Drive through Woodinville, Washington today, and it has the glimmer of an Eastside Seattle suburb about to be born. With its Target, Safeway, and housing developments with names cooked up by marketing departments, Woodinville is fairly unremarkable, a place you’ve seen a million times before. A scant 20 minute drive from Seattle center, via...
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I picked up Octopussy, by Ian Fleming, sometime in the 1970s at the small-town public library where I grew up. It was for sale, and I think cost something like ten cents. Being a young James Bond fan at the time, I was delighted to happen upon this book. But soon after I bought...
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I’ve only had high tea a handful of times, as I’m not much of a tea-drinker. But high tea at a grand hotel is something entirely different. It’s not just tea or sweets; it’s a way of slowing oneself down and savoring the moment. On a Sunday, after a symphony concert at Benaroya Hall,...
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Recently I got a marketing e-mail from a site called BeautifulPeople.com, which purports to admit only “beautiful people.” The e-mail was accompanied by a video of a quite homely guy and a handsome guy at a swimming pool. A trio of hot women comment that Homely Guy (actor Michael J. Sielaff) turns them on...
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In all their glorious beauty, well over a century of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics covers. And all the pages following the covers, too. It always seemed like the covers were the main thing–blimps, subs, nuclear-powered trains, rotating houses, and all sorts of wonders that we would soon experience. Truly, these things make me...
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Want to make all the other kids jealous at the next summer music festival? Ditch your Coleman Elite for something far cooler–a tent modeled in the shape and size of a 1965 VW Camper van (Microbus*). This tent is officially licensed (whew – I was worried about that) and has doors on the side...
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Ever notice there is a class of male actors who seem so gay, but really aren’t? Hugh Jackman John Hurt Jonathan Harris, from Lost in Space Tony Randall The Will and Grace guy Paul Shaffer Dom De Luise Jude Law David Spade Gene Kelly Henry Gibson
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This last June, after Sebastian Horsley died in Soho at the age of 47 from a heroin overdose, I began thinking about this genre of rich wastrel louches. We in the white, waking world are fascinated by stories of Edies and Huntington Hartfords who have it all and waste it all. Of Horsley, The...
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I first encountered China Miéville via his stunning third novel, The Scar. What I find amazing about this interview with Miéville about his latest novel, Kraken, in The Onion’s AV Club is that The Scar isn’t mentioned at all. Yet so many of the commenters echo my amazement with The Scar. Words like “stunning”...
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I cannot get this out of my head. I had heard about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg breaking out in a huge, visible sweat when Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal asked him about privacy problems that Facebook has brought onto its users recently. Mossberg and Swisher, I should mention, did...
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