You can achieve the white picket fence American Dream for as low as $820,000!
You can achieve the white picket fence American Dream for as low as $820,000! SANDIEGOA/GETTY

Who doesn’t love a good conversation about zoning? Mike Rosenberg at the Seattle Times is doing fantastic work with his new housing column (and also all of his reporting before the column for what it’s worth). Please check it out in full. The gist of his column today focuses on where new housing is being developed in Seattle. It’s very few places since most of Seattle — 69 percent of residential plots of land — are occupied by single-family homes. Dense housing really only exists downtown and around transit hubs. Single-family homes are expensive with a market that shows little to no signs of improving. It’s an unrealistic option for most people. More apartments and rentals will cool down rent prices, something that has already happened.

Community meeting about head tax shows vile side of Seattle: The proposed head-tax that would impact three percent of Seattle businesses would raise $75 million for homelessness. This is unacceptable to many, especially the locals that showed up to a community meeting last night in Ballard. This crowd was less of a crowd and more of an angry mob, according to Erica C. Barnett from The C is for Crank and formerly The Stranger. Their goal was “to shut down dialogue, create chaos, and prevent people with opposing views from having a voice,” Barnett reports. Most were filled with vitriolic rage about homelessness and how encampments had infringed on their spaces. Some of the things Barnett outlines in her article and also her live tweets are truly horrifying.


Washington’s non-transparent budget data: The government-disclosure site of fiscal data earned a ‘C’ in transparency. That’s slippage — in 2016 it earned a ‘B’ which is perfectly acceptable. The test this year focused on whether an average person — a layman, if you will — could access budget data easily. The website is not user friendly. There are enough tech people in Washington, get one of those guys on it.

Gates is doing more at home: $158 million more, in fact. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is going to help poor Americans “move up the economic ladder,” as the Seattle Times puts it. They’re going to attempt to tackle the underlying political and economic factors that contribute to poverty. How? Unsure. Stay tuned. Don’t touch that dial.

Spokane teacher wins National Teacher of the Year, meets with Trump: Mandy Manning was awarded a crystal apple at the White House Tuesday for her outstanding job as an educator. She gave Trump something as well. It was an envelope filled with letters written to him by Manning’s immigrant and refugee students.

Batter up: An Eastern Washington school armed its teachers with tee-ball bats. During the “fatal funnel” (police lingo but also could be a cool band name) when the gunman is distracted trying to get through a barricaded doorway, teachers are expected to strike. I don’t know enough baseball terms for any good puns.

Can you imagine dying from eating Romaine lettuce? One person in California doesn’t have to. Because they are dead. Romaine’s first victim has been claimed. There are 121 people sick in 25 states. Six are hospitalized in Washington. Federal investigators still don’t know much about the outbreak including how it spread so fast and where it’s spreading. We’re 12 years post that baby spinach E. coli outbreak that rocked 2006 and we’re no better off. What kind of world do we live in where we can’t trust our leafy greens?

Scientists create plastic-eating enzyme: On accident. It’s penicillin all over again! This time some scientists were doing research on a bug in Japan that had naturally evolved to breakdown plastic when they accidentally manipulated the active enzyme and made it better. It became more efficient at breaking down plastics. It takes a few days for anything to breakdown, but this could really change the fate of our plastic-ravaged world.

Everyone shut up, there are new pictures of Jupiter: Keep your cool. Keep your cool. Yes, I know it looks like a goddamn fucking van Gogh painting but I have got to chill out here. Whew. Okay. We have never seen this before! How wild is that! I love space.


Lil' three-year-old bagpiper: He joined in the Southern Maryland Celtic Festival and achieved his dreams. That's so young to peak.


This guy hacked the horse race system and is worth billions: Here’s your interesting read of the day. Bill Benter wrote an algorithm that hacked horse racing, something notoriously impossible to have the upper hand in because of all the variables. He did it. He did it all with math. He is worth billions. You can to if you learn advanced statistics and do a lot of other work. Or, you can take the easy route and build a time machine out of a DeLorean (you built a time machine out of a DeLorean???) and take it to 2015 where you buy a sports almanac that has all the winners from 1950-2000. Badabing-badaboom. Results.

New Blabbermouth podcast! Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal's Prescription for Winning the Midterms

Ratted out by Rudy: According to Rudy Giuliani, who was just trying to help, Trump reimbursed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for paying Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about her affair with Trump. Now, this is troubling for a lot of reasons. Mostly, it goes against the whole narrative that Trump knew nothing about the hush money payment. Shocker: he lied. Giuliani said all this to make clear that the reimbursement didn’t violate campaign finance laws. Except,


It's also fishy that Trump, who claims to be worth billions, repaid Cohen in monthly installments.

An update from my alley:

I was in my roommate’s car. It was night. We were leaving for a quick McDonald’s run — we all have our (occasional) vices. It was a long Monday, we deserved it.

The opening of the alley was blocked. The lights of the headlights reflected back at us against a dumpster placed directly in our path. It was as inconvenient as the semi-truck that blocked the northbound off-ramp to the West Seattle bridge yesterday.


The dumpster was perfectly centered, intentional. Who had done this? Maybe it was a neighborly tiff or someone needed a better angle to graffiti the backside of the dumpster or maybe the war against cars is real and this is the first move.

I got out of the car to move it and vastly underestimated how heavy dumpsters are. I gave up shortly, the dumpster-mover the clear victor. We reversed the whole way out the other side of the alley.

When we got back it was gone.

The image of it still haunts me:

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Speaking of haunting images: I don’t know if you remember (dedicated Slog AM readers obviously do) but I found a calendar from 2010 in my alley last year made by a hirsute, beefy anonymous man named Vladdy. I don't know him but he has brought an immeasurable amount of light into my life. I’ve been using his calendar and just changed it to May. Apparently, this month is Vladdy’s birthday and I want us all to celebrate:

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Tonight's best Seattle entertainment options include: The beginning of the industrial music festival Mechanismus, the 16th Annual Rosé Revival and Cool Whites, and the Mr. Nude Cascadia 2018 pageant.