University of Washington tuition going up 20% for instate, not good

To say the least. The Seattle PI has reproduced a diagram that shows UW as being about $1,850 less than that of the University of Michigan, but that's not really relevant. Washington has had a great tradition of making higher education affordable, and it would be terrible if that were to be sacrificed because other states are less progressive.

Michigan invasion of Seattle

Appears to be happening, and I love it. I've been shocked by the number of Michigan license plates I've been seeing lately around town. It's like everyone back home somehow received a signal saying that Seattle was a good place to live, packed up, and moved on over. Welcome new comers.

If you ever wondered where the jewelry equivalents to the Garfunkel and Oates song could be found...

Here they are. The lyric I'm talking about is the one from "A turn for the Douche" about guys and tribal tattoos, a species of creature also known as "Bros". The website is "Tribal Hollywood.com". All of the descriptions of the pendants, many of which could have been taken from "The Alphabet of Manliness" by Maddox, are priceless:

"HAZZARD Pendant in Silver and Gunmetal
"The Wild Child and No Limits."

"FAIMALAI Hawaiian Seahorse Pendant Tribal Rope Necklace
"To the Victor go the Spoils""

"DIABLO TRIPLE YANG Fire Pendant in Brass and Silver
"Fiery Intensity and Risk Taker"
(perhaps it's Triple Yang to compensate for a, um, lack of something?)

"BUFFALO HORN Stainless Steel Men's Tribal Horn Necklace P...
"The Call to Arms""

Another great thing about Seattle is that people on the outside don't really know what it's like

They think they do, but they're mistaken, and that makes the city all that more valuable. I mean, when you think of it, how much do folks really know about Seattle? There was 'Sleepless in Seattle', the rise of the grunge scene in the early to mid '90s, and then the WTO protests and afterwards in '99 and '00, but that was anywhere from eleven to twenty years ago. Since then, Seattle has become uncharted territory. The public mojo in the Northwest has moved to Portland, which lately seems to be burning itself out, particularly since the release of Portlandia, leaving Seattle to do its own thing with not a lot of scrutiny. Sure, there are articles here and there about the progressive culture and innovative things happening, but none of it appears to really capture the vibe that actually exists here.

Of course, I can't off the top of my head articulate it either. Perhaps some of it can be found in the lack of self referential understanding that exists here. In my experience, folks in Seattle don't think of themselves as living in a mental construct known as "Seattle", that may or may not correspond with the reality on the street. This applies to other cities in the greater Seattle area. I was bowled over when talking to an acquaintance in the Olympia area who was a native to find out that they really didn't have a notion of what the rest of the world thought about the city, and that they really didn't notice anything different about the grunge scene because they grew up with it. No attempt to spin living in and growing up in Olympia into a false virtue, although 'civic virtue' takes on very strange forms in Olympia sometimes.

Maybe at one point Seattle was bottled and trademarked, but there's not much of that here now outside of the tourist spots downtown, amazingly enough.

One of the good things about living in Seattle....

I went down to the Seattle Public Library to check out a book in collage format by Max Ernst, and found that it was already out. Hell, the fact that the public library has a book like that by Max Ernst is cause for celebration.

Cross post: God damn it, Dale Chihuly ®™ is really coming to the Seattle Center

Or at least lots of glass made by him is. Personally, I think that Chihuly is extremely over rated. The guy hasn't actually blown his own glass in years due to a car accident. Instead, he just designs pieces and has other people execute them. The thing one always hears is that Chihuly has been great for the promotion of artisanal glass in the Northwest, but that as an artist, well, he's not quite as revolutionary as he would like to you to believe. There's lots of wonderful glass in the northwest, but actually constructing a museum for Chihuly seems a little like creating a Thomas Kinkade museum in order to promote painting.

Snoose Junction, one of the best Pizzas in Seattle

Here. It's in Ballard on Market Street, hidden and inconspicuous, yet it has one of the best pizzas in town. A combination of hippy and traditional pizza, my experience with Snoose is that the quality of pizza is spectacular and sets it apart from the competition. Other places might be Vera certified, might try to be completely traditional, but with much less pretention Snoose delivers the goods. And it's also eco-friendly and has Jones soda on tap as its default soda option. And this is not a paid advertisement.

Another pizza place that's somewhat in the same vein but a cut below in quality is the Zeeks local chain, where you can get basically whatever exotic combinations of ingredients you want. More hippy than traditional.

I consider there to be three basic kinds of pizza out here: hippy, traditional, and California, with the rare example of Chicago deep dish and related styles breaking the trend. Hippy is fun non-traditional combinations while California pizza is non-traditional combinations that try to be sophisticated. Sometimes it works and is spectacular, sometimes it doesn't, which is true of much California nuevo cuisine. Traditional in this sense means both east coast and Italian.