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The biggest event of my weekend was not technically a social outing for me, as I went alone: to the Tacoma Pride Festival on Saturday, which I
already wrote about in a separate post on Saturday.
For today's post, that leaves Friday and Monday to tell you about. And, on Friday evening, I went next door to Alexia's place to watch a sort of detour in the Harrison Ford-athon: we saw the 1990 film
The Hunt for Red October. This features Alec Baldein as the character Jack Ryan, a role Harrison Ford took over in 1992 for
Patriot Games and then again in 1994 for
Clear and Present Danger. When I discovered that, I suggest we go back and watch
The Hunt for Red October to be completists with the Jack Ryan character.
The movie was actually a lot of fun, and I reflected on how it came out in 1990, when I was 14 and would have had zero interest in a movie like this. At 14, of course, I was much more interested in broad comedies and action movies. Complex geopolitical plotting was way too far above my head. (14-year-olds on average today are far more sophisticated than I was at that age. I bet plenty of kids that age might enjoy a movie of this sort now, if not one that's 33 years old.)
Also:
The Hunt for Red October is really a Sean Connery movie, and he was about 60 years old at the time. The movie employs an interesting device with its language, showing the Russian characters speaking in Russian for just a few minutes. Then, the camera moves in for a close-up, at which point they just switch over to English, in their native accents—including Sam Neil and Stellan Skarsgård, both of whom are strikingly young looking in this movie.
In any case, we both had a really good time watching it. I also made popcorn, which I mixed with about 1/3 of a bag of popcorn that had been left out at work. I ate way too much of it. This is one of my skills, eating too much of things. I should put that on my resume.
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— पांच हजार चार सौ तैंतीस —
Yesterday afternoon, I took myself to see
The Lesson downtown at AMC Pacific Place, which was fine, but I really wanted it to be better.
I came home afterward, and wrote the review. Not long after that, since I had the evening free to do so, I went along with Shobhit to another City Council District 3 candidate forum, this one hosted by the Eastlake Community Council. The location of this one was at
the most interesting location yet for one of these forums, a floating building on Lake Union called
College Club, a "rowing & social club." I didn't even fully register that that's what it was until I asked for the bathroom and got momentarily confused by the door saying "locker room" and seeing
a bunch of life jackets stacked atop lockers; bathroom sinks equipped with shaving cream; and a row of shower stalls around the far corner.
When I posted about it, I noted that I've been to so many of these forums now, I hear the same thing over and over from each candidate (including Shobhit, incidentally, when he gives his own introduction). But, I should also clarify that each neighborhood has its own localized concerns—a big one for Eastlake is the planned
Rapid Ride J line, which they evidently don't want but is being treated by the city as too late to cancel—and that does result in some variation in the open forum Q&A portions of these candidate forums.
Indeed, when there was a brief social mixer element at the end of the event, and although it seemed at first that we would leave fairly quickly because most attendees were chatting with other candidates, Shobhit did wind up sitting at a table and chatting for a while with a couple of people. I didn't even notice this until after I wound up chatting quite a while with a woman organizer from the Eastlake Community Council who asked how I liked the event, and I noted that I was married to one of the candidates. She was pretty passionate about how Eastlake residents feel the Rapid Ride J line is a misguided use of city funds, when the #70 bus that already exists is regarded as more than sufficient.
I would be interested in representative sample polling on that, by the way. I didn't think to mention this to her, but the feelings of the people on the community council are not necessarily the feelings of the neighborhood. Just those of the people who get involved at this level.
In fact, I didn't even realize until going to all these forus that virtually every neighborhood in Seattle has its own "community council." To my surprise, the official City of Seattle website, while offering an easy to find
map of City Council districts, does not have a comprehensive list of neighorbood community councils. I really think they should.
Different neighborhoods have varying levels of involvement and organization, anf the Phonney Ridge Community Council website, which isn't even in the District 3 for which Shobhit is running, has a
list of different neighborhood councils—but they all seem to focus on North Seattle neighborhoods. Someone needs to aggregate the neighborhood councils in District 3. I should dig deeper into this and see if there's any district agency or person who would have such a list.
Anyway, I wasn't even really aware that Eastlake was established as a neighborhood with its own official boundaries; it's one of three subneighnborhoods that make up "
Cascade," which wraps around about three quarters of Lake Union: Weslake, South Lake Union, and then Eastlake. It's less than a square mile in size, and
according to the Eastlake Wikipedia page, it had a population of 8,505 as of 2013. I just looked further into that sourcing and even the geography is convoluted; I mentioned this population figure to the woman who was speaking to me and she corrected me to say the neighborhood was about 7,000 people. I'm now finding many online sources that vary wildly, but
Nextdoor lists it as 6,538, which I suppose would be rounded up to 7,000.
Most of my experience with the Eastlake neighborhood is just passing through it, historically between Downtown and the U District. It's been a long time, but when the PCC office was still in the U District, a few times we did go down to eat at Eastlake Bar & Grill, which I just now learned
closed last fall after 18 years in business. That's a bummer. They had the best grilled cheese sandwiches.
That's really my only connection to the Eastlake neighborhood, though. Although now I've had this interesting experience in the College Club building.
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[posted 11:57 am]
