apparently had its last major maintenance circa 1980. The hallway carpet was threadbare. Paint was peeling on the hallway ceilings. The floors in the unit were worn and grimy. The bathroom walls were mildewed. And no, this wasn’t a unit that was to have work before it was rented, it was “ready to rent.”
The next one had extra rooms (without closets) counted as “bedrooms”. That’s actually illegal in Portland but I can’t seem to find any such rule at either the state, county, or city level here. I guess it’s just more evidence as to how much power the local sleazy landlords have over the political process. Moreover, some of the units had carpets befouled by animal urine (the places reeked of it) which hadn’t been replaced. Maybe there were nicer vacancies in the building (the top floor is getting extensive work), but why would I want to rent from someone who’s obviously a sleazy cheapskate?
Have I mentioned yet that in past years I’ve searched for apartments in San Francisco, Oakland, and Portland and never saw anything as dirty and poorly-maintained as what I regularly see in Seattle?
To be fair, Seattle isn’t the only place where sleazy landlords predominate. San Francisco is full of them. They just express their sleaze in different ways. Like by removing in-house laundry facilities and making tenants walk several blocks in the rain to do their wash.
Hopefully I’ll have better luck tomorrow evening.
Tonight’s apartment, while something of a dump by Portland standards, actually isn’t too bad by Seattle standards. Then I notice the beautiful view of the Seattle Central Community College truck loading docks out the window.
Have I mentioned how much I loathe the sound (not to mention the smell) of idling trucks outside my windows in Portland, and how many of them come in the course of the day to the Volvo dealer across the street? And how one goal in this move is to make the hassle worth it by ending my having to put up with such noise pollution?
It’s probably just as well, as that building comes disrecommended by a friend after its landlord pulled a sleazy number with his security deposit on him. I would have been tempted to rent the thing (with qualms) had it not had that noise issue (and approximately half the units in the building don’t. So it may be a blessing in disguise that the particulars about this unit made it easy to say “no.”
So the search continues. I look at another one tomorrow evening.
No complete dumps tonight, just things I have qualms about lest I find something better. First apartment was a little on the gloomy side and the building had only a single washer and dryer thanks to a really small utility room. Other apartment was nice but expensive, pricey enough that before I saw it I decided to rent it only if it had everything on my wish list. And it came up two items short.
So I’ll wait a while. If someone rents one out from under me, no tears. Neither was that good a deal in the first place.
The most recent apartment I looked at would have been just about ideal, except (a) they allow smoking in the building, and (b) in between when I called and when I arrived to see it, it got rented. The latter isn’t exactly surprising, as it was maintained in much better shape than is the norm in Seattle (i.e. it was maintained to the standards you’d expect in Portland or Oakland).
It’s all making me wonder once more how much I want to settle here. Things appear to have gotten only very marginally better than last month.
The non-dumps are typically so pricey that I’d spend as much on them as I’m spending now between the guesthouse and my place in Portland. I really miss my own kitchen and bathroom here, but I could get those by renting a studio at about the same monthly cost I’m spending here. (Studios in nice buildings are common as dirt.) Then I’d have the advantage of two homes to choose from.
I’m not quite ready to do that. In fact, I may not do it. What I am going to do is keep looking for a one-bedroom until I reach the end of my first month here. Then I’ll pay for another month and change strategies somehow.
Lyle Lanley: Well, sir, there’s nothing on earth Like a genuine, Bona fide, Electrified, Six-car Monorail! What’d I say?— From The Simpsons. Full lyrics here.Ned Flanders: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: What’s it called?
Patty+Selma: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: That’s right! Monorail!
A big part of the anatomy of Seattle’s dysfunctionality is its persistent inability to build any sort of rapid-transit system, despite a cryingly urgent need for one. And a big part of that is the a dysfunctionality in the local political culture that says unless something gives you 100% of what you want, you fight it tooth and nail.
That spells death to any sort of rapid-transit project. Because in order to satisfy everyone, the initial segment must be about 1/4 mile away from everybody. If anyone’s left out, it's slighting people, and will be fought to death. If it’s any closer, then it’s too close, it’s ruining property values, and will be fought to death. Since you can’t start with everything, everywhere, (and it’s impossible to simulataneously be nowhere) it all ends up being a somewhat difficult proposition.
