Maybe it’s just because my train to downtown terminated at the Mount Baker station with no warning this morning (a sign on the train usually tells you when a train will be going out of service, but this one just said “Sound Transit”), but everything I read this morning got on my nerves.
First up: This Seattle Times minifeature about the opening of the airport light-rail station this weekend. The headline (taken from a quote, I’m sad to say, by Sound Transit spokesman Bruce Gray): “Light rail reaches airport, no longer a train to nowhere.” Residents of Pioneer Square, Chinatown, Beacon Hill, Mount Baker, and the Rainier Valley will no doubt be surprised to discover that their neighborhoods are officially “nowhere.”
Speaking of disrespect for South End residents, the second thing that annoyed me this morning was this piece in CityArts Magazine about Bookworm Exchange, a used bookstore on Rainier Ave. that will be closing at the end of the year.
The writer hands the microphone to store owner Jim Holmes, who blames South End residents’ lack of interest in “support[ing] a local bookstore” for the store’s demise. (Funny, you don’t see anyone blaming literacy-challenged Capitol Hill or downtown residents for the demise of Bailey/Coy and Elliott Bay’s Pioneer Square store, respectively. )
I have another suggestion: Perhaps it’s because Bookworm Exchange never had any books its potential customers wanted to read? Every time I ventured into Bookworm Exchange, I found its shelves crammed with years-old Oprah’s Book Club paperbacks, battered children’s books, circa-1985 juicer/diet/microwave cookbooks, and heartwarming holiday stories.
Maybe if they’d offered more literary selections—and a few books that were actually less than a year old—they would have fared better with all us supposedly indie-bookstore-hating South Enders.
Third, the lead to this KOMO story about a male-female pair who are accused of murdering six members of the woman’s family. It reads: “Michele Anderson and Joe McEnroe are accused of murdering six members of her family, but their lawyers want them exempt from the death penalty.”
I know standards are different in TV news, but an accusation isn’t a conviction. Their lawyer can want them to be exempt from the death penalty and argue that they’re not guilty. Saying that they’re accused of a crime, but they want an exemption implies that they’ve already been convicted.
Finally, much as I respect Seattle Times transportation reporter Mike Lindblom, his 1,200-word front-page story about the supposed dangers of the ORCA card is a little, well, paranoid. The premise of the piece—titled, “Is Big Brother watching your ORCA card?”—is that employers who subsidize ORCA cards can access information about where employees are traveling—finding out, for example, if you went to the beach when you said you were sick, or if you’re making money reselling cards.
Sounds scary. What you don’t find out until very, very late in the story is that in order to actually access that kind of information, an employer would have to make a written request to ORCA for each employee they want to spy on, creating a paper trail that employees could access. Then the employer would have to track each trip, by date, to find out exactly where they’ve been—potentially hundreds of trips per month for each individual employee. They’d also have to know, for example, which stop you’d get off at to access the mall or the beach or wherever it is you aren’t “supposed” to be on a particular date, and compare that to where you said you were. Spying on employees via ORCA, in other words, would create hundreds or thousands of hours of additional work for employers, and it’s very difficult to imagine an employer who couldn’t find better uses for their time.
In fact, it appears that Lindblom couldn’t find one. Every employer he interviewed told him they would not collect data on individual ORCA users. So… what’s the story, again?
