Wednesday, March 14, 2007

no means no

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Seattle voters rejected both options on the ballot for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct: no tunnel, no new elevated viaduct. I voted that way, so this is good news for me. Hopefully now our governor, mayor and speaker realizes that we need to look at other alternatives. We don't need a bigger viaduct. If we simply increase the capacity for cars, there will just be more cars on the road, wasting gas and polluting the air. We need to seriously look at improving our mass transit system, so that we can actually move the city forward.

One of the things I love about cities like New York or San Francisco or Taipei or almost any other major city I've been to with the exception of Los Angeles, is that I can get around on foot if I wanted to, conveniently. When I lived in the U District, it wasn't so bad, because everything was one bus ride away, and I could look up schedules for just one bus to reduce wait times. But now that I don't, it's a pain to go anywhere. I end up more often than not reconsidering plans to do anything, just because I don't feel like traveling an hour and a half each way, or waiting for an evening bus that only comes once an hour, and stops running at 1100pm. This shit needs to change, or I'd really be compelled to move to another city. Perhaps if we got rid of the viaduct and put the money they would have spent building a new monstrosity to beef up our public transportation, things would actually improve.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

riding the metro

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Today, on every bus I took (the 75 to and from the U District and the 540 to and from Redmond), there was exactly 1 (one) hot boy in tight indie hipster jeans. Every bus. Surely this cannot be simply a coincidence. Surely, this must mean something! But what? What could it mean? The only thing I gleaned from it was that given four chances to talk to a hot guy sitting next to me, I took none of them. Something is obviously wrong with me.

Friday, March 02, 2007

be louder

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I don't particularly like or dislike Hillary Clinton, but it's not a good sign that she can't hire people for her campaign who don't understand the difference between Chinese and Chinese-American. The SF Chronicle reported on Tuesday that a Hillary Clinton staffer refused a couple journalists for ethnic newspapers at the door because they were "foreign press." How disrespectful is that? What kind of message does that send, that regardless of everything Asian-Americans have done for this country, they can still be considered foreign? This is exactly the attitude that leads to something like if we were to be in a war with an Asian nation, and then we rounded up all the people who happened to have the same ethnicity and you know, interned them in camps or something. Clinton's campaign apologized for the gaffe after the journalists involved made a fuss, but this really doesn't endear me to Hillary.