Enter the monorail. It has a cozy history in Seattle as a tourist ride. Best of all, nobody has used one as the basis of a city-wide transport system, anywhere. There are some two good reasons for this:
Notice I said “best of all” above. That’s no mistake. Since a monorail transit system is a wildly impractical idea that (a) has never been built anywhere, and (b) probably never will be built, it is the perfect system for Seattle: a fantasy system. No need to worry about unpleasant little real-world details. and everyone can cling to their myth of it being exactly 1/4 mile away.
So it got huge support. Which, of course, was its downfall. Because after the voters approved the monorail, it then actually had to be built. Big, big problem. And then the cash-register bells started chiming. You take it from there.
What’s annoying is that so many intelligent people who should know better are still clinging to their beautiful myth and crying over their baby meeting its inevitable demise. The man probably has a number of other creepy attributes, but mayor Greg Nickels deserves a gold star in my book for stopping good money from being thrown after bad on this particular white elephant.
The good thing about the monorail is that it was such an obviously ridiculous idea, it quite naturally drew fierce criticism from (among others) the automobiles über alles crowd. They spent so much time fighting the monorail that they were distracted from the Sound Transit light rail project. Now that the monorail is dead, the light rail so far underway that it’s probably too late to stop it. And once the first segment gets built, the die is cast: it’ll be light rail for future rapid-transit projects as well.
It was a messy and expensive process, but the practical technology prevailed.
When stories like the previous one play out, the standard pundit response is to talk about the “Seattle Process” of lengthy public input and how this tends to slow things down but (a) is ultimately worth it, (b) is a local tradition, and (c) is what the voters want.
Sounds convincing. Trouble is, it’s mostly bullshit.
There’s always differences of opinion on any issue in any city. But something interesting takes place in Seattle.
If it’s not in the interest of any well-connected bigwig, “we must respect the Seattle Process” (which comes complete with agents of the well-connected wanting to talk it to death). It thus gets done excruciatingly slowly, if at all.
If a project strokes the wallets of well-connected local capitalists, the “Seattle Process” mysteriously disappears. A textbook example of this is the two new sports stadiums that were built after the Kingdome (a perfectly fine facility built at public expense, recently refurbished at significant cost, and for which the construction bonds hadn’t even been paid off) was torn down.
The net effect is of a local myth that serves to excuse the political system from persistently ignoring public needs at the expense of private profit.
Entrance to the new place. Click to enlarge.
It’s actually in a building I hesitated on initially, because it’s in a neighborhood (Queen Anne) without a natural foods co-op. Other than that it looked really tempting.
That was before I discovered that its landlord (in a 180-degree departure from the normal Seattle sleaze) prices his rents significantly below market, a luxury he can afford as a result of purchasing the building long ago.
Yesterday I was kicking myself for not having grabbed that unit as I looked at the exterior of another building in the neighborhood that had a vacancy. It wasn’t as nice a building, and it wasn’t far enough from the nearest arterials to avoid all of the car noise and car stink. Since I was only about three blocks from the missed opportunity, I decided to cruise by it just to see if, against all odds, there was a vacancy sign on it.
There was.
And it had been flipped over just hours before, so the apartment was still very much available. I was the first caller, in fact.
One of the things I hate about Seattle is how few apartments there are on quiet residential streets. As I ranted earlier:
Housing? Despite it’s size, it’s a city dominated by suburban supremacy. If you can’t afford (or don’t desire) to buy a single-family detached home, you’re relegated to living in the noisiest and most polluted locations; they’re the only places new apartment construction has been allowed for decades. There’s a horrible shortage (compared to any other place I’ve lived) of multifamily housing in clean, quiet areas. Seattle wins again.
What happened to Capitol Hill’s west slope is especially tragic. It was (and to some degree remains) a wonderful neighborhood of multifamily dwellings on residential streets. In 1962, I-5 was routed right along the base of it. A four-block wide swath that had been prime, quiet, livable areas within walking distance of the downtown core became seriously compromised by noise and pollution. A fifth block was destroyed completely by replacing it with the freeway itself.
The Eastlake neighborhood fared worse. Already long and linear, the freeway was routed through its heart. Virtually the entire neighborhood was degraded. Only a few blocks in an area that protrudes into Lake Union was spared.
In discussions with friends, I’ve opined verbally that highways and other automobile infrastructure should be routed through neighborhoods of lower-density single-family detached homes. Let the demographic that uses cars the most live with the negative effects of the things.
