F E A T U R E S

McBee enjoys his store-bought skull but is otherwise not fooled by cute wildlife: Don't Fuck with a Weasel.

Summer poetry - Ethan Gilsdorf isn't road kill but he knows about the Overpass...

Attack of the Wi-fi Girls - Part II - Wireless security (or lack thereof) - rhe gleeful geeks of SeattleWireless.net sniff my password, A report from Paris, and iChatAV (Part I found here)

(from May 2003) Think I'll go eat worms. Annelids sacrifice their fannies for once-a-year sex, and Ryan Wells samples the resultant palolo harvest in Samoan Delicacy, Worm Debauchery.

(From May 2003) Can this man's dignity be saved? Three Jobs in High Tech Hell. (If I get hit by a car, please don't let my parents see me like this....

L E T T E R S

A sharp reader links McDonald's wi-fi and a remedy, and Maud Lynn dabbles in Bee movies, and we find some amazingly provocative signage.

R E V I E W S

(from May 2003) Our trusting Scottish friends kindly send us a copy of the video "Over... and Out - Deep Water Kayak Rescue Techniques but we accidentally let a naughty canoer review it.

(from May 2003) Philip Johns learns some possibly-useful things about nose hairs in the mysterious and engaging book Trail of Feathers - In Search of the Birdmen of Peru.

T H E C A S U A L C O O K

(from May 2003) Small and rare is hard to come by, roast beef-wise but our own Casual Cook brings us a most clever trick to achieve this. Add roast asparagus (and roast potatoes if you don't fear the spud) and you have a nice spring dinner.

E D I T O R I A L

POSTCARDS FROM EVERETT

After nine months on the road, living in guest rooms and out of my car, I have concluded that I'm a West Coast girl. This realization came to me only after I got out of my car up in the Cascade mountains and took a deep familiar breath. The mountains of the east coast don't smell the same, nor do the coastal waters. In a perfect scenario, I would spend fall and winter in Boston, and spring and summer in western Washington.

I thought I was going to be sucked back into urban life in Seattle but find the charms (of all places) the Navy port town of Everett, Washington to be oddly attractive. Initially I looked here because Marcia "The Muse" offered me the use of her futon and that's where she now lives with her Objectivist husband Tym. Also, rents are cheap, and then I landed a job in the farm community of Arlington which meant that unless I wanted to spend all my spare time and money on commuting and gasoline, Everett was a good place to settle for a while. I got here in June, around the same time that the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln arrived back in port from whatever it was doing in the Middle East. (It seems funny to me that a battle ship was important to a desert war, but it's an odd little century.) Anyway, the welcome back banners are still up two months later, the flags have never come down, and though I'm generally suspicious of rampant nationalism, it's a little more bearable in a Navy town and the sense of community here makes it a friendly place to be.

Geographically, the area is fetching. Two rivers run into salt water sloughs. Seattle doesn't have geography like this, reedy and lush and slow.

So if one is intent on Getting Lost, what are your options here? It's a good 35 miles from Seattle, but transportation options are surprisingly good. There's a ferry out to Whidbey Island, and Amtrak's trains to Vancouver, San Diego, and Chicago come through daily at least. The public transit buses go to some distant weird places, and an actual commute is possible into Seattle in large comfy buses. The light rail Sounder is still just a notion, but an optimistic one. The Everett Amtrak station has a sign and a little gate for the Sounder train, even as today's headline mentioned the project being stalled yet again. We have the stations. We have the track. We have the damned little gate at the station. What we have is no train. I reminds me of the joke about the little girl who sees a pile of manure and is sure the pony has to be somewhere nearby. The place has potential. It has an economic base and a bit of charm. Like many things in a good many lives... it'll do for now.