Category: olyblogosphere (Page 8 of 12)

1. Protect Nature (or an empty lot with trees) with the new Save LBA Woods blog.

My first impression is that they could’ve thought of a different name. LBA stinks as a park name to begin with (Little Baseball Association), but LBA Woods implies the area they’re trying to save has anything to do with the park, other than being next door.

2. Starhill Farm has Seedings!!

3. A sort of old update from the Bees, Birds and Butterflies blog on some infosheets they posted. Its a good blog, so worth the almost month old link.

4. Super cool post from Nick Strite on Capitol Lake:

What I think is just another example of we self-centered humans is the concern for the aesthetic values of the lake. People who are for the lake staying a lake value it for its appearance.

The lake is aesthetically pleasing and people firmly believe that it does bring in business and boost Olympia’s appeal. The strongest argument for the “keep the lake” side is that if an estuary were developed that it might destroy business downtown because of the loss of this attractive body of water. That is something no one can predict. It is moderately plausible that business would be affected but it is not possible to predict unless it were actually made into an estuary.

1. Calavara.com has a pre and two post (one and two) Arts Walk posts. The best part is the in-Arts Walk art.

2. Mark over at Notes on the State of Olympia states the obvious. But, its worth repeating a lot:

The Arts Walk on the Friday night before Procession is the realization of Olympia’s potential.

…
Tonight, we’ll embrace standing on the sidewalk; we’ll experience something new, unexpected; and we might even find that elusive place downtown to have a glass of wine with one’s friends.

3. The Flat Win Company was on hand, selling something.

4. OlyMEGA was open.

5. Trixy was there.

6. Lots going on at Kitzel’s too.

7. Doris at Thurston Talk posts up a short piece on encounters.

8. And, boy, we haven’t even gotten to Procession yet. Here’s Mojourner Truth’s Insect Sect.

9. Walt Jorgenson, who of late has been the guy who goes around town and takes long videos and posts them on Youtube, does just that with Procession. Part 1 and Part 2. Here’s another one by katyoneil.

1. I could’ve mentioned this in the last update, but Terrence Knight (remember “The Sitting Duck?”) is back.

Remember when he left? I wasn’t too impressed. I’m still not all that impressed, his website is pretty bad. Needs some work. Like, its not 1999 sort of work. It seems like it would be harder to update html page like the one he’s working on than update a wordpress.com page like the one he has set up here.

But, the videos themselves (shooting ordinance, Jim Lynch reading) and this article deserve praise. Good effort,  but help your readers and get the with the times.

2. Olympia Food Bloggers Bake Sale! For the Food Bank! Tomorrow (Friday, April 27) Both the Plum Palate and Pure Hunger are pointing this one out. Get yourself down there.

3. Its spring time, so its then time for Griffin Neighborhood to talk all about Scotch Broom.

4. And, shoot, everyone listen to this: a pilot podcast from David Raffin. Technically speaking Raffin does have podcast already, but its typically short clips from comedy shows.

But, this one is a proper podcast, with Raffin and a straight-man, topics and the whole thing. Its still very much David Raffin, but its the sort of long form podcast that I wish he’d do more of.

And, this is just me talking, but if Mathias Eichler were to start some sort of Maximum Fun podcast empire, this sort of long form Raffin is something I could get behind. Mathias is a busy man already, though.

1. Rock show at the library. Isn’t exactly a rare thing, but man, only in Olympia, right? Snazzy Bouquet: Now I want a donut.

2. Happens so rarely, but this blog has something worth linking to. Thurston Pundits: Honoring local greatness

3. Steven Willis, of Evergroove Fame, goes back to Evergreen for a lecture. This sort of thing, when a local Evergreen alum connects back to the campus, happens too rarely. Morty the Dog: Evergreen Lecture.

4. Rare thing that a local business (thanks to Mathias) comes up with a blog posting idea that isn’t just “hey look at this not so interesting project. Eyes of South Sound.

This is cool too me especially because for some reason I’ve been the guy in my family that was sent up on the roof for chores. Those roof shots are super cool.

5. And, something that doesn’t fall into the rare theme at all, Janine Unsoeld writes an exhaustive post about the Scott Yoos thing. Little Hollywood: Scott Yoos Trial Scheduled For August 13

1. A blogger comes to Olympia, visits friend, enjoys self, spends money downtown. Please, visitor and business folks, peruse this post and look for clues to get more people to Olympia to spend money.