This morning I expressed my impression (and surprise) that Queen Anne, historically a more expensive and sought-after neighborhood, now seems an easier market than Capitol Hill. His response was that’s probably because Queen Anne lacks easy access to I-5, thus limiting the neighborhood’s appeal to (Microsoft and other Eastside) employees who refuse to live in suburbia yet remain firmly wedded to the concept of driving to work.
Music to my ears. One of the things I like about Queen Anne is its lack of proximity to that godawful freeway. Aurora Ave. N., the old highway 99, runs along the east edge of the neighborhood. That’s bad enough in my book. Thankfully, it does far less damage to Queen Anne than I-5 does to Capitol Hill: fewer lanes, less traffic, lower speed limit, and further from the neighborhood center.
Let the carhead commuters breathe carbon monoxide and tire dust. Serves them right.
If only there weren’t so many nice bicycle-riding eco-radicals in that neighborhood being subjected to the same fate.
The two Pakistani officials told The Associated Press that this could explain why Friday’s predawn attack missed its apparent target, Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenant.So it’s OK to bomb villages (in a country that’s not only a noncombatant but officially an ally, nonetheless) just because you think someone of interest might be there.Al-Zawahri sent some aides to the dinner instead and investigators were trying to determine whether they had been in any of the three houses that were destroyed in the missile strike that killed at least 17 people, one of the officials said. [emphasis added]
Does this mean it’s now okey-dokey if Hamas sends a suicide bombers to blow up Israeli buses as long as they believe them to be carrying IDF officers? (Which, given how Israel has mandatory conscription, is a fair bet for pretty much any reasonably-crowded civilian bus.)
Two excerpts from two news articles. First, from The Independent:
The deputy leader of al-Qa’ida may have survived an American air strike in Pakistan because he did not turn up to a dinner at which he was expected. As the reports emerged yesterday, thousands of Pakistanis took part in angry street protests at the air strike, in which 18 civilians are believed to have died, including six children. [emphasis added]Next, an AP wire item:
Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., said the real problem is that the U.S.-allied Pakistani government does not control the region along the mountainous border with Afghanistan, where the attack occurred. Many al-Qaida and Taliban combatants are believed to have taken refuge there. [emphasis added]And Bayh is considered to be a front-runner for the 2008 presidential race.“It’s a regrettable situation, but what else are we supposed to do?” Bayh told CNN’s “Late Edition.” “It’s like the wild, wild west out there. The Pakistani border is a real problem.”
Let’s rework that second quote a little bit, shall we?
Hamas leader Mohammed Deif said the real problem is that the Palestinians do not control most of Palestine, which remains occupied by Zionist forces. Many Israeli military members are believed to have taken refuge there.“It’s a regrettable situation, but what else are we supposed to do? The Zionist occupation is a real problem.” Deif told an interviewer with Al-Jazeera.
Put negatively, cars and suburbia cause dementia. Car culture is the main reason Americans are so sedentary.
This Craigslist listing is a real hoot:
First Floor 2 BD- Rare Vacancy!!We are located at 730 N 85th Street. Our building is close to GreenLake, Greenwood, and Northgate. Rare Vancancy [sic] will be available first week of February. Please call 206-781-5158...leave your name and number if I can’t personally take your call.
I mean, give me an effing break here. It’s on the ground floor, in an undistinguished building, on an arterial, and in a so-so neighborhood. Yet it’s a “rare vacancy.”
You might as well call sand rare in Sahara.
Try feeding in “37.27N 115.78W” to Google Maps. (It’s the coordinates of the so-called “Area 51” secret military research complex.)
Not surprisingly, the map is all grayed out. It starts getting grayed out at a pretty coarse resolution. So it’s surprising that the satellite view (which one would think would be of even more interest to spies than a map) allows you do zoom in significantly closer than the maps view does.
You can’t zoom in to maximum resolution, of course, but you can get close enough to see an airfield and a complex of buildings surrounding at the southwest corner of Groom Dry Lake.
And no, I don’t believe in UFO conspiracy stories. Well, actually I do, just not in the way most people would associate with that phrase.
UFO is, of course, an acronym for “unidentified flying object.” And, as I’ve alluded to before, I believe the area is a secret military research complex. Precisely, a complex where the military experiments with its next generations of aircraft.
