Inaugural poem set to a local funk-rock track; waiting lists for vaccine-clinic helpers are getting as long as those for the vaccines themselves; Tacoma police SUV runs over street-race spectators; Microsoft’s developing chatbots based on dead people.

Sanity (or something like it) comes to America; past inauguration memories; vaccines still in short supply; state GOP cracks down on its own ‘moderates.’

City asks artists and others to ponder their communities’ future; remembering one year of COVID in WA (and in the US); state makes a new vaccine distribution plan; man arrested at DC riot had tried to join Seattle protest groups, but was suspected of being a right-wing infiltrator.

Canadian artists depict Seattle’s CHOP protests; still more local fallout from the DC coup attempt; a quiet but ‘weird’ opening to WA’s legislative session; how the Storm’s Sue Bird helped get Raphael Warnock into the US Senate.

Could John Roderick’s deleted Twitter thread affect Ken Jennings’ TV career?; Inslee announces new ‘reopening’ plan, restaurant trade org. hates it; Virginia Mason/CHI Franciscan merger moves ahead; pioneering local Black judge dies.

Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic leader quits, claims systemic racism at parent organization; a local singer becomes a social-media meme as ‘Bean Dad’; local Catholics want archbishop to speak up about abusive priests; some computer-animated New Year’s weirdness fictionally set at the Space Needle.

Alternative (and distanced) New Year’s ideas; homeless advocates stage an occupation at a Fife motel; probable arson totals a Lake City strip mall; Seattle home prices just keep rising.

Seven Gables Theater movie memories; the local COVID curve’s still ‘flattening’ for now; Seahawks clinch division title; ‘excessive force’ lawsuit against the SPD could cost the city $600,000 or more.

Timothy Egan on Lewis & Clark’s lessons for surviving a bleak winter; right-wing protesters try to break into Oregon’s capitol building; daytime flooded streets are followed by nighttime snow; some folks want a gondola to West Seattle instead of light rail.

Church stages ‘ICE cage’ nativity scene; judge OKs Cal Anderson encampment sweep; next vaccine shipments to WA cut back; Inslee’s next budget proposal includes a capital gains tax (again).

A still-closed Henry Art Gallery puts its art on buses; the first local vaccine shots get taken; more post-ethnic sports team names are on the way; Tim Eyman hates face masks (duh).

Views of an empty Microsoft campus (except for construction crews); the state passes 200,000 COVID cases; the first vaccine doses are on the way; another shooting at another right-wing Olympia protest.

An old idea about why Seattle attracted Scandinavians; a ‘Nation’ article disses the UW’s ‘modeling team’ org. and the Gates Foundation; King County to partly bail out Convention Center expansion project; ‘rapid response teams’ going to understaffed nursing homes.

Space Needle New Year’s fireworks are canceled (again), to ‘go virtual’ this year; COVID outbreak at a WA Frito-Lay plant; police pepper-spray and topple an old man with PTSD at a Capitol Hill protest; can the unfinished Convention Center expansion plan be redirected?

Microsoft’s business-meeting surveillance and ‘scoring’ plan; local doctor’s COVID precautions pay off; Amazon accused of warehouse-safety cover up; UW football’s big comeback win.