MISCmedia for 3/1/01
Shaking It Up

(NOTE: Today's previously-announced contents have been delayed to a later date, for obvious reasons.)

EARTHQUAKE IRONY #1: It happened just as Mayor Schell was going to announce plans to re-ban outdoor Mardi Gras celebrations, after Pioneer Square got taken over the previous night by non-laid-back, non-mellow, non-baby-boomer-generation people (some of whom, admittedly, got really stupid and started moshpit-like fights against one another, but who probably could've been disuaded from such dumbness with saner civic and poice policies). (More about this in tomorrow's installment.)

Schell was probably going to bemoan the couple of broken windows and bashed cars from the previous night, when Nature provided its own show of rowdiness.

Earthquake Irony #2: One of the most damaged buildings was the Fenix Underground, Ground Zero of the Mardi Gras raucousness.

Earthquake Irony #3: Just about all the big local institutions hated by local lefties got visibly caught up in the Ash Wednesday Quake:

• The second really big damage spot was the former Sears catalog warehouse, now Starbucks' HQ. (Lotsa bricks fell from the 1906-vintage building, but recent structural retrofitting worked and the thing stayed up.)

• The third big damage spot was one of the buildings on 1st Ave. S. Paul Allen's bought as part of his big football-stadium project.

• And Bill Gates was shaken at the Westin Hotel, during a big presentation trying to sell software to schools.

My Own Story: I was in a high-rise when things started shaking all over. I immediately took to protect the computer I was working on. The coffee cup and other objects on the desk were less lucky. It took about five minutes just to clear my way through the fallen books and shelving to get to the elevators, which were shut down, and from there to schlepping my way down a dozen flights of stairs.

Once outside and among the teeming masses of temporarily displaced downtown office workers (such as the city employees at Key Tower photographed on this page), I shot a few pics of stray bricks and abandoned, broken home belongings such as the TV set depicted here.

Returned home to find a cheap but fondly-remembered little piece of statuary broken. Otherwise, things had been knocked about and tossed to the floor but remained intact.

As I'm writing this, my nervous system is still giving me a little shellshock. I can't say it was fun, but at least there was only one death (that we know of at this point), lots of kids are getting a day off from school today, most of the seismic-reconstruction work around here has proven sound, and I (and, I hope, you) survived shaken but not stirred.

(OK, OK, I'm understating the emotional/visceral dislocation I experienced, not at the time but starting about 15 minutes later and continuing for several hours afterward. If I'd been a dog I've been yelping and jumping and annoying my owner all day.)

IN OTHER NEWS: The next MISCmedia print mag will be a combo March-April, out in a couple of weeks.

NEXT: Pioneer Square Mardi Gras--WTO without the politics?

ELSEWHERE:

• Local net-users' own earthquake stories....
• "The Gallery of 'Misused' Quotation Marks"....
• Painterly colorizations of historic photos....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Hardcore porn producers tone down their works for a new mainstream market.
• Comparing a couple of WTO protest videos.
• That integral aspect of the Seattle zeitgeist, complaining.
• Previewing a whole empire of MISCmedia products.
• Does the "Northwest Lifestyle" personality type even exist?
• An amateur experiment in age-regression therapy.
• A fantasy-fandom HQ pulls a disappearing trick.
• A photographic ode to the wonders of snow in Seattle.
• How a conspiracy theorist might view the power-crisis mania.
• Complaining about the Filmlooked versions of Red Dwarf.
• Learning to like Valentine's Day.
• Parts one and two of a cash-strapped single mom's travails thru the welfare bureaucracy.
• A personal account of being pushed out of dot-com employment.
• A fashion makeover gone very wrong.
• Parts one and two of a mild pique of jealousy for Mexico's public-transport system.
• Amazon.com tries the wrong way to become a respectable company.
• What might be the basis of '90s nostalgia.
• Boo for consumer-sex and non-sex; yay for real sex.
• What's wrong with Playboy isn't what its most vocal critics claim is wrong with it.
• What we know so far about the new administration.
• A glimpse of our forthcoming coffee-table photo book.
• Still more new cable channels.

ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
• Reviews of literature & art, nonfiction & culture criticism, movies & videos, and music & noise
• Longer articles and essays
• Some slightly weird little fiction pieces
• X-Word crossword puzzles, now with on-screen solving
• Cyber Stuff, links to cool and/or useful sites
• A listing of many Things I Like (and a few things I hate)
• The origin and future of MISCmedia