Sometimes those aircraft look and act quite different from current-generation aircraft. Take the B-2 “stealth” bomber, for example. There were actually reports from remote areas of Nevada of a mysterious bat-wing like UFO during the years the bomber was being developed but before the military publically announced it. Before that announcement, the existence of such a bomber was a secret, and the military denied it was researching any such aircraft in response to the UFO reports.
It certainly was a UFO then. It was obviously a flying object, and nobody (at least no civilians) knew what it was. And there was an organized secret effort — a conspiracy, in other words — to build it and cover up its existence. Ergo, an actual UFO conspiracy.
But space aliens? Naah. Some people flatter the government too much. Governments are nothing but social constructs — groups of people. They can keep secrets — small ones for a long time, and big ones for short times. But they have a great deal of difficulty keeping big secrets for a long time.
It’s very hard for me to believe that in all the years there’s supposed to have been aliens at Area 51, nobody’s been willing to put their name to a big exposé of it. The most logical explanation for this lack of an exposé is a lack of space aliens.
Update: The FAS has some much better resolution pictures of Area 51 here.
One of my memories as a child in the Chicago suburbs was eating at The Berghoff on trips into town. Just learned it’s soon to be no more.
Yet another sleazy Seattle landlord. This time a scumbag who accepts my holding deposit money (don’t worry, I will get it back), rents it to someone else, and doesn’t even call beck to let me know what he did. That was left as an exercise for me.
I’m reasonably sure he rented it to a friend or some other inside contact, because he was unable to give a coherent explanation why he rejected my application. If there was actually a problem, he could have rattled of an explicit reason in a heartbeat.
As for what’s next, resuming the job search seems like a good idea. It’s the old “one little problem” catch: the job is fine, but there’s this one little problem: the city it’s located in.
But that still leaves housing arrangements for the duration of this job, which I am most emphatically not going to leave unless I have another sure thing in hand.
Names are not being changed or omitted to protect the guilty. Just don’t have the full information handy right now. Expect a post thiscoming Monday giving the gory details as to just who shafted me.
First, let’s assume for sake of discussion the accused did in fact do all they are alleged to. Even then, calling them “terrorists” is a misuse of language that cheapens the word “terrorism”. Because nobody died in any of the acts of sabotage the accused allegedly committed. And this was deliberate — one of the core principles of both the ELF and the ALF is to avoid doing physical harm to any living thing. That’s in contrast to real terrorists who set out to kill and maim as many as possible so as to maximize fear.
Of course, it’s yet to be demonstrated the accused are, in fact, guilty. As this article points out, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that the establishment is doing this to distract the public from their own far more serious misdeeds. Those misdeeds, after all, involved lies and deception on a grand scale. Once you’re playing that game, why not play it some more in an attempt to distract public opinion? It’s not even necessary for any convictions to result from the arrests; the arrests themselves have grabbed the headlines and distracted the media from the corruption scandals in Washington.
Or, both scenarios could be true. The accused could turn out to be guilty and their arrests could have been strategically timed.
I'm typing this on the train back to Seattle. Based on the announcement the conductor just made, it appears as if the Seahawks are going to win the playoff. That’s the least thing Seattle needs — more encouragement to the sports fans.
I wouldn’t hold anything against sports fans if the teams they rooted for weren’t such egregious examples of corporate welfare. But they are. And particularly greedy ones at that. The Kingdome was barely a quarter-century old (and that makes it newer than most commercial and residential buildings in Seattle) when the whining by sports team owners about it being incurably obsolete began.
It being an issue of lining the pockets of some well-connected capitalists, the political system naturally found a way to accomplish the deed. To the detriment of all sorts of other projects which the money could have been spent on, of course.
A fascinating thing about Seattle is that if you look at its history, the place started to suck at about the same time the big-league teams arrived. Up until the early 1970’s, Seattle did things like pass “forward thrust” bond measures to build parks. In decades past, Seattle voters helped create a model municipally-owned electric utility and pioneered public housing. There were serious efforts to build a mass transit system in the 60’s and early 70’s. Local politicians managed to get the military to deed over two bases, thus creating Magnuson and Discovery parks.
Then Seattle joined the big leagues, and at about that time started to coast on past efforts. Slowly, gradually, the quality of life declined year by year. What was once one of the most livable cities in America is now yet another major metropolitan area plagued by all the typical big-city ills.
My theory is that the two are related. As I alread mentioned, once money is spent on grandiose stadiums, it’s not available to be spent on other things. Moreover, once they have the artificially manufactured spectacle of big league sports to distract them, people spend less time worrying about civic issues and more time rooting for “their” team.