2. Then this other blogger comes to Olympia, walks around, entertains himself with portable technology and doesn’t buy a damn thing. What’s his problem? Again, visitor and business sector folk, please look for clues to why this guy didn’t spend any money.

3. And, the plumpalate reminds us that this really is the time of year for shellfish. The Oyster Light season is quickly coming to a close, so before the sun starts shining too much and the water is too warm, get yourself some bivalves. From plumpalate:

Something spontaneously good may worm its way forward and that’s when you snatch it up. That’s what happened at Olympia Seafood last week. I went in to get last week’s smoked salmon and came out with something else besides. Something slightly intimidating: mussels and clams. I’d never made shellfish before. But Tony, the owner, told me these were collected that very morning at Totten Inlet. This was not a moment to resist. 

So I didn’t know what I was doing. But the recipe he gave me sounded so easy, I thought I couldn’t mess it up.

4. Its probably worth the effort to watch Walt Jorgenson’s videos (one, two and three) of the SPEECH media roundtable last week. I watched mostly through the intros, then got distracted. Hopefully, I’ll pick it back up in a few days.

I pointed a week or so back that a new book was coming out that had the name “Olympia” in the title, which always gets me excited. Turns out there is a lot more to this story than what I first saw.

First, here’s a podcast I listened to earlier this week in which Andras Jones, the author of “Accidental Initiations: In The Kabbalistic Tree of Olympia” explains the story behind the book.

Merywn Haskett, who plays a part in the book and took one for the team writes his review: A Narcissistic Misogynist with a Persecution Complex. 

From the review:

The book goes back and forth between Kabbalistic mumbo-jumbo, and an autobiography where he never admits fault, where he gets bullied or fired everywhere he goes (which, apparently, is why he doesn’t make movies anymore) and where his fear and/or hatred of women is probably the most honest thing he writes. He idolizes his deceased father, a college professor who had numerous affairs with his students. 

Merwyn (check) not a fan. By the way, it is worth looking at the responses to Merywn’s review, which he cross-posted to Amazon.

So, then Jones posts up a response to Haskett’s review on his own blog. The post is frustratingly titled: A Narcissistic Misogynist with a Persecution Complex. Come on guys, someone pick a new blog post title.

From Jones’ response:

Don’t get me wrong. I would still like to punch him in the face. I just don’t allow myself to gnaw on that particular brain bone for very long before breathing it out.

Not a breakout of a mutual appreciation club by any means.

And then, Haskett’s counter, yet to be title “I wear women’s glases.”

At the bottom, this sounds like a very personal fight between a handful of folks, which is becoming more public because one of them wrote a book and two of them have blogs.

But, not to ignore the fight (other than pointing it out, I have nothing really of substance to say about it), but here are a few independent thoughts about the book.

1. Isn’t it interesting, how the cover seems to stretch the Olympia brand?

2. Part of the book seems to deal with a tree in Sylvester Park that holds some significance. According to Jones, Olympia has been shaped to intensify this significance. At one point in the podcast, he seemed to imply that there could be a secret movement of city fathers to make these changes happen, specifically inside Sylvester Park. He commented something along the lines of “if I was on the city council,” implying it was the city making the changes.

Of course, Sylvester is a state park, so depending on your perspective, making the force behind the changes more vast and creepy.

3. Also, the idea of a shadow history and geography of the city is sort of fascinating. Not that my fascination has any bearing on the argument above or calling people “boring haters.”

1. Bus Driver appreciation day? Sure!

2. Speaking of books (lots of books last week), Wolf Tales blog has a new book too!

3. Mark isn’t signing up for the planning commission again. Hopefully this means he’ll be blogging about non-planning commission things now.

Best part of the post:

The OPC, just like the other groups I mentioned, does impact our lives, though those impacts aren’t often apparent to the casual and sometimes even dedicated observer. Even when one is interested in the instrumentalities of community governance, there is a huge learning curve. Thus, the job of someone writing about a planning commission as a piece of the larger context is exceedingly difficult, but that is a challenge I intend to undertake. As you’ve seen by now, I’m interested in the theory as well as its applications and I’m not sure exactly where we’ll end up. At least we can take pleasure in the knowledge thatinterminable deliberations like the SMP have not dissuaded me from moving on to subjects of interest in the meantime.

