Cause they’re waiting for you at Bellevue with their oxygen masks.

Seattle has a sister city – Bellevue. It’s right on the other side of Lake Washington, you can see it if you’re looking for Mt. Rainier and accidentally look too far to the left. Since moving to Seattle over a year and a half ago, I’ve somehow failed to make it to Bellevue. Honestly, I had no reason to go to what I suspected was Seattle Lite.

Last night, however, comic legend Emo Philips handed me that reason. He was performing a three night stand at some comedy club in Bellevue. We decided to cross the water and see what there was to see.

Arriving in Bellevue an hour before the show, we had a bit of time to check out the town. With just a simple drive down the main street (Bellevue Way), I suddenly understood that Bellevue wasn’t Seattle Lite, but Seattle was Bellevue Lite. This town’s got money.

The entire downtown was basically one big, very posh, strip mall. The whole thing was named “The Bellevue Collection.” Seriously. It’s made up of Nordstrom, Macy’s (and not a converted Kaufmann’s store), Crate and Barrel (basically Ikea for douchebags) and a slew of other high-end chain stores (Hollister, Abercrombie & Fitch, etc.). Eddie Bauer’s owns an entire skyscraper.

And if all that didn’t make me feel like I didn’t belong, the people were like Seattlites on some very, very expensive coke. These people were wealthy. All of them. But even more than that, they were extremely impressed with themselves. Later that night, Emo Philips asked, “before the invention of cell phones, was it harder to tell who was and wasn’t a gigantic douchebag?” The answer is undoubtedly yes. Except in Bellevue.

This was a town where a brand new VW would be pretty ghetto. This isn’t a jeans and tshirt kind of town. Unless you’re wearing $400 Diesel Jeans with a $600 Tom Ford tshirt. Everybody was well dressed and on their way to some leisure activity or another.

I was glad, however, to note that the Seattle rule of “if someone is nice to you, there’s a 90% chance they’re not white.” Two people (who weren’t getting paid to be so) were nice to me. The latino janitor who struck up a conversation with me going up the elevator and the black bathroom attendant who, though being paid to be nice, was actually genuinely nice.

Yes, this club had a bathroom attendant. This club, called The Parlor, thought very highly of itself. Mostly, it was a billiards club (read: not a pool hall). There was an enforced dress code and it was all just very very foreign to me. Maybe I’m a hick, but I’ve never been in a bathroom where there was a guy I had to tip watching me pee.

We took our seats, pretty close to the front, but this was restaurant style seating. You shared a table with some brand new friends, were expected to order drinks and some sort of cooked meat product and eat while waiting for some comedy. The three guys sitting at the table with us were clearly from Bellevue. One fellow was talking about a friend of his that makes $400,000 creating firmware for cellphones. Another guy said that that was good, but he couldn’t complain about how much he made (which was apparently close to $400,000). I’m so out of touch with these kind of people that I don’t even know if they’re a name I could use to make fun of them.

Finally the show started and after a host and three comics (all of which were pretty good – especially the last guy, Craig Gass), it was time for Emo Philips. I remembered seeing him in the 80s on MTV’s Half Hour Comedy Hour. I think Dr. Demento would play a few of his one liners too. I loved his comedy. In my 10 year old mind, he was right up there with Bob Newhart and Steven Wright (I was a weird kid). So when I saw that he was performing nearby, I jumped at the chance.

And I’m so ridiculously thrilled that I did. His set was a little over 30 minutes long and though some of his jokes were from his early days, the vast majority was new material. He even had a prop – a grey binder with a poem and two ideas for greeting cards. “Now that you’re married…. I hope your naked couplings do not sadden the Lord.”

Mostly, he’s known for his “garden path” style spoken in a very slow, wandering falsetto, like: “I woke up this morning with a bloody nose. I thought, ‘How did THIS get into bed with me?’” and “I was born in Chicago. When I was 10, my parents moved to a suburb called Downers Grove. When I was 12, I found them.”

I can’t remember jokes, so I had to go to emophilips.com to look them up – there’s an Random Emo Logic Generator there. Check it out.

After the show, I got to meet the man (as seen in the photo) and he signed a CD for me. I thanked him for coming, said I loved the set and told him that even Smartz liked it more than she thought she would. “Oh I’ll put that on my resume,” he replied. “Not as horrible as suspected.”

Thanks, Emo!

It’s two miles of cars! Thousands of them! This was mostly old cars, but also some new ones and even some electric ones.

Turns out that I have an affection for hot rods. I never really did before, but now I quite fancy them!

I took 70 or so pictures and I’ll let you see all of them.

Click here to see the whole gallery.

This past Sunday, Smartz and I took a ride on the excursion train that runs from Snoqualmie to North Bend and back again (with a little jaunt to the Falls). Our original plans involved another excursion line that’s powered by steam, but they don’t open until Memorial Day. However, the railroad museum at Snoqualmie is one of my favorite places, so it wasn’t much like settling.

True, I’d rather it be a steam engine, but just being around trains thrills me to death. The trip was short and pretty slow, but it wasn’t overly crowded and the day was beautiful with hardly a cloud in the sky.

I took a fair amount of pictures, so maybe you’d want to check those out…

On Sunday, while everyone was getting pre-drinking for the Super Bowl, Smartz and I checked out the Model Train Show at the Evergreen Fair Grounds in Monroe.