The conductor just broke the bad news: Seattle 34, Carolina 14. Curses!
Certainly didn’t take long for the thing to become obsolete, what with the announcement of the new Intel-based MacBook laptops. Which sucks, but then again, such things always happen when buying a computer.
Even if I knew the announcement was coming, it wouldn’t have affected my decision much. I needed to replace my ailing old laptop, and needed to do it soon. The new MacBooks aren’t available yet. And when they’re available, they’ll quickly run out and be backordered.
And when they come in from backorder, the first surprise of the day for many users is that they’re no faster than the G4 laptops. Trouble is, there’s no applications out for the Intel platform yet: all the executables are PowerPC binaries. The only way they’ll run on a MacBook is with emulator software. What was native code becomes interpreted code. Goodbye speed advantage.
Not to mention the inevitable teething pains the new hardware — and the software that runs on it — will go through. The new MacBooks not only won’t run software faster, they’ll run it less reliably.
Those issues, of course, will be addressed within six months, and then the new systems will indeed live up to their claims. But not until then. So my new laptop is a lot less obsolete than it might first appear.
Consider the following Craigslist Ad (reproduced below to preserve it for posterity when it expires or is removed for being misleading):
$490 / 1br* - sweet 2nd story apartment* At this point, we know something’s fishy here. One bedroom apartments just don’t rent for this price in Seattle.Reply to: hous-127936393@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-01-23, 7:58PM PSTperfect 2nd story apartment in triplex. large carpeted living/bedroom† with great light. quaint kitchen with cooking range. front porch and backyard. free washer and dryer downstairs, electricity included. walk to fremont, gasworks, UW and more. shared bathroom‡ with one other male renter. call: 206.719.6165
this is in or around wallingford
no -- it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
† No, dipshit. It’s either a living room or a bedroom. Not both. Yet another sleazy Seattle landlord who thinks a studio apartment is a 1 bedroom apartment. But wait…
‡ It’s not even a studio! It’s an efficiency fer crissakes!
And no, neither e-mail address nor phone number have been changed to shield the guilty from the natural consequences of their own dishonesty.
Saw yet another apartment this evening. It sounded like the kind of extremely scarce mid-market apartment that rents within hours of coming available. Alas, I was No. 3 in line. So odds are Nos. 1 or 2 would grab it before I could even look at it.
It was in a building in a borderline location; about half of it being badly impacted by a very busy arterial and a truck-loading dock that gets early-morning deliveries.
The anticipated “sorry, it’s been rented, don’t bother coming” call never came. When I got there, the owner headed down the hall in the direction of the loading dock. Yup, the worst apartment on the third floor, closest corner in the building to both loading dock and arterial. No shortage of noise and fumes for that lucky tenant.
I will say that after nearly eight weeks searching for something that doesn’t abjectly suck, most of the sting is now gone. I’m no longer disappointed by such things; I simply expect them.
If there’s any landlords reading this they might suspect I have a general hatred against them. Not really. Sure, it’s a capitalistic game with its exploitive elements. But who doesn’t play capitalist in our society? It’s not as if there’s much of an alternative, after all. The real question is do you play the capitalist game with viciousness and enthusiasm, or do you play it with moderation. (Bonus points, of course, for playing the game with an aim to subverting it.)
No, my complaints against sleazy landlords are complaints against sleazy landlords. Note the adjective. If you’re not a sleazy landlord, then you should feel no offense at what I type. Trouble is: the vast preponderance of Seattle landlords are sleazy.
That makes encountering a definitively non-sleazy one surreal. I encountered one this evening: Fred Sheets, owner of the Lenawee, the Granada, and a few other Capitol Hill apartments whose names I forget at the moment and unfortunately can’t list here. Maybe I’m jumping the gun on this conclusion, but I don’t think so. For openers, a frient of mine in the local Tenant’s Union related how they simply never had any complaints about Sheets buildings.
It was, as I say, surreal, given how much my expectations had been lowered by other buildings in that part of Capitol Hill. It was almost jarring, in fact. Instead of a battered interior with slapdash repairs I was greeted by a building that looked like it had been put into a gigantic hermetically-sealed bottle right after it was completed in 1917 and uncorked only yesterday. The lobby was actually in nicer shape than the lobbies of the super-premium top-market buildings with $1200 a month, 1000-square-foot 1 bedroom apartments.