4. Bike hut at the westside co-op. Thank goodness this hut isn’t replacing a patch of grass or dirt, because the westside would have a problem with that.

5. And, “Self-Titled” is a hipster video.

(Note from March 13, 9:52 pm: Just found this laying as a draft, though I swear I set it to publish over a week ago. Damn blogger.com)

1. From: Accidental Initiations 2: “‘Accidental Initiations: In The Kabbalistic Tree of Olympia’ went to press today… There really is something in AI’s one hundred and eighty-four pages for anyone to hate…”

2. And, another book: “9 ways to sock a fish” via Calavara.com. Literally a book in just over a day. Go to the link and figure out how to buy it.

3. And, speaking of things being made, Oly-Mega looks like its working on getting an hacker space up and running in town.

4. As Mathias said, that didn’t take long for someone (in this case Rob Richards) to be disappointed in the city council.

5. And, because I have a thing for this particular train line, a train through the old brewery:

1. I’ve been waiting for a decent link from this blog for a little while. And, now from Jamaica to Olympia, and we’re not good hosts:

Americans don’t know how to make you feel at home in their country. There are constant reminders that I am not from here and while I could care less about those who choose to hold that against me, it is still something you will never have to encounter as a Jamaican in Jamaica. I tell everyone the reason why I love Washington so much, and in particular the Seattle/Tacoma area, is that I feel less out-of-place here than I have felt in any other place in the United States – and I have been to many places in New York, D.C., Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Maryland. Here, I feel less like a black girl married to a white man and more like Camille than I have since I left my home in Jamaica.

2. I don’t want to give Ken his own post on this, mostly because Ken didn’t write the press release that I have an issue with. No, radio was not the original “social media.” Talking to someone in front of you was the original social media. Radio was the original technological broadcast media, which is the opposite of social media.

3. “FREAKING ARTHURIAN MYTHS,” which is preceded by “but I work at Radiance, okay? I’ve lived in Olympia for decades”).

2. According to Mark at Notes on the State of Olympia, the planning commission is in a hurry, but still probably won’t make their goal:

Finally, and most importantly, if we cannot meet this schedule by even one meeting because there aren’t enough Mondays and Wednesdays in March, we’ll have at least three new commissioners who will be responsible for voting on the entire package without much of a clue about what they are voting on. Ironically, while we collectively convinced ourselves of the need to hurry, except for the personal desire that the departing commissioners had to complete this during their terms, I didn’t hear another argument in favor of an expedited schedule. As we left it last night, if we cannot complete the SMP on this new timeframe, we’ll defeat the purpose of a condensed schedule anyway and will waste up to 24 hours (assuming that meetings do not exceed three hours) of meeting time and staff hours. Our collective response was: “we should try.” Thus, Fonzie sailed over the shark.

3. Mojourner Truth blog has a lot more to say about the downed wood on Legion Way:

But what really interested me was the next comment, from a resident of Legion street, where some beautiful but doomed oaks were damaged. Under normal circumstances, she said, the city crew would cut, and the neighbors would then come through and salvage the wood. But this storm hit too many trees, and a contractor was hired that proceeded to block access to locals, while allowing someone from out Delphi Road way to come in and load up with prime firewood. The commenter said she called the City, which said that no, the contractor was not entitles to the wood.

Yet again, we see how transfer of a government function to the private sector can devolve to piracy. I don’t know whether the load of firewood is destined for the market, or just heating some guy’s house. But I do know that putting up barriers and preventing the neighbors from getting a share is wrong. I also see that when all is said and done, private entities will have lined their pockets with government funds, even if they are not ripping off firewood, for work that some of the neighbors would have done for free.

4. Tobi Vail has been blogging a series of posts at Collapse Board called “Hello from Olympia, WA.” Here’s post #5, that includes this wonderful line: “We got to the Lower East Side at 4 AM. Apparently the city that never sleeps does sleep from 4-5 AM. Olympia has more stuff that’s 24 hours than the Lower East Side.”

5. I’m linking to this post from the Griffin Neighbors, not because I think the topic is interesting at all, but because it points about that the Steamboat Island/Griffin metroplex has its own print newspaper called the Register.

I propose that Olympia Views blogger pick up a copy and give us a well thought out blog post about these little local newspapers (like the KeyPen News) and how they fit into the news ecosystem. I heard a story once that the CPJ was one of these neighborhood rags before becoming a horrible student newspaper. That would be interesting to read about.