I’m again becoming quite the little railfan, and even though I had a small train layout when I was a kid, I never really got too into model railroading. However, since I like trains, I figured that I’d enjoy myself at the train show.

Turns out, I did.

I took tons of pics, trying to get Smartz’s camera to co-operate with macro-close up shot – only a handful turned out as anything interesting.

Check them out, if you like…

Click here!

The state of Washington doesn’t really seem to care about its history. True, since it’s the west coast, there’s not much history to learn about. But what history is here is largely unexplained and uninterpreted.

When I travel, I generally focus upon history. It can be fairly recent or even prehistoric (which is a silly word), but my travels often involve or completely revolve around the historic. I’ve traveled around much of western Washington, diving into the history of Seattle and the passes over the Cascades. I’ve studied the natives, the white folk, the British, Spanish and, later, Americans who claimed this area as their own.

Overall, there is almost zero interpretation of any of this. Take my recent “discovery” of Fort Casey on Whidbey Island.

Back east, a fort this size and in this good of condition would have some explanation. There would be plaques, markers, tour guides and probably a gift shop (I guess it’s the price we pay). There wasn’t a single historical marker or sign explaining what any of this was.

As you walk from the parking lot to the fort itself there is a little bulletin board kind of sign with a very rudimentary map (xeroxed?) and maybe a few words about the fort (when it was built, etc). However, that’s it.

Learning the history of a place while you’re visiting the place is great! The old and ancient are given new life when you’re standing where those before us have stood. The artillery pieces at the fort were pretty spectacular. How far they could shoot, how they were loaded and how quickly they became obsolete would have meant much more if I hadn’t simply read it on a Wikipedia page.

All this begs the question: why? Why isn’t this site, and many others in this fine state, interpreted? Is it a financial thing? Is this a trade off for not having a state income tax? Maybe it is. Mostly, however, I think it’s a lack of interest stemming from the fact that most everybody here is new.

Many of the outlying communities, which have had the chance to foster a few generations of fairly stationary residents, have pretty nice historical societies. And while they’ve generally not gotten around to the interpretation of historic sites, at least there is a growing interest.

But Seattle and the more touristy parts around it (such as Fort Casey, I guess) suffer greatly from lack of roots. We are a very transient city made up of many self-focused people on their way to get more coffee. So few of us stop to think of what was here before us. Too many Seattleites fail to perceive that there even is an us – usually it’s just a “me.”

Since Fort Caseyis far enough away from the city to not be as influenced by this poisonous attitude, there’s probably a good chance that it’ll be interpreted at some point. But for Discovery Park and Magnuson Park (an army base with an old missile silo and a Navy base with ammunition bunkers, respectively) there’s probably no hope at all.

What little hope there is seems to be left to the individual. The “underground” of Seattle was nearly forgotten until one person took it upon himself to uncover it. Here, history must be tracked down, researched and then interpreted.

Back east, the basic story is told through historical markers and tour guides. From there, you can delve into the details. Here, it seems, even the basic story must be dug up – what to say of the details. We become the voices of the past and the tour guides to the very few who are interested enough to listen.

Nikki visited Seattle this past weekend and we all had a ball. We took her on a short tour of Seattle and the out lying areas. It was quite a bit of fun and we took pictures!

Check them out here.

When you’re on two wheels, you always have to watch out for yourself. The folks in cars (typically called “cagers”) do not see you. And even if they do see you, they don’t really care.

This is worse in Seattle. I’ve said it before, the worst drivers that I’ve ever seen has been in Seattle. I have driven in all 48 continental states and none have been worse than the drivers of Seattle.

Let me illustrate this with a little story. Thankfully, I followed my instincts and this all happened in front of me.

I was as a four-way stop a block east of a Aurora Ave, a busy four lane. It was rush hour. I was riding north and about to turn left towards Aurora. As I pulled up to the intersection, I saw a woman to my left in a Subaru talking away on her cell phone.

Getting there before her, I had every reason to go first. But since she was otherwise occupied, I decided to let her go before me so that I could keep an eye on her and she wouldn’t kill me.

She went straight and I turned right, we were both heading in the same direction. As we got to Aurora, there were two cars in front of us. The street we were on was a fairly narrow two-way street. Both of the cars in our front were turning right. Traffic was so heavy that they could not make even a right turn.

The woman in front of me, still on her cell phone, must have decided that heavy traffic wasn’t really all that good of a reason to hold her up. She pulled into the oncoming lane, past the two cars and was now along side the first car and blocking the lane so that anyone wanted to turn off Aurora onto our street could not. However, she wasn’t out far enough for anyone to really see.

A white car making a left turn off of Aurora couldn’t see her until he was right upon her. The driver, also a woman, hit her brakes and had to squeeze diagonally between this Subaru and oncoming traffic on Aurora.

As this was happening, a car heading north on Aurora who also couldn’t see any of this happening until it was too late, also had to squeeze between the new car and the woman in the Subaru. There were three cars now gridlocked at the intersection.

This could all be remedied if the woman on the phone would just back up. She refused to do so. There was enough room for the diagonal cars to get by, but it was a very tight fit and required going up on the curb. The first car hit the curb, up and over, rolled down her window and cussed the cell phone woman out. Big time. I cheered. The other car did the same.

The cell phone woman then flew out into traffic, making a left turn onto a very busy four lane. Cars slammed on their brakes as the woman continued her conversation. Turn signals were, of course, not involved in any of this.

This is why I trust my gut when it comes to cagers. I don’t trust them, especially in Seattle.