The unit itself was a small studio. I was admiring the better-than-average condition of the paint on the walls (I’ve seen some interiors that are in absolutely dreadful condition and been told with a straight face it’s ready to be moved in to). That prompted a profuse apology from the building manager about the few nails in the wall, with an emphatic promise that don’t worry, those nails will be removed, those holes will be spackled and the entire room will be repainted before you move in.
Two pleasant surprises await me in the kitchen. The first is a built-in table to eat off of. Precisely the thing someone who doesn’t want to spend money furnishing a place needs. The second is a rare (for Seattle) gas stove. While commenting on the kitchen, the manager points out that the bed in the main room is a Murphy bed and comes with the apartment, as well. So the only thing I’ll need to purchase is a desk to work at!
I then drop my bombshell. I’m only interested in a six-month lease, and I’m willing to pay you more per month for the freedom of a shorter lease. My explanation of my situation is interrupted by the manger, who thanks me for being honest about my situation, agrees to the six-month lease, and refuses to accept one cent more in rent per month!
The one sucky thing is is that the building isn’t exactly located in the quietest and nicest part of Capitol Hill. (Don’t worry, it’s not on a busy street, either; I wouldn’t have applied for it if it was.) It’s something I’m overlooking thanks to the efforts of the owner in making his building an attractive place to live in.
The sleazeball of a landlord who screwed me out of an apartment I was first in line for goes by the name of Jan Wagner. He’s a male, first name is pronounced “John” even though it’s spelled differently. His cell number is 206-909-4053; the manager’s number (listed here so if you spot it in an ad, you can avoid wasting your time) is 206-282-4878.
The building is the Glen Eden Apartments at 921 First Ave W. on the south slope of Queen Anne hill.
Avoid like the plague unless you get some sort of perverse pleasure in interacting with slippery eels.
This award, that is. To wit:
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 14:49:08 -0800 From: Darrin Waters <darrinandstasia (at) hotmail (dot) com> Subject: RE: $490 / 1br - sweet 2nd story apartment To: n5jrn (at) mac (dot) com SORRY YOU WERE SO OFFENDED, I DID THIS FOR MY DAD WHO’S A SENIOR CITIZEN AS A FAVOR, AND DIDNT REALIZE THE WORDING WOULD RUIN YOUR LIFE. JUST A DAUGHTER TRYING TO HELP OUT A LANDLORD THAT ACTUALLY FOR 35 YEARS PEOPLE HAVE LOVED AND WHO EVEN GIVES HIS TENANTS CHRISTMAS PRESENTS. SO GET A LIFE BUD, YOUR BARKIN UP THE WRONG TREE OF ACTUALLY GOOD PEOPLE. HAPPY NEW YEAR
No excuse. You’re honestly trying to tell me you grew up as the child of a landlord and you never learned the difference between a 1-bedroom, a studio, and an efficiency? I knew the difference between a 1-bedroom and a studio by the time I was fifteen, and I lived in a small, rural town with very little multifamily housing.
Sorry, that turkey just don’t fly.
Face it, scumbag: you’re a liar. You lied in your ad title, and you’re lying again in an attempt to cook up an excuse for your earlier lying.
Seems as if Chavez’ recent clear-cut antisemitic insinuation is, well, not so clear-cut after all.
Ain’t timing a bitch. Click to enlarge.
Not that it would have fooled me without the legitimate message from PayPal of actual activity on my very much still open account, but amusing nonetheless.
If you thought Portland’s (so far as I know unique) decision to not cooperate with the FBI in the guise of a “Joint Terrorism Task Force” was groundless, consider what the FBI has been caught doing in Georgia.
Consider this article. Note the headline. It doesn’t focus on management compelling employees to work excessive hours, it focuses on the employees earning “excessive” pay because of it!
But how excessive is the pay, really? The kind of hours they’re talking about are truly hellish and life-draining. For something that unpleasant, the pay should be high.
Given how it’s just been demonstrated that the establishment media cares more about money than people, it’s definitely a good thing that the overtime pay rate was high enough to capture their attention. Better to have the right thing done for the wrong reason than to not have it done at all.
Can there any doubt after his latest antic that, contrary to how he portrays himself, Tim Eyman is no simple anti-tax populist? Face it, he’s a member in good standing of the doctrinaire right wing.
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